Care to comment? Recommendations for commenting on news stories

Erez Shmueli, Amit Kagian, Yehuda Koren, Ronny Lempel

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Many websites provide commenting facilities for users to express their opinions or sentiments with regards to content items, such as, videos, news stories, blog posts, etc. Previous studies have shown that user comments contain valuable information that can provide insight onWeb documents and may be utilized for various tasks. This work presents a model that predicts, for a given user, suitable news stories for commenting. The model achieves encouraging results regarding the ability to connect users with stories they are likely to comment on. This provides grounds for personalized recommendations of stories to users who may want to take part in their discussion. We combine a content-based approach with a collaborative-filtering approach (utilizing users'co-commenting patterns) in a latent factor modeling framework. We experiment with several variations of the model's loss function in order to adjust it to the problem domain. We evaluate the results on two datasets and show that employing co-commenting patterns improves upon using content features alone, even with as few as two available comments per story. Finally, we try to incorporate available social network data into the model. Interestingly, the social data does not lead to substantial performance gains, suggesting that the value of social data for this task is quite negligible.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWWW'12 - Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web
Pages429-438
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web, WWW'12 - Lyon, France
Duration: 16 Apr 201220 Apr 2012

Publication series

NameWWW'12 - Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web

Conference

Conference21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web, WWW'12
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityLyon
Period16/04/1220/04/12

Keywords

  • Collaborative filtering
  • Comment recommendation
  • Latent factor models
  • Personalization
  • Recommendation system
  • User generated content

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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