Gradual trust and distrust in recommender systems

Trust networks among users of a recommender system (RS) prove beneficial to the quality and amount of the recommendations. Since trust is often a gradual phenomenon, fuzzy relations are the pre-eminent tools for modeling such networks. However, as current trust-enhanced RSs do not work with the notion of distrust, they cannot differentiate unknown users from malicious users, nor represent inconsistency. These are serious drawbacks in large networks where many users are unknown to each other and might provide contradictory information. In this paper, we advocate the use of a trust model in which trust scores are (trust,distrust)couples, drawn from a bilattice that preserves valuable trust provenance information including gradual trust, distrust, ignorance, and inconsistency. We pay particular attention to deriving trust information through a trusted third party, which becomes especially challenging when also distrust is involved. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.