OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Domain adaptation for commitment detection in email
Authors: Hosein Azarbonyad, Robert Sim, Ryen W. White
Venue: Conference WSDM 2019
Year: 2019

People often make commitments to perform future actions. Detecting commitments made in email (e.g., "I'll send the report by end of day'') enables digital assistants to help their users recall promises they have made and assist them in meeting those promises in a timely manner. In this paper, we show that commitments can be reliably extracted from emails when models are trained and evaluated on the same domain (corpus). However, their performance degrades when the evaluation domain differs. This illustrates the domain bias associated with email datasets and a need for more robust and generalizable models for commitment detection. To learn a domain-independent commitment model, we first characterize the differences between domains (email corpora) and then use this characterization to transfer knowledge between them. We investigate the performance of domain adaptation, namely transfer learning, at different granularities: feature-level adaptation and sample-level adaptation. We extend this further using a neural autoencoder trained to learn a domain-independent representation for training samples. We show that transfer learning can help remove domain bias to obtain models with less domain dependence. Overall, our results show that domain differences can have a significant negative impact on the quality of commitment detection models and that transfer learning has enormous potential to address this issue.
How many folders do you really need?: Classifying email into a handful of categories
Authors: Mihajlo Grbovic, Guy Halawi, Zohar Shay Karnin, Yoelle Maarek
Venue: Conference CIKM 2014
Year: 2014

Email classification is still a mostly manual task. Consequently, most Web mail users never define a single folder. Recently however, automatic classification offering the same categories to all users has started to appear in some Web mail clients, such as AOL or Gmail. We adopt this approach, rather than previous (unsuccessful) personalized approaches because of the change in the nature of consumer email traffic, which is now dominated by (non-spam) machine-generated email. We propose here a novel approach for (1) automatically distinguishing between personal and machine-generated email and (2) classifying messages into latent categories, without requiring users to have defined any folder. We report how we have discovered that a set of 6 "latent" categories (one for human- and the others for machine-generated messages) can explain a significant portion of email traffic. We describe in details the steps involved in building a Web-scale email categorization system, from the collection of ground-truth labels, the selection of features to the training of models. Experimental evaluation was performed on more than 500 billion messages received during a period of six months by users of Yahoo mail service, who elected to be part of such research studies. Our system achieved precision and recall rates close to 90% and the latent categories we discovered were shown to cover 70% of both email traffic and email search queries. We believe that these results pave the way for a change of approach in the Web mail industry, and could support the invention of new large-scale email discovery paradigms that had not been possible before.
Hidden in plain sight: Classifying emails using embedded image contents
Authors: Navneet Potti, James B. Wendt, Qi Zhao, Sandeep Tata, Marc Najork
Venue: Conference WWW 2018
Year: 2018

A vast majority of the emails received by people today are machine-generated by businesses communicating with consumers. While some emails originate as a result of a transaction (e.g., hotel or restaurant reservation confirmations, online purchase receipts, shipping notifications, etc.), a large fraction are commercial emails promoting an offer (a special sale, free shipping, available for a limited time, etc.). The sheer number of these promotional emails makes it difficult for users to read all these emails and decide which ones are actually interesting and actionable. In this paper, we tackle the problem of extracting information from commercial emails promoting an offer to the user. This information enables an email platform to build several new experiences that can unlock the value in these emails without the user having to navigate and read all of them. For instance, we can highlight offers that are expiring soon, or display a notification when there»s an unexpired offer from a merchant if your phone recognizes that you are at that merchant»s store. A key challenge in extracting information from such commercial emails is that they are often image-rich and contain very little text. Training a machine learning (ML) model on a rendered image-rich email and applying it to each incoming email can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we describe a cost-effective approach for extracting signals from both the text and image content of commercial emails in the context of Gmail, an email platform that serves over a billion users around the world. The key insight is to leverage the template structure of emails, and use off-the-shelf OCR techniques to obtain the text from images to augment the existing text features offline. Compared to a text-only approach, we show that we are able to identify 9.12% more email templates corresponding to ~5% more emails being identified as offers. Interestingly, our analysis shows that this 5% improvement in coverage is across the board, irrespective of whether the emails were sent by large merchants or small local merchants, allowing us to deliver an improved experience for everyone.
Ranking relevance in Yahoo search
Authors: Dawei Yin, Yuening Hu, Jiliang Tang, Tim Daly Jr., Mianwei Zhou, Hua Ouyang, Jianhui Chen, Changsung Kang, Hongbo Deng, Chikashi Nobata, Jean-Marc Langlois, Yi Chang
Venue: Conference KDD 2016
Year: 2016

