Leveraging Interfaces to Improve Recommendation Diversity

Increasing diversity in the output of a recommender system is an active research question for solving a long-tail issue. Most of the current approaches have focused on ranked list optimization to improve recommendation diversity. However, little is known about the effect that a visual interface can have on this issue. This paper shows that a multidimensional visualization promotes diversity of social exploration in the context of an academic conference. Our study shows a significant difference in the exploration pattern between ranked list and visual interfaces. The results show that a visual interface can help the user explore a a more diverse set of recommended items.