Joint Topic-Semantic-aware Social Recommendation for Online Voting

Online voting is an emerging feature in social networks, in which users can express their attitudes toward various issues and show their unique interest. Online voting imposes new challenges on recommendation, because the propagation of votings heavily depends on the structure of social networks as well as the content of votings. In this paper, we investigate how to utilize these two factors in a comprehensive manner when doing voting recommendation. First, due to the fact that existing text mining methods such as topic model and semantic model cannot well process the content of votings that is typically short and ambiguous, we propose a novel Topic-Enhanced Word Embedding (TEWE) method to learn word and document representation by jointly considering their topics and semantics. Then we propose our Joint Topic-Semantic-aware social Matrix Factorization (JTS-MF) model for voting recommendation. JTS-MF model calculates similarity among users and votings by combining their TEWE representation and structural information of social networks, and preserves this topic-semantic-social similarity during matrix factorization. To evaluate the performance of TEWE representation and JTS-MF model, we conduct extensive experiments on real online voting dataset. The results prove the efficacy of our approach against several state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: The 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017

Recruitment Market Trend Analysis with Sequential Latent Variable Models

Recruitment market analysis provides valuable understanding of industry-specific economic growth and plays an important role for both employers and job seekers. With the rapid development of online recruitment services, massive recruitment data have been accumulated and enable a new paradigm for recruitment market analysis. However, traditional methods for recruitment market analysis largely rely on the knowledge of domain experts and classic statistical models, which are usually too general to model large-scale dynamic recruitment data, and have difficulties to capture the fine-grained market trends. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new research paradigm for recruitment market analysis by leveraging unsupervised learning techniques for automatically discovering recruitment market trends based on large-scale recruitment data. Specifically, we develop a novel sequential latent variable model, named MTLVM, which is designed for capturing the sequential dependencies of corporate recruitment states and is able to automatically learn the latent recruitment topics within a Bayesian generative framework. In particular, to capture the variability of recruitment topics over time, we design hierarchical dirichlet processes for MTLVM. These processes allow to dynamically generate the evolving recruitment topics. Finally, we implement a prototype system to empirically evaluate our approach based on real-world recruitment data in China. Indeed, by visualizing the results from MTLVM, we can successfully reveal many interesting findings, such as the popularity of LBS related jobs reached the peak in the 2nd half of 2014, and decreased in 2015.Comment: 11 pages, 30 figure, SIGKDD 201

MOOCs Meet Measurement Theory: A Topic-Modelling Approach

This paper adapts topic models to the psychometric testing of MOOC students based on their online forum postings. Measurement theory from education and psychology provides statistical models for quantifying a person's attainment of intangible attributes such as attitudes, abilities or intelligence. Such models infer latent skill levels by relating them to individuals' observed responses on a series of items such as quiz questions. The set of items can be used to measure a latent skill if individuals' responses on them conform to a Guttman scale. Such well-scaled items differentiate between individuals and inferred levels span the entire range from most basic to the advanced. In practice, education researchers manually devise items (quiz questions) while optimising well-scaled conformance. Due to the costly nature and expert requirements of this process, psychometric testing has found limited use in everyday teaching. We aim to develop usable measurement models for highly-instrumented MOOC delivery platforms, by using participation in automatically-extracted online forum topics as items. The challenge is to formalise the Guttman scale educational constraint and incorporate it into topic models. To favour topics that automatically conform to a Guttman scale, we introduce a novel regularisation into non-negative matrix factorisation-based topic modelling. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach with both quantitative experiments on three Coursera MOOCs, and with a qualitative survey of topic interpretability on two MOOCs by domain expert interviews.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures; accepted into AAAI'201