Are Item Attributes a Good Alternative to Context Elicitation in Recommender Systems?

Context-aware recommendation became a major topic of interest within the recommender systems community as the context is crucial to provide the right items at the right moment. Many studies aim at developing complex models to include contextual factors in the recommendation process. Despite a real improvement on the recommendations quality, such contextual factors face users' privacy and data collection issues. We support the idea that context could be expressed in term of item attributes rather than contextual factors. To investigate that hypothesis, we designed an online experiment where 174 users were asked to describe the context in which they would listen the proposed songs for which we collected 12 musical attributes. We make available all the material collected during this study for research purposes and non-commercial use.