Premi al millor PFC en l'Àrea de Sistemes de la informació d'Enginyeria de Telecomunicació o d'Enginyeria Electrònica de l'ETSETB-UPC (curs 2013-2014). Atorgat per Cátedra Red.es

Social Recommender Systems were born with the goal to mitigate the current information overload caused by the birth of Social Networks among other causes. They have enabled Internet actors (e.g. users, web browsers, sensors, actuators, etc.) to make more informed decisions based on the information that is been shown to them, up to the point that some actors even blindly trust the recommendation generated by these systems. Within this scenario, this thesis proposes a novel Hybrid Social Recommender System purely based on the text reviews typed by users. The proposed engine treats the review content and sentiment separately and finally, combines both into a single recommendation. Very little scientific research has been published on mining text reviews with the aim of performing item recommendation. Moreover, among all Hybrid Recommendation Systems in the literature, none use the above-mentioned review features into a collaborative and content-based recommender. With the purpose in mind of assessing the platform effectiveness, we present a methodology that goes from the process of extracting the data directly from a Social Network, cleaning and pre-processing the text data, building the predictive model with different state-of-the art machine learning techniques, up to the point of evaluating the system in terms of several key metrics. The data extraction process gains our attention due to the challenges imposed by most social platforms in obtaining all the geo-positioned data generated in a bounded region. To overcome the platform limitations, we introduce the use of the Quadtree algorithm with the goal of crawling all the geo-positioned reviews. The algorithm is enhanced with a module that copes with the time dynamics and captures the time-stamped data as well. Moreover, we study the effectiveness of the Quadtree partition method to crawl any type of spatial data, which tends to be softly distributed in the area. This thesis draws several conclusions from the available data about the use of several state-of-the art text mining techniques and the effectiveness of the proposed recommender setup. Nonetheless, future work needs to design and propose novel evaluation methodologies that uncouple the system evaluation from the data.

Award-winning