Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-16-2020
Publication Title
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
Volume
31
First Page
591
Last Page
627
Abstract
In recent years, researchers in the field of recommender systems have explored a range of advanced interfaces to improve user interactions with recommender systems. Some of the major research ideas explored in this new area include the explainability and controllability of recommendations. Controllability enables end users to participate in the recommendation process by providing various kinds of input. Explainability focuses on making the recommendation process and the reasons behind specific recommendation more clear to the users. While each of these approaches contributes to making traditional “black-box” recommendation more attractive and acceptable to end users, little is known about how these approaches work together. In this paper, we investigate the effects of adding user control and visual explanations in a specific context of an interactive hybrid social recommender system. We present Relevance Tuner+, a hybrid recommender system that allows the users to control the fusion of multiple recommender sources while also offering explanations of both the fusion process and each of the source recommendations. We also report the results of a controlled study (N = 50) that explores the impact of controllability and explainability in this context.
Recommended Citation
Tsai, CH., Brusilovsky, P. The effects of controllability and explainability in a social recommender system. User Model User-Adap Inter 31, 591–627 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-020-09281-5
Comments
This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-020-09281-5
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