{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,31]],"date-time":"2026-07-31T02:51:14Z","timestamp":1785466274493,"version":"3.56.0"},"reference-count":73,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,16]],"date-time":"2023-10-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1697414400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Science Foundation","award":["#1910696"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["#1910696"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n            Today\u2019s recommender systems are criticized for recommending items that are too obvious to arouse users\u2019 interests. Therefore, the research community has advocated some \u201cbeyond accuracy\u201d evaluation metrics such as novelty, diversity, and serendipity with the hope of promoting information discovery and sustaining users\u2019 interests over a long period of time. While bringing in new perspectives, most of these evaluation metrics have not considered individual users\u2019 differences in their capacity to experience those \u201cbeyond accuracy\u201d items. Open-minded users may embrace a wider range of recommendations than conservative users. In this article, we proposed to use curiosity traits to capture such individual users\u2019 differences. We developed a model to approximate an individual\u2019s curiosity distribution over different stimulus levels. We used an item\u2019s surprise level to estimate the stimulus level and whether such a level is in the range of the user\u2019s appetite for stimulus, called\n            <jats:italic>Comfort Zone<\/jats:italic>\n            . We then proposed a recommender system framework that considers both user preference and their\n            <jats:italic>Comfort Zone<\/jats:italic>\n            where the curiosity is maximally aroused. Our framework differs from a typical recommender system in that it leverages human\u2019s\n            <jats:italic>Comfort Zone<\/jats:italic>\n            for stimuli to promote engagement with the system. A series of evaluation experiments have been conducted to show that our framework is able to rank higher the items with not only high ratings but also high curiosity stimulation. The recommendation list generated by our algorithm has a higher potential of inspiring user curiosity compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. The personalization factor for assessing the surprise stimulus levels further helps the recommender model achieve smaller (better) inter-user similarity.\n          <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3617598","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,25]],"date-time":"2023-08-25T11:56:23Z","timestamp":1692964583000},"page":"1-23","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":13,"title":["Modeling Users\u2019 Curiosity in Recommender Systems"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"18","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3097-8451","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhe","family":"Fu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5418-6969","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xi","family":"Niu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/AICCSA47632.2019.9035339"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_3_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1126\/science.aaa1160"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_4_2","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Development and Learning","author":"Barto Andrew G.","year":"2004","unstructured":"Andrew G. Barto, Satinder Singh, and Nuttapong Chentanez. 2004. Intrinsically motivated learning of hierarchical collections of skills. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Development and Learning. 112\u201319."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_5_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1126\/science.153.3731.25"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_6_2","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR\u201911)","author":"Bertin-Mahieux Thierry","year":"2011","unstructured":"Thierry Bertin-Mahieux, Daniel P. W. Ellis, Brian Whitman, and Paul Lamere. 2011. The million song dataset. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR\u201911)."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_7_2","unstructured":"Gerlof Bouma. 2009. Normalized (pointwise) mutual information in collocation extraction. In Proceedings of the International Conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) Vol. 30 31\u201340."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_8_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TSC.2020.2964552"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_9_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s11257-019-09221-y"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_10_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3205849"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_11_2","unstructured":"Meadhbh Foster and Mark T. Keane. 2013. Surprise: You\u2019ve got some explaining to do. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society . Berlin 2321\u20132326."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_12_2","article-title":"Deep learning models for serendipity recommendations: A survey and new perspectives","author":"Fu Zhe","year":"2023","unstructured":"Zhe Fu, Xi Niu, and Mary Lou Maher. 2023. Deep learning models for serendipity recommendations: A survey and new perspectives. ACM Computing Surveys 56, 1, Article 19 (January 2024), 26 pages.","journal-title":"ACM Computing Surveys"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_13_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3539618.3591787"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_14_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3487047"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_15_2","first-page":"8","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems ACS","author":"Grace Kazjon","year":"2015","unstructured":"Kazjon Grace and Mary Lou Maher. 2015. Surprise and reformulation as meta-cognitive processes in creative design. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems ACS. 8."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_16_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-44989-0_32"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_17_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-47096-2_11"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_18_2","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Creativity. Association for Computational Creativity","author":"Grace Kazjon","year":"2017","unstructured":"Kazjon Grace, Mary Lou Maher Maryam Mohseni, and Rafael P\u00e9rez y P\u00e9rez. 2017. Encouraging p-creative behaviour with computational curiosity. