Social networks include millions of users constantly looking for new relationships for personal or professional purposes. Social network sites recommend friends based on relationship features and content information. A significant part of information shared every day is spread in Hashtags. None of the existing content-based recommender systems uses the semantic of hashtags while suggesting new friends. Currently, hashtags are considered as strings without looking at their meanings. Social network sites group together people sharing exactly the same hashtags and never semantically close ones. We think that hashtags encapsulate some people interests. In this paper, we propose a framework showing how a recommender system can benefit from hashtags to enrich users' profiles. This framework consists of three main components: (1) constructing user's profile based on shared hashtags, (2) matching method that computes semantic similarity between profiles, (3) grouping semantically close users using clustering technics. The proposed framework has been tested on a Twitter dataset from the Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection consisting of 81306 profiles.
Twitter, one of the biggest and most popular microblogging Websites, has evolved into a powerful communication platform which allows millions of active users to generate huge volume of microposts and queries on a daily basis. To accommodate effective categorization and easy search, users are allowed to make use of hashtags, keywords or phrases prefixed by hash character, to categorize and summarize their posts. However, valid hashtags are not restricted and thus are created in a free and heterogeneous style, increasing difficulty of the task of tweet categorization. In this paper, we propose a…
Simple, short, and compact hashtags cover a wide range of information on social networks. Although many works in the field of natural language processing (NLP) have demonstrated the importance of hashtag recommendation, hashtag recommendation for images has barely been studied. In this paper, we introduce the HARRISON dataset, a benchmark on hashtag recommendation for real world images in social networks. The HARRISON dataset is a realistic dataset, composed of 57,383 photos from Instagram and an average of 4.5 associated hashtags for each photo. To evaluate our dataset, we design a baseline f…
IBM Research India（IBM印度研究院）；Indian Institute of Technology（印度理工学院）；Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology（内塔吉·苏巴斯理工学院）
The hashtag recommendation problem addresses recommending (suggesting) one or more hashtags to explicitly tag a post made on a given social network platform, based upon the content and context of the post. In this work, we propose a novel methodology for hashtag recommendation for microblog posts, specifically Twitter. The methodology, EmTaggeR, is built upon a training-testing framework that builds on the top of the concept of word embedding. The training phase comprises of learning word vectors associated with each hashtag, and deriving a word embedding for each hashtag. We provide two train…
Online social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikis and Linkedin have made a great impact on the way we consume information in our day to day life. Now it has become increasingly important that we come across appropriate content from the social media to avoid information explosion. In case of Twitter, popular information can be tracked using hashtags. Studying the characteristics of tweets containing hashtags becomes important for a number of tasks, such as breaking news detection, personalized message recommendation, friends recommendation, and sentiment analysis among others. In this paper,…
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）
Hashtags in online social networks have gained tremendous popularity during the past five years. The resulting large quantity of data has provided a new lens into modern society. Previously, researchers mainly rely on data collected from Twitter to study either a certain type of hashtags or a certain property of hashtags. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale empirical analysis of hashtags shared on Instagram, the major platform for hashtag-sharing. We study hashtags from three different dimensions including the temporal-spatial dimension, the semantic dimension, and the social dimen…
Most of the recent studies of social recommendation assume that people share similar preferences with their friends and the online social relations are helpful in improving traditional recommender systems. However, this assumption is often untenable as the online social networks are quite sparse and a majority of users only have a small number of friends. Besides, explicit friends may not share similar interests because of the randomness in the process of building social networks. Therefore, discovering a number of reliable friends for each user plays an important role in advancing social reco…
The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals' online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social relations, i.e., friends. While friendship ensures some homophily, the similarity of a user with her friends can vary as the number of friends increases. Research from sociology suggests that friends are more similar than strangers, but friends can have different interests. Exogenous information such as comments and ratings may help discern different degrees of agree…
A routine activity of social networks servers is to recommend candidate friends that one may know and stimulate addition of these people to one's contacts. An intriguing issue is how these recommendation lists are composed. This work investigates the main variables involved in the recommendation activity, in order to reproduce these lists including its time dependent characteristics. We propose relevant algorithms. Besides conventional approaches, such as friend_of_a_friend, two techniques of importance have not been emphasized in previous works: randomization and direct use of interestingness…
Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph, containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. Thi…
This paper is concerned with how to make efficient use of social information to improve recommendations. Most existing social recommender systems assume people share similar preferences with their social friends. Which, however, may not hold true due to various motivations of making online friends and dynamics of online social networks. Inspired by recent causal process based recommendations that first model user exposures towards items and then use these exposures to guide rating prediction, we utilize social information to capture user exposures rather than user preferences. We assume that p…
Social connections play a vital role in improving the performance of recommendation systems (RS). However, incorporating social information into RS is challenging. Most existing models usually consider social influences in a given session, ignoring that both users preferences and their friends influences are evolving. Moreover, in real world, social relations are sparse. Modeling dynamic influences and alleviating data sparsity is of great importance. In this paper, we propose a unified framework named Dynamic RElation Aware Model (DREAM) for social recommendation, which tries to model both us…
Understanding community structure in social media is critical due to its broad applications such as friend recommendations, link predictions and collaborative filtering. However, there is no widely accepted definition of community in literature. Existing work use structure related metrics such as modularity and function related metrics such as ground truth to measure the performance of community detection algorithms, while ignoring an important metric, size of the community. [1] suggests that the size of community with strong ties in social media should be limited to 150. As we discovered in t…
Twitter data is extremely noisy -- each tweet is short, unstructured and with informal language, a challenge for current topic modeling. On the other hand, tweets are accompanied by extra information such as authorship, hashtags and the user-follower network. Exploiting this additional information, we propose the Twitter-Network (TN) topic model to jointly model the text and the social network in a full Bayesian nonparametric way. The TN topic model employs the hierarchical Poisson-Dirichlet processes (PDP) for text modeling and a Gaussian process random function model for social network model…
We propose a friend recommendation system (an application of link prediction) using edge embeddings on social networks. Most real-world social networks are multi-graphs, where different kinds of relationships (e.g. chat, friendship) are possible between a pair of users. Existing network embedding techniques do not leverage signals from different edge types and thus perform inadequately on link prediction in such networks. We propose a method to mine network representation that effectively exploits heterogeneity in multi-graphs. We evaluate our model on a real-world, active social network where…
Two main approaches to using social network information in recommendation have emerged: augmenting collaborative filtering with social data and algorithms that use only ego-centric data. We compare the two approaches using movie and music data from Facebook, and hashtag data from Twitter. We find that recommendation algorithms based only on friends perform no worse than those based on the full network, even though they require much less data and computational resources. Further, our evidence suggests that locality of preference, or the non-random distribution of item preferences in a social ne…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Social recommendation is effective in improving the recommendation performance by leveraging social relations from online social networking platforms. Social relations among users provide friends' information for modeling users' interest in candidate items and help items expose to potential consumers (i.e., item attraction). However, there are two issues haven't been well-studied: Firstly, for the user interests, existing methods typically aggregate friends' information contextualized on the candidate item only, and this shallow context-aware aggregation makes them suffer from the limited frie…
Social-based recommendation systems exploit the selections of friends to combat the data sparsity on user preferences, and improve the recommendation accuracy of the collaborative filtering strategy. The main challenge is to capture and weigh friends' preferences, as in practice they do necessarily match. In this paper, we propose a Neural Attention mechanism for Social collaborative filtering, namely NAS. We design a neural architecture, to carefully compute the non-linearity in friends' preferences by taking into account the social latent effects of friends on user behavior. In addition, we …
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
In collaborative filtering, it is an important way to make full use of social information to improve the recommendation quality, which has been proved to be effective because user behavior will be affected by her friends. However, existing works leverage the social relationship to aggregate user features from friends' historical behavior sequences in a user-level indirect paradigm. A significant defect of the indirect paradigm is that it ignores the temporal relationships between behavior events across users. In this paper, we propose a novel time-aware sequential recommendation framework call…
Most previous works in privacy of Online Social Networks (OSN) focus on a restricted scenario of using one type of information to infer another type of information or using only static profile data such as username, profile picture or home location. However the multimedia footprints of users has become extremely diverse nowadays. In reality, an adversary would exploit all types of information obtainable over time, to achieve its goal. In this paper, we analyse OSN privacy by jointly exploiting longterm multimodal information. We focus in particular on inference of social relationships. We cons…
