Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS) play a pivotal role in personalized cultural discovery by guiding user attention and mitigating information overload through interactive dialogue. However, existing Transformer-based CRS models predominantly focus on token-level generation, limiting their ability to capture sentence-level semantic interaction patterns. Furthermore, while user preferences are often inferred through interaction entities among these entities, current approaches typically overlook the sequential dependencies, either semantic or ID-based, which are crucial for accurate and context-aware recommendations. To overcome these limitations, we propose SDCRS, a sequence-augmented CRS based on diffusion models, which integrates sentence-level and entity-level sequential modeling to enhance the response generation and recommendation modules. By integrating diffusion mechanisms, SDCRS not only improves the diversity of generated responses but also enhances user preference modeling, particularly under cold-start conditions. Comprehensive experiments clearly demonstrate that SDCRS achieves superior performance over all baselines.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of searching target images using an image-text pair as a query. Given the straightforward relation of query pair-target image, the dominant methods follow the learning paradigm of common image-text retrieval and simply model this problem as the query-target matching problem. Particularly, the common practice first encodes the multi-modal query into one feature and then aligns it with the target image. However, such a learning paradigm only explores the naive relation in the triplets. We argue that CIR triplets encompass additional associations besides the primary query-target relation, which is overlooked in existing works. In this paper, we disclose two new relations residing in the triplets by viewing the triplet as a graph node. In analogy with the graph node, we mine two associations of text-bridged image alignment and complementary text reasoning. The text-bridged image alignment considers composed image retrieval as a specialized form of image retrieval, where the query text acts as a bridge between the query image and the target one, and a hinge-based cross attention is proposed to incorporate this relation into the network learning. On the other hand, the association of complementary text reasoning regards composed image retrieval as a specific type of cross-modal retrieval, where the composite two images are used to reason the complementary text. To integrate these views effectively, a twin attention-based compositor is designed. By combining these two types of complementary associations with the explicit query pair-target image relation, we establish a comprehensive set of constraints for composed image retrieval. With the above designs, we finally developed our CaLa, a Complementary Association Learning framework for Augmenting Composed Image Retrieval. Experimental evaluations are conducted on the widely-used CIRR and FashIionIQ benchmarks with multiple backbones to validate the effectiveness of our CaLa. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method in the composed image retrieval task. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Chiangsonw/CaLa

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) can actively discover users’ preferences and perform recommendations during conversations. The majority of works on CRS tend to focus on a single conversation and dig it using knowledge graphs, language models, etc. However, they often overlook the abundant and rich preference information that exists in the user's historical conversations. Meanwhile, end-to-end generation of recommendation results may lead to a decrease in recommendation quality. In this work, we propose a personalized conversational recommendation system infused with historical interaction information. This framework leverages users’ preferences extracted from their historical conversations and integrates them with the users’ preferences in current conversations. We find that this contributes to higher accuracy in recommendations and fewer recommendation turns. Moreover, we improve the interactive pattern between the recommendation module and the dialogue generation module by utilizing the slot filling method. This enables the results inferred by the recommendation module to be integrated into the conversation naturally and accurately. Our experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the evaluation of recommendations and dialogue generation.

Dating recommendation becomes a critical task since the rapid development of online dating sites and it is beneficial for users to find their ideal relationships from a large number of registered members. Different users usually have different tastes when choosing their dating partners. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish the users personal features and preferences in dating recommendation methods. However, present approaches dont capture enough user preferences from social graph and attribute data. They also ignore user attributes, which is the complementary and consistent side information of user social graphs. In this paper, we propose a Matching Individual Preferences with Features (MIPF) model to recommend dating partners jointly using user attributes and social graphs. We aim to model user features and preferences to identify what the user has and what the user likes. We also distinguish user preferences into explicit preferences and implicit preferences. The implicit preferences are mined from social graphs, while the explicit preferences are captured from the social links. Additionally, convolutional neural networks are used to extract the latent non-linear information in user attributes. Experiments on real-world online dating datasets demonstrate our MIPF model is superior to existing methods.