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Creativity. Association for Computational Creativity."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_19_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3209978.3209981"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_20_2","first-page":"6840","article-title":"Denoising diffusion probabilistic models","volume":"33","author":"Ho Jonathan","year":"2020","unstructured":"Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, and Pieter Abbeel. 2020. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (2020), 6840\u20136851.","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_21_2","unstructured":"Yelp Inc.2020. Yelp open dataset. Retrieved December 13 2021 from https:\/\/www.yelp.com\/dataset"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_22_2","first-page":"547","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems","author":"Itti Laurent","year":"2006","unstructured":"Laurent Itti and Pierre F. Baldi. 2006. Bayesian surprise attracts human attention. In Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 547\u2013554."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_23_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/582415.582418"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_24_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1401890.1401944"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_25_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2016.08.014"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_26_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Youfang Leng Li Yu and Xi Niu. 2022. Dynamically aggregating individuals\u2019 social influence and interest evolution for group recommendations. Information Sciences 614 (2022) 223\u2013239.","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ins.2022.09.058"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_27_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Huiyuan Li Li Yu Xi Niu Youfang Leng and Qihan Du. 2024. Sequential and graphical cross-domain recommendations with a multi-view hierarchical transfer gate. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data 18 1 Article 8 (January 2024) 28 pages.","DOI":"10.1145\/3604615"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_28_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3383313.3412238"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_29_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/956863.956951"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_30_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3357384.3357868"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_31_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3178876.3186150"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_32_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1037\/0033-2909.116.1.75"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_33_2","first-page":"139","volume-title":"Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science, S. Bagnara (Ed.)","author":"Macedo Lu\u00eds","year":"1999","unstructured":"Lu\u00eds Macedo and Am\u00edlcar Cardoso. 1999. Towards artificial forms of surprise and curiosity. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science, S. Bagnara (Ed.). Citeseer, 139\u2013144."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_34_2","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society","author":"Macedo Lu\u00eds","year":"2001","unstructured":"Lu\u00eds Macedo and Am\u00edlcar Cardoso. 2001. Modeling forms of surprise in an artificial agent. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_35_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/EPIA.2005.341263"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_36_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3407182"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_37_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2766462.2767755"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_38_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kathryn Merrick Mary Lou Maher and Rob Saunders. 2008. Achieving adaptable behaviour in intelligent rooms using curious supervised learning agents. Proc. CAADRiA 2008 Beyond Computer Aided Design . 185\u2013192.","DOI":"10.52842\/conf.caadria.2008.185"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_39_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-540-89187-1"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_40_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1126\/science.159.3810.56"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_41_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1024422330338"},{"issue":"12","key":"e_1_3_2_42_2","first-page":"2735","article-title":"Sparsity and cold start recommendation system challenges solved by hybrid feedback","volume":"12","author":"Mohamed Marwa Hussien","year":"2019","unstructured":"Marwa Hussien Mohamed, Mohamed Helmy Khafagy, Heba Elbeh, and Ahmed Mohamed Abdalla. 2019. Sparsity and cold start recommendation system challenges solved by hybrid feedback. International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology 12, 12 (2019), 2735\u20132742.","journal-title":"International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_43_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3234944.3234974"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_44_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3099023.3099097"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_45_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3295750.3298963"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_46_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3173574.3173597"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_47_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3406522.3446017"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_48_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3209978.3210197"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_49_2","unstructured":"Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frederic Kaplan. 2004. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics Lund University Cognitive Studies . 127\u2013130."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_50_2","volume-title":"The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing what We Read and How We Think","author":"Pariser Eli","year":"2011","unstructured":"Eli Pariser. 