Entity linking is a new technique in recommender systems to link users’ interaction behaviors in different domains, for the purpose of improving the performance of the recommendation task. Linking-based cross-domain recommendation aims to alleviate the data sparse problem by utilizing the domain-sharable knowledge from auxiliary domains. However, existing methods fail to prevent domain-specific features to be transferred, resulting in suboptimal results. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by proposing an adversarial transfer learning based model ATLRec, which effectively captures domain-sharable features for cross-domain recommendation. In ATLRec, we leverage adversarial learning to generate representations of user-item interactions in both the source and the target domains, such that the discriminator cannot identify which domain they belong to, for the purpose of obtaining domain-sharable features. Meanwhile each domain learns its domain-specific features by a private feature extractor. The recommendation of each domain considers both domain-specific and domain-sharable features. We further adopt an attention mechanism to learn item latent factors of both domains by utilizing the shared users with interaction history, so that the representations of all items can be learned sufficiently in a shared space, even when few or even no items are shared by different domains. By this method, we can represent all items from the source and the target domains in a shared space, for the purpose of better linking items in different domains and capturing cross-domain item-item relatedness to facilitate the learning of domain-sharable knowledge. The proposed model is evaluated on various real-world datasets and demonstrated to outperform several state-of-the-art single-domain and cross-domain recommendation methods in terms of recommendation accuracy.

Entity linking (EL) is the task of determining the identity of textual entity mentions given a predefined knowledge base (KB). Plenty of existing efforts have been made on this task using either “local” information (contextual information of the mention in the text), or “global” information (relations among candidate entities). However, either local or global information might be insufficient especially when the given text is short. To get richer local and global information for entity linking, we propose to enrich the context information for mentions by getting extra contexts from the web through web search engines (WSE). Based on the intuition above, two novel attempts are made. The first one adds web-searched results into an embedding-based method to expand the mention’s local information, where we try two different methods to help generate high-quality web contexts: one is to apply the attention mechanism and the other is to use the abstract extraction method. The second one uses the web contexts to extend the global information, i.e., finding and utilizing more extra relevant mentions from the web contexts with a graph-based model. Finally, we combine the two models we propose to use both extended local and global information from the extra web contexts. Our empirical study based on six real-world datasets shows that using extra web contexts to extend the local and the global information could effectively improve the F1 score of entity linking.

With the popularity of storing large data graph in cloud, the emergence of subgraph pattern matching on a remote cloud has been inspired. Typically, subgraph pattern matching is defined in terms of subgraph isomorphism, which is an NP-complete problem and sometimes too strict to find useful matches in certain applications. And how to protect the privacy of data graphs in subgraph pattern matching without undermining matching results is an important concern. Thus, we propose a novel framework to achieve the privacy-preserving subgraph pattern matching in cloud. In order to protect the structural privacy in data graphs, we firstly develop a k-automorphism model based method. Additionally, we use a cost-model based label generalization method to protect label privacy in both data graphs and pattern graphs. During the generation of the k-automorphic graph, a large number of noise edges or vertices might be introduced to the original data graph. Thus, we use the outsourced graph, which is only a subset of a k-automorphic graph, to answer the subgraph pattern matching. The efficiency of the pattern matching process can be greatly improved in this way. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the high efficiency of our framework.

With the development and prevalence of online social networks, there is an obvious tendency that people are willing to attend and share group activities with friends or acquaintances. This motivates the study on group recommendation, which aims to meet the needs of a group of users, instead of only individual users. However, how to aggregate different preferences of different group members is still a challenging problem: 1) the choice of a member in a group is influenced by various factors, e.g., personal preference, group topic, and social relationship; 2) users have different influences when in different groups. In this paper, we propose a generative geo-social group recommendation model (GSGR) to recommend points of interest (POIs) for groups. Specifically, GSGR well models the personal preference impacted by geographical information, group topics, and social influence for recommendation. Moreover, when making recommendations, GSGR aggregates the preferences of group members with different weights to estimate the preference score of a group to a POI. Experimental results on two datasets show that GSGR is effective in group recommendation and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

A point of interest (POI) is a specific point location that someone may find useful. With the development of urban modernization, a large number of functional organized POI groups (FOPGs), such as shopping malls, electronic malls, and snacks streets, are springing up in the city. They have a great influence on people’s lives. We aim to discover functional organized POI groups for spatial keyword recommendation because FOPGs-based recommendation is superior to POIs-based recommendation in efficiency and flexibility. To discover FOPGs, we design clustering algorithms to obtain organized POI groups (OPGs) and utilize OPGs-LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) model to reveal functions of OPGs for further recommendation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study functional organized POI groups which have important applications in urban planning and social marketing.