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Impacts of Personal Characteristics on User Trust in Conversational Recommender Systems

Published: 29 April 2022 Publication History
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    Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) imitate human advisors to assist users in finding items through conversations and have recently gained increasing attention in domains such as media and e-commerce. Like in human communication, building trust in human-agent communication is essential given its significant influence on user behavior. However, inspiring user trust in CRSs with a “one-size-fits-all” design is difficult, as individual users may have their own expectations for conversational interactions (e.g., who, user or system, takes the initiative), which are potentially related to their personal characteristics. In this study, we investigated the impacts of three personal characteristics, namely personality traits, trust propensity, and domain knowledge, on user trust in two types of text-based CRSs, i.e., user-initiative and mixed-initiative. Our between-subjects user study (N=148) revealed that users’ trust propensity and domain knowledge positively influenced their trust in CRSs, and that users with high conscientiousness tended to trust the mixed-initiative system.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2022
    10459 pages
    ISBN:9781450391573
    DOI:10.1145/3491102
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    Published: 29 April 2022

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    1. Conversational recommender systems
    2. mixed-initiative interaction
    3. personal characteristics
    4. trust

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    • Hong Kong Baptist University Interdisciplinary Research Clusters Matching Scheme (IRCMS)
    • General Research Fund (GRF) by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, China

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    April 29 - May 5, 2022
    LA, New Orleans, USA

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