in which each column vector xr corresponds to a specific resource’s ratings by all m users. This representation usually leverages item-item similarities and leads to item-based CF algorithms [3]. For a survey on neighborhood-based recommendation methods, such as CF, see Chapter 4.
Note that because of the ternary relational nature of folksonomies, traditional RS cannot be applied directly. Therefore, in order to develop RS for folksonomies, one needs to either (i) reduce the ternary relation Y to a lower dimensional space (usually second-order tensors) where traditional RS can be applied, or develop new algorithms that operate over third-order tensors or tripartite undirected hypergraphs. Note that if one follows (i), care must be taken during the dimensionality reduction since important information can be discarded, which can lower the overall accuracy of the recommendations. In Section 19.4 we present and discuss both families of algorithms.
19.2.3 Multi-mode Recommendations
Differently from the traditional RS paradigm, where one is usually concerned only with rating prediction or resource recommendations, STS users may be interested in finding resources/tags, or even other users, and therefore recommendations can be provided for any of these entity types. The recommendation of tags is used in several systems, like Delicious and Bib- Sonomy, for example. It usually involves the recommendation of tags to users, based on the tags other users have provided for the same resources. Tag recommendations can expose different facets of an information item and relieve users from the obnoxious task of coming up with a good set of tags. Moreover, tag recommendation can reduce the problem of tag sparsity, which results from the unwillingness of users to tag. Figure 19.5 illustrates tag recommendations in BibSonomy.
It is important to note that differently from traditional RS, where there is usually no repeat-buying, i.e., the user usually does not buy the same book, movie, CD, etc. twice, re-occurring tags are a common feature of STS. A tag that has already been used to annotate a resource can be reused to annotate other different resources. This means that while traditional RS usually only recommend items that the user has not yet bought or rated, tag recommenders can eventually recommend tags that the user has already used for other resources.
The recommendation of resources is largely used in e-commerce and advertising, like in Amazon for example. With the actual trend towards STS, the current resource recommendation services will also be able exploit the tags to boost the recommendation quality, for example, by recommending resources to users based on the tags they have in common with other similar users. The movie recommendation website movielens6, where users rate the movies they like and receive recommendations about other movies in which they might be interested, is a notable example.
It started as a traditional recommender service operating over the typical user-rating binary matrix, and just recently added social tagging features, whereby new tagaware algorithms are being developed and deployed [30].
A third type of recommendation concerns recommending interesting users to a target user, which can help to connect people with common interests and encourage them to contribute and share more content. With the term interesting users, we mean those users who have similar profile to the target user. If a set of tags is frequently used by many users, for example, then these users implicitly form a group of users with common interests, even though they may not have any physical or online connections. The tags represent the common interests to this user group. Each mode of recommendation, i.e., tag, resource, or user, is useful, depending of course on the context of the particular application. Algorithms that are able to provide integrated multi-mode recommendations are very appealing, as one can spare the effort of implementing and maintaining several mode-specific recommender systems. 19.3 RealWorld Social Tagging Recommender Systems
19.3.1 What are the Challenges?
For a recommender system to be successful in a real world application, it must approach several challenges. First, the provided recommendations must match the situation, i.e., tags should describe the annotated resource, products should awake the interest of the user, suggested resources should be interesting and relevant. Second, the suggestions should be traceable such that one easily understands why he got the items suggested. Third, they must be delivered timely without delay and they must be easy to access (i.e., by allowing the user to click on them or to use tab-completion when entering tags). Furthermore, the system must ensure that recommendations do not impede the normal usage of the system.
In this section we focus on tag recommendations as example of recommenders in STS. Most STS contain a tag recommender which suggests tags to the user when she is annotating a resource. Recommending tags can serve various purposes, such as: increasing the chances of getting a resource annotated, reminding a user what a resource is about, and consolidating the vocabulary across the users. Furthermore, as Sood et al. [33] point out, tag recommendations “fundamentally change the tagging process from generation to recognition” which requires less cognitive effort and time.
More formally, given a user u and a resource r, the task of a tag recommender is to predict the tags tags(u, r) the user will assign to the resource. We will depict the (ordered!) set of recommended tags by T? (u, r). Although we do not take the order of tags as the user entered them into account, the order of tags as given by the recommender plays an important role for the evaluation.