Learning to recommend similar items from human judgments

Similar item recommendations—a common feature of many Web sites—point users to other interesting objects given a currently inspected item. A common way of computing such recommendations is to use a similarity function , which expresses how much alike two given objects are. Such similarity functions are usually designed based on the specifics of the given application domain. In this work, we explore how such functions can be learned from human judgments of similarities between objects, using two domains of “quality and taste”—cooking recipe and movie recommendation—as guiding scenarios. In our approach, we first collect a few thousand pairwise similarity assessments with the help of crowdworkers. Using these data, we then train different machine learning models that can be used as similarity functions to compare objects. Offline analyses reveal for both application domains that models that combine different types of item characteristics are the best predictors for human-perceived similarity. To further validate the usefulness of the learned models, we conducted additional user studies. In these studies, we exposed participants to similar item recommendations using a set of models that were trained with different feature subsets. The results showed that the combined models that exhibited the best offline prediction performance led to the highest user-perceived similarity, but also to recommendations that were considered useful by the participants, thus confirming the feasibility of our approach.