Chris Newell

Bio: Chris Newell is an academic researcher from BBC Research & Development. The author has contributed to research in topics: Recommender system & User experience design. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 7 publications receiving 643 citations.

Explaining the user experience of recommender systems

Abstract: Research on recommender systems typically focuses on the accuracy of prediction algorithms. Because accuracy only partially constitutes the user experience of a recommender system, this paper proposes a framework that takes a user-centric approach to recommender system evaluation. The framework links objective system aspects to objective user behavior through a series of perceptual and evaluative constructs (called subjective system aspects and experience, respectively). Furthermore, it incorporates the influence of personal and situational characteristics on the user experience. This paper reviews how current literature maps to the framework and identifies several gaps in existing work. Consequently, the framework is validated with four field trials and two controlled experiments and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. The results of these studies show that subjective system aspects and experience variables are invaluable in explaining why and how the user experience of recommender systems comes about. In all studies we observe that perceptions of recommendation quality and/or variety are important mediators in predicting the effects of objective system aspects on the three components of user experience: process (e.g. perceived effort, difficulty), system (e.g. perceived system effectiveness) and outcome (e.g. choice satisfaction). Furthermore, we find that these subjective aspects have strong and sometimes interesting behavioral correlates (e.g. reduced browsing indicates higher system effectiveness). They also show several tradeoffs between system aspects and personal and situational characteristics (e.g. the amount of preference feedback users provide is a tradeoff between perceived system usefulness and privacy concerns). These results, as well as the validated framework itself, provide a platform for future research on the user-centric evaluation of recommender systems.

Updatable, Accurate, Diverse, and Scalable Recommendations for Interactive Applications

Abstract: Recommender systems form the backbone of many interactive systems. They incorporate user feedback to personalize the user experience typically via personalized recommendation lists. As users interact with a system, an increasing amount of data about a user’s preferences becomes available, which can be leveraged for improving the systems’ performance. Incorporating these new data into the underlying recommendation model is, however, not always straightforward. Many models used by recommender systems are computationally expensive and, therefore, have to perform offline computations to compile the recommendation lists. For interactive applications, it is desirable to be able to update the computed values as soon as new user interaction data is available: updating recommendations in interactive time using new feedback data leads to better accuracy and increases the attraction of the system to the users. Additionally, there is a growing consensus that accuracy alone is not enough and user satisfaction is also dependent on diverse recommendations.In this work, we tackle this problem of updating personalized recommendation lists for interactive applications in order to provide both accurate and diverse recommendations. To that end, we explore algorithms that exploit random walks as a sampling technique to obtain diverse recommendations without compromising on efficiency and accuracy. Specifically, we present a novel graph vertex ranking recommendation algorithm called RP3β that reranks items based on three-hop random walk transition probabilities. We show empirically that RP3β provides accurate recommendations with high long-tail item frequency at the top of the recommendation list. We also present approximate versions of RP3β and the two most accurate previously published vertex ranking algorithms based on random walk transition probabilities and show that these approximations converge with an increasing number of samples.To obtain interactively updatable recommendations, we additionally show how our algorithm can be extended for online updates at interactive speeds. The underlying random walk sampling technique makes it possible to perform the updates without having to recompute the values for the entire dataset.In an empirical evaluation with three real-world datasets, we show that RP3β provides highly accurate and diverse recommendations that can easily be updated with newly gathered information at interactive speeds (L 100ms).

Blockbusters and Wallflowers: Accurate, Diverse, and Scalable Recommendations with Random Walks

Abstract: User satisfaction is often dependent on providing accurate and diverse recommendations. In this paper, we explore scalable algorithms that exploit random walks as a sampling technique to obtain diverse recommendations without compromising on accuracy. Specifically, we present a novel graph vertex ranking recommendation algorithm called RP^3_beta that re-ranks items based on 3-hop random walk transition probabilities. We show empirically, that RP^3_beta provides accurate recommendations with high long-tail item frequency at the top of the recommendation list. We also present scalable approximate versions of RP^3_beta and the two most accurate previously published vertex ranking algorithms based on random walk transition probabilities and show that these approximations converge with increasing number of samples.

Design and evaluation of a client-side recommender system

Abstract: Most recommender systems found on the web are server-based and centralised. However, it can be difficult to maintain the responsiveness with this approach when there are large numbers of concurrent users. In this demonstration we present an alternative approach where major parts of the recommender system are implemented in scripts run by the user's client system.

Keyword-Based TV Program Recommendation.

Abstract: Notwithstanding the success of collaborative filtering algorithms for item recommendation there are still situations in which there is a need for content-based recommendation, especially in new-item scenarios, e.g. in streaming broadcasting. Since video content is hard to analyze we use documents describing the videos to compute item similarities. We do not use the descriptions directly, but use their keywords as an intermediate level of representation. We argue that a nearest-neighbor approach relying on unrestricted keywords deserves a special definition of similarity that also takes word similarities into account. We define such a similarity measure as a divergence measure of smoothed keyword distributions. The smoothing is done on the basis of co-occurrence probabilities of the present keywords. Thus co-occurrence similarity of words is also taken into account. We have evaluated keyboard-based recommendations with a dataset collected by the BBC and on a subset of the MovieLens dataset augmented with plot descriptions from IMDB. Our main conclusions are (1) that keyword-based rating predictions can be very effective for some types of items, and (2) that rating predictions are significantly better if we do not only take into account the overlap of keywords between two documents, but also the mutual similarities between keywords.

