As a pivotal tool to alleviate the information overload problem, recommender systems aim to predict user's preferred items from millions of candidates by analyzing observed user-item relations. As for alleviating the sparsity and cold start problems encountered by recommender systems, researchers resort to employing side information or knowledge in recommendation as a strategy for uncovering hidden (indirect) user-item relations, aiming to enrich observed information (or data) for recommendation. However, in the face of the high complexity and large scale of side information and knowledge, this strategy relies for efficient implementation on the scalability of recommendation models. Not until after the prevalence of machine learning did graph embedding techniques be a concentration, which can efficiently utilize complex and large-scale data. In light of that, equipping recommender systems with graph embedding techniques has been widely studied these years, appearing to outperform conventional recommendation implemented directly based on graph topological analysis. As the focus, this article retrospects graph embedding-based recommendation from embedding techniques for bipartite graphs, general graphs and knowledge graphs, and proposes a general design pipeline of that. In addition, after comparing several representative graph embedding-based recommendation models with the most common-used conventional recommendation models on simulations, this article manifests that the conventional models can overall outperform the graph embedding-based ones in predicting implicit user-item interactions, revealing the comparative weakness of graph embedding-based recommendation in these tasks. To foster future research, this article proposes suggestions on making a trade-off between graph embedding-based recommendation and conventional recommendation in different tasks, and puts forward open questions.
With the explosive growth of online information, recommender systems play a key role to alleviate such information overload. Due to the important application value of recommender systems, there have always been emerging works in this field. In recommender systems, the main challenge is to learn the effective user/item representations from their interactions and side information (if any). Recently, graph neural network (GNN) techniques have been widely utilized in recommender systems since most of the information in recommender systems essentially has graph structure and GNN has superiority in …
University of Qom（库姆大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Considering processes of a business in a recommender system is highly advantageous. Although most studies in the business process analysis domain are of descriptive and predictive nature, the feasibility of constructing a process-aware recommender system is assessed in a few works. One reason can be the lack of knowledge on process mining potential for recommendation problems. Therefore, this paper aims to identify and analyze the published studies on process-aware recommender system techniques in business process management and process mining domain. A systematic review was conducted on 33 ac…
Amazon（亚马逊）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高等技术学院）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Collaborative recommendation approaches based on nearest-neighbors are still highly popular today due to their simplicity, their efficiency, and their ability to produce accurate and personalized recommendations. This chapter offers a comprehensive survey of neighborhood-based methods for the item recommendation problem. It presents the main characteristics and benefits of such methods, describes key design choices for implementing a neighborhood-based recommender system, and gives practical information on how to make these choices. A broad range of methods is covered in the chapter, including…
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In recommender systems, one common challenge is the cold-start problem, where interactions are very limited for fresh users in the systems. To address this challenge, recently, many works introduce the meta-optimization idea into the recommendation scenarios, i.e. learning to learn the user preference by only a few past interaction items. The core idea is to learn global shared meta-initialization parameters for all users and rapidly adapt them into local parameters for each user respectively. They aim at deriving general knowledge across preference learning of various users, so as to rapidly …
Recommender systems use algorithms to provide users with product or service recommendations. Recently, these systems have been using machine learning algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence. However, choosing a suitable machine learning algorithm for a recommender system is difficult because of the number of algorithms described in the literature. Researchers and practitioners developing recommender systems are left with little information about the current approaches in algorithm usage. Moreover, the development of a recommender system using a machine learning algorithm often has…
The number of reviews on Amazon has grown significantly over the years. Customers who made purchases on Amazon provide reviews by rating the product from 1 to 5 stars and sharing a text summary of their experience and opinion of the product. The ratings of a product are averaged to provide an overall product rating. We analyzed what ratings score customers give to a specific product (a music track) in order to build a recommender model for digital music tracks on Amazon. We test various traditional models along with our proposed deep neural network (DNN) architecture to predict the reviews rat…
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；The 1st Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University（哈尔滨医科大学附属第一医院）
Recommender systems have fulfilled an important role in everyday life. Recommendations such as news by Google, videos by Netflix, goods by e-commerce providers, etc. have heavily changed everyones lifestyle. Health domains contain similar decision-making problems such as what to eat, how to exercise, and what is the proper medicine for a patient. Recently, studies focused on recommender systems to solve health problems have attracted attention. In this paper, we review aspects of health recommender systems including interests, methods, evaluation, future challenges and trend issues. We find th…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
