  Socially-based recommendation systems have recently attracted significant
interest, and a number of studies have shown that social information can
dramatically improve a system's predictions of user interests. Meanwhile, there
are now many potential applications that involve aspects of both recommendation
and information retrieval, and the task of collaborative retrieval---a
combination of these two traditional problems---has recently been introduced.
Successful collaborative retrieval requires overcoming severe data sparsity,
making additional sources of information, such as social graphs, particularly
valuable. In this paper we propose a new model for collaborative retrieval, and
show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by
incorporating information from social networks. We also provide empirical
analyses of the ways in which cultural interests propagate along a social graph
using a real-world music dataset.