Search engines play a crucial role in our daily lives. Relevance is the core problem of a commercial search engine. It has attracted thousands of researchers from both academia and industry and has been studied for decades. Relevance in a modern search engine has gone far beyond text matching, and now involves tremendous challenges. The semantic gap between queries and URLs is the main barrier for improving base relevance. Clicks help provide hints to improve relevance, but unfortunately for most tail queries, the click information is too sparse, noisy, or missing entirely. For comprehensive relevance, the recency and location sensitivity of results is also critical. In this paper, we give an overview of the solutions for relevance in the Yahoo search engine. We introduce three key techniques for base relevance -- ranking functions, semantic matching features and query rewriting. We also describe solutions for recency sensitive relevance and location sensitive relevance. This work builds upon 20 years of existing efforts on Yahoo search, summarizes the most recent advances and provides a series of practical relevance solutions. The performance reported is based on Yahoo's commercial search engine, where tens of billions of urls are indexed and served by the ranking system.
A generalized framework for population based training
Authors: Ang Li, Ola Spyra, Sagi Perel, Valentin Dalibard, Max Jaderberg, Chenjie Gu, David Budden, Tim Harley, Pramod Gupta
Venue: Conference KDD 2019
Year: 2019

Population Based Training (PBT) is a recent approach that jointly optimizes neural network weights and hyperparameters which periodically copies weights of the best performers and mutates hyperparameters during training. Previous PBT implementations have been synchronized glass-box systems. We propose a general, black-box PBT framework that distributes many asynchronous "trials" (a small number of training steps with warm-starting) across a cluster, coordinated by the PBT controller. The black-box design does not make assumptions on model architectures, loss functions or training procedures. Our system supports dynamic hyperparameter schedules to optimize both differentiable and non-differentiable metrics. We apply our system to train a state-of-the-art WaveNet generative model for human voice synthesis. We show that our PBT system achieves better accuracy, less sensitivity and faster convergence compared to existing methods, given the same computational resource.
Learning and Transferring IDs Representation in E-commerce
Authors: Kui Zhao, Yuechuan Li, Zhaoqian Shuai, Cheng Yang
Venue: Conference KDD 2018
Year: 2018

Many machine intelligence techniques are developed in E-commerce and one of the most essential components is the representation of IDs, including user ID, item ID, product ID, store ID, brand ID, category ID etc. The classical encoding based methods (like one-hot encoding) are inefficient in that it suffers sparsity problems due to its high dimension, and it cannot reflect the relationships among IDs, either homogeneous or heterogeneous ones. In this paper, we propose an embedding based framework to learn and transfer the representation of IDs. As the implicit feedbacks of users, a tremendous amount of item ID sequences can be easily collected from the interactive sessions. By jointly using these informative sequences and the structural connections among IDs, all types of IDs can be embedded into one low-dimensional semantic space. Subsequently, the learned representations are utilized and transferred in four scenarios: (i) measuring the similarity between items, (ii) transferring from seen items to unseen items, (iii) transferring across different domains, (iv) transferring across different tasks. We deploy and evaluate the proposed approach in Hema App and the results validate its effectiveness.
The utility of linguistic rules in opinion mining
Authors: Xiaowen Ding, Bing Liu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2007
Year: 2007

Online product reviews are one of the important opinion sources on the Web. This paper studies the problem of determining the semantic orientations (positive or negative) of opinions expressed on product features in reviews. Most existing approaches use a set of opinion words for the purpose. However, the semantic orientations of many words are context dependent. In this paper, we propose to use some linguistic rules to deal with the problem together with a new opinion aggregation function. Extensive experiments show that these rules and the function are highly effective. A system, called Opinion Observer, has also been built.
Eyeblink-based anti-spoofing in face recognition from a generic webcamera
Authors: Gang Pan 0001, Lin Sun 0009, Zhaohui Wu 0001, Shihong Lao
Venue: Conference ICCV 2007
Year: 2007

We present a real-time liveness detection approach against photograph spoofing in face recognition, by recognizing spontaneous eyeblinks, which is a non-intrusive manner. The approach requires no extra hardware except for a generic webcamera. Eyeblink sequences often have a complex underlying structure. We formulate blink detection as inference in an undirected conditional graphical framework, and are able to learn a compact and efficient observation and transition potentials from data. For purpose of quick and accurate recognition of the blink behavior, eye closity, an easily-computed discriminative measure derived from the adaptive boosting algorithm, is developed, and then smoothly embedded into the conditional model. An extensive set of experiments are presented to show effectiveness of our approach and how it outperforms the cascaded Adaboost and HMM in task of eyeblink detection.
DeepCrime: attentive hierarchical recurrent networks for crime prediction
Authors: Chao Huang, Junbo Zhang, Yu Zheng, Nitesh V. Chawla
Venue: Conference CIKM 2018
Year: 2018

