1,462 research outputs found
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
Alleviating the Long-Tail Problem in Conversational Recommender Systems
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to provide the recommendation
service via natural language conversations. To develop an effective CRS,
high-quality CRS datasets are very crucial. However, existing CRS datasets
suffer from the long-tail issue, \ie a large proportion of items are rarely (or
even never) mentioned in the conversations, which are called long-tail items.
As a result, the CRSs trained on these datasets tend to recommend frequent
items, and the diversity of the recommended items would be largely reduced,
making users easier to get bored.
To address this issue, this paper presents \textbf{LOT-CRS}, a novel
framework that focuses on simulating and utilizing a balanced CRS dataset (\ie
covering all the items evenly) for improving \textbf{LO}ng-\textbf{T}ail
recommendation performance of CRSs. In our approach, we design two pre-training
tasks to enhance the understanding of simulated conversation for long-tail
items, and adopt retrieval-augmented fine-tuning with label smoothness strategy
to further improve the recommendation of long-tail items. Extensive experiments
on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and
extensibility of our approach, especially on long-tail recommendation.Comment: work in progres
Toward a collective intelligence recommender system for education
The development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), have revolutionized the world and have moved us into the information age, however the access and handling of this large amount of information is causing valuable time losses. Teachers in Higher Education especially use the Internet as a tool to consult materials and content for the development of the subjects. The internet has very broad services, and sometimes it is difficult for users to find the contents in an easy and fast way. This problem is increasing at the time, causing that students spend a lot of time in search information rather than in synthesis, analysis and construction of new knowledge. In this context, several questions have emerged: Is it possible to design learning activities that allow us to value the information search and to encourage collective participation?. What are the conditions that an ICT tool that supports a process of information search has to have to optimize the student's time and learning?
This article presents the use and application of a Recommender System (RS) designed on paradigms of Collective Intelligence (CI). The RS designed encourages the collective learning and the authentic participation of the students.
The research combines the literature study with the analysis of the ICT tools that have emerged in the field of the CI and RS. Also, Design-Based Research (DBR) was used to compile and summarize collective intelligence approaches and filtering techniques reported in the literature in Higher Education as well as to incrementally improving the tool.
Several are the benefits that have been evidenced as a result of the exploratory study carried out. Among them the following stand out:
• It improves student motivation, as it helps you discover new content of interest in an easy way.
• It saves time in the search and classification of teaching material of interest.
• It fosters specialized reading, inspires competence as a means of learning.
• It gives the teacher the ability to generate reports of trends and behaviors of their students, real-time assessment of the quality of learning material.
The authors consider that the use of ICT tools that combine the paradigms of the CI and RS presented in this work, are a tool that improves the construction of student knowledge and motivates their collective development in cyberspace, in addition, the model of Filltering Contents used supports the design of models and strategies of collective intelligence in Higher Education.Postprint (author's final draft
An investigation on the impact of natural language on conversational recommendations
In this paper, we investigate the combination of Virtual Assistants and Conversational Recommender Systems (CoRSs) by designing and implementing a framework named ConveRSE, for building chatbots that can recommend items from different domains and interact with the user through natural language. An user experiment was carried out to understand how natural language influences both the cost of interaction and recommendation accuracy of a CoRS. Experimental results show that natural language can indeed improve user experience, but some critical aspects of the interaction should be mitigated appropriately
Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods
Peer reviewedPostprin
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
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
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