A Factored Similarity Model with Trust and Social Influence for Top-N Recommendation

Many trust-aware recommendation systems have emerged to overcome the problem of data sparsity, which bottlenecks the performance of traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommendation algorithms. However, these systems most rely on the binary social network information, failing to consider the variety of trust values between users. To make up for the defect, this paper designs a novel Top-N recommendation model based on trust and social influence, in which the most influential users are determined by the Improved Structural Holes (ISH) method. Specifically, the features in Matrix Factorization (MF) were configured by deep learning rather than random initialization, which has a negative impact on prediction of item rating. In addition, a trust measurement model was created to quantify the strength of implicit trust. The experimental result shows that our approach can solve the adverse impacts of data sparsity and enhance the recommendation accuracy

Top-N Recommendation Based on Mutual Trust and Influence

To improve recommendation quality, the existing trust-based recommendation methods often directly use the binary trust relationship of social networks, and rarely consider the difference and potential influence of trust strength among users. To make up for the gap, this paper puts forward a hybrid top-N recommendation algorithm that combines mutual trust and influence. Firstly, a new trust measurement method was developed based on dynamic weight, considering the difference of trust strength between users. Secondly, a new mutual influence measurement model was designed based on trust relationship, in light of the social network topology. Finally, two hybrid recommendation algorithms, denoted as FSTA(Factored Similarity model with Trust Approach) and FSTI(Factored similarity models with trust and influence), were presented to solve the data sparsity and binarity. The two algorithms integrate user similarity, item similarity, mutual trust and mutual influence. Our approach was compared with several other recommendation algorithms on three standard datasets: FilmTrust, Epinions and Ciao. The experimental results proved the high efficiency of our approach

Enhancing the Generalization for Text Classification through Fusion of Backward Features

Generalization has always been a keyword in deep learning. Pretrained models and domain adaptation technology have received widespread attention in solving the problem of generalization. They are all focused on finding features in data to improve the generalization ability and to prevent overfitting. Although they have achieved good results in various tasks, those models are unstable when classifying a sentence whose label is positive but still contains negative phrases. In this article, we analyzed the attention heat map of the benchmarks and found that previous models pay more attention to the phrase rather than to the semantic information of the whole sentence. Moreover, we proposed a method to scatter the attention away from opposite sentiment words to avoid a one-sided judgment. We designed a two-stream network and stacked the gradient reversal layer and feature projection layer within the auxiliary network. The gradient reversal layer can reverse the gradient of features in the training stage so that the parameters are optimized following the reversed gradient in the backpropagation stage. We utilized an auxiliary network to extract the backward features and then fed them into the main network to merge them with normal features extracted by the main network. We applied this method to the three baselines of TextCNN, BERT, and RoBERTa using sentiment analysis and sarcasm detection datasets. The results show that our method can improve the sentiment analysis datasets by 0.5% and the sarcasm detection datasets by 2.1%

Self-Attention Based Sequential Recommendation With Graph Convolutional Networks

Learning embeddings representations of users and items lies at the core of modern recommender systems. Existing methods based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and sequential recommendation typically obtain a user’s or an item’s embedding by mapping from pre-existing features into better embeddings for users and items, such as ID and attributes. GCN integrates the user-item interaction as the bipartite graph structure into the embedding process, which can better represent sparse data, but cannot capture users’ long-term interests. Sequential recommendation seek to capture the “context” of users’ activities based on their historical actions, but requires dense data to support it. The goal of our work is to combine the advantages of GCN and sequential recommendation models by proposing a novel Self-Attention based Sequential recommendation with Graph Convolutional Networks (SASGCN). It uses multiple lightweight GCN layers to capture high-order connectivity between users and items, and by introducing ratings as auxiliary information into the user-item interaction matrix, it provides richer information. By incorporating self-attention based methods, the proposed model capture long-term semantics through relatively few actions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art models consistently