Graph Embedding for Scholar Recommendation in Academic Social Networks

Abstract

The academic social networks (ASNs) play an important role in promoting scientific collaboration and innovation in academic society. Accompanying the tremendous growth of scholarly big data, finding suitable scholars on ASNs for collaboration has become more difficult. Different from friend recommendation in conventional social networks, scholar recommendation in ASNs usually involves different academic entities (e.g., scholars, scientific publications, and status updates) and various relationships (e.g., collaboration relationship between team members, citations, and co-authorships), which forms a complex heterogeneous academic network. Our goal is to recommend potential similar scholars for users in ASNs. In this article, we propose to design a graph embedding-based scholar recommendation system by leveraging academic auxiliary information. First, we construct enhanced ASNs by integrating two types of academic features extracted from scholars’ academic information with original network topology. Then, the refined feature representations of the scholars are obtained by a graph embedding framework, which helps the system measure the similarity between scholars based on their representation vectors. Finally, the system generates potential similar scholars for users in ASNs for the final recommendation. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on five real-world datasets: SCHOLAT, Zhihu, APS, Yelp and Gowalla. The experimental results demonstrate that our model is effective and achieves promising improvements than the other competitive baselines.