Session 1a: The User in the Loop

Date: Wednesday, Sept 16, 2015, 16:00-17:30
Location: HS 1
Chair: Marco de Gemmis

  • Putting Users in Control of their Recommendations
    by F. Maxwell Harper, Funing Xu, Harmanpreet Kaur, Kyle Condiff, Shuo Chang and Loren Terveen

    The essence of a recommender system is that it can recommend items personalized to the preferences of an individual user. But typically users are given no explicit control over this personalization, and are instead left guessing about how their actions affect the resulting recommendations. We hypothesize that any recommender algorithm will better fit some users’ expectations than others, leaving opportunities for improvement. To address this challenge, we study a recommender that puts some control in the hands of users. Specifically, we build and evaluate a system that incorporates user-tuned popularity and recency modifiers, allowing users to express concepts like “show more popular items”. We find that users who are given these controls evaluate the resulting recommendations much more positively. Further, we find that users diverge in their preferred settings, confirming the importance of giving control to users.

  • Letting Users Choose Recommender Algorithms: An Experimental Study
    by Michael D. Ekstrand, Daniel Kluver, F. Maxwell Harper and Joseph A. Konstan

    Recommender systems are not one-size-fits-all; different algorithms and data sources have different strengths, making them a better or worse fit for different users and use cases. As one way of taking advantage of the relative merits of different algorithms, we gave users the ability to change the algorithm providing their movie recommendations and studied how they make use of this power. We conducted our study with the launch of a new version of the MovieLens movie recommender that supports multiple recommender algorithms and allows users to choose the algorithm they want to provide their recommendations. We examine log data from user interactions with this new feature to understand whether and how users switch among recommender algorithms, and select a final algorithm to use. We also look at the properties of the algorithms as they were experienced by users and examine their relationships to user behavior.

    We found that a substantial portion of our user base (25%) used the recommender-switching feature. The majority of users who used the control only switched algorithms a few times, trying a few out and settling down on an algorithm that they would leave alone. The largest number of users prefer a matrix factorization algorithm, followed closely by item-item collaborative filtering; users selected both of these algorithms much more often than they chose a non-personalized mean recommender. The algorithms did produce measurably different recommender lists for the users in the study, but these differences were not directly predictive of user choice.

  • ‘I like to explore sometimes’: Adapting to Dynamic User Novelty Preferences
    by Komal Kapoor, Vikas Kumar, Loren Terveen, Joseph A. Konstan and Paul Schrater

    Studies have shown that the recommendation of unseen, novel or serendipitous items is crucial for a satisfying and engaging user experience. As a result, recent developments in recommendation research have increasingly focused towards introducing novelty in user recommendation lists. While, existing solutions aim to find the right balance between the similarity and novelty of the recommended items, they largely ignore the user needs for novelty. In this paper, we show that there are large individual and temporal differences in the users’ novelty preferences. We develop a regression model to predict these dynamic novelty preferences of users using features derived from their past interactions. Finally, we describe an adaptive recommender, adaNov-R, that adapts to the user needs for novel items and show that the model achieves better recommendation performance on a metric that considers both novel and familiar items.

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