IMPROVING COLLABORATIVE FILTERING RECOMMENDER BY USING MULTI-CRITERIA RATING AND IMPLICIT SOCIAL NETWORKS TO RECOMMEND RESEARCH PAPERS

Research paper recommender systems (RSs) aim to alleviate the information overload of researchers by suggesting relevant and useful papers. The collaborative filtering in the area of recommending research papers can benefit by using richer user feedback data through multi-criteria rating, and by integrating richer social network data into the recommender algorithm. Existing approaches using collaborative filtering or hybrid approaches typically allow only one rating criterion (overall liking) for users to evaluate papers. We conducted a qualitative study using focus group to explore the most important criteria for rating research papers that can be used to control the paper recommendation by enabling users to set the weight for each criterion. We investigated also the effect of using different rating criteria on the user interface design and how the user can control the weight of the criteria. We followed that by a quantitative study using a questionnaire to validate our findings from the focus group and to find if the chosen criteria are domain independent. Combining social network information with collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms has successfully reduced some of the drawbacks of collaborative filtering and increased the accuracy of recommendations. All existing recommendation approaches that combine social network information with collaborative filtering in this domain have used explicit social relations that are initiated by users (e.g. “friendship”, “following”). The results have shown that the recommendations produced using explicit social relations cannot compete with traditional collaborative filtering and suffer from the low user coverage. We argue that the available data in social bookmarking Web sites can be exploited to connect similar users using implicit social connections based on their bookmarking behavior. We explore the implicit social relations between users in social bookmarking Web sites (such as CiteULike and Mendeley), and propose three different implicit social networks to recommend relevant papers to users: readership, co-readership and tag-based implicit social networks. First, for each network, we tested the interest similarities of users who are connected using the proposed implicit social networks and compare them with the interest similarities using two explicit social networks: co-authorship and friendship. We found that the readership implicit social network connects users with more similarities than users who are connected using co-authorship and friendship explicit social networks. Then, we compare the recommendation using three different recommendation approaches and implicit social network alone with the recommendation using implicit and explicit social network. We found that fusing recommendation from implicit and explicit social networks can increase the prediction accuracy, and user coverage. The trade-off between the prediction accuracy and diversity was also studied with different social distances between users. The results showed that the diversity of the recommended list increases with the increase of social distance. To summarize, the main contributions of this dissertation to the area of research paper recommendation are two-fold. It is the first to explore the use of multi-criteria rating for research papers. Secondly, it proposes and evaluates a novel approach to improve collaborative filtering in both prediction accuracy (performance) and user coverage and diversity (nonperformance measures) in social bookmarking systems for sharing research papers, by defining and exploiting several implicit social networks from usage data that is widely available

Trust-enhanced visibility for personalized document recommendations

Documents are recommended by computer-based systems normally according to their prominence in the document reference network. Based on the requirements identified in a concrete use case for recommending scientific publications, the paper claims that merely measuring prominence is insufficient for high quality recommendations. We propose to use information from a trust network in addition to the document network in order to improve and to personalize recommendations. A trust-enhanced visibility measure integrates trust information and the classical reference based measures. A simulation study applies the new visibility measure to the presented use case

Vertrauensbasierte Empfehlungen in mehrschichtigen Netzwerken

The huge interest in social networking applications - Friendster.com, for example, has more than 40 million users - led to a considerable research interest in using this data for generating recommendations. Especially recommendation techniques that analyze trust networks were found to provide very accurate and highly personalized results. The main contribution of this thesis is to extend the approach to trust-based recommendations, which up to now have been made for unlinked items such as products or movies, to linked resources, in particular documents. Therefore, a second type of network, namely a document reference network, is considered apart from the trust network. This is, for example, the citation network of scientific publications or the hyperlink graph of webpages. Recommendations for documents are typically made by reference-based visibility measures which consider a document to be the more important, the more often it is referenced by important documents. Document and trust networks, as well as further networks such as organization networks are integrated in a multi-layer network. This architecture makes it possible to combine classical measures for the visibility of a document with trust-based recommendations, giving trust-enhanced visibility measures. Moreover, an approximation approach is introduced which considers the uncertainty induced by duplicate documents. These measures are evaluated in simulation studies. The trust-based recommender system for scientific publications SPRec implements a two-layer architecture and provides personalized recommendations via a Web interface.Soziale Netzwerke mit ihren Millionen von Nutzern haben zu einem großen Interesse an der Fragestellung geführt, wie die Informationen aus solchen sozialen Netzwerken in Empfehlungssystemen genutzt werden können. Aktuelle Forschungsarbeiten haben gezeigt, dass vor allem Techniken, die soziale Vertrauensnetzwerke zur Grundlage nehmen, sehr gute Ergebnisse liefern. Die vorliegende Dissertation erweitert Ansätze zu vertrauensbasierten Empfehlungen, die bisher nur isolierte Objekte wie beispielsweise Produkte oder Filme berücksichtigt haben, zu Ansätzen für vernetzte Ressourcen, insbesondere Dokumente. Daher wird neben dem Vertrauensnetzwerk eine zweite Art von Netzwerk betrachtet, ein Dokumentennetzwerk. Beispiele für Dokumentennetzwerke sind Zitationsnetzwerke wissenschaftlicher Publikationen oder der Hyperlink-Graph zwischen Webseiten. Dokumentenempfehlungen werden typischerweise mit referenzbasierten Sichtbarkeitsmaßen berechnet, die ein Dokument als wichtig erachten, wenn es von vielen wichtigen Dokumenten referenziert wird. Vertrauensnetzwerke und Dokumentennetzwerke werden in einer zweischichtigen Architektur integriert. Weitere Netzwerke, wie zum Beispiel Organisationsnetzwerke bauen sie zu einer mehrschichtigen Architektur aus. In dieser Architektur können klassische Maße für Dokumentensichtbarkeit mit vertrauensbasierten Empfehlungen kombiniert werden, nämlich in den sogenannten vertrauensbasierten Sichtbarkeitsmaßen. Darüberhinaus führt die Dissertation einen Ansatz ein, um die vertrauensbasierte Sichtbarkeit dann approximieren zu können, wenn das Dokumentennetzwerk Duplikate von Dokumenten enthält. Die entwickelten Sichtbarkeitsmaße werden in einer Simulationsstudie analysiert. Das webbasierte Empfehlungssystem für wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen SPRec implementiert die vertrauensbasierten Sichtbarkeitsmaße und generiert personalisierte Empfehlungen