Multi-Step Critiquing User Interface for Recommender Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces four user-friendly web interfaces for multi-step critiquing in recommender systems, enhancing decision-making and personalization in hotel recommendations, with broad adaptability and research utility.

Contribution

It presents novel, flexible web interfaces for personalized critiquing in recommender systems, addressing a gap in user-friendly design and facilitating research and testing.

Findings

Interfaces improve user decision-making in hotel recommendations

System is model-agnostic, allowing broad applicability

Highlights limitations and potential improvements in critiquing approaches

Abstract

Recommendations with personalized explanations have been shown to increase user trust and perceived quality and help users make better decisions. Moreover, such explanations allow users to provide feedback by critiquing them. Several algorithms for recommender systems with multi-step critiquing have therefore been developed. However, providing a user-friendly interface based on personalized explanations and critiquing has not been addressed in the last decade. In this paper, we introduce four different web interfaces (available under https://lia.epfl.ch/critiquing/) helping users making decisions and finding their ideal item. We have chosen the hotel recommendation domain as a use case even though our approach is trivially adaptable for other domains. Moreover, our system is model-agnostic (for both recommender systems and critiquing models) allowing a great flexibility and further extensions. Our interfaces are above all a useful tool to help research in recommendation with critiquing. They allow to test such systems on a real use case and also to highlight some limitations of these approaches to find solutions to overcome them.