Fourth Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems Workshop

The 4th Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems (KaRS) Workshop focuses on all aspects related to the exploitation of external and explicit knowledge sources to feed and build a recommendation engine, and on the adoption of interactions based on the conversational paradigm. The aim is to go beyond the traditional accuracy goal and to start a new generation of algorithms and approaches with the help of the methodological diversity embodied in fields such as Human–Computer Interaction, Conversational Recommender Systems, Semantic Web, and Knowledge Graphs. Consequently the focus lies on works improving the user experience and following goals such as user engagement and satisfaction or customer value.

In the last few years, a renewed interest of the research community on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) is emerging. This is probably due to the great diffusion of Digital Assistants (DAs) such as Amazon Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant that are revolutionizing the way users interact with machines. DAs allow users to execute a wide range of actions through an interaction mostly based on natural language messages.
However, although DAs are able to complete tasks such as sending texts, making phone calls, or playing songs, they are still at an early stage on offering recommendation capabilities by using the conversational paradigm.
In addition, we have been witnessing the advent of more and more precise and powerful recommendation algorithms and techniques able to effectively assess users’ tastes and predict information that would probably be of interest to them.
Most of these approaches rely on the collaborative paradigm (often exploiting machine learning techniques) and do not take into account the huge amount of knowledge, both structured and non-structured ones, describing the domain of interest of the recommendation engine.
Although very effective in predicting relevant items, collaborative approaches miss some very interesting features that go beyond the accuracy of results and move in the direction of providing novel and diverse results as well as generating an explanation for the recommended items. Furthermore, this side information becomes crucial when a conversational interaction is implemented, in particular for the preference elicitation, explanation, and critiquing steps.

A detailed description of the Workshop is available on the website of the 4th Knowledge-aware and Conversational Recommender Systems (KaRS) Workshop 2022.
Accepted contributions will be presented during the Workshop.

Organizers

• VITO WALTER ANELLI, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
• PIERPAOLO BASILE, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
• GERARD DE MELO, Hasso Plattner Institute, and University of Potsdam, Germany
• FRANCESCO M. DONINI, Tuscia University, Italy
• ANTONIO FERRARA, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
• CATALDO MUSTO, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
• FEDELUCIO NARDUCCI, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
• AZZURRA RAGONE, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
• MARKUS ZANKER, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy and University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Website

https://kars-workshop.github.io/2022/

Date

Half day.