The Effect of News Article Quality on Ad Consumption

Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently. However, they should be arranged with careful consideration of each other, as we show in this study, since user behaviors toward advertisements are significantly affected by the news articles. This paper investigates the effect of news articles on users' ad consumption and shows the dependency between news and ad effectiveness. We conducted a service log analysis and showed that sessions with high-quality news article exposure had more ad consumption than those with low-quality news article exposure. Based on this result, we hypothesized that exposure to high-quality articles will lead to a high ad consumption rate. Thus, we conducted million-scale A/B testing to investigate the effect of high-quality articles on ad consumption, in which we prioritized high-quality articles in the ranking for the treatment group. The A/B test showed that the treatment group's ad consumption, such as the number of clicks, conversions, and sales, increased significantly while the number of article clicks decreased. We also found that users who prefer a social or economic topic had more ad consumption by stratified analysis. These insights regarding news articles and advertisements will help optimize news and ad effectiveness in rankings considering their mutual influence.Comment: 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2021

Theoretical Analysis on the Efficiency of Interleaved Comparisons

This study presents a theoretical analysis on the efficiency of interleaving, an efficient online evaluation method for rankings. Although interleaving has already been applied to production systems, the source of its high efficiency has not been clarified in the literature. Therefore, this study presents a theoretical analysis on the efficiency of interleaving methods. We begin by designing a simple interleaving method similar to ordinary interleaving methods. Then, we explore a condition under which the interleaving method is more efficient than A/B testing and find that this is the case when users leave the ranking depending on the item's relevance, a typical assumption made in click models. Finally, we perform experiments based on numerical analysis and user simulation, demonstrating that the theoretical results are consistent with the empirical results.Comment: The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR2023

Decomposition and Interleaving for Variance Reduction of Post-click Metrics

In this study, we propose an efficient method for comparing the post-click metric (e.g., dwell time and conversion rate) of multiple rankings in online experiments. The proposed method involves (1) the decomposition of the post-click metric measurement of a ranking into a click model estimation and a post-click metric measurement of each item in the ranking, and (2) interleaving of multiple rankings to produce a single ranking that preferentially exposes items possessing a high population variance. The decomposition of the post-click metric measurement enables the free layout of items in a ranking and focuses on the measurement of the post-click metric of each item in the multiple rankings. The interleaving of multiple rankings reduces the sample variance of the items possessing a high population variance by optimizing a ranking to be presented to the users so that those items received more samples of the post-click metric. In addition, we provide a proof that the proposed method leads to the minimization of the evaluation error in the ranking comparison and propose two practical techniques to stabilize the online experiment. We performed a comprehensive simulation experiment and a real service setting experiment. The experimental results revealed that (1) the proposed method outperformed existing methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy, and the performance was especially remarkable when the input rankings shared many items, and (2) the two stabilization techniques successfully improved the evaluation accuracy and efficiency.Comment: The 7th ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR2021

Cognitive Profile of Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

Background/Aims: Frontal lobe dysfunction is believed to be a primary cognitive symptom in idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH); however, the neuropsychology of this disorder remains to be fully investigated. The objective of this study was to delineate a comprehensive profile of cognitive dysfunction in iNPH and evaluate the effects of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shunt surgery on cognitive dysfunction. Methods: A total of 32 iNPH patients underwent neuropsychological testing of memory, attention, language, executive function, and visuoperceptual and visuospatial abilities. Of these 32 patients, 26 were reevaluated approximately 1 year following CSF shunt surgery. The same battery of tests was performed on 32 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 30 healthy elderly controls. Results: The iNPH patients displayed baseline deficits in attention, executive function, memory, and visuoperceptual and visuospatial functions. Impairments of attention, executive function, and visuoperceptual and visuospatial abilities in iNPH patients were more severe than in those with AD, whereas the degree of memory impairment was comparable to that in AD patients. A significant improvement in executive function was observed following shunt surgery. Conclusion: Patients with iNPH are impaired in various aspects of cognition involving both ‘frontal’ executive functions and ‘posterior cortical’ functions. Shunt treatment can ameliorate executive dysfunction

Sulfur assimilation using gaseous carbonyl sulfideby the soil fungus Trichoderma harzianum

