Enhancing Recommender Systems With a Stimulus-Evoked Curiosity Mechanism

Ke Xu, Junwen Mo, Yi Cai, Huaqing Min

Abstract: Classical algorithms in recommender systems (RS) mainly emphasis on achieving high accuracy and thus recommend items precisely matching a user's past choices. However, the user may gradually lose interest and crave something more inspiring. In psychology, curiosity is a critical human nature and can be efficient bootstrap exploratory behaviors, thus this phenomenon can be explained as insufficient stimulation to induce curiosity regard to recommended items. Inspired from the above, this work proposes a Curiosity-drive Recommendation Framework (CdRF) which incorporates a highly innovative Stimulus-evoked Curiosity mechanism (SeCM) together with a basic accuracy-oriented algorithm via Borda count. In SeCM, we first estimate the stimulus intensity appearing on each item for each user and then model personalized curiosity among the calculated intensities using Wundt curve. For the target user, the output of CdRF is a ranked list of N N items which are both relevant and highly curiousness. We conduct extensive experiments using four public datasets to evaluate the performance of each specification of SeCM as well as the whole framework CdRF. The results reveal that SeCM can flexibly generate diversified items and CdRF can increase diversity in terms of ILS, Newness and AD while compromising very little Precision. This kind of research also offers a way to understand both individual differences in curiosity and how curiosity contributes to item exploration at the level of RS.