Friending recommendation has successfully contributed to the explosive growth of on-line social networks. Most friending recommendation services today aim to support passive friending, where a user passively selects friending targets from the recommended candidates. In this paper, we advocate recommendation support for active friending, where a user actively specifies a friending target. To the best of our knowledge, a recommendation designed to provide guidance for a user to systematically approach his friending target, has not been explored in existing on-line social networking services. To …
An important fact in studying the link prediction is that the structural properties of networks have significant impacts on the performance of algorithms. Therefore, how to improve the performance of link prediction with the aid of structural properties of networks is an essential problem. By analyzing many real networks, we find a common structure property: nodes are preferentially linked to the nodes with the weak clique structure (abbreviated as PWCS to simplify descriptions). Based on this PWCS phenomenon, we propose a local friend recommendation (FR) index to facilitate link prediction. O…
We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We find that for a user deciding between two choices an additional rating star has a much larger effect than an additional friend's recommendation on the probability of selecting an item. Equally important, negative opinions from friends are more influential than positive opinions, and people exhibit more random behavior in their choices when the decision invol…
A social network grows over a period of time with the formation of new connections and relations. In recent years we have witnessed a massive growth of online social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. So it has become a problem of extreme importance to know the destiny of these networks. Thus predicting the evolution of a social network is a question of extreme importance. A good model for evolution of a social network can help in understanding the properties responsible for the changes occurring in a network structure. In this paper we propose such a model for evolution of social networks. …
The prevalence of online social network makes it compulsory to study how social relations affect user choice. However, most existing methods leverage only first-order social relations, that is, the direct neighbors that are connected to the target user. The high-order social relations, e.g., the friends of friends, which very informative to reveal user preference, have been largely ignored. In this work, we focus on modeling the indirect influence from the high-order neighbors in social networks to improve the performance of item recommendation. Distinct from mainstream social recommenders tha…
An effective content recommendation in modern social media platforms should benefit both creators to bring genuine benefits to them and consumers to help them get really interesting content. In this paper, we propose a model called Social Explorative Attention Network (SEAN) for content recommendation. SEAN uses a personalized content recommendation model to encourage personal interests driven recommendation. Moreover, SEAN allows the personalization factors to attend to users' higher-order friends on the social network to improve the accuracy and diversity of recommendation results. Construct…
Recent social recommender systems benefit from friendship graph to make an accurate recommendation, believing that friends in a social network have exactly the same interests and preferences. Some studies have benefited from hard clustering algorithms (such as K-means) to determine the similarity between users and consequently to define degree of friendships. In this paper, we went a step further to identify true friends for making even more realistic recommendations. we calculated the similarity between users, as well as the dependency between a user and an item. Our hypothesis is that due to…
Incorporating Like-Minded Peers to Overcome Friend Data Sparsity in Session-Based Social Recommendations
College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University（内蒙古大学计算机学院）；College of Medicine, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学医学院）；School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学工程与计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机学院）
Online social as an extension of traditional life plays an important role in our daily lives. Users often seek out new friends that have significant similarities such as interests and habits, motivating us to exploit such online information to suggest friends to users. In this work, we focus on friend suggestion in online game platforms because in-game social quality significantly correlates with player engagement, determining game experience. Unlike a typical recommendation system that depends on item-user interactions, in our setting, user-user interactions do not depend on each other. Meanw…
Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
On social network platforms, a user's behavior is based on his/her personal interests, or influenced by his/her friends. In the literature, it is common to model either users' personal preference or their socially influenced preference. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning model SocialTrans for social recommendations to integrate these two types of preferences. SocialTrans is composed of three modules. The first module is based on a multi-layer Transformer to model users' personal preference. The second module is a multi-layer graph attention neural network (GAT), which is used to m…
