Experiments in dynamic critiquing

ABSTRACT

Conversational recommender systems are commonly used to help users to navigate through complex product-spaces by alternatively making product suggestions and soliciting user feedback in order to guide subsequent suggestions. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in developing effective interfaces that support user interaction in domains of limited user expertise. Critiquing has proven to be a popular and successful user feedback mechanism in this regard, but is typically limited to the modification of single features. We review a novel approach to critiquing, dynamic critiquing, that allows users to modify multiple features simultaneously by choosing from a range of so-called compound critiques that are automatically proposed based on their current position within the product-space. In addition, we introduce the results of an important new live-user study that evaluates the practical benefits of dynamic critiquing.

REFERENCES

• 1: Half-day tutorial presented with John Riedl and Joseph Konstan at IJCAI 2003, the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico, August 9-15 2003.
• 2: Rakesh Agrawal , Hiekki Mannila , Ramakrishnan Srikant , Hannu Toivonen , A. Inkeri Verkamo, Fast discovery of association rules, Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, CA, 1996
• 3: J. Anthony, B. Großmann-Hutter, L. Marchand, R. Rummer, T. Bohnenberger, and F. Wittig. When Actions Have Consequences: Empirically Based Decision Making for Intelligent User Interfaces. Knowledge-Based Systems, 14:75--92, 2001.
• 4: R. Burke, K. Hammond, and B. Young. Knowledge-based navigation of complex information spaces. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 462--468. AAAI Press/MIT Press, 1996. Portland, OR.
• 5: Robin D. Burke , Kristian J. Hammond , Benjamin C. Young, The FindMe Approach to Assisted Browsing, IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications, v.12 n.4, p.32-40, July 1997 [doi>10.1109/64.608186]
• 6: Zhenjiang Hu , Wei-Ngan Chin , Masato Takeichi, Calculating a New Data Mining Algorithm for Market Basket Analysis, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, p.169-184, January 01, 2000
• 7: K. McCarthy, J. Reilly, L. McGinty, and B. Smyth. On the Dynamic Generation of Compound Critiques in Conversational Recommender Systems. In P. D. Bra, editor, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH-04), 2004. Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
• 8: K. McCarthy, J. Reilly, L. McGinty, and B. Smyth. Thinking Positively - Explanatory Feedback for Conversational Recommender Systems. In P. Cunningham and D. McSherry, editors, Proceedings of the European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR-04) Explanation Workshop, pages 115--124, 2004. Madrid, Spain.
• 9: L. McGinty and B. Smyth. The Role of Diversity in Conversational Systems. In D. Bridge and K. Ashley, editors, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR-03). Springer, 2003. Troindheim, Norway.
• 10: L. McGinty and B. Smyth. Tweaking Critiquing. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Personalization and Web Techniques at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03). Morgan-Kaufmann, 2003. Acapulco, Mexico.
• 11: J. Reilly, K. McCarthy, L. McGinty, and B. Smyth. Dynamic Critiquing. In P. G. Calero and P. Funk, editors, Proceedings of the European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR-04). Springer, 2004. Madrid, Spain.
• 12: J. Reilly, K. McCarthy, L. McGinty, and B. Smyth. Incremental Critiquing. In Proceedings of The 24th SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. (AI-04), 2004. Cambridge, UK.
• 13: J. Ben Schafer , Joseph A. Konstan , John Riedl, E-Commerce Recommendation Applications, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, v.5 n.1-2, p.115-153, January-April 2001 [doi>10.1023/A:1009804230409]
• 14: D. Weld, C. Anderson, P. Domingos, O. Etzioni, T. Lau, K. Gajos, and S. Wolfman. Automatically Personalizing User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), 2003. Acapulco, Mexico.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
critiquing, recommender systems, user-interfacing/feedback