A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships
Ziheng Chen
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis appears to be a review article on the effects of social relationships on recommender systems. As such it does not add to the accumulated knowledge that it is attempting to report. Review articles should add to knowledge by comparing and contrasting both the methods and the results obtained by the approaches discussed. This article only provides anecdotal evidence and does not systematically codify it in useful quantitative tables etc. I finished reading it without feeling that I had learnt anything new.
Lines 387-46 seem to come from instructions on how to write a paper, and are not part of this work.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe English is generally OK but care needs to be taken to ensure the proper use of definite and indefinite articles, particularly to make sure the appropriate form is used for both singular and plural subjects.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the organizational structure and content of the paper. We have rewritten introduction, future research directions, discussion, summary, and added related content to Section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have explained and restated some professional terms in the paper.
4) We have carefully checked and revised the format of the references to make them consistent.
5) We refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis is a paper considering Recommendation Methods based on Social relationships. The study has been structured in a very comprehensible way. The scientific discussion has been proceeded with appropriate structure. The use of particular methods has been given appropriate justification. The analysis was done, and their results were presented in a very good way. I would only recommend the authors to underline the scientific problem/question or paper’s aim depending on the kind of scientific discussion that the authors wish to follow. Additionally the beginning of introduction part (line 38-46), seems to contain editorial guide. I think it would be reasonable to delete that part. I think that making amendments of the indicated minor mistakes would improve the quality of the paper. Nevertheless I’m sure that the readers will appreciate the paper in a present form after minor corrections. I would like to congratulate the authors for interesting original paper preparation.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the organizational structure and content of the paper. We have rewritten introduction, future research directions, discussion, summary, and added related content to Section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have explained and restated some professional terms in the paper.
4) We have carefully checked and revised the format of the references to make them consistent.
5) We refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsAll the paper has to be redone at 0. There is no respect for the form of a survey. The paper is not well organized and contains duplicate sections that go towards the same thing.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the organizational structure and content of the paper. We have rewritten introduction, future research directions, discussion, summary, and added related content to Section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have explained and restated some professional terms in the paper.
4) We have carefully checked and revised the format of the references to make them consistent.
5) We refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe paper contains sufficiently new and suitable information, and it adheres to the journal’s standards. The topic and level of formality are appropriate for the journal`s readership. Its style and readability are suitable. There is a huge amount of information given throughout the article, but I would suggest revising the paper.
The methodological concept is clear, and the selected methodology is scientifically appropriate.
The Figure 1- The flow of social relationship-based RS must be better explained.
The subchapter privacy protection must be completed.
The limitations are missing.
In summary, the article is sufficiently interesting to warrant publication, but it needs minor revision. Please follow all the comments above.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageMinor editing of English language required
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the organizational structure and content of the paper. We have rewritten introduction, future research directions, discussion, summary, and added related content to Section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have explained and restated some professional terms in the paper.
4) We have carefully checked and revised the format of the references to make them consistent.
5) We refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 5 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsIn this paper the author summarize the current development of social network based recommender systems. They introduce these papers from the background, methods and evaluation metrics. Specifically, they categorize the methods adopted in the algorithms. After reading this paper, I have following suggestions:
1st Although the author categorize the methods and algorithms of social relations based recommendation systems, they didn’t point out the general idea of how the social network information is incorporated in the recommender. I suggest the author to use a pipeline to show this in the introduction part
2nd Recently, the trustworthy and explainable recommendation attracts more attentions. I suggest the author to introduce the explainable recommender in one part. Here are several related papers:
1 Ren, Zhaochun, Shangsong Liang, Piji Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, and Maarten de Rijke. "Social collaborative viewpoint regression with explainable recommendations." In Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on web search and data mining, pp. 485-494. 2017.
2 Cai, Xingjuan, Wanwan Guo, Mengkai Zhao, Zhihua Cui, and Jinjun Chen. "A Knowledge Graph-Based Many-Objective Model for Explainable Social Recommendation." IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (2023).
3 Chen, Ziheng, Fabrizio Silvestri, Jia Wang, Yongfeng Zhang, Zhenhua Huang, Hongshik Ahn, and Gabriele Tolomei. "Grease: Generate factual and counterfactual explanations for gnn-based recommendations." arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.04222 (2022).
