Using consumer feedback from location-based services in PoI recommender systems for people with autism
This work addresses the problem of creating inclusive recommender systems for people with autism by leveraging existing consumer reviews to overcome data scarcity, though it is incremental in applying known methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of incorporating sensory data for Points of Interest (PoIs) in recommender systems for people with autism by extracting such data from consumer feedback on location-based services like TripAdvisor, resulting in improved accuracy and ranking capability when using this data, with further gains from combining it with crowdsourced datasets.
When suggesting Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders, we must take into account that they have idiosyncratic sensory aversions to noise, brightness and other features that influence the way they perceive places. Therefore, recommender systems must deal with these aspects. However, the retrieval of sensory data about PoIs is a real challenge because most geographical information servers fail to provide this data. Moreover, ad-hoc crowdsourcing campaigns do not guarantee to cover large geographical areas and lack sustainability. Thus, we investigate the extraction of sensory data about places from the consumer feedback collected by location-based services, on which people spontaneously post reviews from all over the world. Specifically, we propose a model for the extraction of sensory data from the reviews about PoIs, and its integration in recommender systems to predict item ratings by considering both user preferences and compatibility information. We tested our approach with autistic and neurotypical people by integrating it into diverse recommendation algorithms. For the test, we used a dataset built in a crowdsourcing campaign and another one extracted from TripAdvisor reviews. The results show that the algorithms obtain the highest accuracy and ranking capability when using TripAdvisor data. Moreover, by jointly using these two datasets, the algorithms further improve their performance. These results encourage the use of consumer feedback as a reliable source of information about places in the development of inclusive recommender systems.