Hyperbolic space and hyperbolic embeddings are becoming a popular research field for recommender systems. However, it is not clear under what circumstances the hyperbolic space should be considered. To fill this gap, This paper provides theoretical analysis and empirical results on when and where to use hyperbolic space and hyperbolic embeddings in recommender systems. Specifically, we answer the questions that which type of models and datasets are more suited for hyperbolic space, as well as which latent size to choose. We evaluate our answers by comparing the performance of Euclidean space a…
Utilizing review information to enhance recommendation, the de facto review-involved recommender systems, have received increasing interests over the past few years. Thereinto, one advanced branch is to extract salient aspects from textual reviews (i.e., the item attributes that users express) and combine them with the matrix factorization technique. However, existing approaches all ignore the fact that semantically different reviews often include opposite aspect information. In particular, positive reviews usually express aspects that users prefer, while negative ones describe aspects that us…
Competence Center Machine Learning Rhine-Ruhr（莱茵-鲁尔机器学习能力中心）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Fraunhofer Center for Machine Learning（弗劳恩霍夫机器学习中心）；Fraunhofer IAIS（弗劳恩霍夫智能分析与信息系统研究所）；Berlin Center for Machine Learning（柏林机器学习中心）；TU Berlin（柏林工业大学）
Just as user preferences change with time, item reviews also reflect those same preference changes. In a nutshell, if one is to sequentially incorporate review content knowledge into recommender systems, one is naturally led to dynamical models of text. In the present work we leverage the known power of reviews to enhance rating predictions in a way that (i) respects the causality of review generation and (ii) includes, in a bidirectional fashion, the ability of ratings to inform language review models and vice-versa, language representations that help predict ratings end-to-end. Moreover, our…
Recommender systems are one of the most applied methods in machine learning and find applications in many areas, ranging from economics to the Internet of things. This article provides a general overview of modern approaches to recommender system design using clustering as a preliminary step to improve overall performance. Using clustering can address several known issues in recommendation systems, including increasing the diversity, consistency, and reliability of recommendations; the data sparsity of user-preference matrices; and changes in user preferences over time. This work will be usefu…
Recommender Systems are tools that improve how users find relevant information in web systems, so they do not face too much information. In order to generate better recommendations, the context of information should be used in the recommendation process. Context-Aware Recommender Systems were created, accomplishing state-of-the-art results and improving traditional recommender systems. There are many approaches to build recommender systems, and two of the most prominent advances in area have been the use of Embeddings to represent the data in the recommender system, and the use of Deep Learnin…
Most of the existing recommender systems are based only on the rating data, and they ignore other sources of information that might increase the quality of recommendations, such as textual reviews, or user and item characteristics. Moreover, the majority of those systems are applicable only on small datasets (with thousands of observations) and are unable to handle large datasets (with millions of observations). We propose a recommender algorithm that combines a rating modelling technique (i.e., Latent Factor Model) with a topic modelling method based on textual reviews (i.e., Latent Dirichlet…
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；Department of Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学控制与计算机工程系）
Recommender systems are software tools used to generate and provide suggestions for items and other entities to the users by exploiting various strategies. Hybrid recommender systems combine two or more recommendation strategies in different ways to benefit from their complementary advantages. This systematic literature review presents the state of the art in hybrid recommender systems of the last decade. It is the first quantitative review work completely focused in hybrid recommenders. We address the most relevant problems considered and present the associated data mining and recommendation …
We present the results of an initial analysis conducted on a real-life setting to quantify the effect of shilling attacks on recommender systems. We focus on both algorithm performance as well as the types of users who are most affected by these attacks.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
As one of the most successful AI-powered applications, recommender systems aim to help people make appropriate decisions in an effective and efficient way, by providing personalized suggestions in many aspects of our lives, especially for various human-oriented online services such as e-commerce platforms and social media sites. In the past few decades, the rapid developments of recommender systems have significantly benefited human by creating economic value, saving time and effort, and promoting social good. However, recent studies have found that data-driven recommender systems can pose ser…
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia（马来西亚国民大学）；Taiz University（塔伊兹大学）
Recommender system has been proven to be significantly crucial in many fields and is widely used by various domains. Most of the conventional recommender systems rely on the numeric rating given by a user to reflect his opinion about a consumed item; however, these ratings are not available in many domains. As a result, a new source of information represented by the user-generated reviews is incorporated in the recommendation process to compensate for the lack of these ratings. The reviews contain prosperous and numerous information related to the whole item or a specific feature that can be e…
