Abstract
Recommender systems have greatly evolved in recent years and have become an integral part of the Web. From e-commerce sites to mobile apps, our daily routine revolves around a series of “small” decisions that are influenced by such recommendations. In a similar manner, online social networks recommend only a subset of the massive amount of content published by a user’s friends. However, the prevalent approach for the content selection process in such systems is driven by the amount of interaction between the user and the friend who published the content. As a result, content of interest is often lost due to weak social ties. In this paper, we present a fine-grained recommender system for social ecosystems, designed to recommend media content (e.g., music videos, online clips) published by the user’s friends. The system design was driven by the findings of our qualitative user study that explored the value and requirements of a recommendation component within a social network. The core idea behind the proposed approach was to leverage the abundance of preexisting information in each user’s account for creating interest profiles, to calculate similarity scores at a fine-grained level for each friend. The intuition behind the proposed method was to find consistent ways to obtain information representations that can identify overlapping interests in very specific sub-categories (e.g., two users’ music preferences may only coincide on hard rock). While the system is intended as a component of the social networking service, we developed a proof-of-concept implementation for Facebook and explored the effectiveness of our underlying mechanisms for content analysis. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, as the recommended content of interest was both overlooked by the existing Facebook engine and not contained in the users’ Facebook News Feed. We also conducted a user study for exploring the usability aspects of the prototype and found that it offers functionality that could significantly improve user experience in popular services.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For simplicity, we use the term “genre” to also denote fine-grained sub-genre information.
References
Aivazoglou M, Roussos O, Ioannidis S, Spiliotopoulos D, Polakis J (2017) Reveal: fine grained recommendations in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (ASONAM 2017), Sydney, pp 1–4
Antonakaki D, Spiliotopoulos D, Samaras CV, Pratikakis P, Ioannidis S, Fragopoulou P (2017) Social media analysis during political turbulence. PLoS ONE 12(10):1–23
Bakshy E, Eckles D, Yan R, Rosenn I (2012) Social influence in social advertising: evidence from field experiments. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on electronic commerce, Valencia, pp 146–161
Berkovsky S, Freyne J (2015) Web personalization and recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, Sydney, pp 2307–2308
Bird S, Loper E, Klein E (2009) Natural language processing with Python. O’Reilly Media Inc, Sebastopol
Cai X, Bain M, Krzywicki A, Wobcke W, Sok Y, Compton P, Mahidadia A (2010) Collaborative filtering for people to people recommendation in social networks. In: Advances in artificial intelligence. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 6464, pp 476–485
Camacho L, Alves-Souza SΝ (2018) Social network data to alleviate cold-start in recommender system: a systematic review. Inf Process Manag 54(4):529–544
Chamoso P, Rivas A, Rodríguez S, Bajo J (2018) Relationship recommender system in a business and employment-oriented social network. Inf Sci 433:204–220
Chin J, Diehl V, Norman K (1988) Development of an instrument measuring user satisfaction of human-computer interface. In: Proceedings of the ‘88 SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Washington, DC, pp 213–218
Contratres FG, Alves-Souza SN, Filgueiras L, DeSouza L (2018) Sentiment analysis of social network data for cold-start relief in recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 2018 conference on information systems and technologies, Naples, pp 122–132
Da’u A, Salim N, Rabiu I, Osman A (2020) Weighted aspect-based opinion mining using deep learning for recommender system. Expert Syst Appl 140:112871
De Meo P, Fotia L, Messina F, Rosaci D, Sarné GM (2018) Providing recommendations in social networks by integrating local and global reputation. Inf Syst 78:58–67
De Pessemier T, Dooms S, Roelandts J, Martens L (2011) Analysis of the information value of user connections for video recommendations in a social network. In: Proceedings of the 2011 CEUR workshop, Pisa, pp 1–7
Dridi A, Reforgiato Recupero D (2019) Leveraging semantics for sentiment polarity detection in social media. Int J Mach Learn Cybern 10:2045
Facebook (2017) Graph API edges. https://goo.gl/PdWuYm. Accessed 11 Oct 2018
Facebook (2018) Using actions. https://goo.gl/9schoS. Accessed 15 Oct 2018
Facebook (2019) Facebook—how does news feed decide which stories to show? https://goo.gl/Dupvg8. Accessed 20 Oct 2019
Facebook news feed (2016) News Feed FYI: a window into news feed. https://goo.gl/ByPLgF. Accessed 19 Oct 2018
Fang X, Zhan J (2015) Sentiment analysis using product review data. J Big Data 2(1):1–14
Freebase (2018) A community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things. https://developers.google.com/freebase/. Accessed 11 Nov 2018
Garosi F (2008) PyCLIPS Manual. http://pyclips.sourceforge.net/manual/pyclips.html. Accessed 11 Mar 2019
Gretarsson B, O’Donovan J, Bostandjiev S, Hall C, Holerer T (2010) Smallworlds: visualizing social recommendations. Comput Graph Forum 29(3):833–842
Guy I, Zwerdling N, Ronen I, Carmel D, Uziel E (2010) Social media recommendation based on people and tags. In: Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR’10), New York, NY, pp 194–201
