Exploiting Auxiliary Information for Recommendation Systems

Abstract:
Due to the explosive growth of information, recommender systems have been playing an increasingly important role in online services. However, these systems suffer from limited performance when data are very sparse, which is common in many application scenarios. To address this issue, auxiliary information is usually used to boost the performance.

In this talk, we will introduce our recent research works which try to integrate different types of auxiliary information into recommendation systems. First, we investigate how to leverage the heterogeneous information in a knowledge base. We design three components to extract items' semantic representations from structural content, textual content and visual content, respectively. And we propose an integrated framework, which is termed as Collaborative Knowledge Base Embedding, to jointly learn the latent representations in collaborative filtering as well as items' semantic representations from the knowledge base. Second, we observe that people often use multiple platforms to fulfill their different information needs. Therefore, we propose a semi-supervised transfer learning method for cross-platform behavior prediction, called XPTRANS. It fully exploits the small number of overlapped crowds to optimally bridge a user's behaviors in different platforms.

Biodata:
Dr. Xing Xie is currently a senior research manager in Microsoft Research Asia, and a guest Ph.D advisor for the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in July 2001, working on data mining, social computing and ubiquitous computing. During the past years, he has published over 200 referred journal and conference papers, such as ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM Transactions on the Web, ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, etc. He has more than 50 patents filed or granted.