In recent years, recommender systems are crucially important for the delivery of personalized services that satisfy users' preferences. With personalized recommendation services, users can enjoy a variety of recommendations such as movies, books, ads, restaurants, and more. Despite the great benefits, personalized recommendations typically require the collection of personal data for user modelling and analysis, which can make users susceptible to attribute inference attacks. Specifically, the vulnerability of existing centralized recommenders under attribute inference attacks leaves malicious …
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
In light of the emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in recommender systems research and several fruitful results in recent years, this survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of the recent trends of deep reinforcement learning in recommender systems. We start with the motivation of applying DRL in recommender systems. Then, we provide a taxonomy of current DRL-based recommender systems and a summary of existing methods. We discuss emerging topics and open issues, and provide our perspective on advancing the domain. This survey serves as introductory material for r…
Bias Mitigation for AI-Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems: A Systematic Literature Review and Taxonomy
Technical University of Munich Munich Germany；Technical University of Munich \& Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Munich Germany；Technical University of Munich；Technical University of Munich \& Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
Advanced Analytics Institute, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学高级分析学院）
While recommendation plays an increasingly critical role in our living, study, work, and entertainment, the recommendations we receive are often for irrelevant, duplicate, or uninteresting products and services. A critical reason for such bad recommendations lies in the intrinsic assumption that recommended users and items are independent and identically distributed (IID) in existing theories and systems. Another phenomenon is that, while tremendous efforts have been made to model specific aspects of users or items, the overall user and item characteristics and their non-IIDness have been over…
University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；TU Dortmund（多特蒙德工业大学）
Recommender Systems are nowadays successfully used by all major web sites (from e-commerce to social media) to filter content and make suggestions in a personalized way. Academic research largely focuses on the value of recommenders for consumers, e.g., in terms of reduced information overload. To what extent and in which ways recommender systems create business value is, however, much less clear, and the literature on the topic is scattered. In this research commentary, we review existing publications on field tests of recommender systems and report which business-related performance measures…
Recent years have witnessed the fast development of the emerging topic of Graph Learning based Recommender Systems (GLRS). GLRS mainly employ the advanced graph learning approaches to model users' preferences and intentions as well as items' characteristics and popularity for Recommender Systems (RS). Differently from conventional RS, including content based filtering and collaborative filtering, GLRS are built on simple or complex graphs where various objects, e.g., users, items, and attributes, are explicitly or implicitly connected. With the rapid development of graph learning, exploring an…
This paper provides a review of the job recommender system (JRS) literature published in the past decade (2011-2021). Compared to previous literature reviews, we put more emphasis on contributions that incorporate the temporal and reciprocal nature of job recommendations. Previous studies on JRS suggest that taking such views into account in the design of the JRS can lead to improved model performance. Also, it may lead to a more uniform distribution of candidates over a set of similar jobs. We also consider the literature from the perspective of algorithm fairness. Here we find that this is r…
Recommender systems aim to provide item recommendations for users, and are usually faced with data sparsity problem (e.g., cold start) in real-world scenarios. Recently pre-trained models have shown their effectiveness in knowledge transfer between domains and tasks, which can potentially alleviate the data sparsity problem in recommender systems. In this survey, we first provide a review of recommender systems with pre-training. In addition, we show the benefits of pre-training to recommender systems through experiments. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research for…
Recently, researchers have turned their attention to recommender systems that use only minimal necessary data. This trend is informed by the idea that recommender systems should use no more user interactions than are needed in order to provide users with useful recommendations. In this position paper, we make the case for applying the idea of minimal necessary data to recommender systems that use user reviews. We argue that the content of individual user reviews should be subject to minimization. Specifically, reviews used as training data to generate recommendations or reviews used to help us…
As the final stage of the multi-stage recommender system (MRS), re-ranking directly affects user experience and satisfaction by rearranging the input ranking lists, and thereby plays a critical role in MRS. With the advances in deep learning, neural re-ranking has become a trending topic and been widely applied in industrial applications. This review aims at integrating re-ranking algorithms into a broader picture, and paving ways for more comprehensive solutions for future research. For this purpose, we first present a taxonomy of current methods on neural re-ranking. Then we give a descripti…
