A Location-Sentiment-Aware Recommender System for Both Home-Town and Out-of-Town Users
This work improves recommendation systems for users in location-based social networks by handling home-town and out-of-town scenarios, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods by adding sentiment and interest drift modeling.
The paper tackles the problem of spatial item recommendation by addressing user interest drift across regions and incorporating crowd sentiments from reviews, proposing LSARS, a latent probabilistic generative model that adapts to these factors and incorporates public preferences for out-of-town scenarios. Experiments on two large-scale LBSN datasets show LSARS achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods, though specific numerical gains are not provided.
Spatial item recommendation has become an important means to help people discover interesting locations, especially when people pay a visit to unfamiliar regions. Some current researches are focusing on modelling individual and collective geographical preferences for spatial item recommendation based on users' check-in records, but they fail to explore the phenomenon of user interest drift across geographical regions, i.e., users would show different interests when they travel to different regions. Besides, they ignore the influence of public comments for subsequent users' check-in behaviors. Specifically, it is intuitive that users would refuse to check in to a spatial item whose historical reviews seem negative overall, even though it might fit their interests. Therefore, it is necessary to recommend the right item to the right user at the right location. In this paper, we propose a latent probabilistic generative model called LSARS to mimic the decision-making process of users' check-in activities both in home-town and out-of-town scenarios by adapting to user interest drift and crowd sentiments, which can learn location-aware and sentiment-aware individual interests from the contents of spatial items and user reviews. Due to the sparsity of user activities in out-of-town regions, LSARS is further designed to incorporate the public preferences learned from local users' check-in behaviors. Finally, we deploy LSARS into two practical application scenes: spatial item recommendation and target user discovery. Extensive experiments on two large-scale location-based social networks (LBSNs) datasets show that LSARS achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods.