Social-Aware Video Recommendation for Online Social Groups

Group recommendation plays a significant role in today's social media systems, where users form social groups to receive multimedia content together and interact with each other, instead of consuming the online content individually. Limitations of traditional group recommendation approaches are as follows. First, they usually infer group members’ preferences by their historical behaviors, failing to capture inactive users’ preferences from the sparse historical data. Second, relationships between group members are not studied by these approaches, which fail to capture the inherent personality of members in a group. To address these issues, we propose a social-aware group recommendation framework that jointly utilizes both social relationships and social behaviors to not only infer a group's preference, but also model the tolerance and altruism characteristics of group members. Based on the observation that the following relationship in the online social network reflects common interests of users, we propose a group preference model based on external experts of group members. Furthermore, we model users’ tolerance (willingness to receive content not preferred) and altruism (willingness to receive content preferred by friends). Finally, based on the group preference model, we design recommendation algorithms for users under different social contexts. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly improves the recommendation accuracy against traditional approaches, especially in the cases of inactive group members.

I. Introduction

The rapid emergence of user generated content (UGC) and online social networks (OSNs) results in a large number of social media contents. Such social media contents are different from traditional ones in a sense that social relationship, user behavior, and user preference jointly affect which contents may interest a user. Chen et al. [1] investigated the recommendation for individuals in Twitter using collaborative social and contextual information.