Since the rise of collaborative tagging systems on the web, the tag recommendation task -- suggesting suitable tags to users of such systems while they add resources to their collection -- has been tackled. However, the (offline) evaluation of tag recommendation algorithms usually suffers from difficulties like the sparseness of the data or the cold start problem for new resources or users. Previous studies therefore often used so-called post-cores (specific subsets of the original datasets) for their experiments. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale experiment in which we analyze different tag recommendation algorithms on different cores of three real-world datasets. We show, that a recommender's performance depends on the particular core and explore correlations between performances on different cores.

The information contained in social tagging systems is often modelled as a graph of connections between users, items and tags. Recommendation algorithms such as FolkRank, have the potential to leverage complex relationships in the data, corresponding to multiple hops in the graph. We present an in-depth analysis and evaluation of graph models for social tagging data and propose novel adaptations and extensions of FolkRank to improve tag recommendations. We highlight implicit assumptions made by the widely used folksonomy model, and propose an alternative and more accurate graph-representation of the data. Our extensions of FolkRank address the new item problem by incorporating content data into the algorithm, and significantly improve prediction results on unpruned datasets. Our adaptations address issues in the iterative weight spreading calculation that potentially hinder FolkRank's ability to leverage the deep graph as an information source. Moreover, we evaluate the benefit of considering each deeper level of the graph, and present important insights regarding the characteristics of social tagging data in general. Our results suggest that the base assumption made by conventional weight propagation methods, that closeness in the graph always implies a positive relationship, does not hold for the social tagging domain.

The information contained in social tagging systems is often modelled as a graph of connections between users, items and tags. Recommendation algorithms such as FolkRank, have the potential to leverage complex relationships in the data, corresponding to multiple hops in the graph. We present an in-depth analysis and evaluation of graph models for social tagging data and propose novel adaptations and extensions of FolkRank to improve tag recommendations. We highlight implicit assumptions made by the widely used folksonomy model, and propose an alternative and more accurate graph-representation of the data. Our extensions of FolkRank address the new item problem by incorporating content data into the algorithm, and significantly improve prediction results on unpruned datasets. Our adaptations address issues in the iterative weight spreading calculation that potentially hinder FolkRank's ability to leverage the deep graph as an information source. Moreover, we evaluate the benefit of considering each deeper level of the graph, and present important insights regarding the characteristics of social tagging data in general. Our results suggest that the base assumption made by conventional weight propagation methods, that closeness in the graph always implies a positive relationship, does not hold for the social tagging domain.

The information contained in social tagging systems is often modelled as a graph of connections between users, items and tags. Recommendation algorithms such as FolkRank, have the potential to leverage complex relationships in the data, corresponding to multiple hops in the graph. We present an in-depth analysis and evaluation of graph models for social tagging data and propose novel adaptations and extensions of FolkRank to improve tag recommendations. We highlight implicit assumptions made by the widely used folksonomy model, and propose an alternative and more accurate graph-representation of the data. Our extensions of FolkRank address the new item problem by incorporating content data into the algorithm, and significantly improve prediction results on unpruned datasets. Our adaptations address issues in the iterative weight spreading calculation that potentially hinder FolkRank's ability to leverage the deep graph as an information source. Moreover, we evaluate the benefit of considering each deeper level of the graph, and present important insights regarding the characteristics of social tagging data in general. Our results suggest that the base assumption made by conventional weight propagation methods, that closeness in the graph always implies a positive relationship, does not hold for the social tagging domain.

Social Tagging Systems are web applications in which users upload resources (e.g., bookmarks, videos, photos, etc.) and annotate it with a list of freely chosen keywords called tags. This is a grassroots approach to organize a site and help users to find the resources they are interested in. Social tagging systems are open and inherently social; features that have been proven to encourage participation. However, with the large popularity of these systems and the increasing amount of user-contributed content, information overload rapidly becomes an issue. Recommender Systems are well known applications for increasing the level of relevant content over the “noise” that continuously grows as more and more content becomes available online. In social tagging systems, however, we face new challenges. While in classic recommender systems the mode of recommendation is basically the resource, in social tagging systems there are three possible modes of recommendation: users, resources, or tags. Therefore suitable methods that properly exploit the different dimensions of social tagging systems data are needed. In this book, we survey the most recent and state-of-the-art work about a whole new generation of recommender systems built to serve social tagging systems. The book is divided into self-contained chapters covering the background material on social tagging systems and recommender systems to the more advanced techniques like the ones based on tensor factorization and graph-based models.

The ever-growing flood of new scientific articles requires novel retrieval mechanisms. One means for mitigating this instance of the information overload phenomenon are collaborative tagging systems, that allow users to select, share and annotate references to publications. These systems employ recommendation algorithms to present to their users personalized lists of interesting and relevant publications. In this paper we analyze different ways to incorporate social data and metadata from collaborative tagging systems into the graph-based ranking algorithm FolkRank to utilize it for recommending scientific articles to users of the social bookmarking system BibSonomy. We compare the results to those of Collaborative Filtering, which has previously been applied for resource recommendation.

