Social-media monitoring for cold-start recommendations

These ratings are generally used either to understand the user preferences or to recommend movies that users with similar rating patterns have rated highly. However, movie recommenders are often subject to the ColdStart problem: new movies have not been rated by anyone, so, they will not be recommended to anyone; likewise, the preferences of new users who have not rated any movie cannot be learned.

In parallel, Social-Media platforms, such as Twitter, collect great amounts of user feedback on movies, as these are very popular nowadays. This thesis proposes to explore feedback shared on Twitter to predict the popularity of new movies and show how it can be used to tackle the Cold-Start problem. It also proposes, at a finer grain, to explore the reputation of directors and actors on IMDb to tackle the Cold-Start problem.