Contrastive Trajectory Learning for Tour Recommendation

The main objective of Personalized Tour Recommendation (PTR) is to generate a sequence of point-of-interest (POIs) for a particular tourist, according to the user-specific constraints such as duration time, start and end points, the number of attractions planned to visit, and so on. Previous PTR solutions are based on either heuristics for solving the orienteering problem to maximize a global reward with a specified budget or approaches attempting to learn user visiting preferences and transition patterns with the stochastic process or recurrent neural networks. However, existing learning methodologies rely on historical trips to train the model and use the next visited POI as the supervised signal, which may not fully capture the coherence of preferences and thus recommend similar trips to different users, primarily due to the data sparsity problem and long-tailed distribution of POI popularity. This work presents a novel tour recommendation model by distilling knowledge and supervision signals from the trips in a self-supervised manner. We propose Contrastive Trajectory Learning for Tour Recommendation (CTLTR), which utilizes the intrinsic POI dependencies and traveling intent to discover extra knowledge and augments the sparse data via pre-training auxiliary self-supervised objectives. CTLTR provides a principled way to characterize the inherent data correlations while tackling the implicit feedback and weak supervision problems by learning robust representations applicable for tour planning. We introduce a hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder to identify tourists’ intentions and use the contrastive loss to discover subsequence semantics and their sequential patterns through maximizing the mutual information. Additionally, we observe that a data augmentation step as the preliminary of contrastive learning can solve the overfitting issue resulting from data sparsity. We conduct extensive experiments on a range of real-world datasets and demonstrate that our model can significantly improve the recommendation performance over the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both recommendation accuracy and visiting orders.

Neural Matrix Factorization Recommendation for User Preference Prediction Based on Explicit and Implicit Feedback

Explicit feedback and implicit feedback are two important types of heterogeneous data for constructing a recommendation system. The combination of the two can effectively improve the performance of the recommendation system. However, most of the current deep learning recommendation models fail to fully exploit the complementary advantages of two types of data combined and usually only use binary implicit feedback data. Thus, this paper proposes a neural matrix factorization recommendation algorithm (EINMF) based on explicit-implicit feedback. First, neural network is used to learn nonlinear feature of explicit-implicit feedback of user-item interaction. Second, combined with the traditional matrix factorization, explicit feedback is used to accurately reflect the explicit preference and the potential preferences of users to build a recommendation model; a new loss function is designed based on explicit-implicit feedback to obtain the best parameters through the neural network training to predict the preference of users for items; finally, according to prediction results, personalized recommendation list is pushed to the user. The feasibility, validity, and robustness are fully demonstrated in comparison with multiple baseline models on two real datasets.

Predicting Activation Liking of People With Dementia

Physical, social and cognitive activation is an important cornerstone in non-pharmacological therapy for People with Dementia (PwD). To support long-term motivation and well-being, activation contents first need to be perceived positively. Prompting for explicit feedback, however, is intrusive and interrupts the activation flow. Automated analyses of verbal and non-verbal signals could provide an unobtrusive means of recommending suitable contents based on implicit feedback. In this study, we investigate the correlation between engagement responses and self-reported activation ratings. Subsequently, we predict ratings of PwD based on verbal and non-verbal signals in an unconstrained care setting. Applying Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) networks, we can show that our classifier outperforms chance level. We further investigate which features are the most promising indicators for the prediction of activation ratings of PwD.

Rank-sensitive proportional aggregations in dynamic recommendation scenarios

In this paper, we focus on the problem of rank-sensitive proportionality preservation when aggregating outputs of multiple recommender systems in dynamic recommendation scenarios. We believe that individual recommenders may provide complementary views on the user’s preferences or needs, and therefore, their proportional (i.e. unbiased) aggregation may be beneficial for the long-term user satisfaction. We propose an aggregation framework (FuzzDA) based on a modified D’Hondt’s algorithm (DA) for proportional mandates allocation. Specifically, we adjusted DA to register fuzzy membership of items and modified the selection procedure to balance both relevance and proportionality criteria. Furthermore, we propose several iterative votes assignment strategies and negative implicit feedback incorporation strategies to make FuzzDA framework applicable in dynamic recommendation scenarios. Overall, the framework should provide benefits w.r.t. long-term novelty of recommendations, diversity of recommended items as well as overall relevance. We evaluated FuzzDA framework thoroughly both in offline simulations and in online A/B testing. Framework variants outperformed baselines w.r.t. click-through rate (CTR) in most of the evaluated scenarios. Some variants of FuzzDA also provided the best or close-to-best iterative novelty (while maintaining very high CTR). While the impact of the framework variants on user-wise diversity was not so extensive, the trade-off between CTR and diversity seems reasonable.

Enhanced Collaborative Filtering for Personalized E-Government Recommendation

The problems with the information overload of e-government websites have been a big obstacle for users to make decisions. One promising approach to solve this problem is to deploy an intelligent recommendation system on e-government platforms. Collaborative filtering (CF) has shown its superiority by characterizing both items and users by the latent features inferred from the user–item interaction matrix. A fundamental challenge is to enhance the expression of the user or/and item embedding latent features from the implicit feedback. This problem negatively affected the performance of the recommendation system in e-government. In this paper, we firstly propose to learn positive items’ latent features by leveraging both the negative item information and the original embedding features. We present the negative items mixed collaborative filtering (NMCF) method to enhance the CF-based recommender system. Such mixing information is beneficial for extending the expressiveness of the latent features. Comprehensive experimentation on a real-world e-government dataset showed that our approach improved the performance significantly compared with the state-of-the-art baseline algorithms.

Implicit Feedback Recommendation Method Based on User-Generated Content

Studying recommendation method has long been a fundamental area in personalized marketing science. The rating data sparsity problem is the biggest challenge of recommendations. In addition, existing recommendation methods can only identify user preferences rather than customer needs. To solve these two bottleneck problems, we propose a novel implicit feedback recommendation method using user-generated content (UGC). We identify product feature and customer needs from UGC using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model and textual semantic analysis techniques, measure user-product fit degree introducing attention mechanism and antonym mechanism, and predict user rating based on user-product fit degree and user history rating data. Using data from a large-scale review sites, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our study makes several research contributions. First, we propose a novel recommendation method with strong robustness against sparse rating data. Second, we propose a novel recommendation method based on the customer need-product feature fit. Third, we propose a novel approach to measure the fit degree of customer needs-product feature, which can effectively improve the performance of recommendation method. Our study also indicates the following findings: (1) UGC can be used to predict user ratings with no user rating records. This finding has important implications to solve the sparsity problem of recommendations thoroughly. (2) The customer need-based recommendation method has better performance than existing user preference-based recommendation methods. This finding sheds light on the necessity of mining customer need for recommendation methods. (3) UGC can be used to mine customer need and product features. This finding indicates that UGC also can be used in the other studies requiring information about customer need and product feature. (4) Comparing the opinions of user review should not be solely on the basis of semantic similarity. This finding sheds light on the limitation of existing opinion mining studies.