Local Ranking Problem on the BrowseGraph

The "Local Ranking Problem" (LRP) is related to the computation of a centrality-like rank on a local graph, where the scores of the nodes could significantly differ from the ones computed on the global graph. Previous work has studied LRP on the hyperlink graph but never on the BrowseGraph, namely a graph where nodes are webpages and edges are browsing transitions. Recently, this graph has received more and more attention in many different tasks such as ranking, prediction and recommendation. However, a web-server has only the browsing traffic performed on its pages (local BrowseGraph) and, as a consequence, the local computation can lead to estimation errors, which hinders the increasing number of applications in the state of the art. Also, although the divergence between the local and global ranks has been measured, the possibility of estimating such divergence using only local knowledge has been mainly overlooked. These aspects are of great interest for online service providers who want to: (i) gauge their ability to correctly assess the importance of their resources only based on their local knowledge, and (ii) take into account real user browsing fluxes that better capture the actual user interest than the static hyperlink network. We study the LRP problem on a BrowseGraph from a large news provider, considering as subgraphs the aggregations of browsing traces of users coming from different domains. We show that the distance between rankings can be accurately predicted based only on structural information of the local graph, being able to achieve an average rank correlation as high as 0.8

Search Behaviour On Photo Sharing Platforms

The behaviour, goals, and intentions of users while searching for images in large scale online collections are not well understood, with image search log analysis providing limited insights, in part because they tend only to have access to user search and result click information. In this paper we study user search behaviour in a large photo-sharing platform, analyzing all user actions during search sessions (i.e. including post result-click pageviews). Search accounts for a significant part of user interactions with such platforms, and we show differences between the queries issued on such platforms and those on general image search. We show that search behaviour is influenced by the query type, and also depends on the user. Finally, we analyse how users behave when they reformulate their queries, and develop URL class prediction models for image search, showing that query-specific models significantly outperform query-agnostic models. The insights provided in this paper are intended as a launching point for the design of better interfaces and ranking models for image search. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

A location-query-browse graph for contextual recommendation

Traditionally, recommender systems modelled the physical and cyber contextual influence on people's moving, querying, and browsing behaviours in isolation. Yet, searching, querying and moving behaviours are intricately linked, especially indoors. Here, we introduce a tripartite location-query-browse graph (LQB) for nuanced contextual recommendations. The LQB graph consists of three kinds of nodes: locations, queries and Web domains. Directed connections only between heterogeneous nodes represent the contextual influences, while connections of homogeneous nodes are inferred from the contextual influences of the other nodes. This tripartite LQB graph is more reliable than any monopartite or bipartite graph in contextual location, query and Web content recommendations. We validate this LQB graph in an indoor retail scenario with extensive dataset of three logs collected from over 120,000 anonymized, opt-in users over a 1-year period in a large inner-city mall in Sydney, Australia. We characterize the contextual influences that correspond to the arcs in the LQB graph, and evaluate the usefulness of the LQB graph for location, query, and Web content recommendations. The experimental results show that the LQB graph successfully captures the contextual influence and significantly outperforms the state of the art in these applications