Serendipitous News Discovery Increases News Consumption in News Recommender Systems

News recommender system users obtain news via incidental exposure to news and experience serendipity in the incidental news consumption. Serendipitous news discovery, the same as serendipity, refers to discovering unexpected and useful information unintentionally. Researchers suggest building serendipitous news recommender systems and increasing serendipitous news discovery to increase the diversity of the news consumption. However, the impacts of serendipitous news discovery on news consumption are uninvestigated, and rare research provides theoretical guidance to the serendipitous news recommender systems. The thesis investigated the impacts of serendipitous news discovery on news consumption with a serendipityrelated emotion, surprise, as a mediator and need for activation as a moderator. 463 participants recruited from Amazon MTurk completed the online survey-experiment. The findings suggest that surprise mediates the correlations between serendipitous news discovery and news consumption. Users who experience higher serendipitous news discovery indicate more positive attitudes on news consumption in the news recommender systems. The results also indicate the possibility that the lack of constant serendipitous news discovery may lead to the consumption of the news similar to the news that trigger serendipity. The research suggests that serendipitous news discovery increases news consumption, including news selection and reading

Beyond-accuracy: a review on diversity, serendipity, and fairness in recommender systems based on graph neural networks

By providing personalized suggestions to users, recommender systems have become essential to numerous online platforms. Collaborative filtering, particularly graph-based approaches using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), have demonstrated great results in terms of recommendation accuracy. However, accuracy may not always be the most important criterion for evaluating recommender systems' performance, since beyond-accuracy aspects such as recommendation diversity, serendipity, and fairness can strongly influence user engagement and satisfaction. This review paper focuses on addressing these dimensions in GNN-based recommender systems, going beyond the conventional accuracy-centric perspective. We begin by reviewing recent developments in approaches that improve not only the accuracy-diversity trade-off but also promote serendipity, and fairness in GNN-based recommender systems. We discuss different stages of model development including data preprocessing, graph construction, embedding initialization, propagation layers, embedding fusion, score computation, and training methodologies. Furthermore, we present a look into the practical difficulties encountered in assuring diversity, serendipity, and fairness, while retaining high accuracy. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions for developing more robust GNN-based recommender systems that go beyond the unidimensional perspective of focusing solely on accuracy. This review aims to provide researchers and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of the multifaceted issues that arise when designing GNN-based recommender systems, setting our work apart by offering a comprehensive exploration of beyond-accuracy dimensions

Comparison of group recommendation algorithms

In recent years recommender systems have become the common tool to handle the information overload problem of educational and informative web sites, content delivery systems, and online shops. Although most recommender systems make suggestions for individual users, in many circumstances the selected items (e.g., movies) are not intended for personal usage but rather for consumption in groups. This paper investigates how effective group recommendations for movies can be generated by combining the group members' preferences (as expressed by ratings) or by combining the group members' recommendations. These two grouping strategies, which convert traditional recommendation algorithms into group recommendation algorithms, are combined with five commonly used recommendation algorithms to calculate group recommendations for different group compositions. The group recommendations are not only assessed in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of other qualitative aspects that are important for users such as diversity, coverage, and serendipity. In addition, the paper discusses the influence of the size and composition of the group on the quality of the recommendations. The results show that the grouping strategy which produces the most accurate results depends on the algorithm that is used for generating individual recommendations. Therefore, the paper proposes a combination of grouping strategies which outperforms each individual strategy in terms of accuracy. Besides, the results show that the accuracy of the group recommendations increases as the similarity between members of the group increases. Also the diversity, coverage, and serendipity of the group recommendations are to a large extent dependent on the used grouping strategy and recommendation algorithm. Consequently for (commercial) group recommender systems, the grouping strategy and algorithm have to be chosen carefully in order to optimize the desired quality metrics of the group recommendations. The conclusions of this paper can be used as guidelines for this selection process

A Distributed and Accountable Approach to Offline Recommender Systems Evaluation

Different software tools have been developed with the purpose of performing offline evaluations of recommender systems. However, the results obtained with these tools may be not directly comparable because of subtle differences in the experimental protocols and metrics. Furthermore, it is difficult to analyze in the same experimental conditions several algorithms without disclosing their implementation details. For these reasons, we introduce RecLab, an open source software for evaluating recommender systems in a distributed fashion. By relying on consolidated web protocols, we created RESTful APIs for training and querying recommenders remotely. In this way, it is possible to easily integrate into the same toolkit algorithms realized with different technologies. In details, the experimenter can perform an evaluation by simply visiting a web interface provided by RecLab. The framework will then interact with all the selected recommenders and it will compute and display a comprehensive set of measures, each representing a different metric. The results of all experiments are permanently stored and publicly available in order to support accountability and comparative analyses.Comment: REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender System

Adapting Recommendation Diversity to Openness to Experience : A Study of Human Behaviour

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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

Measuring the Eccentricity of Items

The long-tail phenomenon tells us that there are many items in the tail. However, not all tail items are the same. Each item acquires different kinds of users. Some items are loved by the general public, while some items are consumed by eccentric fans. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, item eccentricity, to incorporate this difference between consumers of the items. Eccentric items are defined as items that are consumed by eccentric users. We used this metric to analyze two real-world datasets of music and movies and observed the characteristics of items in terms of eccentricity. The results showed that our defined eccentricity of an item does not change much over time, and classified eccentric and noneccentric items present significantly distinct characteristics. The proposed metric effectively separates the eccentric and noneccentric items mixed in the tail, which could not be done with the previous measures, which only consider the popularity of items.Comment: Accepted at IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) 201

Sequeval: A Framework to Assess and Benchmark Sequence-based Recommender Systems

In this paper, we present sequeval, a software tool capable of performing the offline evaluation of a recommender system designed to suggest a sequence of items. A sequence-based recommender is trained considering the sequences already available in the system and its purpose is to generate a personalized sequence starting from an initial seed. This tool automatically evaluates the sequence-based recommender considering a comprehensive set of eight different metrics adapted to the sequential scenario. sequeval has been developed following the best practices of software extensibility. For this reason, it is possible to easily integrate and evaluate novel recommendation techniques. sequeval is publicly available as an open source tool and it aims to become a focal point for the community to assess sequence-based recommender systems.Comment: REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender System