Exploratory recommender systems based on reinforcement learning for finding research topic

Abstract

Traditional recommender systems try to select few items from some candidate items to users. Unfortunately, a user often hope recommender system help him to make a decision or finish a task based on his uncertain preference. For example, a researcher could hope recommender system to help him to find an advanced research topic by recommending literatures paper and refining his research interest and. In this paper, we develop an exploratory paper recommender system based on reinforcement learning, which can navigate a researcher to identify research topic by recommending papers continuously. In order to refine and focus user's research preference, as a reinforcement learning method, Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) is employed for navigating recommendation paper. And two improved MAB methods are proposed, including ϵ-Greedy Stochastic Perturbation (ϵ-Greedy-SP) and Continuous Upper Confidence Bound (Con-UCB). Also, a weighted-LDA method is proposed for constructing the topic tree. A prototype system is developed and used to make experiments. Empirical research is made to analyze the change process of users' preference. The results show that the system is very effective for focusing and finding research topic.