Capturing User Interests by Both Exploitation and Exploration

Personalization is one of the important research issues in the areas of information retrieval and Web search. Providing personalized services that are tailored toward the specific preferences and interests of a given user can enhance her experience and satisfaction. However, to effectively capture user interests is a challenging research problem. Some challenges include how to quickly capture user interests in an unobtrusive way, how to provide diversified recommendations, and how to track the drifts of user interests in a timely fashion. In this paper, we propose a model for learning user interests and an algorithm that actively captures user interests through an interactive recommendation process. The key advantage of our algorithm is that it takes into account both exploitation(recommending items that belong to users' core interest) and exploration(discovering potential interests of users). Extensive experiments using synthetic data and a user study show that our algorithm can quickly capture diversified user interests in an unobtrusive way, even when the user interests may drift along time.