Context Incorporation Techniques for Social Recommender Systems

The problem of information overloading is prevalent in recommendations websites and social networks. Users seek relevant recommendations from like-minded connections. User-item interactions (i.e., ratings) are prevalent in recommendation websites such as Netflix, whereas user-user connections are the interaction sought in social websites such as Twitter. Social recommender systems seek to generate recommendations for users based on similar preferences of their close friends. Because social networks do not normally contain user-item interactions, social recommender systems are typically hybridized with other recommenders (e.g., website recommenders such as Netflix) that provide such interaction. However, current systems are unaware of the user’s additional contextual information when coupled with social counterparts. In this paper, we propose a context-aware deep learning-based recommender system, US-NCF, in support for social recommender systems. Our experiments show US-NCF outperforms state-of-art counterparts.