OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On effective personalized music retrieval by exploring online user behaviors
Authors: Zhiyong Cheng, Jialie Shen, Steven C. H. Hoi
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we study the problem of personalized text based music retrieval which takes users' music preferences on songs into account via the analysis of online listening behaviours and social tags. Towards the goal, a novel Dual-Layer Music Preference Topic Model (DL-MPTM) is proposed to construct latent music interest space and characterize the correlations among (user, song, term). Based on the DL-MPTM, we further develop an effective personalized music retrieval system. To evaluate the system's performance, extensive experimental studies have been conducted over two test collections to compare the proposed method with the state-of-the-art music retrieval methods. The results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms those approaches in terms of personalized search accuracy.
Effective music tagging through advanced statistical modeling
Authors: Jialie Shen, Wang Meng, Shuicheng Yan, HweeHwa Pang, Xian-Sheng Hua
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2010
Year: 2010

Music information retrieval (MIR) holds great promise as a technology for managing large music archives. One of the key components of MIR that has been actively researched into is music tagging. While significant progress has been achieved, most of the existing systems still adopt a simple classification approach, and apply machine learning classifiers directly on low level acoustic features. Consequently, they suffer the shortcomings of (1) poor accuracy, (2) lack of comprehensive evaluation results and the associated analysis based on large scale datasets, and (3) incomplete content representation, arising from the lack of multimodal and temporal information integration. In this paper, we introduce a novel system called MMTagger that effectively integrates both multimodal and temporal information in the representation of music signal. The carefully designed multilayer architecture of the proposed classification framework seamlessly combines Multiple Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) into a single framework. The structure preserves more discriminative information, leading to more accurate and robust tagging. Experiment results obtained with two large music collections highlight the various advantages of our multilayer framework over state of the art techniques.
Modeling concept dynamics for large scale music search
Authors: Jialie Shen, HweeHwa Pang, Meng Wang, Shuicheng Yan
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2012
Year: 2012

Continuing advances in data storage and communication technologies have led to an explosive growth in digital music collections. To cope with their increasing scale, we need effective Music Information Retrieval (MIR) capabilities like tagging, concept search and clustering. Integral to MIR is a framework for modelling music documents and generating discriminative signatures for them. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal, layered learning framework called DMCM. Distinguished from the existing approaches that encode music as an ensemble of order-less feature vectors, our framework extracts from each music document a variety of acoustic features, and translates them into low-level encodings over the temporal dimension. From them, DMCM elucidates the concept dynamics in the music document, representing them with a novel music signature scheme called Stochastic Music Concept Histogram (SMCH) that captures the probability distribution over all the concepts. Experiment results with two large music collections confirm the advantages of the proposed framework over existing methods on various MIR tasks.
Optimal action extraction for random forests and boosted trees
Authors: Zhicheng Cui, Wenlin Chen, Yujie He, Yixin Chen
Venue: Conference KDD 2015
Year: 2015

Additive tree models (ATMs) are widely used for data mining and machine learning. Important examples of ATMs include random forest, adaboost (with decision trees as weak learners), and gradient boosted trees, and they are often referred to as the best off-the-shelf classifiers. Though capable of attaining high accuracy, ATMs are not well interpretable in the sense that they do not provide actionable knowledge for a given instance. This greatly limits the potential of ATMs on many applications such as medical prediction and business intelligence, where practitioners need suggestions on actions that can lead to desirable outcomes with minimum costs.
Discrimination-aware data mining
Authors: Dino Pedreschi, Salvatore Ruggieri, Franco Turini
Venue: Conference KDD 2008
Year: 2008

In the context of civil rights law, discrimination refers to unfair or unequal treatment of people based on membership to a category or a minority, without regard to individual merit. Rules extracted from databases by data mining techniques, such as classification or association rules, when used for decision tasks such as benefit or credit approval, can be discriminatory in the above sense. In this paper, the notion of discriminatory classification rules is introduced and studied. Providing a guarantee of non-discrimination is shown to be a non trivial task. A naive approach, like taking away all discriminatory attributes, is shown to be not enough when other background knowledge is available. Our approach leads to a precise formulation of the redlining problem along with a formal result relating discriminatory rules with apparently safe ones by means of background knowledge. An empirical assessment of the results on the German credit dataset is also provided.
Modeling and predicting user behavior in sponsored search
Authors: Josh Attenberg, Sandeep Pandey, Torsten Suel
Venue: Conference KDD 2009
Year: 2009

