ORec : An Opinion-Based Point-of-Interest Recommendation Framework

As location-based social networks (LBSNs) rapidly grow, it is a timely topic to study how to recommend users with interesting locations, known as points-of-interest (POIs). Most existing POI recommendation techniques only employ the check-in data of users in LBSNs to learn their preferences on POIs by assuming a user's check-in frequency to a POI explicitly reflects the level of her preference on the POI. However, in reality users usually visit POIs only once, so the users' check-ins may not be sufficient to derive their preferences using their check-in frequencies only. Actually, the preferences of users are exactly implied in their opinions in text-based tips commenting on POIs. In this paper, we propose an opinion-based POI recommendation framework called ORec to take full advantage of the user opinions on POIs expressed as tips. In ORec, there are two main challenges: (i) detecting the polarities of tips (positive, neutral or negative), and (ii) integrating them with check-in data including social links between users and geographical information of POIs. To address these two challenges, (1) we develop a supervised aspect-dependent approach to detect the polarity of a tip, and (2) we devise a method to fuse tip polarities with social links and geographical information into a unified POI recommendation framework. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation for ORec using two large-scale real data sets collected from Foursquare and Yelp. Experimental results show that ORec achieves significantly superior polarity detection and POI recommendation accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art polarity detection and POI recommendation techniques.