skip to main content
10.1145/3640794.3665881acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescuiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
extended-abstract

You Today, Better Tomorrow: Envisioning the Role of Conversation in Recommender Systems of the Future

Published: 08 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Recommender systems could evolve from traditional models of recommendation that largely harness data on past interactions to predict what a user might want in a given moment, towards systems that also support and nurture user self-actualization. This shift could guide users in exploring and fulfilling the needs of their future potential selves, untethered from their past and current identities. In this provocation, we suggest that interactive conversational recommendation is a suitable means to rouse this vision. Conversational recommendation is capable of eliciting real-time and layered preferences, and can enable systems to take on a more proactive role in dialoguing with users about their aspirational needs—particularly in helping users navigate the intricacies that often surround these needs. We also examine the potential challenges associated with the realization of such recommender systems—for instance, the complexities in transitioning from past-based patterns of personalization to those that accommodate present-oriented and future-oriented personalization, and the preservation of user agency whilst broadening the scope of roles recommender systems can play. Overall, this paper advocates for a necessary progression in recommender systems, one propelled by conversational recommendation, towards designs that not only avail present-day user needs, but also actively stimulate pathways toward the actualization of their potential and aspirational future selves.

References

[1]
Charu C Aggarwal 2016. Recommender systems. Vol. 1. Springer.
[2]
Sofia Bonicalzi, Mario De Caro, and Benedetta Giovanola. 2023. Artificial intelligence and autonomy: on the ethical dimension of recommender systems. Topoi 42, 3 (2023), 819–832.
[3]
Engin Bozdag and Jeroen Van Den Hoven. 2015. Breaking the filter bubble: democracy and design. Ethics and information technology 17 (2015), 249–265.
[4]
Sarah Dean, Sarah Rich, and Benjamin Recht. 2020. Recommendations and user agency: the reachability of collaboratively-filtered information. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency. 436–445.
[5]
Lior Fink, Leorre Newman, and Uriel Haran. 2024. Let me decide: Increasing user autonomy increases recommendation acceptance. Computers in Human Behavior (2024), 108244.
[6]
Sergio Genovesi, Katharina Kaesling, and Scott Robbins. 2023. Recommender Systems: Legal and Ethical Issues. Springer Nature.
[7]
Mouadh Guesmi, Clara Siepmann, Mohamed Amine Chatti, Shoeb Joarder, Qurat Ul Ain, and Rawaa Alatrash. 2023. Validation of the EDUSS Framework for Self-Actualization Based on Transparent User Models: A Qualitative Study. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. 229–238.
[8]
Lijie Guo. 2018. Beyond the top-n: algorithms that generate recommendations for self-actualization. In Proceedings of the 12th acm conference on recommender systems. 573–577.
[9]
F Maxwell Harper, Funing Xu, Harmanpreet Kaur, Kyle Condiff, Shuo Chang, and Loren Terveen. 2015. Putting users in control of their recommendations. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 3–10.
[10]
Dietmar Jannach, Ahtsham Manzoor, Wanling Cai, and Li Chen. 2021. A survey on conversational recommender systems. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 54, 5 (2021), 1–36.
[11]
Richard C Jeffrey. 1974. Preference among preferences. The Journal of Philosophy 71, 13 (1974), 377–391.
[12]
Manveer Kalirai and Anastasia Kuzminykh. 2022. What Can You Do For Me? The Discoverability of Intelligent Assistant Skills. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2022 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers. 57–59.
[13]
Manveer Kalirai, Alex C Williams, and Anastasia Kuzminykh. 2024. Toward Faceted Skill Recommendation in Intelligent Personal Assistants. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. 640–649.
[14]
Judy Kay and Bob Kummerfeld. 2009. Lifelong user modelling goals, issues and challenges. In Proceedings of the Lifelong User Modelling workshop at UMAP, Vol. 9. Citeseer, 27–34.
[15]
Irwin King, Michael R Lyu, and Hao Ma. 2010. Introduction to social recommendation. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web. 1355–1356.
[16]
Bart P Knijnenburg, Saadhika Sivakumar, and Daricia Wilkinson. 2016. Recommender systems for self-actualization. In Proceedings of the 10th acm conference on recommender systems. 11–14.
[17]
Wenqiang Lei, Xiangnan He, Maarten de Rijke, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2020. Conversational recommendation: Formulation, methods, and evaluation. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 2425–2428.
[18]
Wenqiang Lei, Xiangnan He, Yisong Miao, Qingyun Wu, Richang Hong, Min-Yen Kan, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2020. Estimation-action-reflection: Towards deep interaction between conversational and recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 304–312.
[19]
Tien T Nguyen, Pik-Mai Hui, F Maxwell Harper, Loren Terveen, and Joseph A Konstan. 2014. Exploring the filter bubble: the effect of using recommender systems on content diversity. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web. 677–686.
[20]
Bilih Priyogi. 2019. Preference elicitation strategy for conversational recommender system. In Proceedings of the twelfth ACM international conference on web search and data mining. 824–825.
[21]
Francesco Ricci, Lior Rokach, and Bracha Shapira. 2021. Recommender systems: Techniques, applications, and challenges. Recommender systems handbook (2021), 1–35.
[22]
Michael Schrage. 2020. Recommendation engines. MIT press.
[23]
Daniel Stegmann, Melanie Magin, and Birgit Stark. 2022. Filter bubbles. Elgar Encyclopedia of Technology and Politics 37, 2 (2022), 220.
[24]
Louis H Sullivan. 1922. The tall office building artistically considered.
[25]
Jiliang Tang, Suhang Wang, Xia Hu, Dawei Yin, Yingzhou Bi, Yi Chang, and Huan Liu. 2016. Recommendation with social dimensions. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, Vol. 30.
[26]
Cynthia A Thompson, Mehmet H Goker, and Pat Langley. 2004. A personalized system for conversational recommendations. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 21 (2004), 393–428.
[27]
W Zachary, R Wherry, F Glenn, and J Hopson. 1982. Decision situations, decision processes, and decision functions: Towards a theory-based framework for decision-aid design. In Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 355–358.

Index Terms

  1. You Today, Better Tomorrow: Envisioning the Role of Conversation in Recommender Systems of the Future

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CUI '24: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
      July 2024
      616 pages
      ISBN:9798400705113
      DOI:10.1145/3640794
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 08 July 2024

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. Conversational Recommendation
      2. Recommender Systems
      3. Self-Actualization

      Qualifiers

      • Extended-abstract
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Conference

      CUI '24
      Sponsor:
      CUI '24: ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2024
      July 8 - 10, 2024
      Luxembourg, Luxembourg

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 100 submissions, 34%

      Upcoming Conference

      CUI '25
      ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2025
      July 7 - 9, 2025
      Waterloo , ON , Canada

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • 0
        Total Citations
      • 62
        Total Downloads
      • Downloads (Last 12 months)62
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7
      Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      HTML Format

      View this article in HTML Format.

      HTML Format

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media