1,399 research outputs found
How Algorithmic Confounding in Recommendation Systems Increases Homogeneity and Decreases Utility
Recommendation systems are ubiquitous and impact many domains; they have the
potential to influence product consumption, individuals' perceptions of the
world, and life-altering decisions. These systems are often evaluated or
trained with data from users already exposed to algorithmic recommendations;
this creates a pernicious feedback loop. Using simulations, we demonstrate how
using data confounded in this way homogenizes user behavior without increasing
utility
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
Beyond Personalization: Research Directions in Multistakeholder Recommendation
Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they
are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items
that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has
extended, it has become apparent that the single-minded focus on the user
common to academic research has obscured other important aspects of
recommendation outcomes. Properties such as fairness, balance, profitability,
and reciprocity are not captured by typical metrics for recommender system
evaluation. The concept of multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a
unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings
where the end user is not the sole focus. This article describes the origins of
multistakeholder recommendation, and the landscape of system designs. It
provides illustrative examples of current research, as well as outlining open
questions and research directions for the field.Comment: 64 page
Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS’21)
Recommender systems were originally developed as interactive
intelligent systems that can proactively guide users to items that
match their preferences. Despite its origin on the crossroads of HCI
and AI, the majority of research on recommender systems gradually
focused on objective accuracy criteria paying less and less attention
to how users interact with the system as well as the efficacy of
interface designs from users’ perspectives. This trend is reversing
with the increased volume of research that looks beyond algorithms,
into users’ interactions, decision making processes, and overall
experience. The series of workshops on Interfaces and Human
Decision Making for Recommender Systems focuses on the "human
side" of recommender systems. The goal of the research stream
featured at the workshop is to improve users’ overall experience
with recommender systems by integrating different theories of
human decision making into the construction of recommender
systems and exploring better interfaces for recommender systems.
In this summary,we introduce the JointWorkshop on Interfaces and
Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems at RecSys’21,
review its history, and discuss most important topics considered at
the workshop
Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives
With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have
been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility
of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in
many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many
problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered
considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and
natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the
attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The
influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its
effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems
research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is
flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent
research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely,
we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models,
along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally,
we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new
exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys.
https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502
Fast ALS-based tensor factorization for context-aware recommendation from implicit feedback
Albeit, the implicit feedback based recommendation problem - when only the
user history is available but there are no ratings - is the most typical
setting in real-world applications, it is much less researched than the
explicit feedback case. State-of-the-art algorithms that are efficient on the
explicit case cannot be straightforwardly transformed to the implicit case if
scalability should be maintained. There are few if any implicit feedback
benchmark datasets, therefore new ideas are usually experimented on explicit
benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a generic context-aware implicit feedback
recommender algorithm, coined iTALS. iTALS apply a fast, ALS-based tensor
factorization learning method that scales linearly with the number of non-zero
elements in the tensor. The method also allows us to incorporate diverse
context information into the model while maintaining its computational
efficiency. In particular, we present two such context-aware implementation
variants of iTALS. The first incorporates seasonality and enables to
distinguish user behavior in different time intervals. The other views the user
history as sequential information and has the ability to recognize usage
pattern typical to certain group of items, e.g. to automatically tell apart
product types or categories that are typically purchased repetitively
(collectibles, grocery goods) or once (household appliances). Experiments
performed on three implicit datasets (two proprietary ones and an implicit
variant of the Netflix dataset) show that by integrating context-aware
information with our factorization framework into the state-of-the-art implicit
recommender algorithm the recommendation quality improves significantly.Comment: Accepted for ECML/PKDD 2012, presented on 25th September 2012,
Bristol, U
Hybrid group recommendations for a travel service
Recommendation techniques have proven their usefulness as a tool to cope with the information overload problem in many classical domains such as movies, books, and music. Additional challenges for recommender systems emerge in the domain of tourism such as acquiring metadata and feedback, the sparsity of the rating matrix, user constraints, and the fact that traveling is often a group activity. This paper proposes a recommender system that offers personalized recommendations for travel destinations to individuals and groups. These recommendations are based on the users' rating profile, personal interests, and specific demands for their next destination. The recommendation algorithm is a hybrid approach combining a content-based, collaborative filtering, and knowledge-based solution. For groups of users, such as families or friends, individual recommendations are aggregated into group recommendations, with an additional opportunity for users to give feedback on these group recommendations. A group of test users evaluated the recommender system using a prototype web application. The results prove the usefulness of individual and group recommendations and show that users prefer the hybrid algorithm over each individual technique. This paper demonstrates the added value of various recommendation algorithms in terms of different quality aspects, compared to an unpersonalized list of the most-popular destinations
ScrollyPOI: A Narrative-Driven Interactive Recommender System for Points-of-Interest Exploration and Explainability
Recommender systems can help web users find more relevant content, improve their online experience, and support them in the discovery of new Points-of-Interest (POI). Yet, challenges persist in dealing with the cold-start problem and in recommendation explainability. To address these, we have created ScrollyPOI, an interactive POI recommender system based on Data Humanism principles. Utilizing scrollytelling, we address the cold-start problem by engaging users in reflecting on previous positive experiences. Additionally, ScrollyPOI enhances explainability through input and output explanations. The system uses stacked bar charts and word clouds to explain how user preferences inform recommendations (input). Finally, ScrollyPOI employs a multi-layered approach to explain why specific POIs are recommended (output). We have evaluated ScrollyPOI’s interface and experience through a preliminary study, highlighting its potential for transparent explanations in the POI recommendation domain. Our findings underscore ScrollyPOI’s efficacy in collecting preferences and enhancing recommendation transparency, positioning it as a platform for studying explainability goals in the POI domain
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