Publikationen

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.

Recommender systems are acknowledged as an essential instru- ment to support users in finding relevant information. However, adapting to different domain specific data models is a challenge, which many recommender frameworks neglect. Moreover, the ad- vent of the big data era has posed the need for high scalability and real-time processing of frequent data updates, and thus, has brought new challenges for the recommender systems’ research community. In this work, we show how different item, social and location data features can be utilized and supported to provide real-time recom- mendations. We further show how to process data updates online and capture user’s real-time interest without recalculating recom- mendations. The presented recommendation framework provides a scalable and customizable architecture suited for providing real- time recommendations to multiple domains. We further investigate the impact of an increasing request load and show how the runtime can be decreased by scaling the framework.

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.