Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field

Comparison of group recommendation algorithms

In recent years recommender systems have become the common tool to handle the information overload problem of educational and informative web sites, content delivery systems, and online shops. Although most recommender systems make suggestions for individual users, in many circumstances the selected items (e.g., movies) are not intended for personal usage but rather for consumption in groups. This paper investigates how effective group recommendations for movies can be generated by combining the group members' preferences (as expressed by ratings) or by combining the group members' recommendations. These two grouping strategies, which convert traditional recommendation algorithms into group recommendation algorithms, are combined with five commonly used recommendation algorithms to calculate group recommendations for different group compositions. The group recommendations are not only assessed in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of other qualitative aspects that are important for users such as diversity, coverage, and serendipity. In addition, the paper discusses the influence of the size and composition of the group on the quality of the recommendations. The results show that the grouping strategy which produces the most accurate results depends on the algorithm that is used for generating individual recommendations. Therefore, the paper proposes a combination of grouping strategies which outperforms each individual strategy in terms of accuracy. Besides, the results show that the accuracy of the group recommendations increases as the similarity between members of the group increases. Also the diversity, coverage, and serendipity of the group recommendations are to a large extent dependent on the used grouping strategy and recommendation algorithm. Consequently for (commercial) group recommender systems, the grouping strategy and algorithm have to be chosen carefully in order to optimize the desired quality metrics of the group recommendations. The conclusions of this paper can be used as guidelines for this selection process

A personalized and context-aware news offer for mobile devices

For classical domains, such as movies, recommender systems have proven their usefulness. But recommending news is more challenging due to the short life span of news content and the demand for up-to-date recommendations. This paper presents a news recommendation service with a content-based algorithm that uses features of a search engine for content processing and indexing, and a collaborative filtering algorithm for serendipity. The extension towards a context-aware algorithm is made to assess the information value of context in a mobile environment through a user study. Analyzing interaction behavior and feedback of users on three recommendation approaches shows that interaction with the content is crucial input for user modeling. Context-aware recommendations using time and device type as context data outperform traditional recommendations with an accuracy gain dependent on the contextual situation. These findings demonstrate that the user experience of news services can be improved by a personalized context-aware news offer

User Curiosity Factor in Determining Serendipity of Recommender System

Recommender rystem (RS) is created to solve the problem by recommending some items among a huge selection of items that will be useful for the e-commerce users. RS prevents the users from being flooded by information that is irrelevant for them.Unlike information retrieval (IR) systems, the RS system's goal is to present information to the users that is accurate and preferably useful to them. Too much focus on accuracy in RS may lead to an overspecialization problem, which will decrease its effectiveness. Therefore, the trend in RS research is focusing beyond accuracy methods, such as serendipity. Serendipity can be described as an unexpected discovery that is useful. Since the concept of a recommendation system is still evolving today, formalizing the definition of serendipity in a recommendation system is very challenging.One known subjective factor of serendipity is curiosity. While some researchers already addressed curiosity factor, it is found that the relationships between various serendipity component as perceived by the users and their curiosity levels is still yet to be researched. In this paper, the method to determine user curiosity model by considering the variation of rated items was presented, then relation to serendipity components using existing user feedback data was validated. The finding showed that the curiosity model was related to some user-perceived values of serendipity, but not all. Moreover, it also had positive effect on broadening the user preference.

Serendipity Identification Using Distance-Based Approach

The recommendation system is a method for helping consumers to find products that fit their preferences. However, recommendations that are merely based on user preference are no longer satisfactory. Consumers expect recommendations that are novel, unexpected, and relevant. It requires the development of a serendipity recommendation system that matches the serendipity data character. However, there are still debates among researchers about the available common definition of serendipity. Therefore, our study proposes a work to identify serendipity data's character by directly using serendipity data ground truth from the famous Movielens dataset. The serendipity data identification is based on a distance-based approach using collaborative filtering and k-means clustering algorithms. Collaborative filtering is used to calculate the similarity value between data, while k-means is used to cluster the collaborative filtering data. The resulting clusters are used to determine the position of the serendipity cluster. The result of this study shows that the average distance between the recommended movie cluster and the serendipity movie cluster is 0.85 units, which is neither the closest cluster nor the farthest cluster from the recommended movie cluster

Beyond Optimizing for Clicks: Incorporating Editorial Values in News Recommendation

With the uptake of algorithmic personalization in the news domain, news organizations increasingly trust automated systems with previously considered editorial responsibilities, e.g., prioritizing news to readers. In this paper we study an automated news recommender system in the context of a news organization's editorial values. We conduct and present two online studies with a news recommender system, which span one and a half months and involve over 1,200 users. In our first study we explore how our news recommender steers reading behavior in the context of editorial values such as serendipity, dynamism, diversity, and coverage. Next, we present an intervention study where we extend our news recommender to steer our readers to more dynamic reading behavior. We find that (i) our recommender system yields more diverse reading behavior and yields a higher coverage of articles compared to non-personalized editorial rankings, and (ii) we can successfully incorporate dynamism in our recommender system as a re-ranking method, effectively steering our readers to more dynamic articles without hurting our recommender system's accuracy.Comment: To appear in UMAP 202