Ebook: Social Web Artifacts for Boosting Recommenders: Theory and Implementation

Recommender systems, software programs that learn from human behavior and make predictions of what products we are expected to appreciate and purchase, have become an integral part of our everyday life. They proliferate across electronic commerce around the globe and exist for virtually all sorts of consumable goods, such as books, movies, music, or clothes.

At the same time, a new evolution on the Web has started to take shape, commonly known as the “Web 2.0” or the “Social Web”: Consumer-generated media has become rife, social networks have emerged and are pulling significant shares of Web traffic. In line with these developments, novel information and knowledge artifacts have become readily available on the Web, created by the collective effort of millions of people.

This textbook presents approaches to exploit the new Social Web fountain of knowledge, zeroing in first and foremost on two of those information artifacts, namely classification taxonomies and trust networks. These two are used to improve the performance of product-focused recommender systems: While classification taxonomies are appropriate means to fight the sparsity problem prevalent in many productive recommender systems, interpersonal trust ties – when used as proxies for interest similarity – are able to mitigate the recommenders' scalability problem.

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Recommender systems, software programs that learn from human behavior and make predictions of what products we are expected to appreciate and purchase, have become an integral part of our everyday life. They proliferate across electronic commerce around the globe and exist for virtually all sorts of consumable goods, such as books, movies, music, or clothes.

At the same time, a new evolution on the Web has started to take shape, commonly known as the “Web 2.0” or the “Social Web”: Consumer-generated media has become rife, social networks have emerged and are pulling significant shares of Web traffic. In line with these developments, novel information and knowledge artifacts have become readily available on the Web, created by the collective effort of millions of people.

This textbook presents approaches to exploit the new Social Web fountain of knowledge, zeroing in first and foremost on two of those information artifacts, namely classification taxonomies and trust networks. These two are used to improve the performance of product-focused recommender systems: While classification taxonomies are appropriate means to fight the sparsity problem prevalent in many productive recommender systems, interpersonal trust ties – when used as proxies for interest similarity – are able to mitigate the recommenders' scalability problem.

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Recommender systems, software programs that learn from human behavior and make predictions of what products we are expected to appreciate and purchase, have become an integral part of our everyday life. They proliferate across electronic commerce around the globe and exist for virtually all sorts of consumable goods, such as books, movies, music, or clothes.

At the same time, a new evolution on the Web has started to take shape, commonly known as the “Web 2.0” or the “Social Web”: Consumer-generated media has become rife, social networks have emerged and are pulling significant shares of Web traffic. In line with these developments, novel information and knowledge artifacts have become readily available on the Web, created by the collective effort of millions of people.

This textbook presents approaches to exploit the new Social Web fountain of knowledge, zeroing in first and foremost on two of those information artifacts, namely classification taxonomies and trust networks. These two are used to improve the performance of product-focused recommender systems: While classification taxonomies are appropriate means to fight the sparsity problem prevalent in many productive recommender systems, interpersonal trust ties – when used as proxies for interest similarity – are able to mitigate the recommenders' scalability problem.

Content:
Front Matter....Pages 1-16
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction....Pages 3-9
On Recommender Systems....Pages 11-20
Front Matter....Pages 21-21
Taxonomy-Driven Filtering....Pages 23-45
Topic Diversification Revisited....Pages 47-59
Taxonomies for Calculating Semantic Proximity....Pages 61-77
Recommending Technology Synergies....Pages 79-95
Front Matter....Pages 97-97
Trust Propagation Models....Pages 99-131
Interpersonal Trust and Similarity....Pages 133-151
Front Matter....Pages 153-153
Decentralized Recommender Systems....Pages 155-172
Conclusion....Pages 173-175
Back Matter....Pages 177-187

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Recommender systems, software programs that learn from human behavior and make predictions of what products we are expected to appreciate and purchase, have become an integral part of our everyday life. They proliferate across electronic commerce around the globe and exist for virtually all sorts of consumable goods, such as books, movies, music, or clothes.

At the same time, a new evolution on the Web has started to take shape, commonly known as the “Web 2.0” or the “Social Web”: Consumer-generated media has become rife, social networks have emerged and are pulling significant shares of Web traffic. In line with these developments, novel information and knowledge artifacts have become readily available on the Web, created by the collective effort of millions of people.

This textbook presents approaches to exploit the new Social Web fountain of knowledge, zeroing in first and foremost on two of those information artifacts, namely classification taxonomies and trust networks. These two are used to improve the performance of product-focused recommender systems: While classification taxonomies are appropriate means to fight the sparsity problem prevalent in many productive recommender systems, interpersonal trust ties – when used as proxies for interest similarity – are able to mitigate the recommenders' scalability problem.

Content:
Front Matter....Pages 1-16
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction....Pages 3-9
On Recommender Systems....Pages 11-20
Front Matter....Pages 21-21
Taxonomy-Driven Filtering....Pages 23-45
Topic Diversification Revisited....Pages 47-59
Taxonomies for Calculating Semantic Proximity....Pages 61-77
Recommending Technology Synergies....Pages 79-95
Front Matter....Pages 97-97
Trust Propagation Models....Pages 99-131
Interpersonal Trust and Similarity....Pages 133-151
Front Matter....Pages 153-153
Decentralized Recommender Systems....Pages 155-172
Conclusion....Pages 173-175
Back Matter....Pages 177-187
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