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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Designing a Conversational Travel Recommender System Based on Data-Driven Destination Characterization</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Linus W. Dietz</string-name>
          <email>linus.dietz@tum.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Saadi Myftija</string-name>
          <email>saadi.myftija@tum.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Wolfgang Wörndl</string-name>
          <email>woerndl@in.tum.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Garching</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="DE">Germany</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2019</year>
      </pub-date>
      <fpage>17</fpage>
      <lpage>21</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Recommending complex, intangible items in a domain with high consequences, such as destinations for traveling, requires additional care when deriving and confronting the users with recommendations. In order to address these challenges, we developed CityRec, a destination recommender that makes two contributions. The first is a data-driven approach to characterize cities according to the availability of venues and travel-related features, such as the climate and costs of travel. The second is a conversational recommender system with 180 destinations around the globe based on the datadriven characterization, which provides prospective travelers with inspiration for and information about their next trip. An online user study with 104 participants revealed that the proposed system has a significantly higher perceived accuracy compared to the baseline approach, however, at the cost of ease of use.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>
        In complex recommendation domains, such as the
recommendation of tourist destinations, tweaking the algorithmic accuracy
ad ultimo brings diminishing returns. It has been shown that the
embedding of the algorithm in an adequate user interface is of
similar importance [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ]. Thus, in this paper, we present a
datadriven conversational destination recommender system that has
two contributions: it presents a novel, data-driven approach for
characterizing destinations on user-understandable dimensions and
shows how this characterization can be facilitated in a
conversational recommender. This approach can be seen as an evolution of
Burke’s FindMe Approach [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] in the area of tourism. We thoroughly
evaluated the system from the users’ perspective to understand the
efect of critiquing on the perceived accuracy of the
recommendations and the satisfaction of the users from using the system.
      </p>
      <p>After the literature review in the subsequent section, we will
present the proposed method for characterizing destinations to
realize content-based recommendations. Section 4, presents the the
design and evaluation of the conversational recommender system
that heavily relies on the previous characterization. We conclude
our findings and point out future work in Section 5.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>
        Tourism recommendation is inherently complex and has several
facets. Borràs et al. enumerate four general functionalities of tourism
recommender systems [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]: recommend travel destinations and
tourist packs [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref31">17, 31</xref>
        ], suggesting attractions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ], trip planners [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref12">10,
12</xref>
        ], and social aspects [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]. In this paper, we focus on the first
aspect and acknowledge that there are further definitions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. Herein,
“destination” refers to cities. The challenge in recommending cities
to a user at home arises from the intangibility of the items and the
high emotional involvement [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref33">33</xref>
        ]. It has been shown that leisure
travel has a positive efect on an individual’s happiness; however,
it does not impact the overall life satisfaction, which has been
attributed to poor tourism products [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ]. An alternative conclusion
could be that travelers visit the wrong places. This gives rise to
researching improved destination recommender systems that can
efifciently and efectively capture the user’s preferences to overcome
the cold start problem [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. Given the characteristics of this domain,
Burke and Ramezani suggested either the content-based [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ] or the
knowledge-based [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] paradigm [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        In traditional information retrieval or static content-based
recommendation, continuously querying for relevant items does not
necessarily lead to better results [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ]. Instead, a directed exploration
of the search space using a conversational method is more
promising [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref8">8, 11</xref>
        ]. Burke et al. proposed and evaluated the FindMe
approach [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ], which allows the critiquing of single items so that the
user can refine the recommendations iteratively until she is satisfied
with the result. More advanced approaches on this topic are those of
McCarthy et al., who propose a method to generate compound
critiques [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ], and McGinty and Smyth, who use the adaptive selection
strategy to ensure diverse, yet fitting recommendations over the
course of several critiquing cycles [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. Recently, Xie et al. showed
that incorporating the user experience into a critiquing system can
improve the performance and recommendations at a reduced efort
by the user [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref35">35</xref>
        ]. In this study, we present a recommender system
leveraging the potentials of the interplay between data science and
user interface design. The items are characterized by a
multidimensional space of features, which are intuitively understandable by
the user and can then be critiqued in any direction. To overcome
the problem of skeptical users hesitating to reveal their complete
preferences [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
        ] and the observation that users find it dificult to
assess their exact preferences until when they are dealing with
the actual set of ofered options [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ], the proposed method uses a
mixture of explicit preference elicitation methods.
      </p>
      <p>
        Using the content-based recommendation paradigm, one has to
choose a domain model and distance metric to compute the most
iftting items for the user. Such models can be realized through
ontologies as done in SigTur [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ] or in a the work of Grün et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ].