He J, Chu WW (2010) A social network-based recommender system (SNRS). Ann Inf Syst 12:47–74
Horn L (1989) A natural history of negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Jones AM, Arya A, Agarwal P, Gaurav P, Arya T (2017) An ontological sub-matrix factorization based approach for cold-start issue in recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 2017 international conference on current trends in computer, electrical, electronics and communication, Mysore, India, pp 161–166
Kalaï A, Zayani CA, Amous I, Abdelghani W, Sèdes F (2018) Social collaborative service recommendation approach based on user’s trust and domain-specific expertise. Fut Gen Comput Syst 80:355–367
Li J, Yang Y (2018) Recommender systems based on opinion mining and deep neural networks. In: MATEC web of conferences, 173, Article 03016
Liu B (2015) Sentiment analysis: mining opinions, sentiments, and emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Ma X, Ma J, Li H, Jiang Q, Gao S (2018) ARMOR: a trust-based privacy-preserving framework for decentralized friend recommendation in online social networks. Fut Gen Comput Syst 79:82–94
Makki R, Soto AJ, Brooks S, Milios E (2016) Twitter message recommendation based on user interest profiles. In: Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining, San Francisco, pp 406–410
Margaris D, Vassilakis C (2018) Exploiting rating abstention intervals for addressing concept drift in social network recommender systems. Inf Multidiscip Digit Publ Inst 10(7), Article 230
Margaris D, Vassilakis C, Georgiadis P (2016) Recommendation information diffusion in social networks considering user influence and semantics. Soc Netw Anal Min 6(108):1–22
Margaris D, Vassilakis C, Georgiadis P (2018) Query personalization using social network information and collaborative filtering techniques. Fut Gen Comput Syst 78(1):440–450
Margaris D, Spiliotopoulos D, Vassilakis C (2019) Social relations versus near neighbours: reliable recommenders in Limited Information Social Network Collaborative Filtering for online advertising. In: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (ASONAM 2019), Vancouver, pp 1–8
Mohammadi SA, Andalib A (2017) Using the opinion leaders in social networks to improve the cold start challenge in recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE international conference on web research, Tehran, pp 62–66
Nazir F, Ghazanfar MA, Maqsood M, Aadil F, Rho S, Mehmood I (2019) Social media signal detection using tweets volume, hashtag, and sentiment analysis. Multimedia Tools Appl 78:3553
Pasricha H, Solanki S (2019) A New Approach for Book Recommendation Using Opinion Leader Mining. Emerging Research in Electronics, Computer Science and Technology, Springer-Singapore, pp 501–515
Polanyi L, Zaenen A (2006) Contextual valence shifters. Comput Attitude Affect Text Theory Appl 20:1–10
Reshma R, Ambikesh G, Thilagam P (2016) Alleviating data sparsity and cold start in recommender systems using social behaviour. Proceedings of the 2016 international conference on recent trends in information technology, New Jersey, pp 1–8
Sanders N (2011) Twitter sentiment corpus. https://github.com/zfz/twitter_corpus. Accessed 5 Dec 2019
Sangeetha J, Prakash V (2019) Improved Feature-Specific Collaborative Filtering Model for the Aspect-Opinion Based Product Recommendation. Advances in Big Data and Cloud Computing, Springer-Singapore, pp 275–289
Sauri R (2008) A factuality profiler for eventualities in text. PhD dissertation, Brandeis University
Shen RP, Zhang HR, Yu H, Min F (2019) Sentiment based matrix factorization with reliability for recommendation. Expert Syst Appl 135:249–258
Taboada M, Brooke J, Tofiloski M, Voll K, Stede M (2011) Lexicon based methods for sentiment analysis. Comput Linguist Arch 37(2):267–307
Tewari AS, Jain R, Singh JP, Barman AG (2019) Personalized product recommendation using aspect-based opinion mining of reviews. In: Proceedings of the international ethical hacking conference 2018, Kolkata, India, pp 443–453
Twitter (2019) Twitter social network homepage. https://twitter.com/. Accessed 11 Mar 2019
Urban dictionary (2019) http://www.urbandictionary.com/. Accessed 25 Oct 2019
Viswanath B, Mislove A, Cha M, Gummadi KP (2009) On the evolution of user interaction in facebook. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on online social networks, Barcelona, pp 37–42
Wang F, Jiang W, Li X, Wang G (2018) Maximizing positive influence spread in online social networks via fluid dynamics. Fut Gen Comput Syst 86:1491–1502
Wilson C, Sala A, Puttaswamy KP, Zhao BY (2012) Beyond social graphs: user interactions in online social networks and their implications. ACM Trans Web 6(4):1–31
Wired (2013) Why Facebook is teaching its machines to think like humans. https://goo.gl/wk365x. Accessed 5 Dec 2018
Zhang K, Cheng Y, Xie Y, Honbo D, Agrawal A, Palsetia D, Lee K, Liao WK, Choudhary A (2015) Ses: sentiment elicitation system for social media data. In: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on data mining, Las Vegas, pp 1–11
Zhang Q, Wu J, Zhang Q, Zhang P, Long G, Zhang C (2018) Dual influence embedded social recommendation. World Wide Web 21(4):849–874
Zheng X, Luo Y, Sun L, Zhang J, Chen F (2018) A tourism destination recommender system using users’ sentiment and temporal dynamics. J Intell Inf Syst 51(3):557–578
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Aivazoglou, M., Roussos, A.O., Margaris, D. et al. A fine-grained social network recommender system. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 10, 8 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-019-0621-7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-019-0621-7