Implicit user feedback, including click-through and subsequent browsing behavior, is crucial for evaluating and improving the quality of results returned by search engines. Several recent studies [1, 2, 3, 13, 25] have used post-result browsing behavior including the sites visited, the number of clicks, and the dwell time on site in order to improve the ranking of search results. In this paper, we first study user behavior on sponsored search results (i.e., the advertisements displayed by search engines next to the organic results), and compare this behavior to that of organic results. Second, to exploit post-result user behavior for better ranking of sponsored results, we focus on identifying patterns in user behavior and predict expected on-site actions in future instances. In particular, we show how post-result behavior depends on various properties of the queries, advertisement, sites, and users, and build a classifier using properties such as these to predict certain aspects of the user behavior. Additionally, we develop a generative model to mimic trends in observed user activity using a mixture of pareto distributions. We conduct experiments based on billions of real navigation trails collected by a major search engine's browser toolbar.
Externalities in online advertising
Authors: Arpita Ghosh, Mohammad Mahdian
Venue: Conference WWW 2008
Year: 2008

Most models for online advertising assume that an advertiser's value from winning an ad auction, which depends on the clickthrough rate or conversion rate of the advertisement, is independent of other advertisements served alongside it in the same session. This ignores an important 'externality effect': as the advertising audience has a limited attention span, a high-quality ad on a page can detract attention from other ads on the same page. That is, the utility to a winner in such an auction also depends on the set of other winners. In this paper, we introduce the problem of modeling externalities in online advertising, and study the winner determination problem in these models. Our models are based on choice models on the audience side. We show that in the most general case, the winner determination problem is hard even to approximate. However, we give an approximation algorithm for this problem with an approximation factor that is logarithmic in the ratio of the maximum to the minimum bid. Furthermore, we show that there are some interesting special cases, such as the case where the audience preferences are single peaked, where the problem can be solved exactly in polynomial time. For all these algorithms, we prove that the winner determination algorithm can be combined with VCG-style payments to yield truthful mechanisms.
Psychological advertising: exploring user psychology for click prediction in sponsored search
Authors: Taifeng Wang, Jiang Bian, Shusen Liu, Yuyu Zhang, Tie-Yan Liu
Venue: Conference KDD 2013
Year: 2013

Precise click prediction is one of the key components in the sponsored search system. Previous studies usually took advantage of two major kinds of information for click prediction, i.e., relevance information representing the similarity between ads and queries and historical click-through information representing users' previous preferences on the ads. These existing works mainly focused on interpreting ad clicks in terms of what users seek (i.e., relevance information) and how users choose to click (historically clicked-through information). However, few of them attempted to understand why users click the ads. In this paper, we aim at answering this ``why'' question. In our opinion, users click those ads that can convince them to take further actions, and the critical factor is if those ads can trigger users' desires in their hearts. Our data analysis on a commercial search engine reveals that specific text patterns, e.g., ``official site'', ``$x\%$ off'', and ``guaranteed return in $x$ days'', are very effective in triggering users' desires, and therefore lead to significant differences in terms of click-through rate (CTR). These observations motivate us to systematically model user psychological desire in order for a precise prediction on ad clicks. To this end, we propose modeling user psychological desire in sponsored search according to Maslow's desire theory, which categorizes psychological desire into five levels and each one is represented by a set of textual patterns automatically mined from ad texts. We then construct novel features for both ads and users based on our definition on psychological desire and incorporate them into the learning framework of click prediction. Large scale evaluations on the click-through logs from a commercial search engine demonstrate that this approach can result in significant improvement in terms of click prediction accuracy, for both the ads with rich historical data and those with rare one. Further analysis reveals that specific pattern combinations are especially effective in driving click-through rates, which provides a good guideline for advertisers to improve their ad textual descriptions.
From devices to people: Attribution of search activity in multi-user settings
Authors: Ryen W. White, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Adish Singla, Eric Horvitz
Venue: Conference WWW 2014
Year: 2014

Online services rely on unique identifiers of machines to tailor offerings to their users. An implicit assumption is made that each machine identifier maps to an individual. However, shared ma-chines are common, leading to interwoven search histories and noisy signals for applications such as personalized search and ad-vertising. We present methods for attributing search activity to individual searchers. Using ground truth data for a sample of almost four million U.S. Web searchers-containing both machine identifiers and person identifiers-we show that over half of the machine identifiers comprise the queries of multiple people. We characterize variations in features of topic, time, and other aspects such as the complexity of the information sought per the number of searchers on a machine, and show significant differences in all measures. Based on these insights, we develop models to accurately estimate when multiple people contribute to the logs ascribed to a single machine identifier. We also develop models to cluster search behavior on a machine, allowing us to attribute historical data accurately and automatically assign new search activity to the correct searcher. The findings have implications for the design of applications such as personalized search and advertising that rely heavily on machine identifiers to custom-tailor their services.
Neural text embeddings for information retrieval
Authors: Bhaskar Mitra, Nick Craswell
Venue: Conference WSDM 2017
Year: 2017

