71,615 research outputs found
A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly
difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases.
Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type,
such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our
solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized
recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We
present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as
an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item
attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are
unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and
used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user
model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a
conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly
reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory
item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive
version of the system
Learning Heterogeneous Similarity Measures for Hybrid-Recommendations in Meta-Mining
The notion of meta-mining has appeared recently and extends the traditional
meta-learning in two ways. First it does not learn meta-models that provide
support only for the learning algorithm selection task but ones that support
the whole data-mining process. In addition it abandons the so called black-box
approach to algorithm description followed in meta-learning. Now in addition to
the datasets, algorithms also have descriptors, workflows as well. For the
latter two these descriptions are semantic, describing properties of the
algorithms. With the availability of descriptors both for datasets and data
mining workflows the traditional modelling techniques followed in
meta-learning, typically based on classification and regression algorithms, are
no longer appropriate. Instead we are faced with a problem the nature of which
is much more similar to the problems that appear in recommendation systems. The
most important meta-mining requirements are that suggestions should use only
datasets and workflows descriptors and the cold-start problem, e.g. providing
workflow suggestions for new datasets.
In this paper we take a different view on the meta-mining modelling problem
and treat it as a recommender problem. In order to account for the meta-mining
specificities we derive a novel metric-based-learning recommender approach. Our
method learns two homogeneous metrics, one in the dataset and one in the
workflow space, and a heterogeneous one in the dataset-workflow space. All
learned metrics reflect similarities established from the dataset-workflow
preference matrix. We demonstrate our method on meta-mining over biological
(microarray datasets) problems. The application of our method is not limited to
the meta-mining problem, its formulations is general enough so that it can be
applied on problems with similar requirements
Expressive recommender systems through normalized nonnegative models
We introduce normalized nonnegative models (NNM) for explorative data
analysis. NNMs are partial convexifications of models from probability theory.
We demonstrate their value at the example of item recommendation. We show that
NNM-based recommender systems satisfy three criteria that all recommender
systems should ideally satisfy: high predictive power, computational
tractability, and expressive representations of users and items. Expressive
user and item representations are important in practice to succinctly summarize
the pool of customers and the pool of items. In NNMs, user representations are
expressive because each user's preference can be regarded as normalized mixture
of preferences of stereotypical users. The interpretability of item and user
representations allow us to arrange properties of items (e.g., genres of movies
or topics of documents) or users (e.g., personality traits) hierarchically
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