Argument-based mixed recommenders and their application to movie suggestion

Recommender systems have become prevalent in recent years as they help users to access relevant items from the vast universe of possibilities available these days. Most existing research in this area is based purely on quantitative aspects such as indices of popularity or measures of similarity between items or users. This work introduces a novel perspective on movie recommendation that combines a basic quantitative method with a qualitative approach, resulting in a family of mixed character recommender systems. The proposed framework incorporates the use of arguments in favor or against recommendations to determine if a suggestion should be presented or not to a user. In order to accomplish this, Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) is adopted as the underlying formalism to model facts and rules about the recommendation domain and to compute the argumentation process. This approach has a number features that could be proven useful in recommendation settings. In particular, recommendations can account for several different aspects (e.g., the cast, the genre or the rating of a movie), considering them all together through a dialectical analysis. Moreover, the approach can stem for both content-based or collaborative filtering techniques, or mix them in any arbitrary way. Most importantly, explanations supporting each recommendation can be provided in a way that can be easily understood by the user, by means of the computed arguments. In this work the proposed approach is evaluated obtaining very positive results. This suggests a great opportunity to exploit the benefits of transparent explanations and justifications in recommendations, sometimes unrealized by quantitative methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.