374 research outputs found
Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead
Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge
technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user
(e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed
A domain-independent framework for building conversational recommender systems
Conversational Recommender Systems (CoRSs) implement a paradigm where users can interact with the system for defining their preferences and discovering items that best fit their needs. A CoRS can be straightforwardly implemented as a chatbot. Chatbots are becoming more and more popular for several applications like customer care, health care, medical diagnoses. In the most complex form, the implementation of a chatbot is a challenging task since it requires knowledge about natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and so on. In this paper, we propose a general framework for making easy the generation of conversational recommender systems. The framework, based on a content-based recommendation algorithm, is independent from the domain. Indeed, it allows to build a conversational recommender system with different interaction modes (natural language, buttons, hybrid) for any domain. The framework has been evaluated on two state-of-the-art datasets with the aim of identifying the components that mainly influence the final recommendation accuracy
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
ChatGPT and Persuasive Technologies for the Management and Delivery of Personalized Recommendations in Hotel Hospitality
Recommender systems have become indispensable tools in the hotel hospitality
industry, enabling personalized and tailored experiences for guests. Recent
advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and persuasive
technologies, have opened new avenues for enhancing the effectiveness of those
systems. This paper explores the potential of integrating ChatGPT and
persuasive technologies for automating and improving hotel hospitality
recommender systems. First, we delve into the capabilities of ChatGPT, which
can understand and generate human-like text, enabling more accurate and
context-aware recommendations. We discuss the integration of ChatGPT into
recommender systems, highlighting the ability to analyze user preferences,
extract valuable insights from online reviews, and generate personalized
recommendations based on guest profiles. Second, we investigate the role of
persuasive technology in influencing user behavior and enhancing the persuasive
impact of hotel recommendations. By incorporating persuasive techniques, such
as social proof, scarcity and personalization, recommender systems can
effectively influence user decision-making and encourage desired actions, such
as booking a specific hotel or upgrading their room. To investigate the
efficacy of ChatGPT and persuasive technologies, we present a pilot experi-ment
with a case study involving a hotel recommender system. We aim to study the
impact of integrating ChatGPT and persua-sive techniques on user engagement,
satisfaction, and conversion rates. The preliminary results demonstrate the
potential of these technologies in enhancing the overall guest experience and
business performance. Overall, this paper contributes to the field of hotel
hospitality by exploring the synergistic relationship between LLMs and
persuasive technology in recommender systems, ultimately influencing guest
satisfaction and hotel revenue.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure
ChoiceMates: Supporting Unfamiliar Online Decision-Making with Multi-Agent Conversational Interactions
Unfamiliar decisions -- decisions where people lack adequate domain knowledge
or expertise -- specifically increase the complexity and uncertainty of the
process of searching for, understanding, and making decisions with online
information. Through our formative study (n=14), we observed users' challenges
in accessing diverse perspectives, identifying relevant information, and
deciding the right moment to make the final decision. We present ChoiceMates, a
system that enables conversations with a dynamic set of LLM-powered agents for
a holistic domain understanding and efficient discovery and management of
information to make decisions. Agents, as opinionated personas, flexibly join
the conversation, not only providing responses but also conversing among
themselves to elicit each agent's preferences. Our between-subjects study
(n=36) comparing ChoiceMates to conventional web search and single-agent showed
that ChoiceMates was more helpful in discovering, diving deeper, and managing
information compared to Web with higher confidence. We also describe how
participants utilized multi-agent conversations in their decision-making
process
Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems
A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and
control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time
multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an
unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and
common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of
this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new
technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a
complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These
issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of
conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for
building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose
new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue
management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated
architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an
LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to
modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in
the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a
controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a
proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos
built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through
some illustrative example conversations
Group recommender systems: A multi-agent solution
Providing recommendations to groups of users has become a promising research area, since many items tend to be consumed by groups of people. Various techniques have been developed aiming at making recommendations to a group as a whole. Most works use aggregation techniques to combine preferences, recommendations or profiles. However, satisfying all group members in an even way still remains as a challenge. To deal with this problem, we propose an extension of a multi-agent approach based on negotiation techniques for group recommendation. In the approach, we use the multilateral Monotonic Concession Protocol (MCP) to combine individual recommendations into a group recommendation. In this work, we extend the MCP protocol to allow users to personalize the behavior of the agents. This extension was evaluated in two different domains (movies and points of interest) with satisfactory results. We compared our approach against different baselines, namely: a preference aggregation algorithm, a recommendation aggregation algorithm, and a simple one-step negotiation. The results show evidence that, when using our negotiation approach, users in the groups are more uniformly satisfied than with traditional aggregation approaches.Fil: Villavicencio, Christian Paulo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Schiaffino, Silvia Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Diaz Pace, Jorge Andres. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Monteserin, Ariel José. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin
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