The achievement gap between Roma and non-Roma students in East Central Europe and its potential causes

This study quantifies the achievement gap between Roma and non-Roma students in East Central Europe and assesses the potential causes of the gap. Using the UNDP survey of 2011, the only comparable data on the Roma spanning many countries, we show that the gap in the chances to get secondary education is substantial in all countries. When comparing young adults living with parents of comparable income and educational attainment, the gap drops by more than a half in most countries. Using unique data from Hungary, we assess the gap in standardized test scores and show that it is comparable to the size of the Black-White test score gap in the U.S.A. in the 1980’s. The test score gap in Hungary is almost entirely explained by social differences in income, wealth and parental education, and ethnic factors do not play a significant role. We identify two major mechanisms by which the social disadvantages of Roma students lead to lower skills. Their home environment is less favorable for their cognitive development, and their schools are characterized by a lower quality educational environment. Ethnic differences in the home environment are, again, explained by social differences, and ethnicity seems to play no additional role. On the other hand, while access to higher quality schools is strongly related to social differences, Roma students seem to face additional disadvantages. The results suggest that besides policies that aim at alleviating poverty, well-designed interventions influencing the mechanisms can also improve the skill development of Roma and other disadvantaged children

Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502

Deep Learning for Phishing Detection: Taxonomy, Current Challenges and Future Directions

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme under Grant FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1; and in part by the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, through SPEV project under Grant 2102/2022.Phishing has become an increasing concern and captured the attention of end-users as well as security experts. Existing phishing detection techniques still suffer from the de ciency in performance accuracy and inability to detect unknown attacks despite decades of development and improvement. Motivated to solve these problems, many researchers in the cybersecurity domain have shifted their attention to phishing detection that capitalizes on machine learning techniques. Deep learning has emerged as a branch of machine learning that becomes a promising solution for phishing detection in recent years. As a result, this study proposes a taxonomy of deep learning algorithm for phishing detection by examining 81 selected papers using a systematic literature review approach. The paper rst introduces the concept of phishing and deep learning in the context of cybersecurity. Then, taxonomies of phishing detection and deep learning algorithm are provided to classify the existing literature into various categories. Next, taking the proposed taxonomy as a baseline, this study comprehensively reviews the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques and analyzes their advantages as well as disadvantages. Subsequently, the paper discusses various issues that deep learning faces in phishing detection and proposes future research directions to overcome these challenges. Finally, an empirical analysis is conducted to evaluate the performance of various deep learning techniques in a practical context, and to highlight the related issues that motivate researchers in their future works. The results obtained from the empirical experiment showed that the common issues among most of the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms are manual parameter-tuning, long training time, and de cient detection accuracy.Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, through SPEV project 2102/202

Tidying Up the Conversational Recommender Systems' Biases

The growing popularity of language models has sparked interest in conversational recommender systems (CRS) within both industry and research circles. However, concerns regarding biases in these systems have emerged. While individual components of CRS have been subject to bias studies, a literature gap remains in understanding specific biases unique to CRS and how these biases may be amplified or reduced when integrated into complex CRS models. In this paper, we provide a concise review of biases in CRS by surveying recent literature. We examine the presence of biases throughout the system's pipeline and consider the challenges that arise from combining multiple models. Our study investigates biases in classic recommender systems and their relevance to CRS. Moreover, we address specific biases in CRS, considering variations with and without natural language understanding capabilities, along with biases related to dialogue systems and language models. Through our findings, we highlight the necessity of adopting a holistic perspective when dealing with biases in complex CRS models