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1. The Connection Between Popularity Bias, Calibration, and Fairness in Recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3383313.3418487  

   Abdollahpouri, Himan ; Mansoury, Masoud ; Burke, Robin ; Mobasher, Bamshad ( September 2020 , RecSys '20: Fourteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Recently there has been a growing interest in fairness-aware recommender systems including fairness in providing consistent performance across different users or groups of users. A recommender system could be considered unfair if the recommendations do not fairly represent the tastes of a certain group of users while other groups receive recommendations that are consistent with their preferences. In this paper, we use a metric called miscalibration for measuring how a recommendation algorithm is responsive to users’ true preferences and we consider how various algorithms may result in different degrees of miscalibration for different users. In particular, we conjecture that popularity bias which is a well-known phenomenon in recommendation is one important factor leading to miscalibration in recommendation. Our experimental results using two real-world datasets show that there is a connection between how different user groups are affected by algorithmic popularity bias and their level of interest in popular items. Moreover, we show that the more a group is affected by the algorithmic popularity bias, the more their recommendations are miscalibrated. 

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2. The FacT: Taming Latent Factor Models for Explainability with Factorization Trees

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3331184.3331244  

   Tao, Yiyi ; Jia, Yiling ; Wang, Nan ; Wang, Hongning ( July 2019 , Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval)

   Latent factor models have achieved great success in personalized recommendations, but they are also notoriously difficult to explain. In this work, we integrate regression trees to guide the learning of latent factor models for recommendation, and use the learnt tree structure to explain the resulting latent factors. Specifically, we build regression trees on users and items respectively with user-generated reviews, and associate a latent profile to each node on the trees to represent users and items. With the growth of regression tree, the latent factors are gradually refined under the regularization imposed by the tree structure. As a result, we are able to track the creation of latent profiles by looking into the path of each factor on regression trees, which thus serves as an explanation for the resulting recommendations. Extensive experiments on two large collections of Amazon and Yelp reviews demonstrate the advantage of our model over several competitive baseline algorithms. Besides, our extensive user study also confirms the practical value of explainable recommendations generated by our model. 

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3. Explainable Recommendation via Multi-Task Learning in Opinionated Text Data

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3209978.3210010  

   Wang, Nan ; Wang, Hongning ; Jia, Yiling ; Yin, Yue ( July 2018 , SIGIR '18 The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval)

   Explaining automatically generated recommendations allows users to make more informed and accurate decisions about which results to utilize, and therefore improves their satisfaction. In this work, we develop a multi-task learning solution for explainable recommendation. Two companion learning tasks of user preference modeling for recommendation and opinionated content modeling for explanation are integrated via a joint tensor factorization. As a result, the algorithm predicts not only a user's preference over a list of items, i.e., recommendation, but also how the user would appreciate a particular item at the feature level, i.e., opinionated textual explanation. Extensive experiments on two large collections of Amazon and Yelp reviews confirmed the effectiveness of our solution in both recommendation and explanation tasks, compared with several existing recommendation algorithms. And our extensive user study clearly demonstrates the practical value of the explainable recommendations generated by our algorithm. 

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4. A recommendation approach for user privacy preferences in the fitness domain

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-019-09246-3  

   Sanchez, Odnan Ref ; Torre, Ilaria ; He, Yangyang ; Knijnenburg, Bart P. ( October 2019 , User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction)

   Fitness trackers are undoubtedly gaining in popularity. As fitness-related data are persistently captured, stored, and processed by these devices, the need to ensure users’ privacy is becoming increasingly urgent. In this paper, we apply a data-driven approach to the development of privacy-setting recommendations for fitness devices. We first present a fitness data privacy model that we defined to represent users’ privacy preferences in a way that is unambiguous, compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and able to represent both the user and the third party preferences. Our crowdsourced dataset is collected using current scenarios in the fitness domain and used to identify privacy profiles by applying machine learning techniques. We then examine different personal tracking data and user traits which can potentially drive the recommendation of privacy profiles to the users. Finally, a set of privacy-setting recommendation strategies with different guidance styles are designed based on the resulting profiles. Interestingly, our results show several semantic relationships among users’ traits, characteristics, and attitudes that are useful in providing privacy recommendations. Even though several works exist on privacy preference modeling, this paper makes a contribution in modeling privacy preferences for data sharing and processing in the IoT and fitness domain, with specific attention to GDPR compliance. Moreover, the identification of well-identified clusters of preferences and predictors of such clusters is a relevant contribution for user profiling and for the design of interactive recommendation strategies that aim to balance users’ control over their privacy permissions and the simplicity of setting these permissions. 

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5. Exploring author gender in book rating and recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-020-09284-2  

   Ekstrand, Michael D. ; Kluver, Daniel ( February 2021 , User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   Collaborative filtering algorithms find useful patterns in rating and consumption data and exploit these patterns to guide users to good items. Many of these patterns reflect important real-world phenomena driving interactions between the various users and items; other patterns may be irrelevant or reflect undesired discrimination, such as discrimination in publishing or purchasing against authors who are women or ethnic minorities. In this work, we examine the response of collaborative filtering recommender algorithms to the distribution of their input data with respect to one dimension of social concern, namely content creator gender. Using publicly available book ratings data, we measure the distribution of the genders of the authors of books in user rating profiles and recommendation lists produced from this data. We find that common collaborative filtering algorithms tend to propagate at least some of each user’s tendency to rate or read male or female authors into their resulting recommendations, although they differ in both the strength of this propagation and the variance in the gender balance of the recommendation lists they produce. The data, experimental design, and statistical methods are designed to be reusable for studying potentially discriminatory social dimensions of recommendations in other domains and settings as well. 

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