321 research outputs found
Search Result Diversification in Short Text Streams
We consider the problem of search result diversification for streams of short texts. Diversifying search results in short text streams is more challenging than in the case of long documents, as it is difficult to capture the latent topics of short documents. To capture the changes of topics and the probabilities of documents for a given query at a specific time in a short text stream, we propose a dynamic Dirichlet multinomial mixture topic model, called D2M3, as well as a Gibbs sampling algorithm for the inference. We also propose a streaming diversification algorithm, SDA, that integrates the information captured by D2M3 with our proposed modified version of the PM-2 (Proportionality-based diversification Method -- second version) diversification algorithm. We conduct experiments on a Twitter dataset and find that SDA statistically significantly outperforms state-of-the-art non-streaming retrieval methods, plain streaming retrieval methods, as well as streaming diversification methods that use other dynamic topic models
Recommender Systems
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity
of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information.
Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of
communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and
interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical
achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking,
which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments
in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and
evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future
developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to
illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and
future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great
scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of
interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports
Peeking into the other half of the glass : handling polarization in recommender systems.
This dissertation is about filtering and discovering information online while using recommender systems. In the first part of our research, we study the phenomenon of polarization and its impact on filtering and discovering information. Polarization is a social phenomenon, with serious consequences, in real-life, particularly on social media. Thus it is important to understand how machine learning algorithms, especially recommender systems, behave in polarized environments. We study polarization within the context of the users\u27 interactions with a space of items and how this affects recommender systems. We first formalize the concept of polarization based on item ratings and then relate it to the item reviews, when available. We then propose a domain independent data science pipeline to automatically detect polarization using the ratings rather than the properties, typically used to detect polarization, such as item\u27s content or social network topology. We perform an extensive comparison of polarization measures on several benchmark data sets and show that our polarization detection framework can detect different degrees of polarization and outperforms existing measures in capturing an intuitive notion of polarization. We also investigate and uncover certain peculiar patterns that are characteristic of environments where polarization emerges: A machine learning algorithm finds it easier to learn discriminating models in polarized environments: The models will quickly learn to keep each user in the safety of their preferred viewpoint, essentially, giving rise to filter bubbles and making them easier to learn. After quantifying the extent of polarization in current recommender system benchmark data, we propose new counter-polarization approaches for existing collaborative filtering recommender systems, focusing particularly on the state of the art models based on Matrix Factorization. Our work represents an essential step toward the new research area concerned with quantifying, detecting and counteracting polarization in human-generated data and machine learning algorithms.We also make a theoretical analysis of how polarization affects learning latent factor models, and how counter-polarization affects these models. In the second part of our dissertation, we investigate the problem of discovering related information by recommendation of tags on social media micro-blogging platforms. Real-time micro-blogging services such as Twitter have recently witnessed exponential growth, with millions of active web users who generate billions of micro-posts to share information, opinions and personal viewpoints, daily. However, these posts are inherently noisy and unstructured because they could be in any format, hence making them difficult to organize for the purpose of retrieval of relevant information. One way to solve this problem is using hashtags, which are quickly becoming the standard approach for annotation of various information on social media, such that varied posts about the same or related topic are annotated with the same hashtag. However hashtags are not used in a consistent manner and most importantly, are completely optional to use. This makes them unreliable as the sole mechanism for searching for relevant information. We investigate mechanisms for consolidating the hashtag space using recommender systems. Our methods are general enough that they can be used for hashtag annotation in various social media services such as twitter, as well as for general item recommendations on systems that rely on implicit user interest data such as e-learning and news sites, or explicit user ratings, such as e-commerce and online entertainment sites. To conclude, we propose a methodology to extract stories based on two types of hashtag co-occurrence graphs. Our research in hashtag recommendation was able to exploit the textual content that is available as part of user messages or posts, and thus resulted in hybrid recommendation strategies. Using content within this context can bridge polarization boundaries. However, when content is not available, is missing, or is unreliable, as in the case of platforms that are rich in multimedia and multilingual posts, the content option becomes less powerful and pure collaborative filtering regains its important role, along with the challenges of polarization
Exploring attributes, sequences, and time in Recommender Systems: From classical to Point-of-Interest recommendation
Tesis Doctoral inĂ©dita leĂda en la Universidad AutĂłnoma de Madrid, Escuela PolitĂ©cnica Superior, Departamento de Ingenieria Informática. Fecha de lectura: 08-07-2021Since the emergence of the Internet and the spread of digital communications
throughout the world, the amount of data stored on the Web has been
growing exponentially. In this new digital era, a large number of companies
have emerged with the purpose of ltering the information available on the
web and provide users with interesting items. The algorithms and models
used to recommend these items are called Recommender Systems. These
systems are applied to a large number of domains, from music, books, or
movies to dating or Point-of-Interest (POI), which is an increasingly popular
domain where users receive recommendations of di erent places when
they arrive to a city.
In this thesis, we focus on exploiting the use of contextual information, especially
temporal and sequential data, and apply it in novel ways in both
traditional and Point-of-Interest recommendation. We believe that this type
of information can be used not only for creating new recommendation models
but also for developing new metrics for analyzing the quality of these
recommendations. In one of our rst contributions we propose di erent
metrics, some of them derived from previously existing frameworks, using
this contextual information. Besides, we also propose an intuitive algorithm
that is able to provide recommendations to a target user by exploiting the
last common interactions with other similar users of the system.
