Using consumer feedback from location-based services in PoI recommender systems for people with autism

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to extract sensory data from consumer reviews to improve location-based recommender systems for people with autism, addressing data scarcity and enhancing personalization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model for extracting sensory information from reviews and integrates it into recommender systems, demonstrating improved accuracy with real-world datasets.

Findings

Best performance with TripAdvisor data

Combining datasets improves recommendation accuracy

Consumer feedback is a valuable sensory data source

Abstract

When suggesting Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders, we must take into account that they have idiosyncratic sensory aversions to noise, brightness and other features that influence the way they perceive places. Therefore, recommender systems must deal with these aspects. However, the retrieval of sensory data about PoIs is a real challenge because most geographical information servers fail to provide this data. Moreover, ad-hoc crowdsourcing campaigns do not guarantee to cover large geographical areas and lack sustainability. Thus, we investigate the extraction of sensory data about places from the consumer feedback collected by location-based services, on which people spontaneously post reviews from all over the world. Specifically, we propose a model for the extraction of sensory data from the reviews about PoIs, and its integration in recommender systems to predict item ratings by considering both user preferences and compatibility information. We tested our approach with autistic and neurotypical people by integrating it into diverse recommendation algorithms. For the test, we used a dataset built in a crowdsourcing campaign and another one extracted from TripAdvisor reviews. The results show that the algorithms obtain the highest accuracy and ranking capability when using TripAdvisor data. Moreover, by jointly using these two datasets, the algorithms further improve their performance. These results encourage the use of consumer feedback as a reliable source of information about places in the development of inclusive recommender systems.