In this article, we analyze tag-based user profiles, which result from social tagging activities in Social Web systems and particularly in Flickr, Twitter and Delicious. We investigate the characteristics of tag-based user profiles within these systems, examine to what extent tag-based profiles of individual users overlap between the systems and identify significant benefits of cross-system use...

Our team from the JHU HLTCOE participated in the Entity Linking and Cold Start Knowledge Base tasks in this year’s Text Analysis Conference Knowledge Base Population evaluation. We have previously participated in TAC-KBP entity linking evaluations in 2009, 2010, and 2011. This year we developed two new systems: CALE (Context Aware Linker of Entities) and KELVIN (Knowledge Extraction, Linking, V...

Link prediction in multi-relational social networks has attracted much attention. For instance, we may care the chance of two users being friends based on their contacts of other patterns, e.g., SMS and phone calls. In previous work, matrix factorization models are typically applied in single-relational networks; however, two challenges arise to extend it into multi-relational networks. First, ...

Trust has been explored by many researchers in the past as a successful solution for assisting recommender systems. Even though the approach of using a web-of-trust scheme for assisting the recommendation production is well adopted, issues like the sparsity problem have not been explored adequately so far with regard to this. In this work we are proposing and testing a scheme that uses the exis...

In (Masthoff, 2004), we have investigated techniques for combining individual user models to make recommendations to a group. In Masthoff (2003), we have shown how these techniques might also be applicable when adapting to an individual: for solving the cold start problem and for combining ratings on multiple criteria. In this paper, we look at combining multiple criteria in more detail. We pre...

A study on ignition and early combustion development has been performed in an optical engine at incylinder thermodynamic conditions representative of those occurring during the cold start of a modern DI Diesel engine for passenger cars at an ambient temperature of -20oC. A general description of the process has been derived from in-cylinder pressure analysis and high speed imaging, and the effe...

Matrix factorization has now become a dominant solution for personalized recommendation on the Social Web. To alleviate the cold start problem, previous approaches have incorporated various additional sources of information into traditional matrix factorization models. These upgraded models, however, achieve only “marginal” enhancements on the performance of personalized recommendation. Therefo...

The potential benefit of integrating contextual information for recommendation has received much research attention recently, especially with the ever-increasing interest in mobile-based recommendation services. However, context based recommendation research is limited due to the lack of standard evaluation data with contextual information and reliable technology for extracting such information...

The University of Washington participated in Cold Start Slot Filling for TAC-KBP 2015 with a system that combines three methods: 1) its 2013 OPENIE-KBP system (Soderland et al., 2013); 2) a novel Implicit Relation Information Extractor (IMPLIE); and 3) MULTIR extractor (Hoffmann et al., 2011), trained on a combination of distant supervision and crowdsourced training instances. These three metho...

Recommender system has become an indispensable component in many e-commerce sites. One major challenge that largely remains open is the coldstart problem, which can be viewed as an ice barrier that keeps the cold-start users/items from the warm ones. In this paper, we propose a novel rating comparison strategy (RAPARE) to break this ice barrier. The center-piece of our RAPARE is to provide a fi...