Addressing user's information needs has been one of the main goals of Web search engines since their early days. In some cases, users cannot see their needs immediately answered by search results, simply because these needs are too complex and involve multiple aspects that are not covered by a single Web or search results page. This typically happens when users investigate a certain topic in domains such as education, travel or health, which often require collecting facts and information from many pages. We refer to this type of activities as "research missions". These research missions account for 10% of users' sessions and more than 25% of all query volume, as verified by a manual analysis that was conducted by Yahoo! editors.</p> <p>We demonstrate in this paper that such missions can be automatically identified on-the-fly, as the user interacts with the search engine, through careful runtime analysis of query flows and query sessions.</p> <p>The on-the-fly automatic identification of research missions has been implemented in Search Pad, a novel Yahoo! application that was launched in 2009, and that we present in this paper. Search Pad helps users keeping trace of results they have consulted. Its novelty however is that unlike previous notes taking products, it is automatically triggered only when the system decides, with a fair level of confidence, that the user is undertaking a research mission and thus is in the right context for gathering notes. Beyond the Search Pad specific application, we believe that changing the level of granularity of query modeling, from an isolated query to a list of queries pertaining to the same research missions, so as to better reflect a certain type of information needs, can be beneficial in a number of other Web search applications. Session-awareness is growing and it is likely to play, in the near future, a fundamental role in many on-line tasks: this paper presents a first step on this path.

We are experiencing a new Social Web, where people share, communicate, commiserate, and conflict with each other. As evidenced by systems like Wikipedia, twitter, and delicious.com, these environments are turning people into social information foragers and sharers. Groups interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense of topic areas from "Obama vs. Clinton" to "Islam."</p> <p>PARC's Augmented Social Cognition researchers -- who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, CSCW, and other disciplines -- focus on understanding how to "enhance a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason". Through Social Web systems like social bookmarking sites, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.</p> <p>Here we summarize recent work and early findings such as: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and metadata.

Customer preferences for products are drifting over time. Product perception and popularity are constantly changing as new selection emerges. Similarly, customer inclinations are evolving, leading them to ever redefine their taste. Thus, modeling temporal dynamics should be a key when designing recommender systems or general customer preference models. However, this raises unique challenges. Within the eco-system intersecting multiple products and customers, many different characteristics are shifting simultaneously, while many of them influence each other and often those shifts are delicate and associated with a few data instances. This distinguishes the problem from concept drift explorations, where mostly a single concept is tracked. Classical time-window or instance-decay approaches cannot work, as they lose too much signal when discarding data instances. A more sensitive approach is required, which can make better distinctions between transient effects and long term patterns. The paradigm we offer is creating a model tracking the time changing behavior throughout the life span of the data. This allows us to exploit the relevant components of all data instances, while discarding only what is modeled as being irrelevant. Accordingly, we revamp two leading collaborative filtering recommendation approaches. Evaluation is made on a large movie rating dataset by Netflix. Results are encouraging and better than those previously reported on this dataset.

Motivated by the potential use of collaborative tagging systems to develop new recommender systems, we have implemented and compared three variants of user-based collaborative filtering algorithms to provide recommendations of articles on CiteULike. On our first approach, Classic Collaborative filtering (CCF), we use Pearson correlation to calculate similarity between users and a classic adjusted ratings formula to rank the recommendations. Our second approach, Neighbor-weighted Collaborative Filtering (NwCF), incorporates the amount of raters in the ranking formula of the recommendations. A modified version of the Okapi BM25 IR model over users ’ tags is implemented on our third approach to form the user neighborhood. Our results suggest that incorporating the number of raters into the algorithms leads to an improvement of precision, and they also support that tags can be considered as an alternative to Pearson correlation to calculate the similarity between users and their neighbors in a collaborative tagging system.

The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content sites based on user contributions --social media sites -- becomes increasingly important. Social media in general exhibit a rich variety of information sources: in addition to the content itself, there is a wide array of non-content information available, such as links between items and explicit quality ratings from members of the community. In this paper we investigate methods for exploiting such community feedback to automatically identify high quality content. As a test case, we focus on Yahoo! Answers, a large community question/answering portal that is particularly rich in the amount and types of content and social interactions available in it. We introduce a general classification framework for combining the evidence from different sources of information, that can be tuned automatically for a given social media type and quality definition. In particular, for the community question/answering domain, we show that our system is able to separate high-quality items from the rest with an accuracy close to that of humans

