Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth, Kopeinik Simone
2016
In recent years, a number of recommendation algorithmshave been proposed to help learners find suitable learning resources online.Next to user-centered evaluations, offline-datasets have been usedto investigate new recommendation algorithms or variations of collaborativefiltering approaches. However, a more extensive study comparinga variety of recommendation strategies on multiple TEL datasets ismissing. In this work, we contribute with a data-driven study of recommendationstrategies in TEL to shed light on their suitability forTEL datasets. To that end, we evaluate six state-of-the-art recommendationalgorithms for tag and resource recommendations on six empiricaldatasets: a dataset from European Schoolnets TravelWell, a dataset fromthe MACE portal, which features access to meta-data-enriched learningresources from the field of architecture, two datasets from the socialbookmarking systems BibSonomy and CiteULike, a MOOC dataset fromthe KDD challenge 2015, and Aposdle, a small-scale workplace learningdataset. We highlight strengths and shortcomings of the discussed recommendationalgorithms and their applicability to the TEL datasets.Our results demonstrate that the performance of the algorithms stronglydepends on the properties and characteristics of the particular dataset.However, we also find a strong correlation between the average numberof users per resource and the algorithm performance. A tag recommenderevaluation experiment reveals that a hybrid combination of a cognitiveinspiredand a popularity-based approach consistently performs best onall TEL datasets we utilized in our study.
Traub Matthias, Lacic Emanuel, Kowald Dominik, Kahr Martin, Lex Elisabeth
2016
In this paper, we present work-in-progress on a recommender system designed to help people in need find the best suited social care institution for their personal issues. A key requirement in such a domain is to assure and to guarantee the person's privacy and anonymity in order to reduce inhibitions and to establish trust. We present how we aim to tackle this barely studied domain using a hybrid content-based recommendation approach. Our approach leverages three data sources containing textual content, namely (i) metadata from social care institutions, (ii) institution specific FAQs, and (iii) questions that a specific institution has already resolved. Additionally, our approach considers the time context of user questions as well as negative user feedback to previously provided recommendations. Finally, we demonstrate an application scenario of our recommender system in the form of a real-world Web system deployed in Austria.
Kopeinik Simone, Kowald Dominik, Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Lex Elisabeth
2016
Classic resource recommenders like Collaborative Filteringtreat users as just another entity, thereby neglecting non-linear user-resource dynamics that shape attention and in-terpretation. SUSTAIN, as an unsupervised human cate-gory learning model, captures these dynamics. It aims tomimic a learner’s categorization behavior. In this paper, weuse three social bookmarking datasets gathered from Bib-Sonomy, CiteULike and Delicious to investigate SUSTAINas a user modeling approach to re-rank and enrich Collab-orative Filtering following a hybrid recommender strategy.Evaluations against baseline algorithms in terms of recom-mender accuracy and computational complexity reveal en-couraging results. Our approach substantially improves Col-laborative Filtering and, depending on the dataset, success-fully competes with a computationally much more expen-sive Matrix Factorization variant. In a further step, we ex-plore SUSTAIN’s dynamics in our specific learning task andshow that both memorization of a user’s history and clus-tering, contribute to the algorithm’s performance. Finally,we observe that the users’ attentional foci determined bySUSTAIN correlate with the users’ level of curiosity, iden-tified by the SPEAR algorithm. Overall, the results ofour study show that SUSTAIN can be used to efficientlymodel attention-interpretation dynamics of users and canhelp improve Collaborative Filtering for resource recommen-dations.
Trattner Christoph, Kowald Dominik, Seitlinger Paul, Ley Tobias
2016
Several successful tag recommendation mechanisms have been developed, including algorithms built upon Collaborative Filtering, Tensor Factorization, graph-based and simple "most popular tags" approaches. From an economic perspective, the latter approach has been convincing since calculating frequencies is computationally efficient and effective with respect to different recommender evaluation metrics. In this paper, we introduce a tag recommendation algorithm that mimics the way humans draw on items in their long-term memory in order to extend these conventional "most popular tags" approaches. Based on a theory of human memory, the approach estimates a tag's reuse probability as a function of usage frequency and recency in the user's past (base-level activation) as well as of the current semantic context (associative component).Using four real-world folksonomies gathered from bookmarks in BibSonomy, CiteULike, Delicious and Flickr, we show how refining frequency-based estimates by considering recency and semantic context outperforms conventional "most popular tags" approaches and another existing and very effective but less theory-driven, time-dependent recommendation mechanism. By combining our approach with a simple resource-specific frequency analysis, our algorithm outperforms other well-established algorithms, such as Collaborative Filtering, FolkRank and Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization with respect to recommender accuracy and runtime. We conclude that our approach provides an accurate and computationally efficient model of a user's temporal tagging behavior. Moreover, we demonstrate how effective principles of recommender systems can be designed and implemented if human memory processes are taken into account.
Lacic Emanuel, Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth
2016
Air travel is one of the most frequently used means of transportation in our every-day life. Thus, it is not surprising that an increasing number of travelers share their experiences with airlines and airports in form of online reviews on the Web. In this work, we thrive to explain and uncover the features of airline reviews that contribute most to traveler satisfaction. To that end, we examine reviews crawled from the Skytrax air travel review portal. Skytrax provides four review categories to review airports, lounges, airlines and seats. Each review category consists of several five-star ratings as well as free-text review content. In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive feature study and we find that not only five-star rating information such as airport queuing time and lounge comfort highly correlate with traveler satisfaction but also textual features in the form of the inferred review text sentiment. Based on our findings, we created classifiers to predict traveler satisfaction using the best performing rating features. Our results reveal that given our methodology, traveler satisfaction can be predicted with high accuracy. Additionally, we find that training a model on the sentiment of the review text provides a competitive alternative when no five star rating information is available. We believe that our work is of interest for researchers in the area of modeling and predicting user satisfaction based on available review data on the Web.
Santos Patricia, Dennerlein Sebastian, Theiler Dieter, Cook John, Treasure-Jones Tamsin, Holley Debbie, Kerr Micky , Atwell Graham, Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth
2016
Social learning networks enable the sharing, transfer and enhancement of knowledge in the workplace that builds the ground to exchange informal learning practices. In this work, three healthcare networks are studied in order to understand how to enable the building, maintaining and activation of new contacts at work and the exchange of knowledge between them. By paying close attention to the needs of the practitioners, we aimed to understand how personal and social learning could be supported by technological services exploiting social networks and the respective traces reflected in the semantics. This paper presents a case study reporting on the results of two co-design sessions and elicits requirements showing the importance of scaffolding strategies in personal and shared learning networks. Besides, the significance of these strategies to aggregate trust among peers when sharing resources and decision-support when exchanging questions and answers. The outcome is a set of design criteria to be used for further technical development for a social tool. We conclude with the lessons learned and future work.
Kowald Dominik, Lex Elisabeth
2016
In this paper, we study factors that in uence tag reuse behavior in social tagging systems. Our work is guided by the activation equation of the cognitive model ACT-R, which states that the usefulness of information in human memory depends on the three factors usage frequency, recency and semantic context. It is our aim to shed light on the in uence of these factors on tag reuse. In our experiments, we utilize six datasets from the social tagging systems Flickr, CiteULike, BibSonomy, Delicious, LastFM and MovieLens, covering a range of various tagging settings. Our results con rm that frequency, recency and semantic context positively in uence the reuse probability of tags. However, the extent to which each factor individually in uences tag reuse strongly depends on the type of folksonomy present in a social tagging system. Our work can serve as guideline for researchers and developers of tag-based recommender systems when designing algorithms for social tagging environments.