Duen-Ren Liu, Yu-Shan Liao and Jun-Yi Lu
Providing online news recommendations to users has become an important trend for online media platforms, enabling them to attract more users. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
Providing online news recommendations to users has become an important trend for online media platforms, enabling them to attract more users. The purpose of this paper is to propose an online news recommendation system for recommending news articles to users when browsing news on online media platforms.
Design/methodology/approach
A Collaborative Semantic Topic Modeling (CSTM) method and an ensemble model (EM) are proposed to predict user preferences based on the combination of matrix factorization with articles’ semantic latent topics derived from word embedding and latent topic modeling. The proposed EM further integrates an online interest adjustment (OIA) mechanism to adjust users’ online recommendation lists based on their current news browsing.
Findings
This study evaluated the proposed approach using offline experiments, as well as an online evaluation on an existing online media platform. The evaluation shows that the proposed method can improve the recommendation quality and achieve better performance than other recommendation methods can. The online evaluation also shows that integrating the proposed method with OIA can improve the click-through rate for online news recommendation.
Originality/value
The novel CSTM and EM combined with OIA are proposed for news recommendation. The proposed novel recommendation system can improve the click-through rate of online news recommendations, thus increasing online media platforms’ commercial value.
Details
Keywords
Duen-Ren Liu, Yu-Shan Liao, Ya-Han Chung and Kuan-Yu Chen
Online advertisement brings huge revenue to many websites. There are many types of online advertisement; this paper aims to focus on the online banner ads which are usually placed…
Abstract
Purpose
Online advertisement brings huge revenue to many websites. There are many types of online advertisement; this paper aims to focus on the online banner ads which are usually placed in a particular news website. The investigated news website adopts a pay-per-ad payment model, where the advertisers are charged when they rent a banner from the website during a particular period. In this payment model, the website needs to ensure that the ad pushed frequency of each ad on the banner is similar. Under such advertisement push rules, an ad-recommendation mechanism considering ad push fairness is required.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors proposed a novel ad recommendation method that considers both ad-push fairness and personal interests. The authors take every ad’s exposure time into consideration and investigate users’ three different usage experiences in the website to identify the main factors affecting the interests of users. Online ad recommendation is conducted on the investigated news website.
Findings
The results of the experiments show that the proposed approach performs better than the traditional approach. This method can not only enhance the average click rate of all ads in the website but also ensure reasonable fairness of exposure frequency of each ad. The online experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.
Originality/value
Existing researches had not considered both the advertisement recommendation and ad-push fairness together. With the proposed novel ad recommendation model, the authors can improve the ad click-through rate of ads with reasonable push fairness. The website provider can thereby increase the commercial value of advertising and user satisfaction.
Details
Keywords
Duen-Ren Liu, Yun-Cheng Chou and Ciao-Ting Jian
Online news websites provide diverse article topics, such as fashion news, entertainment and movie information, to attract more users and create more benefits. Recommending movie…
Abstract
Purpose
Online news websites provide diverse article topics, such as fashion news, entertainment and movie information, to attract more users and create more benefits. Recommending movie information to users reading news online can enhance the impression of diverse information and may consequently improve benefits. Accordingly, providing online movie recommendations can improve users’ satisfactions with the website, and thus is an important trend for online news websites. This study aims to propose a novel online recommendation method for recommending movie information to users when they are browsing news articles.
Design/methodology/approach
Association rule mining is applied to users’ news and movie browsing to find latent associations between news and movies. A novel online recommendation approach is proposed based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), enhanced collaborative topic modeling (ECTM) and the diversity of recommendations. The performance of proposed approach is evaluated via an online evaluation on a real news website.
Findings
The online evaluation results show that the click-through rate can be improved by the proposed hybrid method integrating recommendation diversity, LDA, ECTM and users’ online interests, which are adapted to the current browsing news. The experiment results also show that considering recommendation diversity can achieve better performance.
Originality/value
Existing studies had not investigated the problem of recommending movie information to users while they are reading news online. To address this problem, a novel hybrid recommendation method is proposed for dealing with cross-type recommendation tasks and the cold-start issue. Moreover, the proposed method is implemented and evaluated online in a real world news website, while such online evaluation is rarely conducted in related research. This work contributes to deriving user’s online preferences for cross-type recommendations by integrating recommendation diversity, LDA, ECTM and adaptive online interests. The research findings also contribute to increasing the commercial value of the online news websites.
Details
Keywords
Duen-Ren Liu, Yun-Cheng Chou, Chi-Ching Chung and Hsiu-Yu Liao
Due to the rapidly increasing volume of users and products in virtual worlds, recommender systems are an important feature in virtual worlds; they can help solve information…
Abstract
Purpose
Due to the rapidly increasing volume of users and products in virtual worlds, recommender systems are an important feature in virtual worlds; they can help solve information overload problems. Virtual world users are able to perform several actions that promote the enjoyment of their virtual life, including interacting with others, visiting virtual houses and shopping for virtual products. This study aims to concentrate on the following two important factors: the social neighbors’ influences and the virtual house bandwagon phenomenon, which affects users’ preferences during their virtual house visits and purchasing processes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors determine social influence by considering the interactions between the target user and social circle neighbors. The degree of influence of the virtual house bandwagon effect is derived by analyzing the preferences of the virtual house hosts who have been visited by target users during their successive visits. A novel hybrid recommendation method is proposed herein to predict users’ preferences by combining the analyses of both factors.
