Kowald Dominik
2017
Social tagging systems enable users to collaboratively assign freely chosen keywords(i.e., tags) to resources (e.g., Web links). In order to support users in finding descrip-tive tags, tag recommendation algorithms have been proposed. One issue of currentstate-of-the-art tag recommendation algorithms is that they are often designed ina purely data-driven way and thus, lack a thorough understanding of the cognitiveprocesses that play a role when people assign tags to resources. A prominent exam-ple is the activation equation of the cognitive architecture ACT-R, which formalizesactivation processes in human memory to determine if a specific memory unit (e.g.,a word or tag) will be needed in a specific context. It is the aim of this thesis toinvestigate if a cognitive-inspired approach, which models activation processes inhuman memory, can improve tag recommendations.For this, the relation between activation processes in human memory and usagepractices of tags is studied, which reveals that (i) past usage frequency, (ii) recency,and (iii) semantic context cues are important factors when people reuse tags. Basedon this, a cognitive-inspired tag recommendation approach termed BLLAC+MPrisdeveloped based on the activation equation of ACT-R. An extensive evaluation usingsix real-world folksonomy datasets shows that BLLAC+MProutperforms currentstate-of-the-art tag recommendation algorithms with respect to various evaluationmetrics. Finally, BLLAC+MPris utilized for hashtag recommendations in Twitter todemonstrate its generalizability in related areas of tag-based recommender systems.The findings of this thesis demonstrate that activation processes in human memorycan be utilized to improve not only social tag recommendations but also hashtagrecommendations. This opens up a number of possible research strands for futurework, such as the design of cognitive-inspired resource recommender systems
Breitfuß Gert, Kaiser Rene_DB, Kern Roman, Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth, Pammer-Schindler Viktoria, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
Proceedings of the Workshop Papers of i-Know 2017, co-located with International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business 2017 (i-Know 2017), Graz, Austria, October 11-12, 2017.
d'Aquin Mathieu , Adamou Alessandro , Dietze Stefan , Fetahu Besnik , Gadiraju Ujwal , Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Holz Peter, Kümmerle Joachim, Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth, Lopez Sola Susana, Mataran Ricardo, Sabol Vedran, Troullinou Pinelopi, Veas Eduardo, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
More and more learning activities take place online in a self-directed manner. Therefore, just as the idea of self-tracking activities for fitness purposes has gained momentum in the past few years, tools and methods for awareness and self-reflection on one's own online learning behavior appear as an emerging need for both formal and informal learners. Addressing this need is one of the key objectives of the AFEL (Analytics for Everyday Learning) project. In this paper, we discuss the different aspects of what needs to be put in place in order to enable awareness and self-reflection in online learning. We start by describing a scenario that guides the work done. We then investigate the theoretical, technical and support aspects that are required to enable this scenario, as well as the current state of the research in each aspect within the AFEL project. We conclude with a discussion of the ongoing plans from the project to develop learner-facing tools that enable awareness and self-reflection for online, self-directed learners. We also elucidate the need to establish further research programs on facets of self-tracking for learning that are necessarily going to emerge in the near future, especially regarding privacy and ethics.
Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth
2017
In this paper, we study the imbalance between current state-of-the-art tag recommendation algorithms and the folksonomy structures of real-world social tagging systems. While algorithms such as FolkRank are designed for dense folksonomy structures, most social tagging systems exhibit a sparse nature. To overcome this imbalance, we show that cognitive-inspired algorithms, which model the tag vocabulary of a user in a cognitive-plausible way, can be helpful. Our present approach does this via implementing the activation equation of the cognitive architecture ACT-R, which determines the usefulness of units in human memory (e.g., tags). In this sense, our long-term research goal is to design hybrid recommendation approaches, which combine the advantages of both worlds in order to adapt to the current setting (i.e., sparse vs. dense ones)
Seitlinger Paul, Ley Tobias, Kowald Dominik, Theiler Dieter, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Dennerlein Sebastian, Lex Elisabeth, Albert D.
2017
Creative group work can be supported by collaborative search and annotation of Web resources. In this setting, it is important to help individuals both stay fluent in generating ideas of what to search next (i.e., maintain ideational fluency) and stay consistent in annotating resources (i.e., maintain organization). Based on a model of human memory, we hypothesize that sharing search results with other users, such as through bookmarks and social tags, prompts search processes in memory, which increase ideational fluency, but decrease the consistency of annotations, e.g., the reuse of tags for topically similar resources. To balance this tradeoff, we suggest the tag recommender SoMe, which is designed to simulate search of memory from user-specific tag-topic associations. An experimental field study (N = 18) in a workplace context finds evidence of the expected tradeoff and an advantage of SoMe over a conventional recommender in the collaborative setting. We conclude that sharing search results supports group creativity by increasing the ideational fluency, and that SoMe helps balancing the evidenced fluency-consistency tradeoff.
Lacic Emanuel, Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth
2017
Recommender systems are acknowledged as an essential instrumentto support users in finding relevant information. However,the adaptation of recommender systems to multiple domain-specificrequirements and data models still remains an open challenge. Inthe present paper, we contribute to this sparse line of research withguidance on how to design a customizable recommender systemthat accounts for multiple domains with heterogeneous data. Usingconcrete showcase examples, we demonstrate how to setup amulti-domain system on the item and system level, and we reportevaluation results for the domains of (i) LastFM, (ii) FourSquare,and (iii) MovieLens. We believe that our findings and guidelinescan support developers and researchers of recommender systemsto easily adapt and deploy a recommender system in distributedenvironments, as well as to develop and evaluate algorithms suitedfor multi-domain settings
Kowald Dominik, Kopeinik Simone , Lex Elisabeth
2017
Recommender systems have become important tools to supportusers in identifying relevant content in an overloaded informationspace. To ease the development of recommender systems, a numberof recommender frameworks have been proposed that serve a widerange of application domains. Our TagRec framework is one of thefew examples of an open-source framework tailored towards developingand evaluating tag-based recommender systems. In this paper,we present the current, updated state of TagRec, and we summarizeand reƒect on four use cases that have been implemented withTagRec: (i) tag recommendations, (ii) resource recommendations,(iii) recommendation evaluation, and (iv) hashtag recommendations.To date, TagRec served the development and/or evaluation processof tag-based recommender systems in two large scale Europeanresearch projects, which have been described in 17 research papers.‘us, we believe that this work is of interest for both researchersand practitioners of tag-based recommender systems.
Kowald Dominik, Pujari Suhbash Chandra, Lex Elisabeth
2017
Hashtags have become a powerful tool in social platformssuch as Twitter to categorize and search for content, and tospread short messages across members of the social network.In this paper, we study temporal hashtag usage practices inTwitter with the aim of designing a cognitive-inspired hashtagrecommendation algorithm we call BLLI,S. Our mainidea is to incorporate the effect of time on (i) individualhashtag reuse (i.e., reusing own hashtags), and (ii) socialhashtag reuse (i.e., reusing hashtags, which has been previouslyused by a followee) into a predictive model. For this,we turn to the Base-Level Learning (BLL) equation from thecognitive architecture ACT-R, which accounts for the timedependentdecay of item exposure in human memory. Wevalidate BLLI,S using two crawled Twitter datasets in twoevaluation scenarios. Firstly, only temporal usage patternsof past hashtag assignments are utilized and secondly, thesepatterns are combined with a content-based analysis of thecurrent tweet. In both evaluation scenarios, we find not onlythat temporal effects play an important role for both individualand social hashtag reuse but also that our BLLI,S approachprovides significantly better prediction accuracy andranking results than current state-of-the-art hashtag recommendationmethods.