In the last few years, neural representation learning approaches have achieved very good performance on many natural language processing tasks, such as language modelling and machine translation. This suggests that neural models will also achieve good performance on information retrieval (IR) tasks, such as relevance ranking, addressing the query-document vocabulary mismatch problem by using a semantic rather than lexical matching. Although initial iterations of neural models do not outperform traditional lexical-matching baselines, the level of interest and effort in this area is increasing, potentially leading to a breakthrough. The popularity of the recent SIGIR 2016 workshop on Neural Information Retrieval provides evidence to the growing interest in neural models for IR. While recent tutorials have covered some aspects of deep learning for retrieval tasks, there is a significant scope for organizing a tutorial that focuses on the fundamentals of representation learning for text retrieval. The goal of this tutorial will be to introduce state-of-the-art neural embedding models and bridge the gap between these neural models with early representation learning approaches in IR (e.g., LSA). We will discuss some of the key challenges and insights in making these models work in practice, and demonstrate one of the toolsets available to researchers interested in this area.
Discovering and using groups to improve personalized search
Authors: Jaime Teevan, Meredith Ringel Morris, Steve Bush
Venue: Conference WSDM 2009
Year: 2009

Personalized Web search takes advantage of information about an individual to identify the most relevant results for that person. A challenge for personalization lies in collecting user profiles that are rich enough to do this successfully. One way an individual's profile can be augmented is by using data from other people. To better understand whether groups of people can be used to benefit personalized search, we explore the similarity of query selection, desktop information, and explicit relevance judgments across people grouped in different ways. The groupings we explore fall along two dimensions: the longevity of the group members' relationship, and how explicitly the group is formed. We find that some groupings provide valuable insight into what members consider relevant to queries related to the group focus, but that it can be difficult to identify valuable groups implicitly. Building on these findings, we explore an algorithm to "groupize" (versus "personalize") Web search results that leads to a significant improvement in result ranking on group-relevant queries.
Repeatable and reliable search system evaluation using crowdsourcing
Authors: Roi Blanco, Harry Halpin, Daniel M. Herzig, Peter Mika, Jeffrey Pound, Henry S. Thompson, Duc Thanh Tran
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2011
Year: 2011

The primary problem confronting any new kind of search task is how to boot-strap a reliable and repeatable evaluation campaign, and a crowd-sourcing approach provides many advantages. However, can these crowd-sourced evaluations be repeated over long periods of time in a reliable manner? To demonstrate, we investigate creating an evaluation campaign for the semantic search task of keyword-based ad-hoc object retrieval. In contrast to traditional search over web-pages, object search aims at the retrieval of information from factual assertions about real-world objects rather than searching over web-pages with textual descriptions. Using the first large-scale evaluation campaign that specifically targets the task of ad-hoc Web object retrieval over a number of deployed systems, we demonstrate that crowd-sourced evaluation campaigns can be repeated over time and still maintain reliable results. Furthermore, we show how these results are comparable to expert judges when ranking systems and that the results hold over different evaluation and relevance metrics. This work provides empirical support for scalable, reliable, and repeatable search system evaluation using crowdsourcing.
Feedback control of real-time display advertising
Authors: Weinan Zhang, Yifei Rong, Jun Wang, Tianchi Zhu, Xiaofan Wang
Venue: Conference WSDM 2016
Year: 2016

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is revolutionising display advertising by facilitating per-impression auctions to buy ad impressions as they are being generated. Being able to use impression-level data, such as user cookies, encourages user behaviour targeting, and hence has significantly improved the effectiveness of ad campaigns. However, a fundamental drawback of RTB is its instability because the bid decision is made per impression and there are enormous fluctuations in campaigns' key performance indicators (KPIs). As such, advertisers face great difficulty in controlling their campaign performance against the associated costs. In this paper, we propose a feedback control mechanism for RTB which helps advertisers dynamically adjust the bids to effectively control the KPIs, e.g., the auction winning ratio and the effective cost per click. We further formulate an optimisation framework to show that the proposed feedback control mechanism also has the ability of optimising campaign performance. By settling the effective cost per click at an optimal reference value, the number of campaign's ad clicks can be maximised with the budget constraint. Our empirical study based on real-world data verifies the effectiveness and robustness of our RTB control system in various situations. The proposed feedback control mechanism has also been deployed on a commercial RTB platform and the online test has shown its success in generating controllable advertising performance.
Deep semantic hashing with generative adversarial networks
Authors: Zhaofan Qiu, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Tao Mei
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2017
Year: 2017

