Tag-Enhanced Collaborative Filtering for Increasing Transparency and Interactive Control

To increase transparency and interactive control in Recommender Systems, we extended the Matrix Factorization technique widely used in Collaborative Filtering by learning an integrated model of user-generated tags and latent factors derived from user ratings. Our approach enables users to manipulate their preference profile expressed implicitly in the (intransparent) factor space through explicitly presented tags. Furthermore, it seems helpful in cold-start situations since user preferences can be elicited via meaningful tags instead of ratings. We evaluate this approach and present a user study that to our knowledge is the most extensive empirical study of tag-enhanced recommending to date. Among other findings, we obtained promising results in terms of recommendation quality and perceived transparency, as well as regarding user experience, which we analyzed by Structural Equation Modeling.