A social recommender system by combining social network and sentiment similarity: A case study of healthcare

Abstract

Social recommender systems aim to support user preferences and help users make better decisions in social media. The social network and the social context are two vital elements in social recommender systems. In this contribution, we propose a new framework for a social recommender system based on both network structure analysis and social context mining. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are able to capture and simulate the complex structure of a micro-blog network. We derive the prediction formula from ERGMs for recommending micro-blog users. Then, a primary recommendation list is created by analysing the micro-blog network structure. In the next step, we calculate the sentiment similarities of micro-blog users based on a sentiment feature set which is extracted from users’ tweets. Sentiment similarities are used to filter the primary recommendation list and find users who have similar attitudes on the same topic. The goal of those two steps is to make the social recommender system much more precise and to satisfy users’ psychological preferences. At the end, we use this new framework deal with big real-world data. The recommendation results of diabetes accounts of Weibo show that our method outperforms other social recommender systems.