Using Emotion Diversification Based on Movie Reviews to Improve the User Experience of Movie Recommender Systems

Lior Lansman; Osnat Mokryn; Lijie Guo; Mehtab Iqbal; Bart P. Knijnenburg

doi:10.1145/3743147

journal article Sep 09, 2025

Using Emotion Diversification Based on Movie Reviews to Improve the User Experience of Movie Recommender Systems

Lior Lansman

Osnat Mokryn

Lijie Guo

Mehtab Iqbal

Bart P. Knijnenburg

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems Vol. 15 No. 3 pp. 1-27 · Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

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Abstract

Diversifying movie recommendations is an effective way to address choice overload, a phenomenon where recommenders generate lists with highly similar recommendations that are difficult to choose from. However, existing diversification algorithms often rely on latent features, which limits their interpretability and makes it less clear why a particular set of movies is recommended. Given that movies are designed to elicit emotional responses, researchers have suggested leveraging these responses to enhance recommender system performance.
This study introduces a novel “emotion diversification” approach, which diversifies movie recommendations based on emotional signals extracted from audience reviews. We evaluate this method against latent and non-diversified baselines in a controlled user study (N = 115), finding that it significantly improves perceived taste coverage and system satisfaction without compromising recommendation quality.
Going beyond the traditional rating- and/or interaction data used by traditional recommender systems, our work demonstrates the user experience benefits of extracting emotional data from rich, qualitative user feedback and using it to give users a more emotionally diverse set of recommendations.

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Details

Published: Sep 09, 2025
Vol/Issue: 15(3)
Pages: 1-27

Authors

L

Lior Lansman

Information Systems Department, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

O

Osnat Mokryn

Information Systems Department, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

L

Lijie Guo

Human-Centered Computing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA

M

Mehtab Iqbal

Human-Centered Computing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA

B

Bart P. Knijnenburg

School of Computing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA

Cite This Article

Lior Lansman, Osnat Mokryn, Lijie Guo, et al. (2025). Using Emotion Diversification Based on Movie Reviews to Improve the User Experience of Movie Recommender Systems. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 15(3), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3743147

Using Emotion Diversification Based on Movie Reviews to Improve the User Experience of Movie Recommender Systems

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