Explainable Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs for Recommendation

Incorporating knowledge graph into recommender systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. By exploring the interlinks within a knowledge graph, the connectivity between users and items can be discovered as paths, which provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Such connectivity not only reveals the semantics of entities and relations, but also helps to comprehend a user's interest. However, existing efforts have not fully explored this connectivity to infer user preferences, especially in terms of modeling the sequential dependencies within and holistic semantics of a path. In this paper, we contribute a new model named Knowledge-aware Path Recurrent Network (KPRN) to exploit knowledge graph for recommendation. KPRN can generate path representations by composing the semantics of both entities and relations. By leveraging the sequential dependencies within a path, we allow effective reasoning on paths to infer the underlying rationale of a user-item interaction. Furthermore, we design a new weighted pooling operation to discriminate the strengths of different paths in connecting a user with an item, endowing our model with a certain level of explainability. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets about movie and music, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art solutions Collaborative Knowledge Base Embedding and Neural Factorization Machine.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, AAAI-201

Fear and the musical avant-garde in games: Interviews with Jason Graves, Garry Schyman, Paul Gorman and Michael Kamper

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. If you have ever experienced the cold chill of fear when watching a film or playing a video or computer game, it is highly probable that your responses have been manipulated by composers exploiting the musical resources of modernism, experimental music and the avant-garde. Depictions of fear, horror, amorality, evil and so on, have come to be associated with these sound worlds, particularly within the realm of popular culture. A number of game titles and franchises have emerged in recent years, which exploit these musical associations, exploring their creative potential as vehicles of fear and horror within the context of interactive game-play. Two composers associated with this approach are Jason Graves (Dead Space franchise) and Garry Schyman (Bioshock franchise, Dante’s Inferno). This article explores perceived links between avant-garde music (as defined in ‘populist’ rather than musicological or historical terms, as a ‘catch-all’ phrase for twentieth-century music exploiting experimental techniques, modernism and atonality) and depictions of horror and fear through interviews with Graves and Schyman. Further questions are posed to Paul Gorman (audio director – Dante’s Inferno) and Michael Kamper (audio director – Bioshock 2) to contextualize the discussion by demonstrating the significant creative influence of audio directors in guiding the musical approach taken by game composers. The article would be of potential interest to anyone with an interest in game audio, commercial composition/composers, game development, creative collaboration, audio direction and the power of music to manipulate the emotions in association with visual media

I Am Big, It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Sound Technologies and Franz Waxman’s Scores for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Twilight Zone’s “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” (1959)

Franz Waxman composed over 150 film scores, the most famous of which is Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950). The film plot bears a striking resemblance to Rod Serling’s teleplay for The Twilight Zone, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (1959). Waxman, composer of the film, was approached to compose a score for a television episode that was what many term a shortened version of Wilder’s film for the small screen, but with supernatural elements. This article serves to remedy the dearth of literature on this topic and to form an examination of the ways that Waxman conceived of music to accompany films with similar themes but on different screens. Through this comparison of the two scores, a clearer picture of Waxman’s approaches to composing music for moving images will be presented

Baadassss Gangstas: The Parallel Influences, Characteristics and Criticisms of the Blaxploitation Cinema and Gangsta Rap Movements

Serving as two of the most visible African American cultural movements, blaxploitation cinema and gangsta rap played essential roles in giving African American artists an outlet to establish a new black identity for mainstream audiences. After exploring the similarities between the cultural and economic conditions that spawned both movements, this essay examines the parallel techniques by which the preeminent entries in both genres established themselves as culturally relevant for African American audiences. These techniques included a reliance on place and space to establish authenticity, as well as employing African American myths and folklore such as the Signifying Monkey and the badman. By establishing themselves as mainstream representations of black identity, the harshest critics and staunchest defenders of both movements came from within the African American community, a clear indication of the important role each would play in establishing a new era of black representation in popular culture

LUCKY LUKE AS THE AMERICAN COWBOY HERO AS REFLECTED IN JAMES HUTH’S LUCKY LUKE MOVIE

Seseorang dapat disebut sebagai pahlawan apabila orang tersebut telah berjasa untuk masyarakat, bangsa, dan negaranya. Pahlawan mendapatkan tempat yang terhormat di mata masyarakat, sebab masyarakat dapat menilai secara objektif kontribusi apa saja yang diberikan pahlawan kepada masyarakat, bangsa dan negara. Pengorbanan dan perjuangan seorang pahlawan dapat memberikan kontribusi berupa nilai-nilai moral kepada masyarakat. Dalam skripsi ini, penulis tertarik untuk menganalisa seorang tokoh cowboy di Amerika yang dianggap sebagai pahlawan masyarakat Amerika. Untuk menganalisa hal ini, penulis menggunakan pendekatan eksponensial dan antropologi. Dalam film Lucky Luke menggambarkan dengan jelas seorang cowboy yang memiliki peranan penting sebagai seorang sherif di kotanya. Perjuangan dan usahanya dalam menjalankan tugasnya menjadi seorang sherif membawanya menjadi sosok pahlawan yang dikagumi. Karakter seorang pahlawan memberikan nilai-nilai moral yang baik kepada masyarakat. Sehingga, pesan-pesan atau nilai moral dari seorang tokoh pahlawan biasanya dapat disampaikan melalui cerita rakyat, dongeng, maupun legenda. Karena cerita rakyat, dongeng maupun legenda merupakan cara yang mudah dalam menyampaikan nilai-nilai moral dan budaya dari kehidupan seorang tokoh pahlawan

Entropy-based randomisation of rating networks

In the last years, due to the great diffusion of e-commerce, online rating platforms quickly became a common tool for purchase recommendations. However, instruments for their analysis did not evolve at the same speed. Indeed, interesting information about users' habits and tastes can be recovered just considering the bipartite network of users and products, in which links have different weights due to the score assigned to items. With respect to other weighted bipartite networks, in these systems we observe a maximum possible weight per link, that limits the variability of the outcomes. In the present article we propose an entropy-based randomisation of (bipartite) rating networks by extending the Configuration Model framework: the randomised network satisfies the constraints of the degree per rating, i.e. the number of given ratings received by the specified product or assigned by the single user. We first show that such a null model is able to reproduce several non-trivial features of the real network better than other null models. Then, using it as a benchmark, we project the information contained in the real system on one of the layers, showing, for instance, the division in communities of music albums due to the taste of customers, or, in movies due the audience.Comment: 12 pages, 30 figure