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A user-centric evaluation of context-aware recommendations for a mobile news service

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Abstract

Traditional recommender systems provide personal suggestions based on the user’s preferences, without taking into account any additional contextual information, such as time or device type. The added value of contextual information for the recommendation process is highly dependent on the application domain, the type of contextual information, and variations in users’ usage behavior in different contextual situations. This paper investigates whether users utilize a mobile news service in different contextual situations and whether the context has an influence on their consumption behavior. Furthermore, the importance of context for the recommendation process is investigated by comparing the user satisfaction with recommendations based on an explicit static profile, content-based recommendations using the actual user behavior but ignoring the context, and context-aware content-based recommendations incorporating user behavior as well as context. Considering the recommendations based on the static profile as a reference condition, the results indicate a significant improvement for recommendations that are based on the actual user behavior. This improvement is due to the discrepancy between explicitly stated preferences (initial profile) and the actual consumption behavior of the user. The context-aware content-based recommendations did not significantly outperform the content-based recommendations in our user study. Context-aware content-based recommendations may induce a higher user satisfaction after a longer period of service operation, enabling the recommender to overcome the cold-start problem and distinguish user preferences in various contextual situations.

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  1. http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/livinglab/iminds-ilabo

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Acknowledgments

This research was performed in the context of the iMinds-MIX Stream Store project. Stream Store is a project cofunded by iMinds (Interdisciplinary institute for Technology) a research institute founded by the Flemish Government. Companies and organizations involved in the project are De Persgroep, Roularta Media Group nv, iMinds-iLab.o, VMMA, and Limecraft with project support of IWT.

The authors would also like to thank the researchers of MIX for the development of the Stream Store client application and the team of the iMinds-MMLab research group for the processing of the metadata. For the setup of the user experiment and performing the evaluation, the authors would like to express their gratitude to the students of the iMinds-MICT research group.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, iMinds - WiCa - Ghent University, G. Crommenlaan 8 box 201, 9050, Ghent, Belgium

    Toon De Pessemier, Kris Vanhecke & Luc Martens

  2. Department of Communication Sciences, iMinds - MICT - Ghent University, Korte Meer 7-9-11, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Cédric Courtois, Kristin Van Damme & Lieven De Marez

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  1. Toon De Pessemier
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  2. Cédric Courtois
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  3. Kris Vanhecke
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  5. Luc Martens
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Correspondence to Toon De Pessemier.

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De Pessemier, T., Courtois, C., Vanhecke, K. et al. A user-centric evaluation of context-aware recommendations for a mobile news service. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 3323–3351 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2437-9

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