Towards a Social Trust-Aware Recommender for Teachers

Fazeli, S., Drachsler, H., Brouns, F., & Sloep, P. B. (2014). Towards a Social Trust-aware Recommender for Teachers. In N. Manouselis, H. Drachsler, K. Verbert & O. C. Santos (Eds.), Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (pp. 177-194): Springer New York.Online communities and networked learning provide teachers with social learning opportunities, allowing them to interact and collaborate with others in order to develop their personal and professional skills. However, with the large number of learning resources produced everyday, teachers need to find out what are the most suitable ones for them. In this paper, we introduce recommender systems as a potential solution to this . The setting is the Open Discovery Space (ODS) project. Unfortunately, due to the sparsity of the educational datasets most educational recommender systems cannot make accurate recommendations. To overcome this problem, we propose to enhance a trust-based recommender algorithm with social data obtained from monitoring the activities of teachers within the ODS platform. In this article, we outline the re-quirements of the ODS recommender system based on experiences reported in related TEL recommender system studies. In addition, we provide empirical ev-idence from a survey study with stakeholders of the ODS project to support the requirements identified from a literature study. Finally, we present an agenda for further research intended to find out which recommender system should ul-timately be deployed in the ODS platform.NELLL, EU 7th framework Open Discovery Spac

Time-aware trust model for recommender systems

International audienceTrust is an imperative issue in any human society. It is built up with the survey of recurrent interactions between fellows. By consequence, trust is sensible to the time, which we call the temporal factor is trust relationship. During the last decade, the arise of social web resulted a serious need to a trust model for this virtual society. Many models were proposed to represent computational trust in different applications of social web. Even models that represent trust as incremental measurement, do not accord enough importance to the time axe. In this paper, we propose and compare many hypothesis to integrate the temporal factor in measuring trust between fellows

An improved model for trust-aware recommender systems based on multi-faceted trust

As customers enjoy the convenience of online shopping today, they face the problem of selecting from hundreds of thousands of products. Recommender systems, which make recommendations by matching products to customers based on the features of the products and the purchasing history of customers, are increasingly being incorporated into e-commerce websites. Collaborative filtering is a major approach to design algorithms for these systems. Much research has been directed toward enhancing the performance of recommender systems by considering various psychological and behavioural factors affecting the behaviour of users, e.g. trust and emotion. While e-commerce firms are keen to exploit information on social trust available on social networks to improve their services, conventional trust-aware collaborative filtering does not consider the multi-facets of social trust. In this research, we assume that a consumer tends to trust different people for recommendations on different types of product. For example, a user trusts a certain reviewer on popular items but may not place as much trust on the same reviewer on unpopular items. Furthermore, this thesis postulates that if we, as online shoppers, choose to establish trust on an individual while we ourselves are reviewing certain products, we value this individual’s opinions on these products and we most likely will value his/her opinions on similar products in future. Based on the above assumptions, this thesis proposes a new collaborative filtering algorithm for deriving multi-faceted trust based on trust establishment time. Experimental results based on historical data from Epinions show that the new algorithm can perform better in terms of accuracy when compared with conventional algorithms

Making Filter Bubbles Understandable

Recommender systems tend to create filter bubbles and, as a consequence, lower diversity exposure, often with the user not being aware of it. The biased preselection of content by recommender systems has called for approaches to deal with exposure diversity, such as giving users control over their filter bubble. We analyze how to make filter bubbles understandable and controllable by using interactive word clouds, following the idea of building trust in the system. On the basis of several prototypes, we performed explorative research on how to design word clouds for the controllability of filter bubbles. Our findings can inform designers of interactive filter bubbles in personalized offers of broadcasters, publishers, and media houses

EXTRA: EXpertise-Boosted Model for Trust-Based Recommendation System Based on Supervised Random Walk

The quality of recommendations based on any class of recommender systems may become poor if no or low quality data has been provided by users. This is a situation known as it Cold Start problem, which typically happens when a new user registers to the system and no preference data is available for that user. Trust-Aware Recommendation Systems can be considered as a solution for the cold start problem. In these systems, the trust between users plays an import role for making recommendations. However, most of the Trust-Aware RSs consider trust as a context independent phenomenon which means if user a trusts user b to the degree k then user a trusts user b to the degree k in all the concepts. However, in reality, trust is context dependent and user a can trust user b in context X but not in Y. Moreover, most of the trust-aware RSs do not consider an expertise concept for users and all the users are considered as same in the recommendation process. In this paper we proposed a novel approach for detecting expert users just based on their ratings (unlike previous systems which consider the separate profile and extra information for each user to find an expert). In this model a supervised random walk is exploited to search the trust network for finding experts. Empirical experiments on the Epinions dataset shows that EXTRA can outperform previous models in terms of accuracy and coverage

Extracting Implicit Social Relation for Social Recommendation Techniques in User Rating Prediction

Recommendation plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Recommender systems automatically suggest items to users that might be interesting for them. Recent studies illustrate that incorporating social trust in Matrix Factorization methods demonstrably improves accuracy of rating prediction. Such approaches mainly use the trust scores explicitly expressed by users. However, it is often challenging to have users provide explicit trust scores of each other. There exist quite a few works, which propose Trust Metrics to compute and predict trust scores between users based on their interactions. In this paper, first we present how social relation can be extracted from users' ratings to items by describing Hellinger distance between users in recommender systems. Then, we propose to incorporate the predicted trust scores into social matrix factorization models. By analyzing social relation extraction from three well-known real-world datasets, which both: trust and recommendation data available, we conclude that using the implicit social relation in social recommendation techniques has almost the same performance compared to the actual trust scores explicitly expressed by users. Hence, we build our method, called Hell-TrustSVD, on top of the state-of-the-art social recommendation technique to incorporate both the extracted implicit social relations and ratings given by users on the prediction of items for an active user. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to extend TrustSVD with extracted social trust information. The experimental results support the idea of employing implicit trust into matrix factorization whenever explicit trust is not available, can perform much better than the state-of-the-art approaches in user rating prediction

iTrace: An Implicit Trust Inference Method for Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering

The growth of Internet commerce has stimulated the use of collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms as recommender systems. A collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm recommends items of interest to the target user by leveraging the votes given by other similar users. In a standard CF framework, it is assumed that the credibility of every voting user is exactly the same with respect to the target user. This assumption is not satisfied and thus may lead to misleading recommendations in many practical applications. A natural countermeasure is to design a trust-aware CF (TaCF) algorithm, which can take account of the difference in the credibilities of the voting users when performing CF. To this end, this paper presents a trust inference approach, which can predict the implicit trust of the target user on every voting user from a sparse explicit trust matrix. Then an improved CF algorithm termed iTrace is proposed, which takes advantage of both the explicit and the predicted implicit trust to provide recommendations with the CF framework. An empirical evaluation on a public dataset demonstrates that the proposed algorithm provides a significant improvement in recommendation quality in terms of mean absolute error (MAE).Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl