Enhancing group recommendation by incorporating social relationship interactions

Group recommendation, which makes recommendations to a group of users instead of individuals, has become increasingly important in both the workspace and people's social activities, such as brainstorming sessions for coworkers and social TV for family members or friends. Group recommendation is a challenging problem due to the dynamics of group memberships and diversity of group members. Previous work focused mainly on the content interests of group members and ignored the social characteristics within a group, resulting in suboptimal group recommendation performance. In this work, we propose a group recommendation method that utilizes both social and content interests of group members. We study the key characteristics of groups and propose (1) a group consensus function that captures the social, expertise, and interest dissimilarity among multiple group members; and (2) a generic framework that automatically analyzes group characteristics and constructs the corresponding group consensus function. Detailed user studies of diverse groups demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, and the importance of incorporating both social and content interests in group recommender systems.