Findings
The recommendation performance of the proposed method is evaluated by conducting experiments with a data set collected from a virtual world platform. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional recommendation methods, and they also exhibit the effectiveness of considering both the social influence and the virtual house bandwagon effect for making effective recommendations.
Originality/value
Existing studies on recommendation methods did not investigate the virtual house bandwagon effects that are unique to the virtual worlds. The novel idea of the virtual house bandwagon effect is proposed and analyzed for predicting users’ preferences. Moreover, a novel hybrid recommendation approach is proposed herein for generating virtual product recommendations. The proposed approach is able to improve the accuracy of preference predictions and enhance the innovative value of recommender systems for virtual worlds.
Details
Keywords
Duen-Ren Liu, Yang Huang, Jhen-Jie Jhao and Shin-Jye Lee
Online news websites provide huge amounts of timely news, bringing the challenge of recommending personalized news articles. Generative adversarial networks (GAN) based on…
Abstract
Purpose
Online news websites provide huge amounts of timely news, bringing the challenge of recommending personalized news articles. Generative adversarial networks (GAN) based on collaborative filtering (CFGAN) can achieve effective recommendation quality. However, CFGAN ignores item contents, which contain more latent preference features than just user ratings. It is important to consider both ratings and item contents in making preference predictions. This study aims to improve news recommendation by proposing a GAN-based news recommendation model considering both ratings (implicit feedback) and the latent features of news content.
Design/methodology/approach
The collaborative topic modeling (CTM) can improve user preference prediction by combining matrix factorization (MF) with latent topics of item content derived from latent topic modeling. This study proposes a novel hybrid news recommendation model, Hybrid-CFGAN, which modifies the architecture of the CFGAN model with enhanced preference learning from the CTM. The proposed Hybrid-CFGAN model contains parallel neural networks – original rating-based preference learning and CTM-based preference learning, which consider both ratings and news content with user preferences derived from the CTM model. A tunable parameter is used to adjust the weights of the two preference learnings, while concatenating the preference outputs of the two parallel neural networks.
Findings
This study uses the dataset collected from an online news website, NiusNews, to conduct an experimental evaluation. The results show that the proposed Hybrid-CFGAN model can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art GAN-based recommendation methods. The proposed novel Hybrid-CFGAN model can enhance existing GAN-based recommendation and increase the performance of preference predictions on textual content such as news articles.
Originality/value
As the existing CFGAN model does not consider content information and solely relies on history logs, it may not be effective in recommending news articles. Our proposed Hybrid-CFGAN model modified the architecture of the CFGAN generator by adding a parallel neural network to gain the relevant information from news content and user preferences derived from the CTM model. The novel idea of adjusting the preference learning from two parallel neural networks – original rating-based preference learning and CTM-based preference learning – contributes to improve the recommendation quality of the proposed model by considering both ratings and latent preferences derived from item contents. The proposed novel recommendation model can improve news recommendation, thereby increasing the commercial value of news media platforms.
Details
Keywords
Shu-Ying Lin, Duen-Ren Liu and Hsien-Pin Huang
Financial price forecast issues are always a concern of investors. However, the financial applications based on machine learning methods mainly focus on stock market predictions…
Abstract
Purpose
Financial price forecast issues are always a concern of investors. However, the financial applications based on machine learning methods mainly focus on stock market predictions. Few studies have explored credit risk predictions. Understanding credit risk trends can help investors avoid market risks. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prediction model that can effectively predict credit default swaps (CDS).
Design/methodology/approach
A novel generative adversarial network (GAN) for CDS prediction is proposed. The authors take three features into account that are highly relevant to the future trends of CDS: historical CDS price, news and financial leverage. The main goal of this model is to improve the existing GAN-based regression model by adding finance and news feature extraction approaches. The proposed model adopts an attentional long short-term memory network and convolution network to process historical CDS data and news information, respectively. In addition to enhancing the effectiveness of the GAN model, the authors also design a data sampling strategy to alleviate the overfitting issue.
Findings
The authors conduct an experiment with a real dataset and evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The components and selected features of the model are evaluated for their ability to improve the prediction performance. The experimental results show that the proposed model performs better than other machine learning algorithms and traditional regression GAN.
Originality/value
There are very few studies on prediction models for CDS. With the proposed novel approach, the authors can improve the performance of CDS predictions. The proposed work can thereby increase the commercial value of CDS predictions to support trading decisions.