2011. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing what We Read and How We Think. Penguin."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_51_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1038\/4580"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_52_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1017\/S0890060404040119"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_53_2","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Institut Fur Informatik, Technische Universitat Munchen, Arcisstr. 21, 800 Munchen 2","author":"Schmidhuber J\u00fcrgen","year":"1991","unstructured":"J\u00fcrgen Schmidhuber. 1991. Adaptive confidence and adaptive curiosity. In Proceedings of the Institut Fur Informatik, Technische Universitat Munchen, Arcisstr. 21, 800 Munchen 2. Citeseer."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_54_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/IJCNN.1991.170605"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_55_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/CEC.1999.785467"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_56_2","first-page":"2256","volume-title":"Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning","author":"Sohl-Dickstein Jascha","year":"2015","unstructured":"Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Eric Weiss, Niru Maheswaranathan, and Surya Ganguli. 2015. Deep unsupervised learning using nonequilibrium thermodynamics. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2256\u20132265."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_57_2","first-page":"159","volume-title":"Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks","author":"Storck Jan","year":"1995","unstructured":"Jan Storck, Sepp Hochreiter, and J\u00fcrgen Schmidhuber. 1995. Reinforcement driven information acquisition in non-deterministic environments. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. Citeseer, 159\u2013164."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_58_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3357384.3357895"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_59_2","unstructured":"Jianing Sun Wei Guo Dengcheng Zhang Yingxue Zhang Florence Regol Yaochen Hu Huifeng Guo Ruiming Tang Han Yuan Xiuqiang He and Mark Coates. 2020. A framework for recommending accurate and diverse items using bayesian graph convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD\u201920) . Association for Computing Machinery New York NY 2030\u20132039."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_60_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Masaki Suwa J. S. Gero and Terry Purcell. 2000. Unexpected discoveries and S-invention of design requirements: Important vehicles for a design process. Design Studies 21 6 (2000) 539\u2013567.","DOI":"10.1016\/S0142-694X(99)00034-4"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_61_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/DEVLRN.2007.4354044"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_62_2","article-title":"Attention is all you need","volume":"30","author":"Vaswani Ashish","year":"2017","unstructured":"Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, \u0141ukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (2017), 5998\u20136008.","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"issue":"3","key":"e_1_3_2_63_2","first-page":"34","article-title":"Interaction between learning and development","volume":"23","author":"Vygotsky Lev","year":"1978","unstructured":"Lev Vygotsky. 1978. Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the Development of Children 23, 3 (1978), 34\u201341.","journal-title":"Readings on the Development of Children"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_64_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3539618.3591663"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_65_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3383313.3412258"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_66_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/FUZZ-IEEE.2012.6251362"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_67_2","volume-title":"Grundz\u00fcge de Physiologischen Psychologie","author":"Wundt Wilhelm Max","year":"1874","unstructured":"Wilhelm Max Wundt. 1874. Grundz\u00fcge de Physiologischen Psychologie, Vol. 1. W. Engelman."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_68_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2736277.2741095"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_69_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3459637.3482394"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_70_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TKDE.2021.3119140"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_71_2","unstructured":"Shichao Zhang Jiaye Li and Yangding Li. 2022. Reachable distance function for KNN classification. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 35 7 (2022) 7382\u20137396."},{"key":"e_1_3_2_72_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2911451.2911488"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_73_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1073\/pnas.1000488107"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_74_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s11390-020-0135-9"}],"container-title":["ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3617598","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3617598","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,17]],"date-time":"2025-06-17T16:45:59Z","timestamp":1750178759000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3617598"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,16]]},"references-count":73,"journal-issue":{"issue":"1","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,31]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3617598"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3617598","relation":{},"ISSN":["1556-4681","1556-472X"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1556-4681","type":"print"},{"value":"1556-472X","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,16]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2022-08-01","order":0,"name":"received","label":"Received","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2023-08-17","order":1,"name":"accepted","label":"Accepted","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2023-10-16","order":2,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}