11,998 research outputs found
Social Machinery and Intelligence
Social machines are systems formed by technical and human elements interacting in a
structured manner. The use of digital platforms as mediators allows large numbers of human participants to join such mechanisms, creating systems where interconnected digital and human components operate as a single machine capable of highly sophisticated behaviour. Under certain conditions, such systems can be described as autonomous and goal-driven agents. Many examples of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be regarded as instances of this class of mechanisms. We argue that this type of autonomous social machines has provided a new paradigm for the design of intelligent systems marking a new phase in the field of AI. The consequences of this observation range from methodological, philosophical to ethical. On the one side, it emphasises the role of Human-Computer Interaction in the design of intelligent systems, while on the other side it draws attention to both the risks for a human being and those for a society relying on mechanisms that are not necessarily controllable. The difficulty by companies in regulating the spread of misinformation, as well as those by authorities to protect task-workers managed by a software infrastructure, could be just some of the effects of this technological paradigm
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
Causal Inference in Recommender Systems: A Survey and Future Directions
Recommender systems have become crucial in information filtering nowadays.
Existing recommender systems extract user preferences based on the correlation
in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering,
feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate
prediction. However, unfortunately, the real world is driven by causality, not
just correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For instance,
recommender systems might recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a
phone, where the latter can serve as the cause of the former; such a causal
relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address this, researchers in
recommender systems have begun utilizing causal inference to extract causality,
thereby enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we offer a
comprehensive review of the literature on causal inference-based
recommendation. Initially, we introduce the fundamental concepts of both
recommender system and causal inference as the foundation for subsequent
content. We then highlight the typical issues faced by non-causality
recommender system. Following that, we thoroughly review the existing work on
causal inference-based recommender systems, based on a taxonomy of three-aspect
challenges that causal inference can address. Finally, we discuss the open
problems in this critical research area and suggest important potential future
works.Comment: Accepted by ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS
Salience and Market-aware Skill Extraction for Job Targeting
At LinkedIn, we want to create economic opportunity for everyone in the
global workforce. To make this happen, LinkedIn offers a reactive Job Search
system, and a proactive Jobs You May Be Interested In (JYMBII) system to match
the best candidates with their dream jobs. One of the most challenging tasks
for developing these systems is to properly extract important skill entities
from job postings and then target members with matched attributes. In this
work, we show that the commonly used text-based \emph{salience and
market-agnostic} skill extraction approach is sub-optimal because it only
considers skill mention and ignores the salient level of a skill and its market
dynamics, i.e., the market supply and demand influence on the importance of
skills. To address the above drawbacks, we present \model, our deployed
\emph{salience and market-aware} skill extraction system. The proposed \model
~shows promising results in improving the online performance of job
recommendation (JYMBII) ( job apply) and skill suggestions for job
posters ( suggestion rejection rate). Lastly, we present case studies to
show interesting insights that contrast traditional skill recognition method
and the proposed \model~from occupation, industry, country, and individual
skill levels. Based on the above promising results, we deployed the \model
~online to extract job targeting skills for all M job postings served at
LinkedIn.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in KDD202
A Personalised Ranking Framework with Multiple Sampling Criteria for Venue Recommendation
Recommending a ranked list of interesting venues to users based on their preferences has become a key functionality in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) such as Yelp and Gowalla. Bayesian Personalised Ranking (BPR) is a popular pairwise recommendation technique that is used to generate the ranked list of venues of interest to a user, by leveraging the user's implicit feedback such as their check-ins as instances of positive feedback, while randomly sampling other venues as negative instances. To alleviate the sparsity that affects the usefulness of recommendations by BPR for users with few check-ins, various approaches have been proposed in the literature to incorporate additional sources of information such as the social links between users, the textual content of comments, as well as the geographical location of the venues. However, such approaches can only readily leverage one source of additional information for negative sampling. Instead, we propose a novel Personalised Ranking Framework with Multiple sampling Criteria (PRFMC) that leverages both geographical influence and social correlation to enhance the effectiveness of BPR. In particular, we apply a multi-centre Gaussian model and a power-law distribution method, to capture geographical influence and social correlation when sampling negative venues, respectively. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments using three large-scale datasets from the Yelp, Gowalla and Brightkite LBSNs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of fusing both geographical influence and social correlation in our proposed PRFMC framework and its superiority in comparison to BPR-based and other similar ranking approaches. Indeed, our PRFMC approach attains a 37% improvement in MRR over a recently proposed approach that identifies negative venues only from social links
- …