CSFinder: A cold-start friend finder in large-scale social networks

Salem, Yasser; Hong, Jun; Liu, Weiru

Abstract

Recommending users for a new social network user to follow is a topic of interest at present. The existing approaches rely on using various types of information about the new user to determine recommended users who have similar interests to the new user. However, this presents a problem when a new user joins a social network, who is yet to have any interaction on the social network. In this paper we present a particular type of conversational recommendation approach, critiquing-based recommendation, to solve the cold start problem. We present a critiquing-based recommendation system, called CSFinder, to recommend users for a new user to follow. A traditional critiquing-based recommendation system allows
a user to critique a feature of a recommended item at a time and gradually leads the user to the target recommendation. However this may require a lengthy recommendation session. CSFinder aims to reduce the session length by taking a case-based reasoning approach. It selects relevant recommendation sessions of past users that match the recommendation session of the current user to short-cut the current recommendation session. It selects relevant recommendation sessions from a case base that contains the successful recommendation sessions of past users. A past recommendation session can be selected if it contains recommended items and critiques that sufficiently overlap with the ones in the current session. Our experimental results show that CSFinder has significantly shorter sessions than the ones of an Incremental Critiquing system, which is a
baseline critiquing-based recommendation system.

Citation

Salem, Y., Hong, J., & Liu, W. CSFinder: A cold-start friend finder in large-scale social networks. Paper presented at Big Data (Big Data), 2015 IEEE International Conference on

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Big Data (Big Data), 2015 IEEE International Conference on
• Acceptance Date: Jul 12, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Dec 28, 2015
• Publication Date: Oct 29, 2015
• Journal: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 687-696
• Keywords: Web 2.0, Twitter, social networks, conversational recommendation, critiquing, recommender systems
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2015.7363813
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data 2015)