Collaborative Filtering beyond the User-Item Matrix: A Survey of the State of the Art and Future Challenges

Abstract: Over the past two decades, a large amount of research effort has been devoted to developing algorithms that generate recommendations. The resulting research progress has established the importance of the user-item (U-I) matrix, which encodes the individual preferences of users for items in a collection, for recommender systems. The U-I matrix provides the basis for collaborative filtering (CF) techniques, the dominant framework for recommender systems. Currently, new recommendation scenarios are emerging that offer promising new information that goes beyond the U-I matrix. This information can be divided into two categories related to its source: rich side information concerning users and items, and interaction information associated with the interplay of users and items. In this survey, we summarize and analyze recommendation scenarios involving information sources and the CF algorithms that have been recently developed to address them. We provide a comprehensive introduction to a large body of research, more than 200 key references, with the aim of supporting the further development of recommender systems exploiting information beyond the U-I matrix. On the basis of this material, we identify and discuss what we see as the central challenges lying ahead for recommender system technology, both in terms of extensions of existing techniques as well as of the integration of techniques and technologies drawn from other research areas.

Recommender Systems: Introduction and Challenges

Abstract: Recommender Systems (RSs) are software tools and techniques that provide suggestions for items that are most likely of interest to a particular user. In this introductory chapter, we briefly discuss basic RS ideas and concepts. Our main goal is to delineate, in a coherent and structured way, the chapters included in this handbook. Additionally, we aim to help the reader navigate the rich and detailed content that this handbook offers.

A user-centric evaluation framework for recommender systems

Abstract: This research was motivated by our interest in understanding the criteria for measuring the success of a recommender system from users' point view. Even though existing work has suggested a wide range of criteria, the consistency and validity of the combined criteria have not been tested. In this paper, we describe a unifying evaluation framework, called ResQue (Recommender systems' Quality of user experience), which aimed at measuring the qualities of the recommended items, the system's usability, usefulness, interface and interaction qualities, users' satisfaction with the systems, and the influence of these qualities on users' behavioral intentions, including their intention to purchase the products recommended to them and return to the system. We also show the results of applying psychometric methods to validate the combined criteria using data collected from a large user survey. The outcomes of the validation are able to 1) support the consistency, validity and reliability of the selected criteria; and 2) explain the quality of user experience and the key determinants motivating users to adopt the recommender technology. The final model consists of thirty two questions and fifteen constructs, defining the essential qualities of an effective and satisfying recommender system, as well as providing practitioners and scholars with a cost-effective way to evaluate the success of a recommender system and identify important areas in which to invest development resources.

Recommender systems: from algorithms to user experience

Abstract: Since their introduction in the early 1990's, automated recommender systems have revolutionized the marketing and delivery of commerce and content by providing personalized recommendations and predictions over a variety of large and complex product offerings. In this article, we review the key advances in collaborative filtering recommender systems, focusing on the evolution from research concentrated purely on algorithms to research concentrated on the rich set of questions around the user experience with the recommender. We show through examples that the embedding of the algorithm in the user experience dramatically affects the value to the user of the recommender. We argue that evaluating the user experience of a recommender requires a broader set of measures than have been commonly used, and suggest additional measures that have proven effective. Based on our analysis of the state of the field, we identify the most important open research problems, and outline key challenges slowing the advance of the state of the art, and in some cases limiting the relevance of research to real-world applications.

Research-paper recommender systems: a literature survey

Abstract: In the last 16 years, more than 200 research articles were published about research-paper recommender systems. We reviewed these articles and present some descriptive statistics in this paper, as well as a discussion about the major advancements and shortcomings and an overview of the most common recommendation concepts and approaches. We found that more than half of the recommendation approaches applied content-based filtering (55 %). Collaborative filtering was applied by only 18 % of the reviewed approaches, and graph-based recommendations by 16 %. Other recommendation concepts included stereotyping, item-centric recommendations, and hybrid recommendations. The content-based filtering approaches mainly utilized papers that the users had authored, tagged, browsed, or downloaded. TF-IDF was the most frequently applied weighting scheme. In addition to simple terms, n-grams, topics, and citations were utilized to model users' information needs. Our review revealed some shortcomings of the current research. First, it remains unclear which recommendation concepts and approaches are the most promising. For instance, researchers reported different results on the performance of content-based and collaborative filtering. Sometimes content-based filtering performed better than collaborative filtering and sometimes it performed worse. We identified three potential reasons for the ambiguity of the results. (A) Several evaluations had limitations. They were based on strongly pruned datasets, few participants in user studies, or did not use appropriate baselines. (B) Some authors provided little information about their algorithms, which makes it difficult to re-implement the approaches. Consequently, researchers use different implementations of the same recommendations approaches, which might lead to variations in the results. (C) We speculated that minor variations in datasets, algorithms, or user populations inevitably lead to strong variations in the performance of the approaches. Hence, finding the most promising approaches is a challenge. As a second limitation, we noted that many authors neglected to take into account factors other than accuracy, for example overall user satisfaction. In addition, most approaches (81 %) neglected the user-modeling process and did not infer information automatically but let users provide keywords, text snippets, or a single paper as input. Information on runtime was provided for 10 % of the approaches. Finally, few research papers had an impact on research-paper recommender systems in practice. We also identified a lack of authority and long-term research interest in the field: 73 % of the authors published no more than one paper on research-paper recommender systems, and there was little cooperation among different co-author groups. We concluded that several actions could improve the research landscape: developing a common evaluation framework, agreement on the information to include in research papers, a stronger focus on non-accuracy aspects and user modeling, a platform for researchers to exchange information, and an open-source framework that bundles the available recommendation approaches.