Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field

Preface to Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Recommender Systems in Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL 2010)

AbstractTechnology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of technology research & development aiming to support teaching and learning activities. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years.Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty of resources available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.The 1st Workshop on Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL) builds upon the tradition of a series of workshops on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL), Context-Aware Recommendation for Learning and Towards User Modelling and Adaptive Systems for All (TUMAS-A)a. RecSysTEL was organised jointly by the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010) and the 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010), on 29–30 September 2010 in Barcelona, Spain. Its main goal was to bring together researchers and practitioners who are working on topics related to the design, development and testing of recommender systems in educational settings as well as present the current status of research in this area and create cross-disciplinary liaisons between the RecSys and ECTEL communities. Overall, its contributions outline the rich potential of TEL as an application area for recommender systems and identify the challenges of developing such systems in a TEL context

What’s going on in my city? Recommender systems and electronic participatory budgeting

In this paper, we present electronic participatory budgeting (ePB) as a novel application domain for recommender systems. On public data from the ePB platforms of three major US cities – Cambridge, Miami and New York City–, we evaluate various methods that exploit heterogeneous sources and models of user preferences to provide personalized recommendations of citizen proposals. We show that depending on characteristics of the cities and their participatory processes, particular methods are more effective than others for each city. This result, together with open issues identified in the paper, call for further research in the area

Regression and Learning to Rank Aggregation for User Engagement Evaluation

User engagement refers to the amount of interaction an instance (e.g., tweet, news, and forum post) achieves. Ranking the items in social media websites based on the amount of user participation in them, can be used in different applications, such as recommender systems. In this paper, we consider a tweet containing a rating for a movie as an instance and focus on ranking the instances of each user based on their engagement, i.e., the total number of retweets and favorites it will gain. For this task, we define several features which can be extracted from the meta-data of each tweet. The features are partitioned into three categories: user-based, movie-based, and tweet-based. We show that in order to obtain good results, features from all categories should be considered. We exploit regression and learning to rank methods to rank the tweets and propose to aggregate the results of regression and learning to rank methods to achieve better performance. We have run our experiments on an extended version of MovieTweeting dataset provided by ACM RecSys Challenge 2014. The results show that learning to rank approach outperforms most of the regression models and the combination can improve the performance significantly.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Recommender Systems Challenge, RecSysChallenge '1

Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS’21)

Recommender systems were originally developed as interactive intelligent systems that can proactively guide users to items that match their preferences. Despite its origin on the crossroads of HCI and AI, the majority of research on recommender systems gradually focused on objective accuracy criteria paying less and less attention to how users interact with the system as well as the efficacy of interface designs from users’ perspectives. This trend is reversing with the increased volume of research that looks beyond algorithms, into users’ interactions, decision making processes, and overall experience. The series of workshops on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems focuses on the "human side" of recommender systems. The goal of the research stream featured at the workshop is to improve users’ overall experience with recommender systems by integrating different theories of human decision making into the construction of recommender systems and exploring better interfaces for recommender systems. In this summary,we introduce the JointWorkshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems at RecSys’21, review its history, and discuss most important topics considered at the workshop

Argument-based generation and explanation of recommendations

In the recommender systems literature, it has been shown that, in addition to improving system effectiveness, explaining recommendations may increase user satisfaction, trust, persuasion and loyalty. In general, explanations focus on the filtering algorithms or the users and items involved in the generation of recommendations. However, on certain domains that are rich on user-generated textual content, it would be valuable to provide justifications of recommendations according to arguments that are explicit, underlying or related with the data used by the systems, e.g., the reasons for customers' opinions in reviews of e-commerce sites, and the requests and claims in citizens' proposals and debates of e-participation platforms. In this context, there is a need and challenging task to automatically extract and exploit the arguments given for and against evaluated items. We thus advocate to focus not only on user preferences and item features, but also on associated arguments. In other words, we propose to not only consider what is said about items, but also why it is said. Hence, arguments would not only be part of the recommendation explanations, but could also be used by the recommendation algorithms themselves. To this end, in this thesis, we propose to use argument mining techniques and tools that allow retrieving and relating argumentative information from textual content, and investigate recommendation methods that exploit that information before, during and after their filtering processesThe author thanks his supervisor Iván Cantador for his valuable support and guidance in defining this thesis project. The work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-108965GB-I00