skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: When Sentiment Analysis Meets Social Network: A Holistic User Behavior Modeling in Opinionated Data
User modeling is critical for understanding user intents, while it is also challenging as user intents are so diverse and not directly observable. Most existing works exploit specific types of behavior signals for user modeling, e.g., opinionated data or network structure; but the dependency among different types of user-generated data is neglected. We focus on self-consistence across multiple modalities of user-generated data to model user intents. A probabilistic generative model is developed to integrate two companion learning tasks of opinionated content modeling and social network structure modeling for users. Individual users are modeled as a mixture over the instances of paired learning tasks to realize their behavior heterogeneity, and the tasks are clustered by sharing a global prior distribution to capture the homogeneity among users. Extensive experimental evaluations on large collections of Amazon and Yelp reviews with social network structures confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The learned user models are interpretable and predictive: they enable more accurate sentiment classification and item/friend recommendations than the corresponding baselines that only model a singular type of user behaviors.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1553568
PAR ID:
10066047
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
KDD '18 Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1455 to 1464
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. User representation learning is vital to capture diverse user preferences, while it is also challenging as user intents are latent and scattered among complex and different modalities of user-generated data, thus, not directly measurable. Inspired by the concept of user schema in social psychology, we take a new perspective to perform user representation learning by constructing a shared latent space to capture the dependency among different modalities of user-generated data. Both users and topics are embedded to the same space to encode users' social connections and text content, to facilitate joint modeling of different modalities, via a probabilistic generative framework. We evaluated the proposed solution on large collections of Yelp reviews and StackOverflow discussion posts, with their associated network structures. The proposed model outperformed several state-of-the-art topic modeling based user models with better predictive power in unseen documents, and state-of-the-art network embedding based user models with improved link prediction quality in unseen nodes. The learnt user representations are also proved to be useful in content recommendation, e.g., expert finding in StackOverflow. 
    more » « less
  2. Explaining automatically generated recommendations allows users to make more informed and accurate decisions about which results to utilize, and therefore improves their satisfaction. In this work, we develop a multi-task learning solution for explainable recommendation. Two companion learning tasks of user preference modeling for recommendation and opinionated content modeling for explanation are integrated via a joint tensor factorization. As a result, the algorithm predicts not only a user's preference over a list of items, i.e., recommendation, but also how the user would appreciate a particular item at the feature level, i.e., opinionated textual explanation. Extensive experiments on two large collections of Amazon and Yelp reviews confirmed the effectiveness of our solution in both recommendation and explanation tasks, compared with several existing recommendation algorithms. And our extensive user study clearly demonstrates the practical value of the explainable recommendations generated by our algorithm. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Recently, aligning users among different social networks has received significant attention. However, most of the existing studies do not consider users’ behavior information during the aligning procedure and thus still suffer from the poor learning performance. In fact, we observe that social network alignment and behavior analysis can benefit from each other. Motivated by such an observation, we propose to jointly study the social network alignment problem and user behavior analysis problem. We design a novel end-to-end framework named BANANA. In this framework, to leverage behavior analysis for social network alignment at the distribution level, we design an earth mover’s distance based alignment model to fuse users’ behavior information for more comprehensive user representations. To further leverage social network alignment for behavior analysis, in turn, we design a temporal graph neural network model to fuse behavior information in different social networks based on the alignment result. Two models above can work together in an end-to-end manner. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the social network alignment task and the user behavior analysis task, respectively. 
    more » « less
  4. Identifying instances when a user will not able to attend to an incoming message and constructing an auto-response with relevant contextual information may help reduce social pressures to immediately respond that many users face. Mobile messaging behavior often varies from one person to another. As a result, compared to a generic model considering profiles of several users, a personalized model can capture a user's messaging behavior more accurately to predict their inattentive states. However, creating accurate personalized models requires a non-trivial amount of individual data, which is often not available for new users. In this work, we investigate a weighted hybrid approach to model users' attention to messaging. Through dynamic performance-based weighting, we combine the predictions of three types of models, a general model, a group model and a personalized model to create an approach which can work through the lack of initial data while adapting to the user's behavior. We present the details of our modeling approach and the evaluation of the model with over three weeks of data from 274 users. Our results highlight the value of hybrid weighted modeling to predict when a user cannot attend to their messages. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complex and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the current SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness and rationale of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via https://github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ. 
    more » « less