Today, the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems began in Vancouver, Canada. We attend and will present our work on meta-learning reference parsing tools in which we treat reference extraction from scientific articles as a recommendation problem. If you also attend the conference, visit us during the poster session on Thursday.
So far, it has been a great conference with many exciting talks. A few of the many great presentations are the following
Why I like it: Multi-task Learning for Recommendation and Explanation
We describe a novel, multi-task recommendation model, which jointly learns to perform rating prediction and recommendation explanation by combining matrix factorization, for rating prediction, and adversarial sequence to sequence learning for explanation generation. The result is evaluated using real-world datasets to demonstrate improved rating prediction performance, compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, while producing effective, personalized explanations.
Impact of Item Consumption on Assessment of Recommendations in User Studies
In user studies of recommender systems, participants typically cannot consume the recommended items. Still, they are asked to assess recommendation quality and other aspects related to user experience by means of questionnaires. Without having listened to recommended songs or watched suggested movies, however, this might be an error-prone task, possibly limiting validity of results obtained in these studies. In this paper, we investigate the effect of actually consuming the recommended items. We present two user studies conducted in different domains showing that in some cases, differences in the assessment of recommendations and in questionnaire results occur. Apparently, it is not always possible to adequately measure user experience without allowing users to consume items. On the other hand, depending on domain and provided information, participants sometimes seem to approximate the actual value of recommendations reasonably well.
CF4CF: Recommending Collaborative Filtering algorithms using Collaborative Filtering
As Collaborative Filtering becomes increasingly important in both academia and industry recommendation solutions, it also becomes imperative to study the algorithm selection task in this domain. This problem aims at finding automatic solutions which enable the selection of the best algorithms for a new problem, without performing full-fledged training and validation procedures. Existing work in this area includes several approaches using Metalearning, which relate the characteristics of the problem domain with the performance of the algorithms. This study explores an alternative approach to deal with this problem. Since, in essence, the algorithm selection problem is a recommendation problem, we investigate the use of Collaborative Filtering algorithms to select Collaborative Filtering algorithms. The proposed approach integrates subsampling landmarkers, a data characterization approach commonly used in Metalearning, with a Collaborative Filtering methodology, named CF4CF. The predictive performance obtained by CF4CF using benchmark recommendation datasets was similar or superior to that obtained with Metalearning.
Using Citation-Context to Reduce Topic Drifting on Pure Citation-Based Recommendation
Recent works in the area of academic recommender systems have demonstrated the effectiveness of co-citation and citation closeness in related-document recommendations. However, documents recommended from such systems may drift away from the main concept of the query document. In this work, we investigate whether incorporating the textual information in close proximity to a citation as well as the citation position could reduce such drifting and further increase the performance of the recommender system. To investigate this, we run experiments with several recommendation methods on a newly created and now publicly available dataset containing 53 million unique citation based records. We then conduct a user-based evaluation with domain-knowledgeable participants. Our results show that a new method based on the combination of Citation Proximity Analysis (CPA), topic modelling and word embeddings achieve more than 20% improvement in Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) compared to CPA.
Multistakeholder Recommendation with Provider Constraints
Recommender systems are typically designed to optimize the utility of the end user. In many settings, however, the end user is not the only stakeholder and this exclusive focus may produce unsatisfactory results for the others. One such setting is found in multisided platforms, which act as middlemen bringing together buyers and sellers. In such platforms, it may be necessary to jointly optimize the value for both buyers and sellers. This paper proposes a constraint-based integer programming optimization model, in which different sets of constraints are used to reflect the goals of multiple stakeholders. This model is applied as a post-processing step, so it can easily be added onto an existing recommendation system to make it multistakeholder aware. For computational tractability with larger data sets, we reformulate the integer problem using the Lagrangian dual and use subgradient optimization. In experiments with two data sets, we evaluate empirically the interaction between the utilities of buyers and sellers and show that our approximation can achieve good upper and lower bounds in practical situations.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Page-wise Recommendations
Recommender systems can mitigate the information overload problem by suggesting users’ personalized items. In real-world recommendations such as e-commerce, a typical interaction between the system and its users is — users are recommended a page of items and provide feedback; and then the system recommends a new page of items. To effectively capture such interaction for recommendations, we need to solve two key problems — (1) how to update recommending strategy according to user’s real-time feedback, and 2) how to generate a page of items with proper display, which pose tremendous challenges to traditional recommender systems. In this paper, we study the problem of page-wise recommendations aiming to address the aforementioned two challenges simultaneously. In particular, we propose a principled approach to jointly generate a set of complementary items and the corresponding strategy to display them in a 2-D page; and propose a novel page-wise recommendation framework based on deep reinforcement learning, DeepPage, which can optimize a page of items with the proper display based on real-time feedback from users. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Below you find a few impressions from the conference and Vancouver.
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