Viral marketing is becoming important due to the popularity of online social networks (OSNs). Companies may provide incentives (e.g., via free samples of a product) to a small group of users in an OSN, and these users provide recommendations to their friends, which eventually increases the overall sales of a given product. Nevertheless, this also opens a door for "malicious behaviors": dishonest users may intentionally give misleading recommendations to their friends so as to distort the normal sales distribution. In this paper, we propose a detection framework to identify dishonest users in O…
Social recommender systems exploit users' social relationships to improve the recommendation accuracy. Intuitively, a user tends to trust different subsets of her social friends, regarding with different scenarios. Therefore, the main challenge of social recommendation is to exploit the optimal social dependency between users for a specific recommendation task. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation method, named probabilistic relational matrix factorization (PRMF), which aims to learn the optimal social dependency between users to improve the recommendation accuracy, with or without…
Recommender systems in location based social networks mainly take advantage of social and geographical influence in making personalized Points-of-interest (POI) recommendations. The social influence is obtained from social network friends or similar users based on matching visit history whilst the geographical influence is obtained from the geographical footprints users' leave when they check-in at different POIs. However, this approach may fall short when a user moves to a new region where they have little or no activity history. We propose a location aware POI recommendation system that mode…
USC Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
Social media users have finite attention which limits the number of incoming messages from friends they can process. Moreover, they pay more attention to opinions and recommendations of some friends more than others. In this paper, we propose LA-LDA, a latent topic model which incorporates limited, non-uniformly divided attention in the diffusion process by which opinions and information spread on the social network. We show that our proposed model is able to learn more accurate user models from users' social network and item adoption behavior than models which do not take limited attention in…
The number of Internet users had grown rapidly enticing companies and cooperations to make full use of recommendation infrastructures. Consequently, online advertisement companies emerged to aid us in the presence of numerous items and users. Even as a user, you may find yourself drowned in a set of items that you think you might need, but you are not sure if you should try them. Those items could be online services, products, places or even a person for a friendship. Therefore, we need recommender systems that pave the way and help us making good decisions. This paper provides a review on tra…
How to make the best decision between the opinions and tastes of your friends and acquaintances? Therefore, recommender systems are used to solve such issues. The common algorithms use a similarity measure to predict active users' tastes over a particular item. According to the cold start and data sparsity problems, these systems cannot predict and suggest particular items to users. In this paper, we introduce a new recommender system is able to find user preferences and based on it, provides the recommendations. Our proposed system called CUPCF is a combination of two similarity measures in c…
Many social networks in our daily life are bipartite networks built on reciprocity. How can we recommend users/friends to a user, so that the user is interested in and attractive to recommended users? In this research, we propose a new collaborative filtering model to improve user recommendations in reciprocal and bipartite social networks. The model considers a user's "taste" in picking others and "attractiveness" in being picked by others. A case study of an online dating network shows that the new model has good performance in recommending both initial and reciprocal contacts.
Recent research has focused on the monitoring of global-scale online data for improved detection of epidemics, mood patterns, movements in the stock market, political revolutions, box-office revenues, consumer behaviour and many other important phenomena. However, privacy considerations and the sheer scale of data available online are quickly making global monitoring infeasible, and existing methods do not take full advantage of local network structure to identify key nodes for monitoring. Here, we develop a model of the contagious spread of information in a global-scale, publicly-articulated …
After the Internet and the World Wide Web have become popular and widely-available, the electronically stored online interactions of individuals have fast emerged as a challenge for researchers and, perhaps even faster, as a source of valuable information for entrepreneurs. We now have detailed records of informal friendship relations in social networks, purchases on e-commerce sites, various sorts of information being sent from one user to another, online collections of web bookmarks, and many other data sets that allow us to pose questions that are of interest from both academical and commer…
Next (or successive) point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most of the previous studies attempted to incorporate the spatiotemporal information and sequential patterns of user check-ins into recommendation models to predict the target user's next move. However, none of these approaches utilized the social influence of each user's friends. In this study, we discuss a new topic of next POI recommendation and present a deep attentive network for social-aware next POI recommendation called DAN-SNR. In particular, the DAN-SNR makes use of the sel…
Social network based approaches to person recommendations are compared to interest based approaches with the help of an empirical study on a large German social networking platform. We assess and compare the performance of different basic variants of the two approaches by precision / recall based performance with respect to reproducing known friendship relations and by an empirical questionnaire based study. In accordance to expectation, the results show that interest based person recommenders are able to produce more novel recommendations while performing less well with respect to friendship …
