A recommender system based on tag and time information for social tagging systems

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2011-04, Vol.38 (4), p.4575-4587
• Main Authors: Zheng, Nan, Li, Qiudan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Collaborative filtering; Interest drift; Recommender system; Social tagging
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2010.09.131

► This paper investigates the importance and usefulness of tag and time information when predicting users’ preference and how to exploit such information to build an effective resource-recommendation model in social tagging systems. ► A recommender system is built to realize the computational approach. ► Empirical results by using a real-world dataset show that tag and time information can well express users’ taste and better performances can be achieved if such information is integrated into collaborative filtering. Recently, social tagging has become increasingly prevalent on the Internet, which provides an effective way for users to organize, manage, share and search for various kinds of resources. These tagging systems offer lots of useful information, such as tag, an expression of user’s preference towards a certain resource; time, a denotation of user’s interests drift. As information explosion, it is necessary to recommend resources that a user might like. Since collaborative filtering (CF) is aimed to provide personalized services, how to integrate tag and time information in CF to provide better personalized recommendations for social tagging systems becomes a challenging task. In this paper, we investigate the importance and usefulness of tag and time information when predicting users’ preference and examine how to exploit such information to build an effective resource-recommendation model. We design a recommender system to realize our computational approach. Also, we show empirically using data from a real-world dataset that tag and time information can well express users’ taste and we also show that better performances can be achieved if such information is integrated into CF.