Silence is also evidence: interpreting dwell time for recommendation from psychological perspective

Social media is a platform for people to share and vote content. From the analysis of the social media data we found that users are quite inactive in rating/voting. For example, a user on average only votes 2 out of 100 accessed items. Traditional recommendation methods are mostly based on users' votes and thus can not cope with this situation. Based on the observation that the dwell time on an item may reflect the opinion of a user, we aim to enrich the user-vote matrix by converting the dwell time on items into users' ``pseudo votes'' and then help improve recommendation performance. However, it is challenging to correctly interpret the dwell time since many subjective human factors, e.g. user expectation, sensitivity to various item qualities, reading speed, are involved into the casual behavior of online reading. In psychology, it is assumed that people have choice threshold in decision making. The time spent on making decision reflects the decision maker's threshold. This idea inspires us to develop a View-Voting model, which can estimate how much the user likes the viewed item according to her dwell time, and thus make recommendations even if there is no voting data available. Finally, our experimental evaluation shows that the traditional rate-based recommendation's performance is greatly improved with the support of VV model.

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