Preference-Search based Recommendation System for Accommodation Facilitator : A Review

Finding an online house or rented property that meet renters’ requirements is increasingly getting difficult due to large pool of choices available with the renters’ before finalizing accommodation. A renter may spend considerable amount of time exploring numerous online resources to locate accommodation that fit his requirements. Furthermore, renters may not always express their preferences in a manner that easily matches their requirements. Exploring and searching for accommodation online has been done mainly through database queries that return a list of the most suitable accommodations. Recommendation systems methods can be applied to smooth the task of finding desired and required accommodation online. This study proposes a recommendation system that enables renters to carry out a preference-based search on rental properties for accommodation. In this paper preference-based search technique is combined with method called as example-critiquing. Rather than executing a query against the database, this combined approach prompts the renters to express some preferences on rental properties for accommodation. Than this method will be used to construct a preference model for the user, and finally generates a list of properties that best match that preferences.

Integrating reading and writing: supporting students' writing from source

Writing from sources is an important academic skill but students find it a difficult skill to learn. The lesson study method was used to design and evaluate learning and teaching strategies aimed at improving students’ writing from sources skills. The team developed a seven-part lesson plan and associated learning activities and practice opportunities which was delivered over 12 hours. The lesson was delivered to first-year students (n = 150) taking a Critical Skills module. Students’ writing was analysed to identify how they approached integrating sources into their writing. Analyses of student texts suggest significant improvement in some skills, for example, finding, interpreting and synthesising content across sources. Other skills showed less marked improvement, for example, critiquing sources and creating new text. This paper shares the lesson and makes suggestions for future iterations of the lesson.

Preference-based Search using Example-Critiquing with Suggestions

We consider interactive tools that help users search for their most preferred item in a large collection of options. In particular, we examine example-critiquing, a technique for enabling users to incrementally construct preference models by critiquing example options that are presented to them. We present novel techniques for improving the example-critiquing technology by adding suggestions to its displayed options. Such suggestions are calculated based on an analysis of users' current preference model and their potential hidden preferences. We evaluate the performance of our model-based suggestion techniques with both synthetic and real users. Results show that such suggestions are highly attractive to users and can stimulate them to express more preferences to improve the chance of identifying their most preferred item by up to 78%.