The latter is an example of ontologies being used to refine user
profiles by enriching the generic preferences of a tourist through
more specific interests. More often, items are simply characterized
using a multidimensional vector space model. In this case, the
challenge is how to assign each item a value on each dimension, which
is commonly done using expert knowledge. For instance, Herzog
and Wörndl [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref34">15, 34</xref>
        ] characterized regions using travel guides and
their own expert knowledge. Neidhardt et al. developed the Seven
Factor Model of tourist behavioral roles [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ] based on the Big Five
Factor Model [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ] and a factor analysis of existing tourist roles [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref36">36</xref>
        ].
Although they showed its merit in subsequent publications [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">25</xref>
        ], a
common drawback with approaches based on expert judgment is
their scalability to large quantities of items and the dependency on
the accuracy of human judgment. To overcome this, they proposed
a strategy [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref32">32</xref>
        ] for characterizing destinations within the Seven
Factor Model. Using a huge data set of 16,950 destinations
annotated with 26 motivational ratings and 12 geographical attributes,
they proposed two competing methods, cluster analysis and
regression analysis, to map the destinations to the vector space of the
Seven Factor Model. In terms of destination characterization, this
approach is the most similar to the one we proposed. The main
diference is that our data model is directly defined via the data
from the destinations and we are not dependent on expert ratings,
which is an advantage when scaling the approach [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ].
3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>DESTINATION CHARACTERIZATION</title>
      <p>
        The characterization of destinations such as regions or cities is a
challenging task. What are the characteristics of a city for tourists
to base their decision on whether to visit it or not? Previous
approaches have relied on expert assessment [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref32">15, 32</xref>
        ], but the
shortcomings are a potential lack of objectivity and scalability as it is
quite costly to rate myriads of destinations around the world. Thus,
we propose a data-driven approach to characterize cities on the
basis of the variety of venues per category. The underlying
assumption is that, in a city with many restaurants, the travelers have
plenty of options; thus, the quality of experience in the food
category is high. Conversely, a city with very few cultural sites will be
less interesting to a traveler that is interest in this topic. This section
discusses how we collected data about venues and aggregated them
to determine the touristic value of each city.
3.1
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Collecting Venue Information</title>
      <p>There are several providers of information about destinations.
After performing a comparison of providers, such as Google Maps,
Facebook Places, Yelp, OpenStreetMap, and some others, we
decided to use the Foursquare Venue API1, as it ofers suficient rate
limitations and allows us to specify coordinates of a bounding box
in the request parameters. The deciding argument for Foursquare
was the detailed categorization of venues from its taxonomy2.
1https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/api/venues/search
2https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/resources/categories
3.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Characterizing Cities Based on Venue Data</title>
      <p>We collected a data set of 5,723,169 venues in 180 cities around
the world. Foursquare organizes its venues in a tree of 10 top-level
categories, however, we only analyzed the ones relevant for
characterizing the cities for travelers: Arts &amp; Entertainment, Food, Nightlife,
and Outdoors &amp; Recreation. We intend to conceptualize these
features as a multidimensional vector space model and represent each
city as a point in this space. The characterization should
approximate the expected experience that a tourist will have at a city.</p>
      <p>To determine a city’s score for a feature, we analyzed the
distribution of the venue categories. Using the distribution instead of the
absolute number of venues per category, we eliminated the efect
of city size on the category features. Thus, we obtained the ratio
of each feature in the city’s category distribution by dividing the
number of venues per each top level category by the total number
of venues in that city. The underlying assumption is that these
percentages are indicators of the association level of the city with
the feature. This requires the cities to be of at least a certain size
as the distribution of small cities is less reliable. Thus, the smallest
city considered had at least 1,000 venues, with the median being
7,137. We did not analyze the quality of the venues, i.e., through
ratings, as we expected having diferences in the assessment of the
quality owing to cultural diferences.</p>
      <p>Characterizing the cities according to their attractions is a first
step; however, further features are of the travelers’ interest.
Using Climate-Data.org3, we characterized each city using the mean
yearly temperature and the mean yearly precipitation. Furthermore,
we used Numbeo’s “Cost of Living Index”4, which is a relative cost
indicator calculated by combining metrics like consumer goods
prices, restaurants, transportation, and so on as an approximate
price level of visiting the city. Finally, to account for the city size,
we also used the number of venues as a proxy feature for the size
of the city. Table 1 shows the raw values of the features.
