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You Get What You Chat: Using Conversations to Personalize Search-Based Recommendations

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12656))

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Abstract

Prior work on personalized recommendations has focused on exploiting explicit signals from user-specific queries, clicks, likes and ratings. This paper investigates tapping into a different source of implicit signals of interests and tastes: online chats between users. The paper develops an expressive model and effective methods for personalizing search-based entity recommendations. User models derived from chats augment different methods for re-ranking entity answers for medium-grained queries. The paper presents specific techniques to enhance the user models by capturing domain-specific vocabularies and by entity-based expansion. Experiments are based on a collection of online chats from a controlled user study covering three domains: books, travel, food. We evaluate different configurations and compare chat-based user models against concise user profiles from questionnaires. Overall, these two variants perform on par in terms of NCDG@20, but each has advantages on certain domains.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Ghazaleh H. Torbati, Andrew Yates & Gerhard Weikum

Authors
  1. Ghazaleh H. Torbati
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  2. Andrew Yates
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  3. Gerhard Weikum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ghazaleh H. Torbati .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Djoerd Hiemstra

  2. Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium

    Marie-Francine Moens

  3. Toulouse Institute of Computer Science Research, Toulouse, France

    Josiane Mothe

  4. Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

    Raffaele Perego

  5. Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

    Martin Potthast

  6. Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

    Fabrizio Sebastiani

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Torbati, G.H., Yates, A., Weikum, G. (2021). You Get What You Chat: Using Conversations to Personalize Search-Based Recommendations. In: Hiemstra, D., Moens, MF., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., Sebastiani, F. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12656. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72113-8_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72113-8_14

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72112-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72113-8

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