Using consumer feedback from location-based services in PoI recommender systems for people with autism

When suggesting Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders, we must take into account that they have idiosyncratic sensory aversions to noise, brightness and other features that influence the way they perceive places. Therefore, recommender systems must deal with these aspects. However, the retrieval of sensory data about PoIs is a real challenge because most geographical information servers fail to provide this data. Moreover, ad-hoc crowdsourcing campaigns do not guarantee to cover large geographical areas and lack sustainability. Thus, we investigate the extraction of sensory data about places from the consumer feedback collected by location-based services, on which people spontaneously post reviews from all over the world. Specifically, we propose a model for the extraction of sensory data from the reviews about PoIs, and its integration in recommender systems to predict item ratings by considering both user preferences and compatibility information. We tested our approach with autistic and neurotypical people by integrating it into diverse recommendation algorithms. For the test, we used a dataset built in a crowdsourcing campaign and another one extracted from TripAdvisor reviews. The results show that the algorithms obtain the highest accuracy and ranking capability when using TripAdvisor data. Moreover, by jointly using these two datasets, the algorithms further improve their performance. These results encourage the use of consumer feedback as a reliable source of information about places in the development of inclusive recommender systems

Helping consumers to overcome information overload with a diversified online review subset

Abstract Redundant online reviews often have a negative impact on the efficiency of consumers’ decision-making in their online shopping. A feasible solution for business analytics is to select a review subset from the original review corpus for consumers, which is called review selection. This study aims to address the diversified review selection problem, and proposes an effective review selection approach called Simulated Annealing-Diversified Review Selection (SA-DRS) that considers the semantic relationship of review features and the content diversity of selected reviews simultaneously. SA-DRS first constructs a feature taxonomy by utilizing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and the Word2vec model to measure the topic relation and word context relation. Based on the established feature taxonomy, the similarity between each pair of reviews is defined and the review quality is estimated as well. Finally, diversified, high-quality reviews are selected heuristically by SA-DRS in the spirit of the simulated annealing method, forming the selected review subset. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world e-commerce platforms to demonstrate the effectiveness of SA-DRS compared to other extant review selection approaches.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152196/1/11782_2019_Article_62.pd