Soon after the invention of the Internet, the recommender system emerged and related technologies have been extensively studied and applied by both academia and industry. Currently, recommender system has become one of the most successful web applications, serving billions of people in each day through recommending different kinds of contents, including news feeds, videos, e-commerce products, music, movies, books, games, friends, jobs etc. These successful stories have proved that recommender system can transfer big data to high values. This article briefly reviews the history of web recommen…
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey（罗格斯新泽西州立大学）
In e-commerce, online retailers are usually suffering from professional malicious users (PMUs), who utilize negative reviews and low ratings to their consumed products on purpose to threaten the retailers for illegal profits. Specifically, there are three challenges for PMU detection: 1) professional malicious users do not conduct any abnormal or illegal interactions (they never concurrently leave too many negative reviews and low ratings at the same time), and they conduct masking strategies to disguise themselves. Therefore, conventional outlier detection methods are confused by their maskin…
College of Information Science and Engineering（信息科学与工程学院）；Ningbo University（宁波大学）
Recommender System (RS) is currently an effective way to solve information overload. To meet users' next click behavior, RS needs to collect users' personal information and behavior to achieve a comprehensive and profound user preference perception. However, these centrally collected data are privacy-sensitive, and any leakage may cause severe problems to both users and service providers. This paper proposed a novel privacy-preserved recommender system framework (PPRSF), through the application of federated learning paradigm, to enable the recommendation algorithm to be trained and carry out i…
We introduce a simple model to study movie competition in the recommender systems. Movies of heterogeneous quality compete against each other through viewers' reviews and generate interesting dynamics of box-office. By assuming mean-field interactions between the competing movies, we show that run-away effect of popularity spreading is triggered by defeating the average review score, leading to hits in box-office. The average review score thus characterizes the critical movie quality necessary for transition from box-office bombs to blockbusters. The major factors affecting the critical review…
This paper presents Fiducia, a food review system involving a pipeline which processes restaurant-related reviews obtained from Zomato (India's largest restaurant search and discovery service). Fiducia is specific to popular cafe food items and manages to identify relevant information pertaining to each item separately in the reviews. It uses a sentiment check on these pieces of text and accordingly suggests an appropriate restaurant for the particular item depending on user-item and item-item similarity. Experimental results show that the sentiment analyzer module of Fiducia achieves an accur…
Recommender systems engage user profiles and appropriate filtering techniques to assist users in finding more relevant information over the large volume of information. User profiles play an important role in the success of recommendation process since they model and represent the actual user needs. However, a comprehensive literature review of recommender systems has demonstrated no concrete study on the role and impact of knowledge in user profiling and filtering approache. In this paper, we review the most prominent recommender systems in the literature and examine the impression of knowled…
Nowadays, more and more news readers tend to read news online where they have access to millions of news articles from multiple sources. In order to help users to find the right and relevant content, news recommender systems (NRS) are developed to relieve the information overload problem and suggest news items that users might be interested in. In this paper, we highlight the major challenges faced by the news recommendation domain and identify the possible solutions from the state-of-the-art. Due to the rapid growth of building recommender systems using deep learning models, we divide our dis…
Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；DeepBlue Academy of Sciences（深蓝科学院）；Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（博岑-博尔扎诺自由大学）；University of Illinons at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
Recent years have witnessed the fast development of the emerging topic of Graph Learning based Recommender Systems (GLRS). GLRS employ advanced graph learning approaches to model users' preferences and intentions as well as items' characteristics for recommendations. Differently from other RS approaches, including content-based filtering and collaborative filtering, GLRS are built on graphs where the important objects, e.g., users, items, and attributes, are either explicitly or implicitly connected. With the rapid development of graph learning techniques, exploring and exploiting homogeneous …
Recommendation systems have become popular and effective tools to help users discover their interesting items by modeling the user preference and item property based on implicit interactions (e.g., purchasing and clicking). Humans perceive the world by processing the modality signals (e.g., audio, text and image), which inspired researchers to build a recommender system that can understand and interpret data from different modalities. Those models could capture the hidden relations between different modalities and possibly recover the complementary information which can not be captured by a un…
A large amount of information exists in reviews written by users. This source of information has been ignored by most of the current recommender systems while it can potentially alleviate the sparsity problem and improve the quality of recommendations. In this paper, we present a deep model to learn item properties and user behaviors jointly from review text. The proposed model, named Deep Cooperative Neural Networks (DeepCoNN), consists of two parallel neural networks coupled in the last layers. One of the networks focuses on learning user behaviors exploiting reviews written by the user, and…
