Personality And Recommendation Diversity

Diversity is increasingly recognized as an important metric for evaluating the effectiveness of online recommendations. However, few studies have fully explored the possibility of realizing personalized diversity in recommender systems by taking into account the individual user's spontaneous needs. In this chapter, we emphasize the effect of users' personality on their needs for recommendation diversity. We start with a review of the two branches of research in this area, diversityoriented recommender systems (RS) and personality-based RS. We then report the results from a user survey that we conducted with the aim of identifying the relationship between personality and users' preferences for recommendation diversity. For instance, the personality trait of conscientiousness can affect users' preferences not only for diversity in respect of a particular attribute (such as movie genre, country, or release time), but also their preference for overall diversity when all attributes are considered. Motivated by the survey findings, we propose a personality-based diversity-adjusting strategy for recommender systems, and demonstrate its significant merit in improving users' subjective perceptions of the system's recommendation accuracy. Finally, we consider implications and suggestions for future research directions.