As urban crimes (e.g., burglary and robbery) negatively impact our everyday life and must be addressed in a timely manner, predicting crime occurrences is of great importance for public safety and urban sustainability. However, existing methods do not fully explore dynamic crime patterns as factors underlying crimes may change over time. In this paper, we develop a new crime prediction framework--DeepCrime, a deep neural network architecture that uncovers dynamic crime patterns and carefully explores the evolving inter-dependencies between crimes and other ubiquitous data in urban space. Furthermore, our DeepCrime framework is capable of automatically capturing the relevance of crime occurrences across different time periods. In particular, our DeepCrime framework enables predicting crime occurrences of different categories in each region of a city by i) jointly embedding all spatial, temporal, and categorical signals into hidden representation vectors, and ii) capturing crime dynamics with an attentive hierarchical recurrent network. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework over many competitive baselines across various settings.
WassRank: Listwise document ranking using optimal transport theory
Authors: Haitao Yu, Adam Jatowt, Hideo Joho, Joemon M. Jose, Xiao Yang, Long Chen
Venue: Conference WSDM 2019
Year: 2019

Learning to rank has been intensively studied and has shown great value in many fields, such as web search, question answering and recommender systems. This paper focuses on listwise document ranking, where all documents associated with the same query in the training data are used as the input. We propose a novel ranking method, referred to as WassRank, under which the problem of listwise document ranking boils down to the task of learning the optimal ranking function that achieves the minimum Wasserstein distance. Specifically, given the query level predictions and the ground truth labels, we first map them into two probability vectors. Analogous to the optimal transport problem, we view each probability vector as a pile of relevance mass with peaks indicating higher relevance. The listwise ranking loss is formulated as the minimum cost (the Wasserstein distance) of transporting (or reshaping) the pile of predicted relevance mass so that it matches the pile of ground-truth relevance mass. The smaller the Wasserstein distance is, the closer the prediction gets to the ground-truth. To better capture the inherent relevance-based order information among documents with different relevance labels and lower the variance of predictions for documents with the same relevance label, ranking-specific cost matrix is imposed. To validate the effectiveness of WassRank, we conduct a series of experiments on two benchmark collections. The experimental results demonstrate that: compared with four non-trivial listwise ranking methods (i.e., LambdaRank, ListNet, ListMLE and ApxNDCG), WassRank can achieve substantially improved performance in terms of nDCG and ERR across different rank positions. Specifically, the maximum improvements of WassRank over LambdaRank, ListNet, ListMLE and ApxNDCG in terms of nDCG@1 are 15%, 5%, 7%, 5%, respectively.
A Bayesian Approach to In-Game Win Probability in Soccer
Authors: Pieter Robberechts, Jan Van Haaren, Jesse Davis
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become important tools to enhance fan experience, to evaluate in-game decision-making, and to inform coaching decisions. While equally relevant in soccer, the adoption of these models is held back by technical challenges arising from the low-scoring nature of the sport. In this paper, we introduce an in-game win probability model for soccer that addresses the shortcomings of existing models. First, we demonstrate that in-game win probability models for other sports struggle to provide accurate estimates for soccer, especially towards the end of a game. Second, we introduce a novel Bayesian statistical framework that estimates running win, tie and loss probabilities by leveraging a set of contextual game state features. An empirical evaluation on eight seasons of data for the top-five soccer leagues demonstrates that our framework provides well-calibrated probabilities. Furthermore, two use cases show its ability to enhance fan experience and to evaluate performance in crucial game situations.
k-Clustering with Fair Outliers
Authors: Matteo Almanza, Alessandro Epasto, Alessandro Panconesi, Giuseppe Re
Venue: Conference WSDM 2022
Year: 2022

