About

The RecSys Challenge 2019 will be organized by trivago, TU Wien, Polytechnic University of Bari, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. trivago is a global hotel search platform focused on reshaping the way travelers search for and compare hotels, while enabling advertisers of hotels to grow their businesses by providing access to a broad audience of travelers via our websites and apps. trivago has established 55 localized platforms in over 190 countries and provides access to over two million hotels, including alternative accommodations, with prices and availability from over 400+ booking sites and hotel chains.

This year’s challenge focuses on travel metasearch. The goal of this challenge is to develop a session-based and context-aware recommender system using various input data to provide a list of accommodations that will match the needs of the user.

In the challenge, participants will be tasked with predicting which accommodations (items) have been clicked in the search result during the last part of a user session in an offline evaluation setup. To this end, trivago will release a public dataset of hotel search sessions.

The workshop will feature presentations of accepted contributions to the RecSys Challenge 2019.

Publications

Peter Knees, Yashar Deldjoo, Farshad Bakhshandegan Moghaddam, Jens Adamczak, Gerard-Paul Leyson, and Philipp Monreal. 2019. "RecSys Challenge 2019: Session-based Hotel Recommendations." In Thirteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’19), September 16–20, 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark. 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3298689.3346974, BibTex

Jens Adamczak, Gerard-Paul Leyson, Peter Knees, Yashar Deldjoo, Farshad Bakhshandegan Moghaddam, Julia Neidhardt, Wolfgang Wörndl, and Philipp Monreal. 2019. "Session-Based Hotel Recommendations: Challenges and Future Directions." arXiv:1908.00071, BibTex

Participation and Data

The data for this year's challenge is provided by trivago and can be downloaded from https://recsys.trivago.cloud/. You can access the data once you create an account and agree with the terms and conditions. The information on the challenge participation can also be found on this website.

Paper Submission Guidelines ^top

• All participants of the challenge are invited to submit if they consider their submission particularly effective, novel, otherwise interesting, or exploiting identified particularities of the data.
• Note: paper submission is mandatory if you want to be eligible for a prize (top 5). Accepted papers are given an oral and a poster presentation slot at the workshop. At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop and present their work. Please note that a badly written paper or absence of presence at workshop, may prevent you from being eligible for the prize. Please contact the workshop organization if none of the authors will be able to attend the workshop.
• Page limit: 4 pages + 1 page references (ACM SIG Format)
• Anonymization of submissions is not required; please include your team name in abstract and text, as well as a link to your code repository, the achieved score, and a reference to the RecSys Challenge Website (http://www.recsyschallenge.com/2019/). Note: This will be replaced with a reference to an overview paper in the RecSys proceedings for the camera-ready version.
• Submission website: EasyChair
• The submitted papers will be evaluated based on novelty, clarity, and presented empirical results.
• Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC members.
• Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
• Accepted papers must be presented in the RecSys Challenge Workshop (either as an oral presentation or poster).

Workshop Program and Accepted Papers

Program Committee ^top

• Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
• Catalin-Mihai Barbu, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Himan Abdollahpouri, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
• Marko Tkalcic, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• Julia Neidhardt, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• David Zibriczky, DB Schenker, Germany
• Massimo Quadrana, Pandora, USA
• Andreu Vall, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
• Dietmar Jannach, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
• Alejandro Bellogin, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
• Amra Delić, TU Wien, Austria
• Mehdi Elahi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• Dimitris Sacharidis, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Hamed Zamani, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
• Vito Walter Anelli, Politecnico di Bari, Italy
• Mete Sertkan, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Challenge Organizers ^top

• Philipp Monreal, trivago, Germany
• Wolfgang Gassler, trivago, Germany
• Jens Adamczak, trivago, Germany
• Gerard Leyson, trivago, Germany
• Peter Knees, TU Wien, Austria
• Yashar Deldjoo, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy
• Farshad Bakhshandegan Moghaddam, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Advisors ^top

• Dávid Zibriczky, DB Schenker, Germany
• Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
• Hamed Zamani, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA
• Mehdi Elahi, Free University of Bozen, Bolzano