4 He, Xiangnan, Tao Chen, Min-Yen Kan, and Xiao Chen. "Trirank: Review-aware explainable recommendation by modeling aspects." In Proceedings of the 24th ACM international on conference on information and knowledge management, pp. 1661-1670. 2015.
5 Chen, Xu, Yongfeng Zhang, Hongteng Xu, Yixin Cao, Zheng Qin, and Hongyuan Zha. "Visually explainable recommendation." arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.10288 (2018).
3rd Section6 is not that abundant. I suggest the author carefully summarize the challenges and future direction on this topic. A very important topic is the security issue of the social relation based recommender due to the potential information contained in social network. I hope the author could explore more on this topic. I listed several papers below:
1 Zhang, Yihe, Xu Yuan, Jin Li, Jiadong Lou, Li Chen, and Nian-Feng Tzeng. "Reverse attack: Black-box attacks on collaborative recommendation." In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 51-68. 2021.
2 Hu, Rui, Yuanxiong Guo, Miao Pan, and Yanmin Gong. "Targeted poisoning attacks on social recommender systems." In 2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2019.
3 Ziheng Chen, Fabrizio Silvestri, Jia Wang, Yongfeng Zhang, and Gabriele Tolomei. 2023. The Dark Side of Explanations: Poisoning Recommender Systems with Counterfactual Examples. In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '23). https://doi.org/10.1145/3539618.3592070
.4 Rong, Dazhong, Shuai Ye, Ruoyan Zhao, Hon Ning Yuen, Jianhai Chen, and Qinming He. "FedRecAttack: model poisoning attack to federated recommendation." In 2022 IEEE 38th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 2643-2655. IEEE, 2022.
5 Chen, Huiyuan, and Jing Li. "Data poisoning attacks on cross-domain recommendation." In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 2177-2180. 2019.
6 Yu, Yang, Qi Liu, Likang Wu, Runlong Yu, Sanshi Lei Yu, and Zaixi Zhang. "Untargeted attack against federated recommendation systems via poisonous item embeddings and the defense." In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 4854-4863. 2023.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageMinor revision is required.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the organizational structure and content of the paper. We have rewritten introduction, future research directions, discussion, summary, and added related content to Section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have explained and restated some professional terms in the paper.
4) We have carefully checked and revised the format of the references to make them consistent.
5) We refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors have made considerable efforts to improve this paper and it now adds a little to the current understanding of recommender systems by giving some history and attempting some level of classification. I still do not see how this reveals new knowledge. There are a number of key issues that also need to be aggessed:
Acronyms are not expanded consistently and it is not always clear when an acronym is being used or when it is for example a company name. All acronyms should be reresented in full on their first use.
Table 1 is almost unreadable.
The conclusions should make it clear what the paper adds to knowledge, This should be answer the research question posed in the introduction.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe English is generally readable, but there are a number of chinese constructions that need rewriting.
Author Response
Dear Editors and Reviewers,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the title of section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have tried to reduce the plagiarism rate.
4) We have adjusted the table 1, and revised the conclusion sectin.
5) We have added the table 1 in section 2.
6) We have revised all acronyms.
7) We have refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Zhengzhou University of Light Industry
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsMinor Revision Should be Done
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Editors and Reviewers,
On behalf of my co-authors, we would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments which help a lot to improve our paper entitled “A Survey on Recommendation Methods Based on Social Relationships” (No. 2669727). According to their comments, we make great efforts to revise our paper. We asked an English expert to help us polish the grammar and language expression of the paper, and we carefully rechecked it again according to the editor and reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Attached please find the revised version, which we would like to submit for your kind consideration.
In addition, we respond to reviewers’ comments point by point.
We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the manuscript will meet with approval.
The main changes are listed as follows:
1) As the constructive suggestions of the reviewers, we have adjusted the title of section 2.
2) We have revised the grammatical errors and inconsistent expressions in the paper and rewritten some expressions.
3) We have tried to reduce the plagiarism rate.
4) We have adjusted the table 1, and revised the conclusion sectin.
5) We have added the table 1 in section 2.
6) We have revised all acronyms.
7) We have refined the sentences of the entire article to improve the quality of the paper.
All the revised parts are highlighted in the revised manuscript.
Best regards!
Yours sincerely,
Rui Chen
Zhengzhou University of Light Industry
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
