Search

Web Information Systems

Explanations can help users to better understand why items have been recommended. Additionally, explanations for group recommender systems need to consider further goals than single-user recommender systems. For example, we need to balance group members' need for privacy with their need for transparency, since a transparent explanation might pose a privacy hazard. In an online experiment with real groups (n=114 participants: 38 groups of size 3), we seek to understand which factors influence people's privacy concerns when a single explanation is presented to a group in the tourism domain. In particular, we study the direct effects of three factors on privacy concern: a) group members' personality (using the ĝ€ Big Five' personality traits), b) specific preference scenarios (i.e., having minority or majority preferences compared to two other group members), c) the type of relationship they have in the group (i.e., loosely coupled heterogeneous, versus tightly coupled homogeneous). We find that for personality two traits, Extroversion, and Agreeableness, each significantly affects the privacy concern. Moreover, having the minority or majority preferences in the group, as well as the type of relationship people have in the group, have a strong and significant influence on participants' privacy concern. These results suggest that explanations presented to groups need to be adapted to all three factors (personality, type of relationship, and preference scenario) when considering the privacy concern of users., Web Information Systems

Recent research has shown that explanations serve as an important means to increase transparency in group recommendations while also increasing users' privacy concerns. However, it is currently unclear what personal and contextual factors affect users' privacy concerns about various types of personal information. This paper studies the effect of users' personality traits and preference scenarios-having a majority or minority preference-on their privacy concerns regarding location and emotion information. To create natural scenarios of group decision-making where users can control the amount of information disclosed, we develop TouryBot, a chat-bot agent that generates natural language explanations to help group members explain their arguments for suggestions to the group in the tourism domain. We conducted a user study in which we instructed 541 participants to convince the group to either visit or skip a recommended place. Our results show that users generally have a larger concern regarding the disclosure of emotion compared to location information. However, we found no evidence that personality traits or preference scenarios affect privacy concerns in our task. Further analyses revealed that task design (i.e., the pressure on users to convince the group) had an effect on participants' emotion-related privacy concerns. Our study also highlights the utility of providing users with the option of partial disclosure of personal information, which appeared to be popular among the participants., Web Information Systems

Due to the rise of available online music, a lot of music consumption is moving from traditional offline media to online sources. Online music sources offer almost an unlimited music collection to its users. Hence, how music is consumed by users (e.g., experts) may differ from traditional offline sources. In this work we explored how musically sophisticated users (i.e. experts) consume online music in terms of diversity. To analyze this, we gathered data from two different sources: Last.fm and Spotify. As expertise is defined by the ubiquitousness of experiences, we calculated different diversity measurements to explore how ubiquitous (in terms of diversity) the listening behaviors of users are. We found that different musical sophistication levels correspond to applying diversity related to specific kind of musical characteristics (i.e., artist or genre). Our results can provide knowledge on how systems should be designed to provide better support to expert users.

Music streaming services increasingly incorporate different ways for users to browse for music. Next to the commonly used “genre” taxonomy, nowadays additional taxonomies, such as mood and activities, are often used. As additional taxonomies have shown to be able to distract the user in their search, we looked at how to predict taxonomy preferences in order to counteract this. Additionally, we looked at how the number of categories presented within a taxonomy influences the user experience. We conducted an online user study where participants interacted with an application called “Tune-A-Find”. We measured taxonomy choice (i.e., mood, activity, or genre), individual differences (e.g., personality traits and music expertise factors), and different user experience factors (i.e., choice difficulty and satisfaction, perceived system usefulness and quality) when presenting either 6- or 24-categories within the picked taxonomy. Among 297 participants, we found that personality traits are related to music taxonomy preferences. Furthermore, our findings show that the number of categories within a taxonomy influences the user experience in different ways and is moderated by music expertise. Our findings can support personalized user interfaces in music streaming services. By knowing the user’s personality and expertise, the user interface can adapt to the user’s preferred way of music browsing and thereby mitigate the problems that music listeners are facing while finding their way through the abundance of music choices online nowadays.

