8,238 research outputs found
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
Challenges in context-aware mobile language learning: the MASELTOV approach
Smartphones, as highly portable networked computing devices with embedded sensors including GPS receivers, are ideal platforms to support context-aware language learning. They can enable learning when the user is en-gaged in everyday activities while out and about, complementing formal language classes. A significant challenge, however, has been the practical implementation of services that can accurately identify and make use of context, particularly location, to offer meaningful language learning recommendations to users. In this paper we review a range of approaches to identifying context to support mobile language learning. We consider how dynamically changing aspects of context may influence the quality of recommendations presented to a user. We introduce the MASELTOV project’s use of context awareness combined with a rules-based recommendation engine to present suitable learning content to recent immigrants in urban areas; a group that may benefit from contextual support and can use the city as a learning environment
R-UCB: a Contextual Bandit Algorithm for Risk-Aware Recommender Systems
Mobile Context-Aware Recommender Systems can be naturally modelled as an
exploration/exploitation trade-off (exr/exp) problem, where the system has to
choose between maximizing its expected rewards dealing with its current
knowledge (exploitation) and learning more about the unknown user's preferences
to improve its knowledge (exploration). This problem has been addressed by the
reinforcement learning community but they do not consider the risk level of the
current user's situation, where it may be dangerous to recommend items the user
may not desire in her current situation if the risk level is high. We introduce
in this paper an algorithm named R-UCB that considers the risk level of the
user's situation to adaptively balance between exr and exp. The detailed
analysis of the experimental results reveals several important discoveries in
the exr/exp behaviour
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