Evaluating Explanations for different Relationship Strengths

Abstract

People like to travel in groups to visit places. Group recommendation systems can be used to recommend an itinerary of "places of interests" (POIs) in an ordered sequence. The order of POIs in the sequence can be explained to group members to increase acceptance of the recommended items. There is a possibility that explanations which reveal names and rating preferences could create a threat to privacy. The main study in this work uses two group types - a primary group consisting of closely-related members, and a secondary group consisting of loosely-related members. Explanations with either complete information or privacy-preserving information are offered alternatively to these groups. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether different group types need different types of explanations to improve their satisfaction. These explanations explain the entire recommended sequence of POIs with regard to possible conflicting situations that could occur due to disagreement with the order of the sequence. A total of 25 participants took part in the evaluation. There was no significant difference identified between the explanation types preferred by each group type. To understand the underlying reason for this result, a post-hoc analysis was done. We identified a participant's most frequently used conflict-handling modes using the Thomas-Kilmann personality assessment test. We then analyzed the user comments provided during the questionnaire. The analysis potentially suggests that different conflict-handling modes could be a factor affecting which explanation type was preferred by a person when they are in a particular group (e.g. primary vs secondary).