Tackling Data Sparseness in Recommendation using Social Media based Topic Hierarchy Modeling

Recommendation systems play an important role in E-Commerce. However, their potential usefulness in real world applications is greatly limited by the availability of historical rating records from the customers. This paper presents a novel method to tackle the problem of data sparseness in user ratings with rich and timely domain information from social media. We first extract multiple side information for products from their relevant social media contents. Next, we convert the information into weighted topic-item ratings and inject them into an extended latent factor based recommendation model in an optimized approach. Our evaluation on two real world datasets demonstrates the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.