Fungi have the capacity to assimilate a diverse range of both inorganic and organic sulfur compounds. It has been recognized that all sulfur sources taken up by fungi are in soluble forms. In this study, we present evidence that fungi can utilize gaseous carbonyl sulfide(COS) for the assimilation of a sulfur compound. We found that the filamentousfungus Trichoderma harzianum strain THIF08, which has constitutively high COS-degrading activity, was able to grow with COS as the sole sulfur source. Cultivation with 34S-labeled COS revealed that sulfur atom from COS was incorporated into intracellular metabolites such as glutathione and ergothioneine. COS degradation by strain THIF08, in which as much of the moisture derived from the agar medium as possible was removed, indicated that gaseous COS was taken up directly into the cell. Escherichia coli transformed with a COS hydrolase (COSase) gene, which is clade D of the β-class carbonic anhydrase subfamily enzyme with high specificity for COS but low activity for CO2 hydration, showed that the COSase is involved in COS assimilation. Comparison of sulfur metabolites of strain THIF08 revealed a higher relative abundance of reduced sulfur compounds under the COS-supplemented condition than the sulfate-supplemented condition, suggesting that sulfur assimilation is more energetically efficient with COS than with sulfate because there is no redox change of sulfur. Phylogenetic analysis of the genes encoding COSase, which are distributed in a wide range of fungal taxa, suggests that the common ancestor of Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, and Mucoromycota acquired COSase at about 790-670 Ma. © 2024 Iizuka et al

Neuronal surface antigen-specific immunostaining pattern on a rat brain immunohistochemistry in autoimmune encephalitis

A variety of neuronal surface (NS) antibodies (NS-Ab) have been identified in autoimmune encephalitis (AE). Tissue-based assay (TBA) using a rodent brain immunohistochemistry (IHC) is used to screen NS-Ab, while cell-based assay (CBA) to determine NS antigens. Commercial rat brain IHC is currently available but its clinical relevance remains unclear. Immunostaining patterns of NS antigens have not been extensively studied yet. To address these issues, we assessed a predictive value of “neuropil pattern” and “GFAP pattern” on commercial IHC in 261 patients, and characterized an immunostaining pattern of 7 NS antigens (NMDAR, LGI1, GABAaR, GABAbR, AMPAR, Caspr2, GluK2). Sensitivity and specificity of “neuropil pattern” for predicting NS-Ab were 66.0% (95% CI 55.7-75.3), and 98.2% (95% CI 94.8-99.6), respectively. False-positive rate was 1.8% (3/164) while false-negative rate was 34.0% (33/97). In all 3 false-positive patients, neuropil-like staining was attributed to high titers of GAD65-Ab. In 33 false-negative patients, NMDAR was most frequently identified (n=18 [54.5%], 16/18 [88.9%] had low titers [< 1:32]), followed by GABAaR (n=5). Of 261 patients, 25 (9.6%) had either GFAP (n=21) or GFAP-mimicking pattern (n=4). GFAP-Ab were identified in 21 of 31 patients examined with CBA (20 with GFAP pattern, 1 with GFAP-mimicking pattern). Immunostaining pattern of each NS antigen was as follows: 1) NMDAR revealed homogenous reactivity in the dentate gyrus molecular layer (DG-ML) with less intense dot-like reactivity in the cerebellar granular layer (CB-GL); 2) both GABAaR and GluK2 revealed intense dot-like reactivity in the CB-GL, but GABAaR revealed homogenous reactivity in the DG-ML while GluK2 revealed intense reactivity along the inner layer of the DG-ML; and 3) LGI1, Caspr2, GABAbR, and AMPAR revealed intense reactivity in the cerebellar ML (CB-ML) but LGI1 revealed intense reactivity along the middle layer of the DG-ML. Whereas, Caspr2, GABAbR, and AMPAR revealed similar reactivity in the DG-ML but some difference in other regions. TBA is useful not only for screening NS- or GFAP-Ab but also for estimating NS antigens; however, negative results should be interpreted cautiously because “neuropil pattern” may be missed on commercial IHC when antibody titers are low. Antigen-specific immunoreactivity is a useful biomarker of AE