Details
Keywords
Duen-Ren Liu, Chuen-He Liou, Chi-Chieh Peng and Huai-Chun Chi
Social bookmarking is a system which allows users to share, organise, search and manage bookmarks of web resources. However, with the rapid growth in the production of online…
Abstract
Purpose
Social bookmarking is a system which allows users to share, organise, search and manage bookmarks of web resources. However, with the rapid growth in the production of online documents, people are facing the problem of information overload. Social bookmarking web sites offer a solution to this by providing push counts, which are counts of users’ recommendations of articles, and thus indicate the popularity and interest thereof. In this way, users can use the push counts to find popular and interesting articles. A measure of popularity-based solely on push counts, however, cannot be considered a true reflection of popularity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors propose to derive the degree of popularity of an article by considering the reputation of the users who push the article. Moreover, the authors propose a novel personalised blog article recommendation approach which combines reputation-based group popularity with content-based filtering (CBF), for the recommendation of popular blog articles which satisfy users’ personal preferences.
Findings
The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional CBF, item-based and user-based collaborative filtering approaches. The proposed approach considering reputation-based group popularity scores on neighbouring articles indeed can improve the recommendation quality of traditional CBF method.
Originality/value
The recommendation approach modifies CBF method by considering the target user's group preferences, to overcome the limitation of CBF which arises from the recommending only items similar to those the user has previously liked. Users with similar article preferences (profiles) may form a group of users with similar interests. A group's preferences may also reflect an individual's preferences. The reputation-based group preferences of the target user's group can be used to complement the target user's preferences.
Details
Keywords
Duen‐Ren Liu, Wei‐Hsiao Chen and Po‐Huan Chiu
In recent years, readers have limited amounts of time to pick the right books to read from a market that is filled with similar types of books. Aiming to read only good books…
Abstract
Purpose
In recent years, readers have limited amounts of time to pick the right books to read from a market that is filled with similar types of books. Aiming to read only good books, readers tend to check book reviews written by others. However, it is very difficult to find good book reviews. The aim of this paper is to present a book review recommendation system that collects reviews from heterogeneous sources on the Internet and performs quality judgments automatically. Users can then read the top‐ranked reviews suggested by this recommendation system.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, a book review recommendation system is constructed to collect, process, and judge the quality of book reviews from various heterogeneous sources. The quality measurement of book reviews uses review‐evaluation techniques. The prediction results were validated with a ranking list produced by experts.
Findings
The proposed system is effective and suitable for recommending quality book reviews from heterogeneous sources. The proposed quality measurement method is more effective than other more commonly used methods.
Originality/value
This paper is one of the first to apply review evaluation techniques to the process of book review recommendation. The proposed system can collect and recognize book reviews from different websites with various forms of presentation. This evaluation shows that the quality measurement method produces better results than do other methods, such as ranking by rating score or by the date that the review was posted. Those methods are primarily used by commercial websites.
Details
Keywords
Many enterprises implement various business projects on the Internet in the global knowledge economy. The task of managing distributed and heterogeneous project knowledge is very…
Abstract
Many enterprises implement various business projects on the Internet in the global knowledge economy. The task of managing distributed and heterogeneous project knowledge is very important in increasing the knowledge assets of enterprises. Accordingly, this work presents a project‐based knowledge map system to properly organize project knowledge into topic maps, from which users can obtain in‐depth concepts to facilitate further project development. A two‐phase data mining approach involving the ISO/ISEC 13250 topic maps and Extensible Markup Language (XML) is used to establish the proposed system, which can determine knowledge patterns from previous projects and transform these patterns into a navigable knowledge map. The map can help users to locate required information and also offers subject‐related information easily and rapidly over the Internet.
Details
Keywords
Saeedeh Hazratzadeh and Nima Jafari Navimipour
Expert Cloud as a new class of cloud systems enables its users to request and share the skill, knowledge and expertise of people by employing internet infrastructures and cloud…
Abstract
Purpose
Expert Cloud as a new class of cloud systems enables its users to request and share the skill, knowledge and expertise of people by employing internet infrastructures and cloud concepts. Since offering the most appropriate expertise to the customer is one of the clear objectives in Expert Cloud, colleague recommendation is a necessary part of it. So, the purpose of this paper is to develop a colleague recommender system for the Expert Cloud using features matrices of colleagues.
Design/methodology/approach
The new method is described in two phases. In the first phase, all possible colleagues of the user are found through the filtering mechanism and next features of the user and possible colleagues are calculated and collected in matrices. Six potential features of colleagues including reputation, expertise, trust, agility, cost and field of study were proposed. In the second phase, the final score is calculated for every possible colleague and then top-k colleagues are extracted among users. The survey was conducted using a simulation in MATLAB Software. Data were collected from Expert Cloud website. The method was tested using evaluating metrics such as precision, accuracy, incorrect recommendation and runtime.
Findings
The results of this study indicate that considering more features of colleagues has a positive impact on increasing the precision and accuracy of recommending new colleagues. Also, the proposed method has a better result in reducing incorrect recommendation.
Originality/value
In this paper, the colleague recommendation issue in the Expert Cloud is pointed out and the solution approach is applied into the Expert Cloud website.