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This paper describes a decision support system to fulfill the diagnosis of post-harvest diseases in apple fruit. The diagnostic system builds on user feedback elicitation via multiple conversational rounds. The interaction with the user is conducted by selecting and displaying images depicting symptoms of diseased apples. The system is able to adapt the image selection mechanism by exploiting previous user feedback through a contextual multi-armed bandit approach. We performed a large scale user experiment, where different strategies for image selection have been compared in order to identify which reloading strategy makes users more effective in the diagnosis task. Concretely, we compared contextual multi-armed bandit methods with two baseline strategies and identified that the exploration-exploitation principle significantly paid off in comparison to a greedy and to a random stratified selection strategy. Although the application context is very domain specific, we believe that the general methodology of conversational item selection for eliciting user preferences applies to other scenarios in decision support and recommendation systems.

The deep learning wave is propagating through many research areas and communities. In the last years it quickly propagated to Recommendation Systems, a research area which aims to recommend items to users. Indeed, many deep learning models and architectures have been proposed for Recommendation Systems to improve collaborative filtering and content based algorithms. In this paper we propose a hybrid recommendation system combining user ratings and natural language text processing to solve the 0/1 recommendation problem. In particular, we describe a deep learning architecture combining two information sources, namely natural language text and user rating. Natural language text is used to learn a user-specific content-based classifier, while user ratings are used to develop user-adaptive collaborative filtering recommendations. We perform numerical experiments on MovieLens 1M and reach first preliminary, but promising results, showing the proposed architecture has the potential to combine content-based and collaborative filtering recommendation mechanisms using a deep learning supervisor.