Social Collaborative Retrieval
This work addresses data sparsity in collaborative retrieval for applications like music recommendation, though it appears incremental by building on existing social recommendation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of collaborative retrieval, which combines recommendation and information retrieval, by proposing a new model that incorporates social network information to overcome data sparsity. The result shows that their algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, as demonstrated using a real-world music dataset.
Socially-based recommendation systems have recently attracted significant interest, and a number of studies have shown that social information can dramatically improve a system's predictions of user interests. Meanwhile, there are now many potential applications that involve aspects of both recommendation and information retrieval, and the task of collaborative retrieval---a combination of these two traditional problems---has recently been introduced. Successful collaborative retrieval requires overcoming severe data sparsity, making additional sources of information, such as social graphs, particularly valuable. In this paper we propose a new model for collaborative retrieval, and show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by incorporating information from social networks. We also provide empirical analyses of the ways in which cultural interests propagate along a social graph using a real-world music dataset.