Single User Group Recommendations

Abstract

Going to restaurants is also a social activity; people often go to restaurants with family, friends, or colleagues. However, most restaurant finder systems, such as TripAdvisor, allow users to search for restaurants matching only one user's preferences. We present here a system GUI aiming at extending such systems to support the organizer of an event in finding a proper restaurant for her group. The organizer is responsible for expressing the group members' preferences, analyzing the recommendations, and finally selecting a restaurant. We have identified three recommendation techniques (popularity-based, relevance-based, and critiquing-based) to support such a task. These techniques make different assumptions on the amount of information about the group members' preferences available to the organizer, and they support alternative choice patterns. Moreover, the proposed system supports in the final decision-making stage by: a) indicating the extent to which a recommended restaurant is attractive to each group member, w.r.t. the entered preferences, b) suggesting a good choice for the group, and c) illustrating the similarity of other groups which have previously bookmarked one of the recommended restaurants.