On the benefit of logic-based approach to learn pairwise comparisons

In recent years, many daily processes such as internet web searching, e-mail filtering, social media services, e-commerce have benefited from Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The implementation of ML techniques has been largely focused on black box methods where the general conclusions are not easily interpretable. Hence, the elaboration with other declarative software models to identify the correctness and completeness of the models is not easy to perform. On the other hand, the emerge of some logic-based machine learning approaches that can overcome such limitations with their white box methods has been proven to be well-suited for many software engineering tasks. In this paper, we propose the use of a logic-based approach to learn user preference in the form of pairwise comparisons. APARELL as a novel approach of inductive learning is able to model the user’s preferences in Description Logic(DL) and then build a model by generalising the concept for all examples given. This offers a rich, relational representation beyond the usual propositional domain, which is then can be used to produce a set of recommendations. A user study has been performed in our experiment to evaluate the implementation of pairwise preference recommender system when compared to a standard list interface. The result of the experiment shows that the pairwise interface was significantly better than the other interface in many ways.