Most recommendation systems focus on predicting rating or finding aspect information in reviews to understand user preferences and item properties. However, these methods ignore the effectiveness and persuasiveness of recommendation results. Consequently, explainable recommendation, namely providing recommendation results with recommendation reasons at the same time, has attracted increasing attention of researchers due to its ability in fostering transparency and trust. It is lucky that some E-commerce websites provide a kind of new interaction box called Tips and users can express their comments on items with a simple sentence. This brings us an opportunity to realize explainable recommendation. Under the supervision of two explicit feedback, namely rating and textual tips, we can implement a multi-task learning model which can provide recommendation results and generate recommendation reasons at the same time. In this paper, we propose an Encoder-Decoder and Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) based Explainable Recommendation model named EMER to simultaneously implement reason generation and rating prediction. Items title contains significant product-related information and plays an important role in grabbing users attention, so we fuse it in our model to generate recommendation reasons. Numerous experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model is superior to the state-of-the-art models.

Dialogue state is a key information in traditional task-oriented dialogue systems, which represents the user's dialogue intention at each moment through a set of (slot, value). The recent methods model the slot and the dialogue context to keep track of the state, but there is a lack of refinement of context information. They do not consider the influence of dialogue context in different scenarios. Our proposed approach utilizes a fine-grained representation of each slot at multiple levels and incorporates an interaction mechanism to obtain a weight of past memory, present utterance and relevance of the slots. Besides, to address the problem that the dialogue utterance is semantically distant from the corresponding slot value, we introduce the contrastive learning to make the utterance embedding mapped under each slot name more suitable with the ground truth value and away from other slot values. This improves the accuracy of mapping between feature space and semantic space. In the predefined ontology-based approaches, our model achieves leading results with both MultiWOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1 datasets.

Emoji recommendation is an important task to help users find appropriate emojis from thousands of candidates based on a short tweet text. Traditional emoji recommendation methods lack personalized recommendation and ignore user historical information in selecting emojis. In this paper, we propose a personalized emoji recommendation with dynamic user preference (PERD) which contains a text encoder and a personalized attention mechanism. In text encoder, a BERT model is contained to learn dense and low-dimensional representations of tweets. In personalized attention, user dynamic preferences are learned according to semantic and sentimental similarity between historical tweets and the tweet which is waiting for emoji recommendation. Informative historical tweets are selected and highlighted. Experiments are carried out on two real-world datasets from Sina Weibo and Twitter. Experimental results validate the superiority of our approach on personalized emoji recommendation.

Next POI recommendation has been studied extensively in recent years. The goal is to recommend next POI for users at specific time given users’ historical check-in data. Therefore, it is crucial to model both users’ general taste and recent sequential behaviors. Moreover, different users show different dependencies on the two parts. However, most existing methods learn the same dependencies for different users. Besides, the locations and categories of POIs contain different information about users’ preference. However, current researchers always treat them as the same factors or believe that categories determine where to go. To this end, we propose a novel method named Personalized Long- and Short-term Preference Learning (PLSPL) to learn the specific preference for each user. Specially, we combine the long- and short-term preference via user-based linear combination unit to learn the personalized weights on different parts for different users. Besides, the context information such as the category and check-in time is also essential to capture users’ preference. Therefore, in long-term module, we consider the contextual features of POIs in users’ history records and leverage attention mechanism to capture users’ preference. In the short-term module, to better learn the different influences of locations and categories of POIs, we train two LSTM models for location- and category-based sequence, respectively. Then we evaluate the proposed model on two real-world datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-art approaches for next POI recommendation.

With the popularity of social platforms, emoji appears and becomes extremely popular with a large number of users. It expresses more beyond plaintexts and makes the content more vivid. Using appropriate emojis in messages and microblog posts makes you lovely and friendly. Recently, emoji recommendation becomes a significant task since it is hard to choose the appropriate one from thousands of emoji candidates. In this paper, we propose a Context-Aware Personalized Emoji Recommendation (CAPER) model fusing the contextual information and the personal information. It is to learn latent factors of contextual and personal information through a score-ranking matrix factorization framework. The personal factors such as user preference, user gender, and the current time can make the recommended emojis meet users' individual needs. Moreover, we consider the co-occurrence factors of the emojis which could improve the recommendation accuracy. We conduct a series of experiments on the real-world datasets, and experiment results show better performance of our model than existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the considering contextual and personal factors.

