Transfer Meets Hybrid: A Synthetic Approach for Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering with Text

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the key technique for recommender systems (RSs). CF exploits user-item behavior interactions (e.g., clicks) only and hence suffers from the data sparsity issue. One research thread is to integrate auxiliary information such as product reviews and news titles, leading to hybrid filtering methods. Another thread is to transfer knowledge from other source domains such as improving the movie recommendation with the knowledge from the book domain, leading to transfer learning methods. In real-world life, no single service can satisfy a user's all information needs. Thus it motivates us to exploit both auxiliary and source information for RSs in this paper. We propose a novel neural model to smoothly enable Transfer Meeting Hybrid (TMH) methods for cross-domain recommendation with unstructured text in an end-to-end manner. TMH attentively extracts useful content from unstructured text via a memory module and selectively transfers knowledge from a source domain via a transfer network. On two real-world datasets, TMH shows better performance in terms of three ranking metrics by comparing with various baselines. We conduct thorough analyses to understand how the text content and transferred knowledge help the proposed model.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, a full version for the WWW 2019 short pape

Context-aware user modeling strategies for journey plan recommendation

Popular journey planning systems, like Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps, usually ignore user’s preferences and context. This paper shows how we applied context-aware recommendation technologies in an existing journey planning mobile application to provide personalized and context-dependent recommendations to users. We describe two different strategies for context-aware user modeling in the journey planning domain. We present an extensive performance comparison of the proposed strategies by conducting a user-centric study in addition to a traditional offline evaluation methodPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Leveraging Mobile App Classification and User Context Information for Improving Recommendation Systems

Mobile apps play a significant role in current online environments where there is an overwhelming supply of information. Although mobile apps are part of our daily routine, searching and finding mobile apps is becoming a nontrivial task due to the current volume, velocity and variety of information. Therefore, app recommender systems provide users’ desired apps based on their preferences. However, current recommender systems and their underlying techniques are limited in effectively leveraging app classification schemes and context information. In this thesis, I attempt to address this gap by proposing a text analytics framework for mobile app recommendation by leveraging an app classification scheme that incorporates the needs of users as well as the complexity of the user-item-context information in mobile app usage pattern. In this recommendation framework, I adopt and empirically test an app classification scheme based on textual information about mobile apps using data from Google Play store. In addition, I demonstrate how context information such as user social media status can be matched with app classification categories using tree-based and rule-based prediction algorithms. Methodology wise, my research attempts to show the feasibility of textual data analysis in profiling apps based on app descriptions and other structured attributes, as well as explore mechanisms for matching user preferences and context information with app usage categories. Practically, the proposed text analytics framework can allow app developers reach a wider usage base through better understanding of user motivation and context information

Enhancing Mobile App User Understanding and Marketing with Heterogeneous Crowdsourced Data: A Review

© 2013 IEEE. The mobile app market has been surging in recent years. It has some key differentiating characteristics which make it different from traditional markets. To enhance mobile app development and marketing, it is important to study the key research challenges such as app user profiling, usage pattern understanding, popularity prediction, requirement and feedback mining, and so on. This paper reviews CrowdApp, a research field that leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data for mobile app user understanding and marketing. We first characterize the opportunities of the CrowdApp, and then present the key research challenges and state-of-the-art techniques to deal with these challenges. We further discuss the open issues and future trends of the CrowdApp. Finally, an evolvable app ecosystem architecture based on heterogeneous crowdsourced data is presented