Improving argumentation-based recommender systems through context-adaptable selection criteria

Recommender Systems based on argumentation represent an important proposal where the recommendation is supported by qualitative information. In these systems, the role of the comparison criterion used to decide between competing arguments is paramount and the possibility of using the most appropriate for a given domain becomes a central issue; therefore, an argumentative recommender system that offers an interchangeable argument comparison criterion provides a significant ability that can be exploited by the user. However, in most of current recommender systems, the argument comparison criterion is either fixed, or codified within the arguments. In this work we propose a formalization of context-adaptable selection criteria that enhances the argumentative reasoning mechanism. Thus, we do not propose of a new type of recommender system; instead we present a mechanism that expand the capabilities of existing argumentation-based recommender systems. More precisely, our proposal is to provide a way of specifying how to select and use the most appropriate argument comparison criterion effecting the selection on the user´s preferences, giving the possibility of programming, by the use of conditional expressions, which argument preference criterion has to be used in each particular situation.Fil: Teze, Juan Carlos Lionel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos; ArgentinaFil: Gottifredi, Sebastián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: García, Alejandro Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Simari, Guillermo Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentin

Personalized Food Recommendation

Abstract. In this paper a food recommender system giving general and personalized advice is described. The system is based on semi-formal knowledge of personal nutrition gained in a previous project (Food4Me). This project implements a manual expert knowledge based approach using a decision tree for recommending optimal adaptions to the individual nutrition behavior. The system was evaluated in a Proof-of-Principle study whose results lead to the current two research projects. The first project aims at an automated recommender system based on formalized expert knowledge building on the insights from Food4Me. This recommendation system is then extended by including it into an application which provides continuous feedback on the participant's nutritional behavior. Also individual preferences are integrated using approaches from critique based-and persuasive recommender systems. The second system uses an adapted collaborative filtering approach to recommend food based on healthiness and taste ratings of other users augmented by a rating based recommender system for sports. This recommender system is further extended by social support groups and game interaction in view of social motivation. In the future both projects might be used in combination to provide optimal health support

Predictive User Modeling with Actionable Attributes

Different machine learning techniques have been proposed and used for modeling individual and group user needs, interests and preferences. In the traditional predictive modeling instances are described by observable variables, called attributes. The goal is to learn a model for predicting the target variable for unseen instances. For example, for marketing purposes a company consider profiling a new user based on her observed web browsing behavior, referral keywords or other relevant information. In many real world applications the values of some attributes are not only observable, but can be actively decided by a decision maker. Furthermore, in some of such applications the decision maker is interested not only to generate accurate predictions, but to maximize the probability of the desired outcome. For example, a direct marketing manager can choose which type of a special offer to send to a client (actionable attribute), hoping that the right choice will result in a positive response with a higher probability. We study how to learn to choose the value of an actionable attribute in order to maximize the probability of a desired outcome in predictive modeling. We emphasize that not all instances are equally sensitive to changes in actions. Accurate choice of an action is critical for those instances, which are on the borderline (e.g. users who do not have a strong opinion one way or the other). We formulate three supervised learning approaches for learning to select the value of an actionable attribute at an instance level. We also introduce a focused training procedure which puts more emphasis on the situations where varying the action is the most likely to take the effect. The proof of concept experimental validation on two real-world case studies in web analytics and e-learning domains highlights the potential of the proposed approaches

Entity Personalized Talent Search Models with Tree Interaction Features

Talent Search systems aim to recommend potential candidates who are a good match to the hiring needs of a recruiter expressed in terms of the recruiter's search query or job posting. Past work in this domain has focused on linear and nonlinear models which lack preference personalization in the user-level due to being trained only with globally collected recruiter activity data. In this paper, we propose an entity-personalized Talent Search model which utilizes a combination of generalized linear mixed (GLMix) models and gradient boosted decision tree (GBDT) models, and provides personalized talent recommendations using nonlinear tree interaction features generated by the GBDT. We also present the offline and online system architecture for the productionization of this hybrid model approach in our Talent Search systems. Finally, we provide offline and online experiment results benchmarking our entity-personalized model with tree interaction features, which demonstrate significant improvements in our precision metrics compared to globally trained non-personalized models.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication at ACM WWW 201