An Adaptive Recommendation System in Social Media
Chuan Hu, Chen Zhang, Tiejun Wang, Qing Li,
Southwestern Univ.
of Finance & Economics
China
chuanhu90@gmail.com
zcwd123456@gmail.com
sohanter@hotmail.com
kooliqing@gmail.com
Abstract
In a broader sense, news recommendation
essentially is to select relevant news by their themes.
Identification of topical patterns is critical in this task.
Common strategies in the previous studies rely on
news entities to extract topic patterns. In such a way,
news is recommended solely based on the author's
point of view. In this article, we argue that, in social
media, the performance of recommendation can be
immensely enhanced if user interaction is better
utilized. It overcomes the bias of traditional news
recommendation by suggesting relevant information
with a balanced perspective of authors and readers.
This is achieved by identifying and using the topic
patterns of the original news posting and its comments,
one of the most useful records of user behaviors in
social media. In particular, to capture the dynamic
concerns of users, hidden topic patterns are extracted
by utilizing both textual and structural information of
comments. To do so, we model the relationship among
comments and that relative to the original posting
using an undirected acyclic graph, where each node is
a word; each edge is a structural link between words.
Experiments indicate that our proposed solution
provides an effective news recommendation service in
social media.
1. Introduction
Since its inception, the Web has evolved from a
technical framework for information dissemination to
more of an enabler of social interactions among its
users. The Web circa 1990 consisted primarily of static
text content expressed in HTML. Nowadays, users of
the Web have a variety of advanced techniques
including XML and AJAX to access richer and
dynamic content. Such technological advancement has
fertilized vibrant creation, sharing, and collaboration
among the users[1]. These social interactions make
Web to be the most important vehicle for “social
media”
1
. Examples of social media include Blogs,
Microblogging, wikis, social networking, social news,
instant message, podcast etc. Digg (www.digg.com),
Yahoo!Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com), Twitter (Twitter.com),
and StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon.com) are some
shining examples.
One form of social media of particular interest here
is social news. It refers to Web sites where a user can
publish an article or post news to share with others.
Other users can read and comment on the posting and
these comments can, in turn, be read and commented
on. Social news was pioneered by tech-focused
Slashdot (slashdot.org). The more broad-interest Fark
(Fark.com) continued the evolution by relaxing
editorial control of what news stories would be
presented. It became more popular with the advent of
Digg (digg.com), Yahoo!Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com),
Reddit (reddit.com), Newsvine (Newsvine.com) and
NowPublic (NowPublic.com). With such a multiplicity
of social news, information of online news follows a
Long Tail Distribution[2]. That is, in aggregate, the
not-so-well-known news can have more valuable
information than the popular ones. This gives us an
incentive to develop a recommender to provide a set of
relevant news articles, which are expected to be of
interest to the current readers. The user learning
experiences with the system can be enhanced with the
recommended articles.
Since social news is characterized by engaging
interactions among users, its recommendation
mechanism will be different from the recommendation
of traditional news to a large extent. First, it should
1
In Wikipedia, social media is defined as media for social
interaction, using web-based technologies to allow the creation and
exchange of user-generated content.
2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
978-0-7695-4525-7/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2012.94
1759