An Eye-Tracking Study: Implication to Implicit Critiquing Feedback Elicitation in Recommender Systems

The critiquing-based recommender system (CBRS) stimulates users to critique the recommended item in terms of its attribute values. It has been shown that such critiquing feedback can effectively improve users' decision quality, especially in complex decision environments such as e-commerce, tourism, and finance. However, because its explicit elicitation process unavoidably demands extra user efforts, the application in real situations is limited. In this paper, we report an eye-tracking experiment with the objective of studying the relationship between users' eye gazes as laid on recommended items and their critiquing feedback. The results indicate the feasibility of inferring users' feedback based on their eye movements. It hence points out a promising roadmap to developing unobtrusive eye-based feedback elicitation for recommender systems.