Recommender systems (RSs) provide personalised suggestions of information or products relevant to user's needs. RSs are considered as powerful tools that help users to find interesting items matching their own taste. Although RSs have made substantial progress in theory and algorithm development and have achieved many commercial successes, how to utilise the widely available information on Online Social Networks (OSNs) has largely been overlooked. Noticing this gap in existing research on RSs and taking into account a user's selection being greatly influenced by his/her trusted friends and their opinions, this thesis proposes a novel personalised Recommender System framework, so-called Implicit Social Trust and Sentiment (ISTS) based RSs. The main motivation was to overcome the overlooked use of OSNs in Recommender Systems and to utilise the widely available information from such networks. This work also designs solutions to a number of challenges inherent to the RSs domain, such as accuracy, cold-start, diversity and coverage. ISTS improves the existing recommendation approaches by exploring a new source of data from friends' short posts in microbloggings. In the case of new users who have no previous preferences, ISTS maps the suggested recommendations into numerical rating scales by applying the three main components. The first component is measuring the implicit trust between friends based on their intercommunication activities and behaviour. Owing to the need to adapt friends' opinions, the implicit social trust model is designed to include the trusted friends and give them the highest weight of contribution in recommendation encounter. The second component is inferring the sentiment rating to reflect the knowledge behind friends' short posts, so-called micro-reviews. The sentiment behind micro-reviews is extracted using Sentiment Analysis (SA) techniques. To achieve the best sentiment representation, our approach considers the special natural environment in OSNs brief posts. Two Sentiment Analysis methodologies are used: a bag of words method and a probabilistic method. The third ISTS component is identifying the impact degree of friends' sentiments and their level of trust by using machine learning algorithms. Two types of machine learning algorithms are used: classification models and regressions models. The classification models include Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression and Decision Trees. Among the three classification models, Decision Trees show the best Mean absolute error (MAE) at 0.836. Support Vector Regression performed the best among all models at 0.45 of MAE. This thesis also proposes an approach with further improvement over ISTS, namely Hybrid Implicit Social Trust and Sentiment (H-ISTS). The enhanced approach applies improvements by optimising trust parameters to identify the impact of the features (re-tweets and followings/followers list) on recommendation results. Unlike the ISTS which allocates equal weight to trust features, H-ISTS provides different weights to determine the different effects of the two trust features. As a result, we found that H-ISTS improved the MAE to be 0.42 which is based on Support Vector Regression. Further, it increases the number of trust features from two to five features in order to include the influence of these features in rating predictions. The integration of the new approach H-ISTS with a Collaborative Filtering recommender system, in particular memory-based, is investigated next. Therefore, existing users with a history of ratings can receive recommendations by fusing their own tastes and their friends' preferences using the two type of memory-based methods: user-based and item-based. H-ISTSitem is the integration of H-ISTS and item-based which provides the lowest error at 0.7091. The experiments show that diversity is better achieved using the H-ISTSuser which is the integration of H-ISTS and user-based technique. To evaluate the performance of these approaches, two real social datasets are collected from Twitter. To verify the proposed framework, the experiments are conducted and the results are compared against the most relevant baselines which confirmed that RSs have been successfully improved using OSNs. These enhancements demonstrate the effectiveness and promises of the proposed approach in RSs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:728150 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Alahmadi, Dimah |
| Contributors | Zeng, Xiaojun |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/recommender-systems-based-on-online-social-networks-an-implicit-social-trust-and-sentiment-analysis-approach(ac03f7e5-4fc0-4c4a-bace-82188823eb84).html |
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