Auralist: introducing serendipity into music recommendation

  • Authors:
  • Yuan Cao Zhang;Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha;Daniele Quercia;Tamas Jambor

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Recommendation systems exist to help users discover content in a large body of items. An ideal recommendation system should mimic the actions of a trusted friend or expert, producing a personalised collection of recommendations that balance between the desired goals of accuracy, diversity, novelty and serendipity. We introduce the Auralist recommendation framework, a system that - in contrast to previous work - attempts to balance and improve all four factors simultaneously. Using a collection of novel algorithms inspired by principles of "serendipitous discovery", we demonstrate a method of successfully injecting serendipity, novelty and diversity into recommendations whilst limiting the impact on accuracy. We evaluate Auralist quantitatively over a broad set of metrics and, with a user study on music recommendation, show that Auralist's emphasis on serendipity indeed improves user satisfaction.