Session Expert: a Lightweight Conference Session Recommender System

At large and popular conferences, it is not uncommon for attendees to feel overwhelmed and lost while trying to navigate through many parallel sessions. In this paper, we present a conference session recommender system. In contrast to the conventional "query-search" model where a system passively engages with users, Session Expert actively interacts with users via natural, human-like conversations and provides personalized recommendations. The underlying session recommender engine is designed to handle the cold start problem, and is lightweight to enable real-time session recommendations and rationale-aware response generation. Specifically, the recommender system alleviates the cold start problem by transferring knowledge from another similar conference in an offline setting. This step is achieved by first exploiting a positive-unlabeled (PU) learning model to reveal the underlying user interest from the historical enrollment data, and then modeling a bilinear relationship which captures how user and session features influence users' interests. Given the learned bilinear model, recommendation scores and rationale can be generated online as it only involves a few matrix-vector multiplications which can be computed efficiently.