2,663 research outputs found
The benefits of opening recommendation to human interaction
This paper describes work in progress that uses an interactive recommendation process to construct new objects which are tailored to user preferences. The novelty in our work is moving from the recommendation of static objects like consumer goods, movies or books, towards dynamically-constructed recommendations which are built as part of the recommendation process. As a proof-of-concept we build running or jogging routes for visitors to a city, recommending routes to users according to their preferences and we present details of this system
Towards Question-based Recommender Systems
Conversational and question-based recommender systems have gained increasing
attention in recent years, with users enabled to converse with the system and
better control recommendations. Nevertheless, research in the field is still
limited, compared to traditional recommender systems. In this work, we propose
a novel Question-based recommendation method, Qrec, to assist users to find
items interactively, by answering automatically constructed and algorithmically
chosen questions. Previous conversational recommender systems ask users to
express their preferences over items or item facets. Our model, instead, asks
users to express their preferences over descriptive item features. The model is
first trained offline by a novel matrix factorization algorithm, and then
iteratively updates the user and item latent factors online by a closed-form
solution based on the user answers. Meanwhile, our model infers the underlying
user belief and preferences over items to learn an optimal question-asking
strategy by using Generalized Binary Search, so as to ask a sequence of
questions to the user. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed
matrix factorization model outperforms the traditional Probabilistic Matrix
Factorization model. Further, our proposed Qrec model can greatly improve the
performance of state-of-the-art baselines, and it is also effective in the case
of cold-start user and item recommendations.Comment: accepted by SIGIR 202
Evaluating the effectiveness of explanations for recommender systems : Methodological issues and empirical studies on the impact of personalization
Peer reviewedPostprin
Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems: A Landscape of Research
Conversational recommender systems aim to interactively support online users
in their information search and decision-making processes in an intuitive way.
With the latest advances in voice-controlled devices, natural language
processing, and AI in general, such systems received increased attention in
recent years. Technically, conversational recommenders are usually complex
multi-component applications and often consist of multiple machine learning
models and a natural language user interface. Evaluating such a complex system
in a holistic way can therefore be challenging, as it requires (i) the
assessment of the quality of the different learning components, and (ii) the
quality perception of the system as a whole by users. Thus, a mixed methods
approach is often required, which may combine objective (computational) and
subjective (perception-oriented) evaluation techniques. In this paper, we
review common evaluation approaches for conversational recommender systems,
identify possible limitations, and outline future directions towards more
holistic evaluation practices
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