The third workshop on Theory-Informed User Modeling for Tailoring and Personalizing Interfaces (HUMANIZE)1 took place in conjunction with the 24th annual meeting of the intelligent user interfaces (IUI)2 community in Los Angeles, CA, USA on March 20, 2019. The goal of the workshop was to attract researchers from different fields by accepting contributions on the intersection of practical data mining methods and theoretical knowledge for personalization. A total of six papers were accepted for this edition of the workshop.

The second workshop on Theory-Informed UserModeling for Tailoring and Personalizing Interfaces (HUMANIZE)1 took place in conjunction with the 23rd annual meeting of the intelligent user interfaces (IUI)2 community in Tokyo, Japan on March 11, 2018. The goal of the workshop was to attract researchers from different fields by accepting contributions on the intersection of practical data mining methods and theoretical knowledge for personalization. A total of eight papers were accepted for this edition of the workshop.

Instagram is a popular social networking application that allowsusers to express themselves through the uploaded contentand the different filters they can apply. In this study we look atthe relationship between the content of the uploaded Instagrampictures and the personality traits of users. To collect data, weconducted an online survey where we asked participants tofill in a personality questionnaire, and grant us access to theirInstagram account through the Instagram API. We gathered54,962 pictures of 193 Instagram users. Through the GoogleVision API, we analyzed the pictures on their content and clusteredthe returned labels with the k-means clustering approach.With a total of 17 clusters, we analyzed the relationship withusers’ personality traits. Our findings suggest a relationshipbetween personality traits and picture content. This allow fornew ways to extract personality traits from social media trails,and new ways to facilitate personalized systems.

Most of the research in recommender systems focuses on data-driven approaches. In this paper we present our vision for complementing data-driven approaches with model-driven ones. We present a preliminary experimental set-up and we expose our research plan. In the experimental set-up we acquired eudaimonic characteristics of movies and user preferences. Furthermore, we performed a preliminary analysis of the acquired data.

One of the important aspects of movie-making is to trigger emotional responses in viewers. These emotional experiences can be divided into hedonic and eudaimonic. While the former are characterized as plain enjoyment, the latter deal with getting greater insight, self-reflection or contemplation. So far, modeling of user preferences about movies and personalization algorithms have largely ignored the eudaimonic aspect of the consumption of movies. In this paper we fill this gap by exploring what are the relationship between (i) eudaimonic and hedonic characteristics of movies, (ii) users' preferences and (iii) users' personality. Our results show that eudaimonic user profiling effectively divides users into pleasure-seekers and meaning-seekers.

Instagram is a popular social networking application that allows users to express themselves through the uploaded content and the different filters they can apply. In this study we look at personality prediction from Instagram picture features. We explore two different features that can be extracted from pictures: 1) visual features (e.g., hue, valence, saturation), and 2) content features (i.e., the content of the pictures). To collect data, we conducted an online survey where we asked participants to fill in a personality questionnaire and grant us access to their Instagram account through the Instagram API. We gathered 54,962 pictures of 193 Instagram users. With our results we show that visual and content features can be used to predict personality from and perform in general equally well. Combining the two however does not result in an increased predictive power. Seemingly, they are not adding more value than they already consist of independently.

The second workshop on Theory-Informed User Modeling for Tailoring and Personalizing Interfaces (HUMANIZE) took place in conjunction with the 23rd annual meeting of the intelligent user interfaces (IUI) community in Tokyo, Japan on March 11, 2018. The goal of the workshop was to attract researchers from different fields by accepting contributions on the intersection of practical data mining methods and theoretical knowledge for personalization. A total of eight papers were accepted for this edition of the workshop.

Personality traits are increasingly being incorporated in systems to provide a personalized experience to the user. Current work focusing on identifying the relationship between personality and behavior, preferences, and needs often do not take into account differences between age groups. With music playing an important role in our lives, differences between age groups may be especially prevalent. In this work we investigate whether differences exist in music listening behavior between age groups. We analyzed a dataset with the music listening histories and personality information of 1415 users. Our results show agreements with prior work that identi€ed personality-based music listening preferences. However, our results show that the agreements we found are in some cases divided over different age groups, whereas in other cases additional correlations were found within age groups. With our results personality-based systems can provide better music recommendations that is in line with the user’s age.