Natural Language-based Representation of User Preferences

摘要

Preferences have been widely studied in several areas including computer science, as they play an important role in many computational tasks, such as decision making support, providing recommendations and personalizing applications. Although many approaches consider particular preference representation models to be used as input for algorithms to address these tasks, there is a need for identifying a model that provides adequate constructions for users to express their preferences. In this paper, we propose a preference meta-model that provides various preference constructs, which include end-user expressions. We start by describing an exploratory study of how people express their preferences in natural language, which provides the basis for the meta-model. After describing the meta-model, we evaluate it with two user studies in different domains. The results of this evaluation indicate that the preference statements that can be expressed with the meta-model are adequate for allowing users to indicate their preferences to a computational system.