Kowald Dominik
2018
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 nding descriptive tags, tagrecommendation algorithms have been proposed. One issue of current state-of-the-art tagrecommendation algorithms is that they are often designed in a purely data-driven way andthus, lack a thorough understanding of the cognitive processes that play a role when peopleassign tags to resources. A prominent example is the activation equation of the cognitivearchitecture ACT-R, which formalizes activation processes in human memory to determineif a specic memory unit (e.g., a word or tag) will be needed in a specic context. It is theaim of this thesis to investigate if a cognitive-inspired approach, which models activationprocesses in human memory, can improve tag recommendations.For this, the relation between activation processes in human memory and usage prac-tices 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. Based on this, acognitive-inspired tag recommendation approach termed BLLAC+MPr is developed based onthe activation equation of ACT-R. An extensive evaluation using six real-world folksonomydatasets shows that BLLAC+MPr outperforms current state-of-the-art tag recommendationalgorithms with respect to various evaluation metrics. Finally, BLLAC+MPr is utilized forhashtag recommendations in Twitter to demonstrate its generalizability in related areas oftag-based recommender systems. The ndings of this thesis demonstrate that activationprocesses in human memory can be utilized to improve not only social tag recommendationsbut also hashtag recommendations. This opens up a number of possible research strands forfuture work, such as the design of cognitive-inspired resource recommender systems
Hasani-Mavriqi Ilire, Kowald Dominik, Helic Denis, Lex Elisabeth
2018
In this paper, we study the process of opinion dynamics and consensus building inonline collaboration systems, in which users interact with each other followingtheir common interests and their social proles. Specically, we are interested inhow users similarity and their social status in the community, as well as theinterplay of those two factors inuence the process of consensus dynamics. Forour study, we simulate the diusion of opinions in collaboration systems using thewell-known Naming Game model, which we extend by incorporating aninteraction mechanism based on user similarity and user social status. Weconduct our experiments on collaborative datasets extracted from the Web. Ourndings reveal that when users are guided by their similarity to other users, theprocess of consensus building in online collaboration systems is delayed. Asuitable increase of inuence of user social status on their actions can in turnfacilitate this process. In summary, our results suggest that achieving an optimalconsensus building process in collaboration systems requires an appropriatebalance between those two factors.