Context-Aware Places of Interest Recommendations and Explanations

Contextual knowledge has been traditionally used in Recommender Systems (RSs) to improve the recommendation accuracy of the core recommendation algorithm. Beyond this advantage, in this paper we argue that there is an additional benefit of context management; making more convincing recommendations because the system can use the contextual situation of the user to explain why an item has been recommended, i.e., the RS can pinpoint the relationships between the contextual situation and the recommended items to justify the suggestions. The results of a user study indicate that context management and this type of explanations increase the user satisfaction with the recommender system.