Accountable Knowledge-aware Recommender Systems

Abstract

Knowledge-aware algorithms represent one of the most innovative research directions in the area of recommender systems. The use of different types of content representation requires new methods to extract descriptive features to adopt in the recommendation process. The literature on knowledge-aware recommender systems is actually rich and constantly evolving in terms of both techniques and software libraries to implement them. This makes also difficult to define reproducible recommendation pipelines, making the accountability of recommender systems a challenge. This tutorial aims to discuss the most recent trends in the area of knowledge-aware recommender systems, including novel representation methods for textual content, and discuss how to implement reproducible pipelines for knowledge-aware recommender systems. We pursue our goals by using a comprehensive Python framework called ClayRS1 to deal with knowledge-aware recommender systems. We would like to provide: (i) common ground for researchers and practitioners interested in the latest knowledge-aware techniques for user modeling and recommender systems; (ii) a practical way for implementing the whole recommendation pipeline, ranging from the content processing for text to the generation of recommendations and the evaluation of their performance.