Learning an efficient news representation is a fundamental yet important problem for many tasks. Most existing news-relevant methods only take the textual information while abandoning the visual clues from the illustrations. We argue that the textual title and tags together with the visual illustrations form the main force of a piece of news and are more efficient to express the news content. In this paper, we develop a novel framework, namely Semantic Gated Network (SGN), to integrate the news title, tags and visual illustrations to obtain an efficient joint textual-visual feature for the news, by which we can directly measure the relevance between two pieces of news. Particularly, we first harvest the tag embeddings by the proposed self-supervised classification model. Besides, news title is fed into a sentence encoder pretrained by two semantically relevant news to learn efficient contextualized word vectors. Then the feature of the news title is extracted based on the learned vectors and we combine it with features of tags to obtain textual feature. Finally, we design a novel mechanism named semantic gate to adaptively fuse the textual feature and the image feature. Extensive experiments on benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Next POI recommendation has been studied extensively in recent years. The goal is to recommend next POI for users at specific time given users' historical check-in data. Therefore, it is crucial to model users' general taste and recent sequential behavior. Moreover, the context information such as the category and check-in time is also important to capture user preference. To this end, we propose a long- and short-term preference learning model (LSPL) considering the sequential and context information. In long-term module, we learn the contextual features of POIs and leverage attention mechanism to capture users' preference. In the short-term module, we utilize LSTM to learn the sequential behavior of users. Specifically, to better learn the different influence of location and category of POIs, we train two LSTM models for location-based sequence and category-based sequence, respectively. Then we combine the long and short-term results to recommend next POI for users. At last, we evaluate the proposed model on two real-world datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-art approaches for next POI recommendation.

Personalized recommendation has received a lot of attention as a highly practical research topic. However, existing recommender systems provide the recommendations with a generic statement such as “Customers who bought this item also bought…”. Explainable recommendation, which makes a user aware of why such items are recommended, is in demand. The goal of our research is to make the users feel as if they are receiving recommendations from their friends. To this end, we formulate a new challenging problem called personalized reason generation for explainable recommendation for songs in conversation applications and propose a solution that generates a natural language explanation of the reason for recommending a song to that particular user. For example, if the user is a student, our method can generate an output such as “Campus radio plays this song at noon every day, and I think it sounds wonderful,” which the student may find easy to relate to. In the offline experiments, through manual assessments, the gain of our method is statistically significant on the relevance to songs and personalization to users comparing with baselines. Large-scale online experiments show that our method outperforms manually selected reasons by 8.2% in terms of click-through rate. Evaluation results indicate that our generated reasons are relevant to songs and personalized to users, and they attract users to click the recommendations.

Nowadays, with the boom of social media and e-commerce, more and more people prefer to share their consumption experiences and rate services on review sites. Much research has focused on personalized recommendation. However, quality of service also plays an important role in recommender systems, and it is the main concern of this paper. An overall rating that indicates the popular view usually represents the evaluation. There are some challenges when we do not have enough review information to extract public opinion. Take, for example, a movie for which one user rates a two star rating, and another rates a five star rating. In this case, it is difficult to conduct a quality evaluation fairly. However, it is possible to be improved with the help of big social users' contextual information. In this paper, we propose a model to conduct service quality evaluation by improving overall rating of services using an empirical methodology. We use the concept of user rating's confidence, which denotes the trustworthiness of user ratings. First, entropy is utilized to calculate user ratings' confidence. Second, we further explore spatial-temporal features and review sentimental features of user ratings to constrain their confidences. Last, we fuse them into a unified model to calculate an overall confidence, which is utilized to perform service quality evaluation. Extensive experiments implemented on Yelp and Douban Movie datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Tag-based image search is an important method to process images contributed by social users in social media sharing websites like Flickr. However, existing ranking methods for tag-based image search frequently return results that are irrelevant, low-diversity or time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a user-oriented image ranking system with the consideration of image relevance, diversity and computation complexity, aiming to automatically rank images according to their visual information, semantic information and social clues. When you input a query in the user-oriented image search engine, images tagged with query are obtained as the initial results. The initial results include images contributed by different social users. Usually each user contributes several images. First we sort these users by inter-user ranking. Users that have a higher contribution to the given query rank higher. Then we sequentially implement intra-user ranking on the ranked user's image set, and only the most relevant image in each user's image set is selected. These selected images compose the final retrieval results. Experimental results on Flickr dataset show that our user-oriented ranking method is effective and efficient.

