Co-Staying: A Social Network for Increasing the Trustworthiness of Hotel Recommendations

Recommender systems attempt to match users’ preferences with items. To achieve this, they typically store and process a large amount of user profiles, item attributes, as well as an ever-increasing volume of user-generated feedback about those items. By mining user-generated data, such as reviews, a complex network consisting of users, items, and item properties can be created. Exploiting this network could allow a recommender system to identify, with greater accuracy, items that users are likely to find attractive based on the attributes mentioned in their past reviews as well as in those left by similar users. At the same time, allowing users to visualize and explore the network could lead to novel ways of interacting with recommender systems and might play a role in increasing the trustworthiness of recommendations. We report on a conceptual model for a multimode network for hotel recommendations and discuss potential interactive mechanisms that might be employed for visualizing it.