Review of User Interface-Facilitated Serendipity in Recommender Systems

Background

This section provides a background to contextualize the review. This section explains vital attributes of the recommender systems, followed by an overview of the research landscape, which encompasses journals, books, and publications. User-interface-facilitated serendipity is a process used to facilitate serendipity via user controls and visualizations. A recommender system facilitates serendipity when the user stumbles upon a surprising and useful recommendation. This potential feature of recommending systems opens new avenues for finding solutions to problems through unknown and unanticipated routes. It can be helpful as a solution in situations where researchers intentionally seek serendipitous results but can also be found spontaneously.

Further, it can be helpful to find something beneficial in the future and even build up a stack of solutions that could be useful later. Before discussing serendipity and recommender systems in detail, we briefly discuss the terms used throughout the article. The terms are described as follows.