Recommender systems have become the dominant means of curating cultural content, significantly influencing the nature of individual cultural experience. While the majority of research on recommender systems optimizes for personalized user experience, this paradigm does not capture the ways that recommender systems impact cultural experience in the aggregate, across populations of users. Although existing novelty, diversity, and fairness studies probe how systems relate to the broader social role of cultural content, they do not adequately center culture as a core concept and challenge. In this work, we introduce commonality as a new measure that reflects the degree to which recommendations familiarize a given user population with specified categories of cultural content. Our proposed commonality metric responds to a set of arguments developed through an interdisciplinary dialogue between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities. With reference to principles underpinning non-profit, public service media systems in democratic societies, we identify universality of address and content diversity in the service of strengthening cultural citizenship as particularly relevant goals for recommender systems delivering cultural content. Taking diversity in movie recommendation as a case study in enhancing pluralistic cultural experience, we empirically compare systems' performance using commonality and existing utility, diversity, and fairness metrics. Our results demonstrate that commonality captures a property of system behavior complementary to existing metrics and suggest the need for alternative, non-personalized interventions in recommender systems oriented to strengthening cultural citizenship across populations of users. In this way, commonality contributes to a growing body of scholarship developing 'public good' rationales for digital media and ML systems.
翻译:建议系统已成为整理文化内容的主要手段,极大地影响个人文化经验的性质。虽然大多数关于推荐者系统的研究都以个人化用户经验为最佳,但这一模式并未反映建议者系统如何影响整个用户群体的总体文化经验。虽然现有的新颖、多样性和公平研究探索了系统如何与文化内容的更广泛的社会作用相联系,但是它们并没有把文化作为核心概念和挑战的适当核心。在这项工作中,我们将共性作为一种新措施,反映建议者群体熟悉特定文化内容类别的程度。我们提议的共性衡量标准回应了计算机科学、社会科学和人文科学研究人员之间通过跨学科对话开发的一套论点。关于民主社会中非营利性、公共服务媒体系统的基本原则,我们确认在加强文化公民意识服务方面,处理和内容多样性的普遍性是提供文化内容的系统的一个特别相关目标。在加强多元文化经验方面,我们将电影建议作为案例研究,用共同性和现有公用事业、多样性和公平度度度衡量标准对系统的业绩进行了实情比较。我们提出的共同性衡量标准对通过计算机科学科学、社会科学和人文科学以及人文科学的跨学科对话而不断增长的系统提供了补充性。我们的成果显示,在加强现有公民行为体系中,需要发展一种衡量制度。