Social networks and collaborative tagging systems are rapidly gaining popularity as a primary means for storing and sharing data among friends, family, colleagues, or perfect strangers as long as they have common interests. del.icio.us is a social network where people store and share their personal bookmarks. Most importantly, users tag their bookmarks for ease of information dissemination and later look up. However, it is the friendship links, that make delicious a social network. They exist independently of the set of bookmarks that belong to the users and have no relation to the tags typically assigned to the bookmarks. To study the interaction among users, the strength of the existing links and their hidden meaning, we introduce implicit links in the network. These links connect only highly "similar" users. Here, similarity can reflect different aspects of the user’s profile that makes her similar to any other user, such as number of shared bookmarks, or similarity of their tags clouds. We investigate the question whether friends have common interests, we gain additional insights on the strategies that users use to assign tags to their bookmarks, and we demonstrate that the graphs formed by implicit links have unique properties differing from binomial random graphs or random graphs with an expected power-law degree distribution.

In this paper, we propose a user reputation model and apply it to a user-interactive question answering system. It combines the social network analysis approach and the user rating approach. Social network analysis is applied to analyze the impact of participant users' relations to their reputations. User rating is used to acquire direct judgment of a user's reputation based on other users' experiences with this user. Preliminary experiments show that the computed reputations based on our proposed reputation model can reflect the actual reputations of the simulated roles and therefore can fit in well with our user-interactive question answering system. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Question-Answer portals such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers are quickly becoming rich sources of knowledge on many topics which are not well served by general web search engines. Unfortunately, the quality of the submitted answers is uneven, ranging from excellent detailed answers to snappy and insulting remarks or even advertisements for commercial content. Furthermore, user feedback for many topics is sparse, and can be insufficient to reliably identify good answers from the bad ones. Hence, estimating the authority of users is a crucial task for this emerging domain, with potential applications to answer ranking, spam detection, and incentive mechanism design. We present an analysis of the link structure of a general-purpose question answering community to discover authoritative users, and promising experimental results over a dataset of more than 3 million answers from a popular community QA site. We also describe structural differences between question topics that correlate with the success of link analysis for authority discovery.

A referral system is a multiagent system whose member agents are capable of giving and following referrals. The specific cases of interest arise where each agent has a user. The agents cooperate by giving and taking referrals so each can better help its user locate relevant information. This use of referrals mimics human interactions and can potentially lead to greater effectiveness and efficiency than in single-agent systems.Existing approaches consider what referrals may be given and treat the referring process simply as path search in a static graph. By contrast, the present approach understands referrals as arising in and influencing dynamic social networks, where the agents act autonomously based on local knowledge. This paper studies strategies using which agents may search dynamic social networks. It evaluates the proposed approach empirically for a community of AI scientists (partially derived from bibliographic data). Further, it presents a prototype system that assists users in finding other users in practical social networks.

Most recommender systems use Collaborative Filtering or Content-based methods to predict new items of interest for a user. While both methods have their own advantages, individually they fail to provide good recommendations in many situations. Incorporating components from both methods, a hybrid recommender system can overcome these shortcomings. In this paper, we present an elegant and effective framework for combining content and collaboration. Our approach uses a content-based predictor tc enhance existing user data, and then provides personalized suggestions through collaborative filtering. We present experimental results that show how this approach, <i>Content-Boosted Collaborative Filtering</i>, performs better than a pure content-based predictor, pure collaborative filter, and a naive hybrid approach.

Recommender systems leverage product and community information to target products to consumers. Researchers have developed collaborative recommenders, content-based recommenders, and a few hybrid systems. We propose a unified probabilistic framework for merging collaborative and content-based recommendations. We extend Hofmarm's (1999) aspect model to incorporate three-way co-occurrence data among users, items, and item content. The relative influence of collaboration data versus content data is not imposed as an exogenous parameter, but rather emerges naturally from the given data sources. However, global probabilistic models coupled with standard EM learning algorithms tend to drastically overfit in the sparsedata situations typical of recommendation applications. We show that secondary content information can often be used to overcome sparsity. Experiments on data from the Researchlndex library of Computer Science publications show that appropriate mixture models incorporating secondary data produce significantly better quality recommenders than <i>k</i>-nearest neighbors (<i>k</i>-NN). Global probabilistic models also allow more general inferences than local methods like <i>k</i>-NN.

Trust is important wherever agents must interact. We consider the important case of interactions in electronic communities, where the agents assist and represent principal entities, such as people and businesses. We propose a social mechanism of reputation management, which aims at avoiding interaction with undesirable participants. Social mechanisms complement hard security techniques (such as passwords and digital certificates), which only guarantee that a party is authenticated and authorized, but do not ensure that it exercises its authorization in a way that is desirable to others. Social mechanisms are even more important when trusted third parties are not available. Our specific approach to reputation management leads to a decentralized society in which agents help each other weed out undesirable players.