At the same time, we conduct a comprehensive review of the algorithms
that have been proposed in the area of POI recommendation between 2011
and 2019, identifying the common characteristics and methodologies used.
Once this classi cation of the algorithms proposed to date is completed, we
design a mechanism to recommend complete routes (not only independent
POIs) to users, making use of reranking techniques. In addition, due to the
great di culty of making recommendations in the POI domain, we propose
the use of data aggregation techniques to use information from di erent
cities to generate POI recommendations in a given target city.
In the experimental work we present our approaches on di erent datasets
belonging to both classical and POI recommendation. The results obtained
in these experiments con rm the usefulness of our recommendation proposals,
in terms of ranking accuracy and other dimensions like novelty, diversity,
and coverage, and the appropriateness of our metrics for analyzing temporal
information and biases in the recommendations producedDesde la aparici on de Internet y la difusi on de las redes de comunicaciones
en todo el mundo, la cantidad de datos almacenados en la red ha crecido
exponencialmente. En esta nueva era digital, han surgido un gran n umero
de empresas con el objetivo de ltrar la informaci on disponible en la red
y ofrecer a los usuarios art culos interesantes. Los algoritmos y modelos
utilizados para recomendar estos art culos reciben el nombre de Sistemas de
Recomendaci on. Estos sistemas se aplican a un gran n umero de dominios,
desde m usica, libros o pel culas hasta las citas o los Puntos de Inter es (POIs,
en ingl es), un dominio cada vez m as popular en el que los usuarios reciben
recomendaciones de diferentes lugares cuando llegan a una ciudad.
En esta tesis, nos centramos en explotar el uso de la informaci on contextual,
especialmente los datos temporales y secuenciales, y aplicarla de forma novedosa
tanto en la recomendaci on cl asica como en la recomendaci on de POIs.
Creemos que este tipo de informaci on puede utilizarse no s olo para crear
nuevos modelos de recomendaci on, sino tambi en para desarrollar nuevas
m etricas para analizar la calidad de estas recomendaciones. En una de
nuestras primeras contribuciones proponemos diferentes m etricas, algunas
derivadas de formulaciones previamente existentes, utilizando esta informaci
on contextual. Adem as, proponemos un algoritmo intuitivo que es
capaz de proporcionar recomendaciones a un usuario objetivo explotando
las ultimas interacciones comunes con otros usuarios similares del sistema.
Al mismo tiempo, realizamos una revisi on exhaustiva de los algoritmos que
se han propuesto en el a mbito de la recomendaci o n de POIs entre 2011 y
2019, identi cando las caracter sticas comunes y las metodolog as utilizadas.
Una vez realizada esta clasi caci on de los algoritmos propuestos hasta la
fecha, dise~namos un mecanismo para recomendar rutas completas (no s olo
POIs independientes) a los usuarios, haciendo uso de t ecnicas de reranking.
Adem as, debido a la gran di cultad de realizar recomendaciones en el
ambito de los POIs, proponemos el uso de t ecnicas de agregaci on de datos
para utilizar la informaci on de diferentes ciudades y generar recomendaciones
de POIs en una determinada ciudad objetivo.
En el trabajo experimental presentamos nuestros m etodos en diferentes
conjuntos de datos tanto de recomendaci on cl asica como de POIs. Los
resultados obtenidos en estos experimentos con rman la utilidad de nuestras
propuestas de recomendaci on en t erminos de precisi on de ranking y de
otras dimensiones como la novedad, la diversidad y la cobertura, y c omo de
apropiadas son nuestras m etricas para analizar la informaci on temporal y
los sesgos en las recomendaciones producida
Understanding and Mitigating Multi-sided Exposure Bias in Recommender Systems
Fairness is a critical system-level objective in recommender systems that has
been the subject of extensive recent research. It is especially important in
multi-sided recommendation platforms where it may be crucial to optimize
utilities not just for the end user, but also for other actors such as item
sellers or producers who desire a fair representation of their items. Existing
solutions do not properly address various aspects of multi-sided fairness in
recommendations as they may either solely have one-sided view (i.e. improving
the fairness only for one side), or do not appropriately measure the fairness
for each actor involved in the system. In this thesis, I aim at first
investigating the impact of unfair recommendations on the system and how these
unfair recommendations can negatively affect major actors in the system. Then,
I seek to propose solutions to tackle the unfairness of recommendations. I
propose a rating transformation technique that works as a pre-processing step
before building the recommendation model to alleviate the inherent popularity
bias in the input data and consequently to mitigate the exposure unfairness for
items and suppliers in the recommendation lists. Also, as another solution, I
propose a general graph-based solution that works as a post-processing approach
after recommendation generation for mitigating the multi-sided exposure bias in
the recommendation results. For evaluation, I introduce several metrics for
measuring the exposure fairness for items and suppliers, and show that these
metrics better capture the fairness properties in the recommendation results. I
perform extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed
solutions. The experiments on different publicly-available datasets and
comparison with various baselines confirm the superiority of the proposed
solutions in improving the exposure fairness for items and suppliers.Comment: Doctoral thesi
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