Effective event discovery: Using location and social information for scoping event recommendations

Abstract

The ever blurring line between online interactions and physical encounters presents an interesting challenge when recommending events. Events created on social networking sites may have ambiguous location scope. The location information provided may be fuzzy or non existent and additionally the reach and radius of interest in the event can vary greatly. In this work, we identify four categories of events: global, location dependent and socially independent, socially dependent and location independent, and location and socially dependent. We classify events from an organizations internal event management service where the location of the event is unknown, but the location of the attendees are known in order to improve scoping of event recommendations. Our results, investigate the impact of ignoring location properties when recommending events using classic collaborative filtering techniques. Additionally, once global and socially independent events are identified, they can be used to provide recommendations to new users, addressing the cold-start problem. © 2011 ACM.