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；The Wharton School（沃顿商学院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
The impacts of link recommendations on social networks are challenging to evaluate, and so far they have been studied in limited settings. Observational studies are restricted in the kinds of causal questions they can answer and naive A/B tests often lead to biased evaluations due to unaccounted network interference. Furthermore, evaluations in simulation settings are often limited to static network models that do not take into account the potential feedback loops between link recommendation and organic network evolution. To this end, we study the impacts of recommendations on social networks …
In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model, called unified model, which naturally unifies the ideas of social influence, collaborative filtering and content-based methods for item recommendation. To address the issue of hidden social influence, we devise new algorithms to learn the model parameters of our proposal based on expectation maximization (EM). In addition to a single-machine version of our EM algorithm, we further devise a parallelized implementation on the Map-Reduce framework to process two large-scale datasets we collect. Moreover, we show that the social influence…
Matrix Factorization techniques have been successfully applied to raise the quality of suggestions generated by Collaborative Filtering Systems (CFSs). Traditional CFSs based on Matrix Factorization operate on the ratings provided by users and have been recently extended to incorporate demographic aspects such as age and gender. In this paper we propose to merge CFS based on Matrix Factorization and information regarding social friendships in order to provide users with more accurate suggestions and rankings on items of their interest. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a real-life on…
Homophily describes the phenomenon that similarity breeds connection, i.e., individuals tend to form ties with other people who are similar to themselves in some aspect(s). The similarity in music taste can undoubtedly influence who we make friends with and shape our social circles. In this paper, we study homophily in an online music platform Last.fm regarding user preferences towards listening to mainstream (M), novel (N), or diverse (D) content. Furthermore, we draw comparisons with homophily based on listening profiles derived from artists users have listened to in the past, i.e., artist p…
In modern social media platforms, an effective content recommendation should benefit both creators to bring genuine benefits to them and consumers to help them get really interesting content. To address the limitations of existing methods for social recommendation, we propose Social Explorative Attention Network (SEAN), a social recommendation framework that uses a personalized content recommendation model to encourage personal interests driven recommendation. SEAN has two versions: (1) SEAN-END2END allows user's attention vector to attend their personalized interested points in the documents.…
The rapid growth of location-based services(LBSs)has greatly enriched people's urban lives and attracted millions of users in recent years. Location-based social networks(LBSNs)allow users to check-in at a physical location and share daily tips on points-of-interest (POIs) with their friends anytime and anywhere. Such check-in behavior can make daily real-life experiences spread quickly through the Internet. Moreover, such check-in data in LBSNs can be fully exploited to understand the basic laws of human daily movement and mobility. This paper focuses on reviewing the taxonomy of user modelin…
Shahid Beheshti University, G.C.（沙希德·贝赫什提大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
With the advent of online social networks, recommender systems have became crucial for the success of many online applications/services due to their significance role in tailoring these applications to user-specific needs or preferences. Despite their increasing popularity, in general recommender systems suffer from the data sparsity and the cold-start problems. To alleviate these issues, in recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in exploiting social information such as trust relations among users along with the rating data to improve the performance of recommender systems. The mai…
Causal Disentanglement for Regulating Social Influence Bias in Social Recommendation
School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学电气与数据工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences（重庆文理学院人工智能学院）
Recommender systems associated with social networks often use social explanations (e.g. "X, Y and 2 friends like this") to support the recommendations. We present a study of the effects of these social explanations in a music recommendation context. We start with an experiment with 237 users, in which we show explanations with varying levels of social information and analyze their effect on users' decisions. We distinguish between two key decisions: the likelihood of checking out the recommended artist, and the actual rating of the artist based on listening to several songs. We find that while…
Several recent results show the influence of social contacts to spread certain properties over the network, but others question the methodology of these experiments by proposing that the measured effects may be due to homophily or a shared environment. In this paper we justify the existence of the social influence by considering the temporal behavior of Last.fm users. In order to clearly distinguish between friends sharing the same interest, especially since Last.fm recommends friends based on similarity of taste, we separated the timeless effect of similar taste from the temporal impulses of …
