Author:
Yuval Dan-Gur
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
Keyword(s):
Recommender systems, HCI, Friends group, Social IS.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Personalized Web Sites and Services
;
User Modeling
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
We addressed HCI and social aspects of recommender systems by studying the uncharted domain of the advising group and the user's control over it. We conducted a longitudinal field study in which, for two years, our research tool, QSIA (which means QUESTION in Hebrew language), was free for use on the web and was adopted by various institutions and classes of heterogeneous learning domains. QSIA enables the user to be involved in the formation of the advising group. The user was free to choose advising group for each recommendation sought, while the default choice is the common 'neighbors group'. QSIA yielded high internal validity of acceptance and rejection ratios due to the immediate "usage actions" that followed the recommendation outputs. Although the objective amount of data in QSIA's logs are fairly large (31,000 records, 10,000 items, 3,000 users), the relevant figures for analysis of recommendations are modest – 895 recommendations seeking records, accepted from 108 users, 3,
000 rankings by 300 users, and 1,043 "usage actions" by 51 users. Our findings suggest that the perceived quality of the recommendations (measured in terms of "usage actions") is 14% to 24% higher (α≤0.05) for user-controlled 'friends group' than for machine-computed 'neighbors group'. We almost felt that the ancient tribal friends "revived" in modern Information Systems.
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