Serendipity Recommender System for Academic Disciplines

Abstract

This paper proposes a system that encourages users to discover disciplines such as mathematics and biology, which they have not explored before. The recommendation of unexpected information is highly demanded in current recommender systems, which are used in various situations. To meet this need, the present study considers the serendipitous discovery of unexpected disciplines related to the information of interest to users. Serendipity means “the ability to see what others do not, and to discover useful things with your own wisdom.” Our system encourages users first to select a photograph of interest, and then to ponder the relevance of another photograph appearing on the display. The system is also equipped with a hint generation function that outputs an academic discipline related to the photos in order to foster users’ dictionary of unexpected relationship between the two photos. Whether users gain serendipity from the system was evaluated in an experiment. The results confirmed that the system induced serendipity by providing unexpected information through photographs linked to disciplines.