Concept-based Recommendation System for Finding Serendipity

Abstract

Current information recommendation systems obtain users’ preferences from Web browsing histories and activities such as purchase of products, and efficiently provide the users with their preferable information. In such a case, however, the same or similar information is always recommended, which is called filter bubble and it decreases the users’ satisfaction to the systems. If information recommendation systems could provide users with something surprising and useful as output information, the user’s satisfaction to the systems would drastically increase. Therefore, “serendipity” is paid attention to in this research. In this paper, a new information recommendation system using a concept-based information retrieval is proposed to provide the users with serendipitous information. In this system, concepts which describe features or roles of items are input instead of the items themselves, and information which can meet the concepts are output as candidates of serendipitous information. The serendipitous information is extracted from the output information using the criteria which are the indexes of serendipity defined in this research. Through the evaluation experiment, it is revealed that the proposed system achieves the accuracy of 70% for the serendipitous information determination and the accuracy of 100% for the information retrieval, which are satisfactory for this research purpose.