Selected Publications

Below is a selection of my peer-reviewed publications on recommender systems, user modeling, explanations in recommender systems, explanations in constraint-based systems, and group decision-making. My full publication list can be found in my Google Scholar.

According to Google Scholar (as of August 2026), my work has received 2,495 citations, with an h-index of 23 and an i10-index of 38. My most cited publication has accumulated 432 citations. I am the main or co-author of papers that received two Best Paper Awards, at ConfWS 2018 and SEKE 2017, and a Runner-up Best Paper Award at ConfWS 2016.

External profiles: Google Scholar · ORCID · DBLP · PURE · ResearchGate · LinkedIn

2026

How Cultural Background and Cognitive Style Shape Responses to Sustainability-Aware Explanations in Healthy Food Recommender Systems

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Viet-Man Le, Alexander Felfernig, Sebastian Lubos, Thi Minh Ngoc Chau, Li Chen, Gerhard Leitner, Mehrdad Rostami, Amir Mollazadeh

ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2026) — just accepted. CORE A (2026)

When Do Contrastive Explanations Really Matter in Recommender Systems?

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Sebastian Lubos, Alexander Felfernig, Mehrdad Rostami, Viet-Man Le, Damian Garber

ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2026) — just accepted. CORE A (2026)

Sustainability Evaluation Metrics for Recommender Systems

Alexander Felfernig, Damian Garber, Viet-Man Le, Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

Recommender Systems for Sustainability and Social Good, pp. 14–26 (2026)

2025

Sustainability Evaluation Metrics for Configuration Systems

Alexander Felfernig, Damian Garber, Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

27th International Workshop on Configuration (ConfWS 2025), co-located with ECAI 2025. CEUR-WS, vol. 4149, pp. 192–198 (2025)

Towards LLM-Enhanced Product Line Scoping

Alexander Felfernig, Damian Garber, Viet-Man Le, Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

27th International Workshop on Configuration (ConfWS 2025), co-located with ECAI 2025. CEUR-WS, vol. 4149, pp. 128–134 (2025)

Towards LLM-Enhanced Group Recommender Systems

Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Viet-Man Le, Damian Garber, Manuel Henrich, Reinhard Willfort, Jeremias Fuchs

12th Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS 2025), co-located with RecSys 2025. CEUR-WS, vol. 4027 (2025)

Towards LLM-Based Usability Analysis for Recommender User Interfaces

Sebastian Lubos, Alexander Felfernig, Damian Garber, Viet-Man Le, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

12th Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS 2025), co-located with RecSys 2025. CEUR-WS, vol. 4027 (2025)

2024

Less Is More: Towards Sustainability-Aware Persuasive Explanations in Recommender Systems

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Seda Polat Erdeniz, Alexander Felfernig, Sebastian Lubos, Merfat El Mansi, Viet-Man Le

18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. RecSys ’24. ACM, pp. 1108–1112. CORE A (2024)

LLM-generated Explanations for Recommender Systems

Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Seda Polat Erdeniz, Viet-Man Le

Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’24 Adjunct. ACM, pp. 276–285 (2024)

Leveraging LLMs for the Quality Assurance of Software Requirements

Sebastian Lubos, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Damian Garber, Merfat El Mansi, Seda Polat Erdeniz, Viet-Man Le

2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), pp. 389–397 (2024)

Sports Recommender Systems: Overview and Research Directions

Alexander Felfernig, Manfred Wundara, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Viet-Man Le, Sebastian Lubos, Seda Polat-Erdeniz

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 1125–1164 (2024)

InformedQX: Informed Conflict Detection for Over-Constrained Problems

Viet-Man Le, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Mathias Uta

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 38, no. 9, pp. 10616–10623. CORE A* (2024)

Knowledge-based recommender systems: overview and research directions

Mathias Uta, Alexander Felfernig, Viet-Man Le, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Damian Garber, Sebastian Lubos, Tamim Burgstaller

Frontiers in Big Data, vol. 7 (2024)

2023

Employing Nudge Theory and Persuasive Principles with Explainable AI in Clinical Decision Support

Seda Polat Erdeniz, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Sebastian Lubos, Michael Schrempf, Diether Kramer, Peter P. Rainer

2023 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), pp. 2983–2989 (2023)

Recommender systems for sustainability: overview and research issues

Alexander Felfernig, Manfred Wundara, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Seda Polat-Erdeniz, Sebastian Lubos, Merfat El Mansi, Damian Garber, Viet-Man Le

Frontiers in Big Data, vol. 6 (2023)

An Overview of Consensus Models for Group Decision-Making and Group Recommender Systems

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Viet Man Le

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 489–547 (2023)

FMTESTING: A FEATUREIDE Plug-in for Automated Feature Model Analysis and Diagnosis

Tamim Burgstaller, Viet-Man Le, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig

ECAI 2023 (2023)

Concentrating on the Impact: Consequence-based Explanations in Recommender Systems

Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Seda Polat Erdeniz, Merfat El Mansi, Alexander Felfernig, Manfred Wundara, Gerhard Leitner

10th Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS 2023), co-located with RecSys 2023. CEUR-WS, vol. 3534 (2023)

Analysis Operations On The Run: Feature Model Analysis in Constraint-based Recommender Systems

Sebastian Lubos, Alexander Felfernig, Viet-Man Le, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, David Benavides, José A. Zamudio, Damian Garber

Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A. SPLC ’23. ACM, pp. 111–116 (2023)

User Needs for Explanations of Recommendations: In-Depth Analyses of the Role of Item Domain and Personal Characteristics

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Viet Man Le, Thi Minh Ngoc Chau, Thu Giang Mai

Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’23. ACM, pp. 54–65. CORE A (2023)

