MovieTweeters: An Interactive Interface to Improve Recommendation Novelty

This paper introduces and evaluates a novel interface, MovieTweeters. It is a movie recommendation system which incorporates social information with a traditional recommendation algorithm to generate recommendations for users. Few previous studies have investigated the influence of using social information in interactive interfaces to improve the novelty of recommendations. To address this gap, we investigate whether social information can be incorporated effectively into an interactive interface to improve recommendation novelty and user satisfaction. Our initial results suggest that such an interactive interface does indeed help users discover more novel items. Also, we observed users who perceived that they discovered more novel and diverse items reported increased levels of user satisfaction. Surprisingly, we observed that even though we successfully were able to increase the system diversity of the recommendations, it had a negative correlation with users perception of novelty and diversity of the items highlighting the importance of improved user-centered approaches.