Exploring Social Recommendations with Visual Diversity-Promoting Interfaces

The beyond-relevance objectives of recommender systems have been drawing more and more attention. For example, a diversity-enhanced interface has been shown to associate positively with overall levels of user satisfaction. However, little is known about how users adopt diversity-enhanced interfaces to accomplish various real-world tasks. In this article, we present two attempts at creating a visual diversity-enhanced interface that presents recommendations beyond a simple ranked list. Our goal was to design a recommender system interface to help users explore the different relevance prospects of recommended items in parallel and to stress their diversity. Two within-subject user studies in the context of social recommendation at academic conferences were conducted to compare our visual interfaces. Results from our user study show that the visual interfaces significantly reduced the exploration efforts required for given tasks and helped users to perceive the recommendation diversity. We show that the users examined a diverse set of recommended items while experiencing an improvement in overall user satisfaction. Also, the users’ subjective evaluations show significant improvement in many user-centric metrics. Experiences are discussed that shed light on avenues for future interface designs

Multicriteria Evaluation for Top-k and Sequence-based Recommender Systems

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

IntersectionExplorer, a multi-perspective approach for exploring recommendations

© 2018 In this paper, we advent a novel approach to foster exploration of recommendations: IntersectionExplorer, a scalable visualization that interleaves the output of several recommender engines with human-generated data, such as user bookmarks and tags, as a basis to increase exploration and thereby enhance the potential to find relevant items. We evaluated the viability of IntersectionExplorer in the context of conference paper recommendation, through three user studies performed in different settings to understand the usefulness of the tool for diverse audiences and scenarios. We analyzed several dimensions of user experience and other, more objective, measures of performance. Results indicate that users found IntersectionExplorer to be a relatively fast and effortless tool to navigate through conference papers. Objective measures of performance linked to interaction showed that users were not only interested in exploring combinations of machine-produced recommendations with bookmarks of users and tags, but also that this “augmentation” actually resulted in increased likelihood of finding relevant papers in explorations. Overall, the findings suggest the viability of IntersectionExplorer as an effective tool, and indicate that its multi-perspective approach to exploring recommendations has great promise as a way of addressing the complex human-recommender system interaction problem.status: publishe