3.3</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Cluster Analysis</title>
      <p>
        To evaluate the characterization of the 180 cities, we performed
a cluster analysis, an unsupervised learning method whose goal
is to group data items in a way that within the same group, the
items are similar to each other, whereas the groups are dissimilar.
Because the features of the destinations that we considered have
diferent value ranges, we first applied min-max scaling to give
each feature the same weight. To find the best segmentation, we
experimented with common clustering algorithms, such as k-means,
k-medoids, and hierarchical clustering. To evaluate the quality of
the resulting clusters, we looked into metrics like the within-cluster
sums of squares and the average silhouette width [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref30">30</xref>
        ]. The former
3https://en.climate-data.org
4https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp
is a measure of the variability of the instances within each cluster,
whereas the latter is a measure of how well the instances fit into
their assigned cluster, as opposed to all the other clusters.
      </p>
      <p>Using a systematic approach, we obtained the best results using
hierarchical clustering and five clusters. The clusters named after
the city closest to the centroid are “Cologne, Germany,” with 74
Central European and North American cities; “Rome, Italy” with 35
cities in the Mediterranean and Oceania; “Penang, Malaysia” with
48 destinations residing mostly in Asia; “Mexico City, Mexico” with
ifve metropoleis all around the world; and “Cordoba, Spain,” with
18 small and relatively warm cities in diferent continents. Figure 1
shows the normalized values of the five characteristic cities.
4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>A DATA-DRIVEN CONVERSATIONAL</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>DESTINATION RECOMMENDER SYSTEM</title>
      <p>Having characterized the destinations on eight dimensions, we
facilitate it in a content-based critiquing recommender system.
CityRec is implemented as a web application using NodeJS5 and
ReactJS6 in the frontend. The codebase comprises about 3,500 lines
of code and is available on Github7. A demo can be viewed at
http://cityrec.cm.in.tum.de.
4.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>User Interaction with CityRec</title>
      <p>The recommender system has three steps: (1) initial preference
elicitation, shown in Figure 2 (a); (2) refinement through critiquing,
shown in Figure 2 (b); and (3) a results page. In Step (1), we obtain
the initial scores for the user profile by asking the user to select the
destinations that best reflect her preferences from a set of 12 cities.
We then construct an initial user model by averaging the feature
values of the selected cities. This initial seed of 12 destinations
is not random, but a diverse representation of the data set. We
ifll in the first nine slots by selecting two cities from each of the
ifve previously established destination clusters (one in the case
of the small “Mexico City” cluster). The remaining three slots are
randomly selected cities to account for the size diferences of the
clusters. Using this approach, we can generate numerous, diverse,
but equivalent shortlists because each cluster is represented. From
these 12 cities, the users may choose three to five that best reflect
their preferences. If a user does not recognize many cities, she can
5https://nodejs.org/en/
6https://reactjs.org/
7https://github.com/divino5/cityrec-prototype
request another set of cities. Furthermore, a tooltip encourages the
user to select cities that she finds generally interesting, including
those she has already visited. This ensures that the system has
enough data to work with for generating the initial user profile but
avoids cases where users select many displayed cities, which end
up in generic profiles with averaged-out feature values. The result
of this step is an initial profile of the user that resides in the same
vector space as the items.</p>
      <p>In Step (2), we display a set of four initial destinations, computed
using the Euclidean Distance. To give the users more control over
their preference profile, we ask them to provide feedback on the
initial recommendations by critiquing the cities’ features one after
another on a five-point Likert Scale: “much lower” – “lower” — “just
right” — “higher” — “much higher.” As can be seen in Figure 2 (b), the
user now has more information about the cities, which establishes
transparency and enables her to more informed decisions compared
to in the first step. Using this feedback, we statically update the user
profile scores by −0.2, −0.1, 0, 0.1, or 0.2 to attain a more refined
preference model for the user.</p>
      <p>Finally, in the last step, Step (3), the user is presented with a
results page that shows a ranked list of the top five recommendations
and their attributes, which can be explored. This page also contains
the questionnaire for the evaluation.
4.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>Experimental Setup</title>
      <p>The independent variable of the experiment is the version of the
recommender system. Because we wanted to investigate the
potential advantages and drawbacks of using critiquing in this domain,
we created a baseline system in addition to the previously described
critiquing-based recommender. The only diference in the baseline
system was that the critiquing step, Step (2), is entirely skipped;
that is, the outcome of the initial preference elicitation of Step (1)
is the final result and is displayed in the same way as in Step (3).</p>
      <p>
        The dependent variables are the usage metrics, such as the
choices made at each step, the time taken to specify the preferences,
and the number of clicks. Furthermore, we asked the user to fill
out a subset of the ResQue Questionnaire, a validated, user-centric
evaluation framework for recommender systems [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28">28</xref>
        ].
