Integrating Social Relationships and Personality into MAS-Based Group Recommendations

Abstract

Recommender systems aim to predict the preferences of users and suggest items of interest to them in various domains. While traditional recommendation techniques consider users as individuals, some approaches aim to satisfy the needs of a group of people. Multi-agent systems can be used to develop such recommendations, where multiple intelligent agents interact with each other to achieve a common goal, i.e., deciding which item to recommend. Particularly, negotiation techniques can be used to find a decision that aims at maximizing the satisfaction of all group members. The proposed approach introduces a multi-agent recommender system for a group of users by considering their personality traits, relationships and social interactions during the negotiation process that leads to the generation of recommendations. While traditional recommendation techniques do not take into account the effects of personality traits and relationships between individuals, our approach demonstrates that personality traits, especially personality types in the context of conflict management, and social relationships can significantly impact on the group recommendation. The results indicate that the opinion of an individual can be influenced when she is part of a group that cooperates towards a shared goal. Overall, the proposed approach shows that recommender systems can benefit from considering that factors. This work contributes to understanding the impact of personality traits and social relationships on group recommendations and suggests potential directions for future research.