40,645 research outputs found
Seamlessly Unifying Attributes and Items: Conversational Recommendation for Cold-Start Users
Static recommendation methods like collaborative filtering suffer from the
inherent limitation of performing real-time personalization for cold-start
users. Online recommendation, e.g., multi-armed bandit approach, addresses this
limitation by interactively exploring user preference online and pursuing the
exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off. However, existing bandit-based methods
model recommendation actions homogeneously. Specifically, they only consider
the items as the arms, being incapable of handling the item attributes, which
naturally provide interpretable information of user's current demands and can
effectively filter out undesired items. In this work, we consider the
conversational recommendation for cold-start users, where a system can both ask
the attributes from and recommend items to a user interactively. This important
scenario was studied in a recent work. However, it employs a hand-crafted
function to decide when to ask attributes or make recommendations. Such
separate modeling of attributes and items makes the effectiveness of the system
highly rely on the choice of the hand-crafted function, thus introducing
fragility to the system. To address this limitation, we seamlessly unify
attributes and items in the same arm space and achieve their EE trade-offs
automatically using the framework of Thompson Sampling. Our Conversational
Thompson Sampling (ConTS) model holistically solves all questions in
conversational recommendation by choosing the arm with the maximal reward to
play. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ConTS
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods Conversational UCB (ConUCB) and
Estimation-Action-Reflection model in both metrics of success rate and average
number of conversation turns.Comment: TOIS 202
LSTM Networks for Data-Aware Remaining Time Prediction of Business Process Instances
Predicting the completion time of business process instances would be a very
helpful aid when managing processes under service level agreement constraints.
The ability to know in advance the trend of running process instances would
allow business managers to react in time, in order to prevent delays or
undesirable situations. However, making such accurate forecasts is not easy:
many factors may influence the required time to complete a process instance. In
this paper, we propose an approach based on deep Recurrent Neural Networks
(specifically LSTMs) that is able to exploit arbitrary information associated
to single events, in order to produce an as-accurate-as-possible prediction of
the completion time of running instances. Experiments on real-world datasets
confirm the quality of our proposal.Comment: Article accepted for publication in 2017 IEEE Symposium on Deep
Learning (IEEE DL'17) @ SSC
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