(Q1) The travel destinations recommended to me by CityRec
matched my interests
(Q2) The recommender system helped me discover new travel
destinations
(Q3) I understood why the travel destinations were recommended
to me
(Q4) I found it easy to tell the system what my preferences are
(Q5) I found it easy to modify my taste profile in this recommender
system
(Q6) The layout and labels of the recommender interface are
adequate
(Q7) Overall, I am satisfied with this recommender system
(Q8) I would use this recommender system again, when looking
for travel destinations
4.3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>Results</title>
      <p>A total of 104 individuals participated in the online survey from
December 2018 to March 2019. Participants (44% females, 56% males)
Variable
(Q1) Interest match
(Q2) Novelty
(Q3) Understanding
(Q4) Tell prefs.
(Q5) Modify profile
(Q6) Interface
(Q7) Satisfaction
(Q8) Future use</p>
      <sec id="sec-11-1">
        <title>Time to results Clicks</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-11-2">
        <title>PCC Food</title>
        <p>PCC Arts
PCC Outdoors
PCC Nightlife
3.58
3.44
3.46
3.73
3.24
4.15
3.66
3.49
60.92s
6.32
-0.11
0.05
0.02
0.2
were recruited by sharing the user study on social media and among
groups of friends and colleagues. The self-reported ages were 0–
20 (7%), 21–30 (69%,) 31–40 (9%), and 41–50 (5%). Random
assignment of the systems was performed after a landing page and had
almost equal (51% versus 49%) completion of the survey.
The significant diference in (Q1) shows that the perceived
recommendation accuracy is higher, when using the proposed critiquing
recommender system, however, at the cost of worse interface
adequacy (Q6). This is attributable to the overhead of the critiquing
step, Step (2), as it takes triple the time to complete the first two
steps and more than triple the number of clicks. Interestingly, the
users value higher accuracy more than the adequacy of the
interface and the efort as can be seen in the significantly higher user
satisfaction (Q7) and the similar levels of potential future use (Q8).</p>
        <p>Furthermore, we observed that the user profiles of the critiquing
system are significantly higher correlated with the self-assessment
in the case of Outdoors &amp; Recreation and Nightlife. This is further
evidence that the critiquing recommender version performs better
in capturing the preferences of the user. In conclusion, the critiquing
version should be preferred as it provides better recommendations
from the users’ perspective.
5</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>CONCLUSIONS</title>
      <p>In this paper, we proposed an approach for tackling the problem
of recommending complex items in the domain of travel
recommendation. We characterized destinations around the globe in a
user-understandable way and directly used this characterization
in an online recommender system. From the evaluation
experiments conducted, we discovered an interesting trade-of between
the perceived recommendation accuracy and the perceived
adequacy of the user interface; however, the users seemed to favor
better recommendations over less efort to obtain them.</p>
      <p>Because CityRec’s source code has been released, it can also serve
as a foundation for the community to investigate conversational
recommender systems based on data-driven item characterization.
The destination characterization showed decent results; however,
it would be worthwhile to investigate further useful features of
destinations that can be derived from other data sources. In this
study, we found that, despite higher perceived accuracy (Q1), the
interface adequacy (Q6) was rated lower in the critiquing system.
Thus, we regard this study as a first step that is to be extended with
a more sophisticated preference elicitation approach using active
learning. Furthermore, the behavior of the algorithm, with respect
to the diversity of the recommendations, should be analyzed as
well.</p>
      <p>Significance levels: ∗ p &lt; 0.05; ∗ ∗ p &lt; 0.01; ∗ ∗ ∗ p &lt; 0.001
The upper part of Table 2 shows the diferences in the mean
values and the significance tests of the dependent variables. The
mean values of the ordinal answers to the questionnaire (Q1–Q8) are
for viewing purposes only; the test statistic was calculated using the
Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction for independent
populations. The null hypotheses were that the medians of variables
of the two groups are equal. In three cases, (Q1), (Q6), and (Q7),
we could refute the null hypothesis, which provides interesting
insights into the users’ assessment of the system.</p>
      <p>In the survey, we also asked the participants to rate their personal
importance of tourism-related aspects. Thus, we could compute the
Pearson Correlation Coeficient (PCC) between the actual profile
from the system and the self-assessment from the survey. The lower
part of Table 2 shows these correlations per system and the result
of the one-sided Fisher’s r-to-Z test for independent samples.</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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