Hashing has been a widely-adopted technique for nearest neighbor search in large-scale image retrieval tasks. Recent research has shown that leveraging supervised information can lead to high quality hashing. However, the cost of annotating data is often an obstacle when applying supervised hashing to a new domain. Moreover, the results can suffer from the robustness problem as the data at training and test stage may come from different distributions. This paper studies the exploration of generating synthetic data through semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GANs), which leverages largely unlabeled and limited labeled training data to produce highly compelling data with intrinsic invariance and global coherence, for better understanding statistical structures of natural data. We demonstrate that the above two limitations can be well mitigated by applying the synthetic data for hashing. Specifically, a novel deep semantic hashing with GANs (DSH-GANs) is presented, which mainly consists of four components: a deep convolution neural networks (CNN) for learning image representations, an adversary stream to distinguish synthetic images from real ones, a hash stream for encoding image representations to hash codes and a classification stream. The whole architecture is trained end-to-end by jointly optimizing three losses, i.e., adversarial loss to correct label of synthetic or real for each sample, triplet ranking loss to preserve the relative similarity ordering in the input real-synthetic triplets and classification loss to classify each sample accurately. Extensive experiments conducted on both CIFAR-10 and NUS-WIDE image benchmarks validate the capability of exploiting synthetic images for hashing. Our framework also achieves superior results when compared to state-of-the-art deep hash models.
What are we looking for: Towards statistical modeling of saccadic eye movements and visual saliency
Authors: Xiaoshuai Sun, Hongxun Yao, Rongrong Ji
Venue: Conference CVPR 2012
Year: 2012

In this paper, we present a unified statistical framework for modeling both saccadic eye movements and visual saliency. By analyzing the statistical properties of human eye fixations on natural images, we found that human attention is sparsely distributed and usually deployed to locations with abundant structural information. This new observations inspired us to model saccadic behavior and visual saliency based on Super Gaussian Component (SGC) analysis. The model sequentially obtains SGC using projection pursuit, and generates eye-movements by selecting the location with maximum SGC response. Beside human saccadic behavior simulation, we also demonstrated our superior effectiveness and robustness over state-of-the-arts by carrying out dense experiments on psychological patterns and human eye fixation benchmarks. These results also show promising potentials of statistical approaches for human behavior research.
Simulating human saccadic scanpaths on natural images
Authors: Wei Wang 0115, Cheng Chen 0004, Yizhou Wang 0001, Tingting Jiang 0001, Fang Fang 0003, Yuan Yao 0011
Venue: Conference CVPR 2011
Year: 2011

Human saccade is a dynamic process of information pursuit. Based on the principle of information maximization, we propose a computational model to simulate human saccadic scanpaths on natural images. The model integrates three related factors as driven forces to guide eye movements sequentially - reference sensory responses, fovea-periphery resolution discrepancy, and visual working memory. For each eye movement, we compute three multi-band filter response maps as a coherent representation for the three factors. The three filter response maps are combined into multi-band residual filter response maps, on which we compute residual perceptual information (RPI) at each location. The RPI map is a dynamic saliency map varying along with eye movements. The next fixation is selected as the location with the maximal RPI value. On a natural image dataset, we compare the saccadic scanpaths generated by the proposed model and several other visual saliency-based models against human eye movement data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves the best prediction accuracy on both static fixation locations and dynamic scanpaths.
A pseudo-distance map for the segmentation-free skeletonization of gray-scale images
Authors: Jeong-Hun Jang, Ki-Sang Hong
Venue: Conference ICCV 2001
Year: 2001

In this paper we introduce a new tool, called a pseudo-distance map (PDM), for extracting skeletons from grayscale images without region segmentation or edge detection. Given an edge-strength function (ESF) of a gray-scale image, the PDM is computed from the ESF using the partial differential equations we propose. The PDM can be thought of as a relaxed version of a Euclidean distance map. Therefore, its ridges correspond to the skeleton of the original gray-scale image and it provides information on the approximate width of skeletonized structures. Since the PDM is directly computed from the ESF without thresholding it, the skeletonization result is generally robust and less noisy. We tested our method using a variety of synthetic and real images. The experimental results show that our method works well on such images.
Quality assurance in crowdsourcing via matrix factorization based task routing
Authors: Hyun Joon Jung
Venue: Conference WWW 2014
Year: 2014

We investigate a method of crowdsourced task routing based on matrix factorization. From a preliminary analysis of a real crowdsourced data, we begin an exploration of how to route crowdsourcing task via Matrix factorization (MF) which efficiently estimate missing values in a worker-task matrix. Our preliminary results show the benefits of task routing over random assignment, the strength of probabilistic MF over baseline methods.