Nowadays, image location has been widely used in many application scenarios for large geo-tagged image corpora. As to images which are not geographically tagged, we can estimate their locations with the help of the large geo-tagged image set by content based image retrieval. In this paper, we propose a global feature clustering and local feature refinement based image location estimation approach. We exploit spatial information by processing useful visual words. In this process, visual word groups are generated. Moreover to improve the retrieval performance, spatial constraint is utilized to code the relative position of visual words. Here we generate a position descriptor for each visual word. Experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Owing to the portable and excellent phone camera, people now prefer to take photos and upload them by mobile phone. Content based image retrieval is effective for users to obtain relevant information about a photo. Taking the limited bandwidth and instability into account, we propose an effective scalable mobile image retrieval approach in this paper. The proposed mobile image retrieval algorithm first determines the relevant photos according to visual similarity in mobile end, then mines salient visual words by exploring saliency from multiple relevant images, and finally we determine the contribution order of salient visual words for scalable retrieval. In server terminal, spatial verification is performed to re-rank the results. Compared to the existing approaches of mobile image retrieval, our approach transmits less data and reduces the computational cost of spatial verification. Most importantly, when the bandwidth is limited, we can transmit a part of features according their contributions to retrieval. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

With the advent and popularity of social network, more and more users like to share their experiences, such as ratings, reviews, and blogs. The new factors of social network like interpersonal influence and interest based on circles of friends bring opportunities and challenges for recommender system (RS) to solve the cold start and sparsity problem of datasets. Some of the social factors have been used in RS, but have not been fully considered. In this paper, three social factors, personal interest, interpersonal interest similarity, and interpersonal influence, fuse into a unified personalized recommendation model based on probabilistic matrix factorization. The factor of personal interest can make the RS recommend items to meet users' individualities, especially for experienced users. Moreover, for cold start users, the interpersonal interest similarity and interpersonal influence can enhance the intrinsic link among features in the latent space. We conduct a series of experiments on three rating datasets: Yelp, MovieLens, and Douban Movie. Experimental results show the proposed approach outperforms the existing RS approaches.

With the advent and popularity of social network, more and more users like to share their experiences, such as ratings, reviews, and blogs. The new factors of social network like interpersonal influence and interest based on circles of friends bring opportunities and challenges for recommender system (RS) to solve the cold start and sparsity problem of datasets. Some of the social factors have been used in RS, but have not been fully considered. In this paper, three social factors, personal interest, interpersonal interest similarity and interpersonal influence, fuse into a unified personalized recommendation model based on probabilistic matrix factorization. The factor of personal interest can make the RS recommend items to meet users' individualities, especially for experienced users. Moreover, for cold start users, the interpersonal interest similarity and interpersonal influence can enhance the intrinsic link among features in the latent space. We conduct a series of experiments on real rating datasets. Experimental results show the proposed approach outperforms the existing RS approaches .

Automatic image annotation is an important function for online photo sharing service. The concurrence of labels is pretty common in multi-label annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called latent-community and multi-kernel learning (LCMKL). The established graph of labels is regarded as a semantic network. Community detection method is introduced that treats the label set as communities. Multi-kernel learning SVM is adopted for specifying communities and settling difficulty of extracting semantically meaningful entities with some simple features. Experiments on NUS-WIDE database demonstrate that LCMKL outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.

In this paper, a graph cut based tag enrichment approach is proposed. We build a graph for each image with its initial tags. The graph is with two terminals. Nodes of the graph are full connected with each other. Min-cut/max-flow algorithm is utilized to find the relevant tags for the image. Experiments on Flickr dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed graph-cut based tag enrichment approach.