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

From Evaluating to Forecasting Performance: How to Turn Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Recommender Systems into Predictive Sciences

We describe the state-of-the-art in performance modeling and prediction for Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Recommender Systems (RecSys) along with its shortcomings and strengths. We present a framework for further research, identifying five major problem areas: understanding measures, performance analysis, making underlying assumptions explicit, identifying application features determining performance, and the development of prediction models describing the relationship between assumptions, features and resulting performanc

From Evaluating to Forecasting Performance: How to Turn Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Recommender Systems into Predictive Sciences

Non peer reviewe

Contextual Collaboration: Uniting Collaborative Filtering with Pre-trained Language Models

Traditional recommender systems have predominantly relied on identity representations (IDs) to characterize users and items. In contrast, the emergence of pre-trained language model (PLM) en-coders has significantly enriched the modeling of contextual item descriptions. While PLMs excel in addressing few-shot, zero-shot, and unified modeling scenarios, they often overlook the critical collaborative filtering signal. This omission gives rise to two pivotal challenges: (1) Collaborative Contextualization, aiming for the seamless integration of collaborative signals with contextual representations. (2) The necessity to bridge the representation gap between ID-based and contextual representations while preserving their contextual semantics. In this paper, we introduce CollabContext, a novel model that skillfully merges collaborative filtering signals with contextual representations, aligning these representations within the contextual space while retaining essential contextual semantics. Experimental results across three real-world datasets showcase substantial improvements. Through its capability in collaborative contextualization, CollabContext demonstrates remarkable enhancements in recommendation performance, particularly in cold-start scenarios. The code is available after the conference accepts the paper