The Information Value of Context for a Mobile News Service

Toon De Pessemier, Kris Vanhecke, Luc Martens

2015

Abstract

Traditional recommender systems provide personal suggestions based on the user’s preferences, without taking into account any additional contextual information such as time or device type. However, in many applications, this contextual information may be relevant for the human decision process, and as a result, be important to incorporate into the recommendation process, which gave rise to context-aware recommender systems. However, the information value of contextual data for the recommendation process is highly dependent on the application domain and the users’ consumption behavior in different contextual situations. This research aims to assess the information value of context for a recommender system of a mobile news service by analyzing user interactions and feedback. A large-scale user study shows that context-aware recommendations outperform traditional recommendations, but also indicates that the accuracy improvement might be limited in a real-life situation. Service usage takes place in a limited number of different contexts due to user habits and repetitive behavior, leaving little room for optimization based on the context. Data fragmentation over different contextual situations strengthens the sparsity problem, thereby limiting the user-perceived accuracy gain obtained by incorporating context in the recommender. These findings are important for news providers when considering to offer context-aware recommendations.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

De Pessemier T., Vanhecke K. and Martens L. (2015). The Information Value of Context for a Mobile News Service . In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-106-9, pages 363-369. DOI: 10.5220/0005408603630369

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist15,
author={Toon De Pessemier and Kris Vanhecke and Luc Martens},
title={The Information Value of Context for a Mobile News Service},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2015},
pages={363-369},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005408603630369},
isbn={978-989-758-106-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - The Information Value of Context for a Mobile News Service
SN - 978-989-758-106-9
AU - De Pessemier T.
AU - Vanhecke K.
AU - Martens L.
PY - 2015
SP - 363
EP - 369
DO - 10.5220/0005408603630369