Hybrid critiquing-based recommender systems

The “Myth of the Heavenly Cow” is the conventional title of an Egyptian mythological narrative that relates how humanity once rebelled against the sun god and how thereupon the sun god reorganized the cosmos. The narrative is embedded in the so-called Book of the Heavenly Cow, which is preserved in several versions dating to the New Kingdom. It is an etiological myth explaining the origins of certain natural phenomena and religious festivals as well as legitimizing the institution of Egyptian kingship

Interaction design guidelines on critiquing-based recommender systems

A critiquing-based recommender system acts like an artificial salesperson. It engages users in a conversational dialog where users can provide feedback in the form of critiques to the sample items that were shown to them. The feedback, in turn, enables the system to refine its understanding of the user's preferences and prediction of what the user truly wants. The system is then able to recommend products that may better stimulate the user's interest in the next interaction cycle. In this paper, we report our extensive investigation of comparing various approaches in devising critiquing opportunities designed in these recommender systems. More specifically, we have investigated two major design elements which are necessary for a critiquing-based recommender system: critiquing coverage—one vs. multiple items that are returned during each recommendation cycle to be critiqued; and critiquing aid—system-suggested critiques (i.e., a set of critique suggestions for users to select) vs. user-initiated critiquing facility (i.e., facilitating users to create critiques on their own). Through a series of three user trials, we have measured how real-users reacted to systems with varied setups of the two elements. In particular, it was found that giving users the choice of critiquing one of multiple items (as opposed to just one) has significantly positive impacts on increasing users' decision accuracy (particularly in the first recommendation cycle) and saving their objective effort (in the later critiquing cycles). As for critiquing aids, the hybrid design with both system-suggested critiques and user-initiated critiquing support exhibits the best performance in inspiring users' decision confidence and increasing their intention to return, in comparison with the uncombined exclusive approaches. Therefore, the results from our studies shed light on the design guidelines for determining the sweetspot balancing user initiative and system support in the development of an effective and user-centric critiquing-based recommender syste

Interaction design guidelines on critiquing-based recommender systems

A critiquing-based recommender system acts like an artificial salesperson. It engages users in a conversational dialog where users can provide feedback in the form of critiques to the sample items that were shown to them. The feedback, in turn, enables the system to refine its understanding of the user's preferences and prediction of what the user truly wants. The system is then able to recommend products that may better stimulate the user's interest in the next interaction cycle. In this paper, we report our extensive investigation of comparing various approaches in devising critiquing opportunities designed in these recommender systems. More specifically, we have investigated two major design elements which are necessary for a critiquing-based recommender system: critiquing coverage-one vs. multiple items that are returned during each recommendation cycle to be critiqued; and critiquing aid-system-suggested critiques (i.e., a set of critique suggestions for users to select) vs. user-initiated critiquing facility (i.e., facilitating users to create critiques on their own). Through a series of three user trials, we have measured how real-users reacted to systems with varied setups of the two elements. In particular, it was found that giving users the choice of critiquing one of multiple items (as opposed to just one) has significantly positive impacts on increasing users' decision accuracy (particularly in the first recommendation cycle) and saving their objective effort (in the later critiquing cycles). As for critiquing aids, the hybrid design with both system-suggested critiques and user-initiated critiquing support exhibits the best performance in inspiring users' decision confidence and increasing their intention to return, in comparison with the uncombined exclusive approaches. Therefore, the results from our studies shed light on the design guidelines for determining the sweetspot balancing user initiative and system support in the development of an effective and user-centric critiquing-based recommender system

The Evaluation of a Hybrid Critiquing System with Preference-based Recommendations Organization

The critiquing-based recommender system mainly aims to guide users to make an accurate and confident decision, while requiring them to consume a low level of effort. We have previously found that the hybrid critiquing system of combining the strengths from both system-proposed critiques and user self-motivated critiquing facility can highly improve users ’ subjective perceptions such as their decision confidence and trusting intentions. In this paper, we continue to investigate how to further reduce users ’ objective decision effort (e.g. time consumption) in such system by increasing the critique prediction accuracy of the system-proposed critiques. By means of real user evaluation, we proved that a new hybrid critiquing system design that integrates the preferencebased recommendations organization technique for critiques suggestion can effectively help to increase the proposed critiques’ application frequency and significantly contribute to saving users’ task time and interaction effort

Interactive product catalogue with user preference tracking

In the context of m-commerce, small screen size poses serious difficulty for users to browse effectively through a product catalogue, given the limited number of products that may be presented on-screen. Despite the availability of search engines, filters and recommender systems to aid users, these techniques focus on a narrow segment of product offering. The users are thus denied the opportunity to do a more expansive exploration of the products available. This paper describes a novel approach to overcome the constraints of small screen size. Through integration of a product catalogue with a recommender system, an adaptive system has been created that guides users through the process of product browsing. An original technique has been developed to cluster similar positive examples together to identify areas of interest of a user. The performance of this technique has been evaluated and the results proved to be promising

Evaluating recommender systems from the user's perspective: survey of the state of the art

A recommender system is a Web technology that proactively suggests items of interest to users based on their objective behavior or explicitly stated preferences. Evaluations of recommender systems (RS) have traditionally focused on the performance of algorithms. However, many researchers have recently started investigating system effectiveness and evaluation criteria from users' perspectives. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of user experience research in RS by examining how researchers have evaluated design methods that augment RS's ability to help users find the information or product that they truly prefer, interact with ease with the system, and form trust with RS through system transparency, control and privacy preserving mechanisms finally, we examine how these system design features influence users' adoption of the technology. We summarize existing work concerning three crucial interaction activities between the user and the system: the initial preference elicitation process, the preference refinement process, and the presentation of the system's recommendation results. Additionally, we will also cover recent evaluation frameworks that measure a recommender system's overall perceptive qualities and how these qualities influence users' behavioral intentions. The key results are summarized in a set of design guidelines that can provide useful suggestions to scholars and practitioners concerning the design and development of effective recommender systems. The survey also lays groundwork for researchers to pursue future topics that have not been covered by existing method

A 3D Visual Interface for Critiquing-based Recommenders: Architecture and Interaction

Nowadays e-commerce websites offer users such a huge amount of products, which far from facilitating the buying process, actually make it more difficult. Hence, recommenders, which learn from users' preferences, are consolidating as valuable instruments to enhance the buying process in the 2D Web. Indeed, 3D virtual environments are an alternative interface for recommenders. They provide the user with an immersive 3D social experience, enabling a richer visualisation and increasing the interaction possibilities with other users and with the recommender. In this paper, we focus on a novel framework to tightly integrate interactive recommendation systems in a 3D virtual environment. Specifically, we propose to integrate a Collaborative Conversational Recommender (CCR) in a 3D social virtual world. Our CCR Framework defines three layers: the user interaction layer (3D Collaborative Space Client), the communication layer (3D Collaborative Space Server), and the recommendation layer (Collaborative Conversational Recommender). Additionally, we evaluate the framework based on several usability criteria such as learnability, perceived efficiency and effectiveness. Results demonstrate that users positively valued the experience