Mining affective text to improve social media item recommendation

Social media websites, such as YouTube and Flicker, are currently gaining in popularity. A large volume of information is generated by online users and how to appropriately provide personalized content is becoming more challenging. Traditional recommendation models are overly dependent on preference ratings and often suffer from the problem of "data sparsity". Recent research has attempted to integrate sentiment analysis results of online affective texts into recommendation models; however, these studies are still limited. The one class collaborative filtering (OCCF) method is more applicable in the social media scenario yet it is insufficient for item recommendation. In this study, we develop a novel sentiment-aware social media recommendation framework, referred to as SA_OCCF, in order to tackle the above challenges. We leverage inferred sentiment feedback information and OCCF models to improve recommendation performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a real social media web site to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework and methods. The results show that the proposed methods are effective in improving the performance of the baseline OCCF methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.