Lu Guan

Qiong Wu, Yong Liu, Chunyan Miao et al.

With the rapid development of recommender systems, accuracy is no longer the only golden criterion for evaluating whether the recommendation results are satisfying or not. In recent years, diversity has gained tremendous attention in recommender systems research, which has been recognized to be an important factor for improving user satisfaction. On the one hand, diversified recommendation helps increase the chance of answering ephemeral user needs. On the other hand, diversifying recommendation results can help the business improve product visibility and explore potential user interests. In this paper, we are going to review the recent advances in diversified recommendation. Specifically, we first review the various definitions of diversity and generate a taxonomy to shed light on how diversity have been modeled or measured in recommender systems. After that, we summarize the major optimization approaches to diversified recommendation from a taxonomic view. Last but not the least, we project into the future and point out trending research directions on this topic.

Yong Liu, Yinan Zhang, Qiong Wu et al.

Interactive recommendation that models the explicit interactions between users and the recommender system has attracted a lot of research attentions in recent years. Most previous interactive recommendation systems only focus on optimizing recommendation accuracy while overlooking other important aspects of recommendation quality, such as the diversity of recommendation results. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation model, named \underline{D}iversity-promoting \underline{D}eep \underline{R}einforcement \underline{L}earning (D$^2$RL), which encourages the diversity of recommendation results in interaction recommendations. More specifically, we adopt a Determinantal Point Process (DPP) model to generate diverse, while relevant item recommendations. A personalized DPP kernel matrix is maintained for each user, which is constructed from two parts: a fixed similarity matrix capturing item-item similarity, and the relevance of items dynamically learnt through an actor-critic reinforcement learning framework. We performed extensive offline experiments as well as simulated online experiments with real world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.