FastDiagP: An Algorithm for Parallelized Direct Diagnosis

Viet-Man Le, Cristian Vidal Silva, Alexander Felfernig, David Benavides, José Galindo, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 6442–6449. CORE A* (2023)

2022

WipeOutR: Automated Redundancy Detection for Feature Models

Viet-Man Le, Alexander Felfernig, Mathias Uta, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Cristian Vidal Silva

Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A. SPLC ’22. ACM, pp. 164–169 (2022)

Consistency-based integration of multi-stakeholder recommender systems with feature model configuration

Viet-Man Le, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig

Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B. SPLC ’22. ACM, pp. 178–182 (2022)

Test case aggregation for efficient feature model testing

Viet-Man Le, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B. SPLC ’22. ACM, pp. 174–177 (2022)

Explaining Machine Learning Predictions of Decision Support Systems in Healthcare

Seda Polat Erdeniz, Sai Veeranki, Michael Schrempf, Stefanie Jauk, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Diether Kramer, Werner Leodolter

Current Directions in Biomedical Engineering, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 117–120 (2022)

2021

Towards psychology-aware preference construction in recommender systems: Overview and research issues

Müslüm Atas, Alexander Felfernig, Seda Polat-Erdeniz, Andrei Popescu, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Mathias Uta

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 467–489 (2021)

Do Users Appreciate Explanations of Recommendations? An Analysis in the Movie Domain

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Viet Man Le, Muesluem Atas, Alexander Felfernig, Martin Stettinger, Andrei Popescu

Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. RecSys ’21. ACM, pp. 645–650. CORE A (2021)

Evaluating recommender systems in feature model configuration

Mathias Uta, Alexander Felfernig, Viet-Man Le, Andrei Popescu, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Denis Helic

Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A. SPLC ’21. ACM, pp. 58–63 (2021)

DirectDebug: A software package for the automated testing and debugging of feature models

Viet-Man Le, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Müslüm Atas, Mathias Uta, David Benavides, José Galindo

Software Impacts, vol. 9, p. 100085 (2021)

Psychology-Informed Recommender Systems

Elisabeth Lex, Dominik Kowald, Paul Seitlinger, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Markus Schedl

Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 134–242 (2021)

Humanized Recommender Systems: State-of-the-Art and Research Issues

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Nava Tintarev

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1–41 (2021)

DirectDebug: Automated Testing and Debugging of Feature Models

Viet-Man Le, Alexander Felfernig, Mathias Uta, David Benavides, José Galindo, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER), pp. 81–85. CORE A* (2021)

A Conversion of Feature Models into an Executable Representation in Microsoft Excel

Viet-Man Le, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig

Intelligent Systems in Industrial Applications, pp. 153–168 (2021)

2020

Recommender Systems in the Healthcare Domain: State-of-the-Art and Research Issues

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Christoph Trattner, Andreas Holzinger

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 171–201 (2020)

KNOWLEDGECHECKR: Intelligent Techniques for Counteracting Forgetting

Stettinger Martin, Tran Trang, Pribik Ingo, Leitner Gerhard, Felfernig Alexander, Samer Ralph, Atas Müslüm, Wundara Manfred

ECAI 2020 (2020)

2019

Recommender systems for IoT enabled quantified-self applications

Seda Polat Erdeniz, Andreas Menychtas, Ilias Maglogiannis, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran

Evolving Systems, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 291–304 (2019)

Socially-Aware Diagnosis for Constraint-Based Recommendation

Muesluem Atas, Ralph Samer, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Seda Polat Erdeniz, Martin Stettinger

Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’19. ACM, pp. 121–129 (2019)

Towards Social Choice-Based Explanations in Group Recommender Systems

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Müslüm Atas, Alexander Felfernig, Viet Man Le, Ralph Samer, Martin Stettinger

Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’19. ACM, pp. 13–21. CORE A (2019)

User Interfaces for Counteracting Decision Manipulation in Group Recommender Systems

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Viet Man Le, Müslüm Atas, Martin Stettinger, Ralph Samer

Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’19 Adjunct. ACM, pp. 93–98 (2019)

Towards Similarity-Aware Constraint-Based Recommendation

Muesluem Atas, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Seda Polat Erdeniz, Ralph Samer, Martin Stettinger

Advances and Trends in Artificial Intelligence. From Theory to Practice, pp. 287–299 (2019)

2018

Liquid Democracy in Group-based Configuration

Müslüm Atas, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Ralph Samer, Alexander Felfernig, Martin Stettinger, Davide Fucci

20th International Configuration Workshop (ConfWS 2018), CEUR-WS, vol. 2220, pp. 93–98 — Best Paper Award (2018)

Investigating Serial Position Effects in Sequential Group Decision Making

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Müslüm Atas, Alexander Felfernig, Ralph Samer, Martin Stettinger

Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’18. ACM, pp. 239–243. CORE A (2018)

Polarization Effects in Group Decisions

Muesluem Atas, Stefan Reiterer, Alexander Felfernig, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Martin Stettinger

Adjunct Publication of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. UMAP ’18. ACM, pp. 305–310 (2018)

Socially-Aware Recommendation for Over-Constrained Problems

Muesluem Atas, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Ralph Samer

Recent Trends and Future Technology in Applied Intelligence, pp. 267–278 (2018)

Explanations for Groups

Alexander Felfernig, Nava Tintarev, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Martin Stettinger

Group Recommender Systems: An Introduction, pp. 105–126 (2018)

2017

An Overview of Recommender Systems in the Healthy Food Domain

Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Müslüm Atas, Alexander Felfernig, Martin Stettinger

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 501–526 (2017)