31 research outputs found
A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly
difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases.
Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type,
such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our
solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized
recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We
present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as
an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item
attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are
unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and
used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user
model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a
conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly
reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory
item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive
version of the system
A Systematic Approach to Constructing Incremental Topology Control Algorithms Using Graph Transformation
Communication networks form the backbone of our society. Topology control
algorithms optimize the topology of such communication networks. Due to the
importance of communication networks, a topology control algorithm should
guarantee certain required consistency properties (e.g., connectivity of the
topology), while achieving desired optimization properties (e.g., a bounded
number of neighbors). Real-world topologies are dynamic (e.g., because nodes
join, leave, or move within the network), which requires topology control
algorithms to operate in an incremental way, i.e., based on the recently
introduced modifications of a topology. Visual programming and specification
languages are a proven means for specifying the structure as well as
consistency and optimization properties of topologies. In this paper, we
present a novel methodology, based on a visual graph transformation and graph
constraint language, for developing incremental topology control algorithms
that are guaranteed to fulfill a set of specified consistency and optimization
constraints. More specifically, we model the possible modifications of a
topology control algorithm and the environment using graph transformation
rules, and we describe consistency and optimization properties using graph
constraints. On this basis, we apply and extend a well-known constructive
approach to derive refined graph transformation rules that preserve these graph
constraints. We apply our methodology to re-engineer an established topology
control algorithm, kTC, and evaluate it in a network simulation study to show
the practical applicability of our approachComment: This document corresponds to the accepted manuscript of the
referenced journal articl
Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: {A}chieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction
Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the
pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to
in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently
scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from
different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural
objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total
expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that
optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference
schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be
highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for
participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them.
As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other,
we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to
design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency,
participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization
problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller
conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences.
Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and
flexibility of our proposed approaches.Comment: In proceedings of the Thirty-first Web Conference (WWW-2022). arXiv
admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2010.1462
A personalized system for conversational recommendations
technical reportIncreased computing power and theWeb have made information widely accessible. In turn, this has encouraged the development of recommendation systems that help users find items of interest, such as books or restaurants. Such systems are more useful when they personalize themselves to each user?s preferences, thus making the recommendation process more efficient and effective. In this paper, we present a new type of recommendation system that carries out a personalized dialogue with the user. This system ? the Adaptive Place Advisor ? treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. The system incorporates a user model that contains item, attribute, and value preferences, which it updates during each conversation and maintains across sessions. The Place Advisor uses both the conversational context and the user model to retrieve candidate items from a case base. The system then continues to ask questions, using personalized heuristics to select which attribute to ask about next, presenting complete items to the user only when a few remain. We report experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of user modeling in reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item