Skip to main content

Accuracy Is Not Enough: Serendipity Should Be Considered More

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS 2017)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 612))

Abstract

In recent years, information overload has led to the development of a wide variety of different types of recommender systems (RSs), which aim at harnessing the problem in different domains. Most RSs spare no effort to improve the accuracy to help users find items matching their latest preferences. However, RSs with high accuracy not always capture user satisfaction due to that users might get bored with the items which are similar to what they liked in the past. Furthermore, they narrow the horizon of users and limiting the dynamic nature of user interests. Given this, serendipity draws more attention when evaluating RSs. In this paper, we review the studies on serendipity. Working toward this direction, we propose a new metric aiming at evaluating serendipity of RSs and a new strategy to balance the tension between accuracy and serendipity in movie recommender domain.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 259.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 329.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Adamopoulos, P., Tuzhilin, A.: On unexpectedness in recommender systems: or how to better expect the unexpected. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. (TIST) 5(4), 54 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Adomavicius, G., Kwon, Y.O.: Improving aggregate recommendation diversity using ranking-based techniques. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 24(5), 896–911 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Akiyama, T., Obara, K., Tanizaki, M.: Proposal and evaluation of serendipitous recommendation method using general unexpectedness. In: PRSAT@ RecSys, pp. 3–10 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. André, P., Teevan, J., Dumais, S.T.: From x-rays to silly putty via Uranus: serendipity and its role in web search. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2033–2036. ACM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Burkell, J., Quan-Haase, A., Rubin, V.L.: Promoting serendipity online: recommendations for tool design. In: Proceedings of the 2012 iConference, pp. 525–526. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chantanurak, N., Punyabukkana, P., Suchato, A.: Video recommender system using textual data: its application on LMS and serendipity evaluation. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE), pp. 289–295. IEEE (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chiu, Y.S., Lin, K.H., Chen, J.S.: A social network-based serendipity recommender system. In: International Symposium on Intelligent Signal Processing and Communications Systems (ISPACS), pp. 1–5. IEEE (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Fan, X., Mostafa, J., Mane, K., et al.: Personalization is not a panacea: balancing serendipity and personalization in medical news content delivery. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium, pp. 709–714. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Forsblom, A., et al.: Out of the bubble: serendipitous even recommendations at an urban music festival. In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 253–256. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Foster, A., Ford, N.: Serendipity and information seeking: an empirical study. J. Doc. 59(3), 321–340 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Ge, M., Delgado-Battenfeld, C., Jannach, D.: Beyond accuracy: evaluating recommender systems by coverage and serendipity. In: Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 257–260. ACM (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Hornung, T., Ziegler, C.N., Franz, S., et al.: Evaluating hybrid music recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), vol. 01, pp. 57–64. IEEE Computer Society (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Iaquinta, L., De Gemmis, M., Lops, P., et al.: Introducing serendipity in a content-based recommender system. In: Eighth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems, HIS 2008, pp. 168–173. IEEE (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ito, H., Yoshikawa, T., Furuhashi, T.: A study on improvement of serendipity in item-based collaborative filtering using association rule. In: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE), pp. 977–981. IEEE (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Kaminskas, M., Bridge, D.: Diversity, serendipity, novelty, and coverage: a survey and empirical analysis of beyond-accuracy objectives in recommender systems. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. (TIIS) 7(1), 2 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kawamae, N.: Serendipitous recommendations via innovators. In: Proceedings of the 33rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 218–225. ACM (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Lu, Q., Chen, T., Zhang, W., et al.: Serendipitous personalized ranking for top-n recommendation. In: Proceedings of the The 2012 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, vol. 01, pp. 258–265. IEEE Computer Society (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Lu, W., Chung, F.: Computational creativity based video recommendation. In: Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 793–796. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Maksai, A., Garcin, F., Faltings, B.: Predicting online performance of news recommender systems through richer evaluation metrics. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 179–186. ACM (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  20. McNee, S.M., Riedl, J., Konstan, J.A.: Being accurate is not enough: how accuracy metrics have hurt recommender systems. In: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006, pp. 1097–1101. ACM (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Murakami, T., Mori, K., Orihara, R.: Metrics for evaluating the serendipity of recommendation lists. In: Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, pp. 40–46. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Oku, K., Hattori, F.: User evaluation of fusion-based approach for serendipity-oriented recommender system. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Recommendation Utility Evaluation: Beyond RMSE (RUE 2012), pp. 39–44 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Onuma, K., Tong, H., Faloutsos, C.: TANGENT: a novel, ‘Surprise me’, recommendation algorithm. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 657–666. ACM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Pariser, E.: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. Penguin, London (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Remer, T.G.: Serendipity and the Three Princes: From the Peregrinaggio of 1557. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman (1965)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Sugiyama, K., Kan, M.Y.: Serendipitous recommendation for scholarly papers considering relations among researchers. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual International ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 307–310. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Sugiyama, K., Kan, M.Y.: Towards higher relevance and serendipity in scholarly paper recommendation. ACM SIGWEB Newslett. (2015). https://www.comp.nus.edu/~kanmy/papers/SchRec-SIGWebNL.pdf

  28. Taramigkou, M., Bothos, E., Christidis, K., et al.: Escape the bubble: guided exploration of music preferences for serendipity and novelty. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 335–338. ACM (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Taramigkou, M., Bothos, E., Apostolou, D., et al.: Fostering serendipity in online information systems. In: IEEE International Technology Management Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE), pp. 1–10. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Thudt, A., Hinrichs, U., Carpendale, S.: The Bohemian bookshelf: supporting serendipitous book discoveries through information visualization. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1461–1470. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Van Andel, P.: Anatomy of the unsought finding. Serendipity: orgin, history, domains, traditions, appearances, patterns and programmability. Br. J. Philos. Sci. 45(2), 631–648 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Yang, S., Pang, L., Ngo, C.W., et al.: Serendipity-driven celebrity video hyperlinking. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, pp. 413–416. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Zhang, Y.C., Saghdha, D., Quercia, D., et al.: Auralist: introducing serendipity into music recommendation. In: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 13–22. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project 61372113).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ying Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Yu, H., Wang, Y., Fan, Y., Meng, S., Huang, R. (2018). Accuracy Is Not Enough: Serendipity Should Be Considered More. In: Barolli, L., Enokido, T. (eds) Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing . IMIS 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 612. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61542-4_22

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61542-4_22

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61541-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61542-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics