CHARM: A Group Recommender ChatBot

Abstract

Group recommender systems (GRSs) are tools that support a group to find items that the whole group would enjoy experiencing jointly. There are two main lines of research in this field. The first line of research focuses on methods that combine the preferences of individual group members to obtain a group preference model and generate appropriate recommendations. The second line of research is more holistic and aims to support groups in all the phases of their decision-making process. The majority of the approaches of the second type use a simple conversational approach, which is critiquing. However, nowadays people heavily rely on social and chat platforms to make group decisions, and we believe that these platforms could be a valuable mean for building more effective GRSs. To this end, we have designed a framework tool that extends standard chat platforms by augmenting it with a chat-bot. The chat-bot enables the communication between the users on one side and the group recommender agent on the other. Our goal is a new holistic approach to group recommendations that would be the more beneficial than previous proposed conversational approaches. We aim to provide the proposed framework as an open environment for researchers to prototype their own GRSs.