Towards Cognitive Recommender Systems

TLDR

Recommender systems traditionally serve as playlist or product generators, but modern enterprise systems increasingly rely on data, knowledge, and users’ cognitive traits such as personality and behavior. The paper surveys and summarizes prior recommender system studies, discusses their limitations, and proposes a new vision for cognitive recommender systems. It introduces a general framework for data‑driven, knowledge‑driven, and cognition‑driven recommender systems that detect preference changes, predict unknown favorites, and adapt actions in dynamic environments. The authors illustrate a banking scenario showing that current recommender systems fail to incorporate domain expert knowledge, predict customer preferences, and analyze cognitive activities for intelligent, time‑aware recommendations.

Abstract

Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience and use domain experts’ knowledge to adapt to new situations. In this context, an intelligent Recommender System should be able to learn from domain experts’ knowledge and experience, as it is vital to know the domain that the items will be recommended. Traditionally, Recommender Systems have been recognized as playlist generators for video/music services (e.g., Netflix and Spotify), e-commerce product recommenders (e.g., Amazon and eBay), or social content recommenders (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). However, Recommender Systems in modern enterprises are highly data-/knowledge-driven and may rely on users’ cognitive aspects such as personality, behavior, and attitude. In this paper, we survey and summarize previously published studies on Recommender Systems to help readers understand our method’s contributions to the field in this context. We discuss the current limitations of the state of the art approaches in Recommender Systems and the need for our new approach: A vision and a general framework for a new type of data-driven, knowledge-driven, and cognition-driven Recommender Systems, namely, Cognitive Recommender Systems. Cognitive Recommender Systems will be the new type of intelligent Recommender Systems that understand the user’s preferences, detect changes in user preferences over time, predict user’s unknown favorites, and explore adaptive mechanisms to enable intelligent actions within the compound and changing environments. We present a motivating scenario in banking and argue that existing Recommender Systems: (i) do not use domain experts’ knowledge to adapt to new situations; (ii) may not be able to predict the ratings or preferences a customer would give to a product (e.g., loan, deposit, or trust service); and (iii) do not support data capture and analytics around customers’ cognitive activities and use it to provide intelligent and time-aware recommendations.