Integrating Collaboration and Leadership in Conversational Group Recommender Systems

Abstract

Recent observational studies highlight the importance of considering the interactions between users in the group recommendation process, but to date their integration has been marginal. In this article, we propose a collaborative model based on the social interactions that take place in a web-based conversational group recommender system. The collaborative model allows the group recommender to implicitly infer the different roles within the group, namely, collaborative and leader user(s). Moreover, it serves as the basis of several novel collaboration-based consensus strategies that integrate both individual and social interactions in the group recommendation process. A live-user evaluation confirms that our approach accurately identifies the collaborative and leader users in a group and produces more effective recommendations.