Online reviews, like those compiled at Yelp, Amazon, Epinions and Tripadvisor, allow consumers to create social network value for other consumers, and to influence the success or failure of reviewed businesses. These reviews, produced without compensation, are a prominent example of how new social media have altered the challenges facing strategic marketing. Although the production of online reviews has exploded, little is known about what motivates ordinary consumers to produce reviews. We surveyed Yelp review writers, and then compiled an archive of Yelp restaurant reviews and the feedback received on those reviews. This data-set enabled a longitudinal analysis of the role of feedback as an external motivation for review production. Although receiving positive feedback increases the probability that a novice reviewer will continue to produce reviews, such feedback had no detectable effect on the productivity of established reviewers. Results point to an emerging segment of consumers who have a need to publish and reach a mass audience.

Recent years have witnessed the growth of recommender systems, with the help of deep learning techniques. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) play an increasingly vital role in various session-based recommender systems, since they use the user’s sequential history to build a comprehensive user profile, which helps improve the recommendation. However, a problem arises regarding how to be aware of the variation in the user’s contextual preference, especially the short-term intent in the near future, and make the best use of it to produce a precise recommendation at the start of a session. We propose a novel approach named Attention-based Short-term and Long-term Model (ASLM), to improve the next-item recommendation, by using an attention-based RNNs integrating both the user’s short-term intent and the long-term preference at the same time with a two-layer network. The experimental study on three real-world datasets and two sub-datasets demonstrates that, compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach can significantly improve the next-item recommendation, especially at the start of sessions. As a result, our proposed approach is capable of coping with the cold-start problem at the beginning of each session.

One of the primary tasks for commercial recommender systems is to predict the probabilities of users clicking items, e.g., advertisements, music and products. This is because such predictions have a decisive impact on profitability. The classic recommendation algorithm, collaborative filtering (CF), still plays a vital role in many industrial recommender systems. However, although straight CF is good at capturing similar users’ preferences for items based on their past interactions, it lacks regarding (1) modeling the influences of users’ sequential patterns from their individual history interaction sequences and (2) the relevance of users’ and items’ attributes. In this work, we developed an attention-based latent information extraction network (ALIEN) for click-through rate prediction, to integrate (1) implicit user similarity in terms of click patterns (analogous to CF), and (2) modeling the low and high-order feature interactions and (3) historical sequence information. The new model is based on the deep learning, which goes beyond the capabilities of econometric approaches, such as matrix factorization (MF) and k-means. In addition, the approach provides explainability to the recommendation by interpreting the contributions of different features and historical interactions. We have conducted experiments on real-world datasets that demonstrate considerable improvements over strong baselines.