Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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Mining the Real-Time Web: A Novel Approach to Product Recommendation

2012-05, Garcia Esparza, Sandra, O'Mahony, Michael P., Smyth, Barry

Real-time web (RTW) services such as Twitter allow users to express their opinions and interests, often expressed in the form of short text messages providing abbreviated and highly personalized commentary in real-time. Although this RTW data is far from the structured data (movie ratings, product features, etc.) that is familiar to recommender systems research, it can contain useful consumer reviews on products, services and brands. This paper describes how Twitter-like short-form messages can be leveraged as a source of indexing and retrieval information for product recommendation. In particular, we describe how users and products can be represented from the terms used in their associated reviews. An evaluation performed on four different product datasets from the Blippr service shows the potential of this type of recommendation knowledge, and the experiments show that our proposed approach outperforms a more traditional collaborative-filtering based approach.

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Further experiments in micro-blog categorization

2011-08-31, Garcia Esparza, Sandra, O'Mahony, Michael P., Smyth, Barry

Since the creation of Twitter in 2008, micro-blogging services have received a lot of attention among users who wish to share news items, opinions and information with friends and colleagues. However, these services typically provide for only limited organisation of content, with the main ranking criterion being post time with perhaps some basic message filtering accommodated. Given the substantial and increasing volume of posts that micro-blogging services attract, there is a clear need to assist users when it comes to effectively consuming this content. In this regard, categorisation offers one approach to organise content by grouping related messages together. In this paper we present a study in the recommendation of categories for short-form messages in order to provide for better search and message filtering. In particular, we present an index-based approach where real-time web data can be used as a source of knowledge for category recommendation. Further, we evaluate our approach on two different micro-blogging datasets and results show that micro-blog messages in sufficient quantities provide a useful recommendation signal for category recommendation.

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Effective product recommendation using the real-time web

2010-12-14, Garcia Esparza, Sandra, O'Mahony, Michael P., Smyth, Barry

The so-called real-time web (RTW) is a web of opinions, comments, and personal viewpoints, often expressed in the form of short, 140-character text messages providing abbreviated and highly personalized commentary in real-time. Today, Twitter is undoubtedly the king of the RTW. It boasts 190 million users and generates in the region of 65m tweets per day. This RTW data is far from the structured data (movie ratings, product features, etc.) that is familiar to recommender systems research but it is useful to consider its applicability to recommendation scenarios. In this paper we consider harnessing the real-time opinions of users, expressed through the Twitter-like short textual reviews available on the Blippr service (www.blippr.com). In particular we describe how users and products can be represented from the terms used in their associated reviews and describe experiments to highlight the recommendation potential of this RTW data-source and approach.

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A multi-criteria evaluation of a user generated content based recommender system

2011-10-23, Garcia Esparza, Sandra, O'Mahony, Michael P., Smyth, Barry

The Social Web provides new and exciting sources of information that may be used by recommender systems as a complementary source of recommendation knowledge. For example, User-Generated Content, such as reviews, tags, comments, tweets etc. can provide a useful source of item information and user preference data, if a clear signal can be extracted from the inevitable noise that exists within these sources. In previous work we explored this idea, mining term-based recommendation knowledge from user reviews, to develop a recommender that compares favourably to conventional collaborative-filtering style techniques across a range of product types. However, this previous work focused solely on recommendation accuracy and it is now well accepted in the literature that accuracy alone tells just part of the recommendation story. For example, for many, the promise of recommender systems lies in their ability to surprise with novel recommendations for less popular items that users might otherwise miss. This makes for a riskier recommendation prospect, of course, but it could greatly enhance the practical value of recommender systems to end-users. In this paper we analyse our User-Generated Content (UGC) approach to recommendation using metrics such as novelty, diversity, and coverage and demonstrate superior performance, when compared to conventional user-based and item- based collaborative filtering techniques, while highlighting a number of interesting performance trade-offs.

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On the real-time web as a source of recommendation knowledge

2010-09, Garcia Esparza, Sandra, O'Mahony, Michael P., Smyth, Barry

The so-called real-time web (RTW) is a web of opinions, comments, and personal viewpoints, often expressed in the form of short, 140-character text messages providing abbreviated and personalized commentary in real-time. Twitter is undoubtedly the king of the RTW. It boasts 100+ million users and generates in the region of 50m tweets per day. This RTW data is far from the structured data (ratings, product features, etc.) familiar to recommender systems research, but it is useful to consider its applicability to recommendation scenarios. In this short paper we describe an experiment to look at harnessing the real-time opinions of movie fans, expressed through the Twitter-like short textual reviews available on the Blippr service (www.blippr.com). In particular we describe how users and movies can be represented from the terms used in their associated reviews and describe a number of experiments to highlight the recommendation potential of this RTW data-source and approach.

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Towards tagging and categorization for micro-blogs

2010-08-30, Garcia Esparza, Sandra, O'Mahony, Michael P., Smyth, Barry

Abstract. Micro-blogging services are becoming very popular among users who want to share local or global news, their knowledge or their opinions on the real-time web. Lately, users are also using these services to search for information, and some services include tag or category information to better facilitate search. However, these tags are typically free-form in nature with users permitted to adopt their own conventions without restriction, which can make the set of tags noisy and sparse. A solution to this problem is to recommend tags (or categories) to users. Our work represents an initial study in the recommendation of categories for short-form messages in order to provide for better search and message filtering. In particular, we describe how such real-time web data can be used as a source of indexing and retrieval information for category recommendation. An evaluation performed on two different micro-blogging datasets indicates that promising performance is achieved by our approach.