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With the proliferation of social networks, group activities have become an essential ingredient of our daily life. A growing number of users share their group activities online and invite their friends to join in. This imposes the need of an in-depth study on the group recommendation task, i.e., recommending items to a group of users. Despite its value and significance, group recommendation remains an unsolved problem due to 1) the weights of group members are crucial to the recommendation performance but are rarely learnt from data; 2) social followee information is beneficial to understand users’ preferences but is rarely considered; and 3) user-item interactions are helpful to reinforce the performance of group recommendation but are seldom investigated. Toward this end, we devise neural network-based solutions by utilizing the recent developments of attention network and neural collaborative filtering (NCF). First of all, we adopt an attention network to form the representation of a group by aggregating the group members’ embeddings, which allows the attention weights of group members to be dynamically learnt from data. Second, the social followee information is incorporated via another attention network to enhance the representation of individual user, which is helpful to capture users’ personal preferences. Third, considering that many online group systems also have abundant interactions of individual users on items, we further integrate the modeling of user-item interactions into our method. Through this way, the recommendation for groups and users can be mutually reinforced. Extensive experiments on the scope of both macro-level performance comparison and micro-level analyses justify the effectiveness and rationality of our proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event recommendation is essential to help people find attractive events to attend, but it intrinsically faces cold-start problem. The previous studies exploit multiple contextual factors to overcome the cold-start problem in event recommendation. However, they do not consider the correlation among different contextual factors. Moreover, suggesting events for a group of users also has not been well studied. In this paper, we first discover the correlation between organizer and textual content, i.e., the events held by the same organizer tend to have more similar content. Based on this observation, we present a content-venue-aware topic model (CVTM) to capture group interests on an event from two perspectives: content and venue. The correlation between organizer and content is modeled in CVTM to alleviate the sparsity of textual content, and then we can further extract group interests on content of an event more accurately. Finally, a group event recommendation method using CVTM is proposed. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the recommendation performance of our model on two real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods that suggest upcoming events for groups. Besides, CVTM can learn semantically coherent latent topics which are useful to explain recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]