Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences

It is increasingly rare to encounter a Web service that doesn’t engage in some form of automated recommendation, with Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques being virtually ubiquitous as the means for delivering relevant content. Yet several key issues still remain unresolved, including optimal han...

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Main Authors: Alanazi, Sultan, Goulding, James, McAuley, Derek
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Published: 2016
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/37112/
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author Alanazi, Sultan
Goulding, James
McAuley, Derek
author_facet Alanazi, Sultan
Goulding, James
McAuley, Derek
author_sort Alanazi, Sultan
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description It is increasingly rare to encounter a Web service that doesn’t engage in some form of automated recommendation, with Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques being virtually ubiquitous as the means for delivering relevant content. Yet several key issues still remain unresolved, including optimal handling of cold starts and how best to maintain user privacy within that context. Recent work has demonstrated a potentially fruitful line of attack in the form of cross system user modelling, which uses features generated from one domain to bootstrap recommendations in another. In this paper we evidence the effectiveness of this approach through direct real-world user feedback, deconstructing a cross-system news recommendation service where user models are generated via social media data. It is shown that even when a relatively naive vector-space approach is used, it is possible to automatically generate user-models that provide statistically superior performance than when items are explicitly filtered based on a user’s self-declared preferences. Detailed qualitative analysis of why such effects occur indicate that different models are capturing widely different areas within a user’s preference space, and that hybrid models represent fertile ground for future research.
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format Conference or Workshop Item
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institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
institution_category Local University
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publishDate 2016
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spelling nottingham-371122020-05-04T18:02:33Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/37112/ Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences Alanazi, Sultan Goulding, James McAuley, Derek It is increasingly rare to encounter a Web service that doesn’t engage in some form of automated recommendation, with Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques being virtually ubiquitous as the means for delivering relevant content. Yet several key issues still remain unresolved, including optimal handling of cold starts and how best to maintain user privacy within that context. Recent work has demonstrated a potentially fruitful line of attack in the form of cross system user modelling, which uses features generated from one domain to bootstrap recommendations in another. In this paper we evidence the effectiveness of this approach through direct real-world user feedback, deconstructing a cross-system news recommendation service where user models are generated via social media data. It is shown that even when a relatively naive vector-space approach is used, it is possible to automatically generate user-models that provide statistically superior performance than when items are explicitly filtered based on a user’s self-declared preferences. Detailed qualitative analysis of why such effects occur indicate that different models are capturing widely different areas within a user’s preference space, and that hybrid models represent fertile ground for future research. 2016-07-10 Conference or Workshop Item PeerReviewed Alanazi, Sultan, Goulding, James and McAuley, Derek (2016) Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences. In: 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2016 (HT'16), 10-13 July 2016, Halifax, Canada. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2914586.2914640
spellingShingle Alanazi, Sultan
Goulding, James
McAuley, Derek
Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
title Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
title_full Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
title_fullStr Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
title_full_unstemmed Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
title_short Cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
title_sort cross-system recommendation: user-modelling via social media versus self-declared preferences
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/37112/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/37112/