Clustering problems and clustering algorithms are often overly sensitive to the presence of outliers: even a handful of points can greatly affect the structure of the optimal solution and its cost. This is why many algorithms for robust clustering problems have been formulated in recent years. These algorithms discard some points as outliers, excluding them from the clustering. However, outlier selection can be unfair: some categories of input points may be disproportionately affected by the outlier removal algorithm. We study the problem of k-clustering with fair outlier removal and provide the first approximation algorithm for well-known clustering formulations, such as k-means and k-median. We analyze this algorithm and prove that it has strong theoretical guarantees. We complement this result with an empirical evaluation showing that, while standard methods for outlier removal have a disproportionate impact across categories of input points, our algorithm equalizes the impact while retaining strong experimental performances on multiple real--world datasets. We also show how the fairness of outlier removal can influence the performance of a downstream learning task. Finally, we provide a coreset construction, which makes our algorithm scalable to very large datasets.
Cross-domain recommendation without sharing user-relevant data
Authors: Chen Gao, Xiangning Chen, Fuli Feng, Kai Zhao, Xiangnan He, Yong Li, Depeng Jin
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Web systems that provide the same functionality usually share a certain amount of items. This makes it possible to combine data from different websites to improve recommendation quality, known as the cross-domain recommendation task. Despite many research efforts on this task, the main drawback is that they largely assume the data of different systems can be fully shared. Such an assumption is unrealistic - different systems are typically operated by different companies, and it may violate business privacy policy to directly share user behavior data since it is highly sensitive. In this work, we consider a more practical scenario to perform cross-domain recommendation. To avoid the leak of user privacy during the data sharing process, we consider sharing only the information of the item side, rather than user behavior data. Specifically, we transfer the item embeddings across domains, making it easier for two companies to reach a consensus (e.g., legal policy) on data sharing since the data to be shared is user-irrelevant and has no explicit semantics. To distill useful signals from transferred item embeddings, we rely on the strong representation power of neural networks and develop a new method named as NATR (short for Neural Attentive Transfer Recommendation). We perform extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, demonstrating that NATR achieves similar or even better performance than traditional cross-domain recommendation methods that directly share user-relevant data. Further insights are provided on the efficacy of NATR in using the transferred item embeddings to alleviate the data sparsity issue.
Exploiting aesthetic preference in deep cross networks for cross-domain recommendation
Authors: Jian Liu, Pengpeng Zhao, Fuzhen Zhuang, Yanchi Liu, Victor S. Sheng, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou, Hui Xiong
Venue: Conference WWW 2020
Year: 2020

Visual aesthetics of products plays an important role in the decision process when purchasing appearance-first products, e.g., clothes. Indeed, user’s aesthetic preference, which serves as a personality trait and a basic requirement, is domain independent and could be used as a bridge between domains for knowledge transfer. However, existing work has rarely considered the aesthetic information in product images for cross-domain recommendation. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new deep Aesthetic Cross-Domain Networks (ACDN), in which parameters characterizing personal aesthetic preferences are shared across networks to transfer knowledge between domains. Specifically, we first leverage an aesthetic network to extract aesthetic features. Then, we integrate these features into a cross-domain network to transfer users’ domain independent aesthetic preferences. Moreover, network cross-connections are introduced to enable dual knowledge transfer across domains. Finally, the experimental results on real-world datasets show that our proposed model ACDN outperforms benchmark methods in terms of recommendation accuracy.
Solving the sparsity problem in recommendations via cross-domain item embedding based on co-clustering
Authors: Yaqing Wang, Chunyan Feng, Caili Guo, Yunfei Chu, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Venue: Conference WSDM 2019
Year: 2019

Session-based recommendations recently receive much attentions due to no available user data in many cases, e.g., users are not logged-in/tracked. Most session-based methods focus on exploring abundant historical records of anonymous users but ignoring the sparsity problem, where historical data are lacking or are insufficient for items in sessions. In fact, as users' behavior is relevant across domains, information from different domains is correlative, e.g., a user tends to watch related movies in a movie domain, after listening to some movie-themed songs in a music domain (i.e., cross-domain sessions). Therefore, we can learn a complete item description to solve the sparsity problem using complementary information from related domains. In this paper, we propose an innovative method, called Cross-Domain Item Embedding method based on Co-clustering (CDIE-C), to learn cross-domain comprehensive representations of items by collectively leveraging single-domain and cross-domain sessions within a unified framework. We first extract cluster-level correlations across domains using co-clustering and filter out noise. Then, cross-domain items and clusters are embedded into a unified space by jointly capturing item-level sequence information and cluster-level correlative information. Besides, CDIE-C enhances information exchange across domains utilizing three types of relations (i.e., item-to-context-item, item-to-context-co-cluster and co-cluster-to-context-item relations). Finally, we train CDIE-C with two efficient training strategies, i.e., joint training and two-stage training. Empirical results show CDIE-C outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods on three cross-domain datasets and can effectively alleviate the sparsity problem.
Scene summarization for online image collections
Authors: Ian Simon, Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz
Venue: Conference ICCV 2007
Year: 2007

We formulate the problem of scene summarization as selecting a set of images that efficiently represents the visual content of a given scene. The ideal summary presents the most interesting and important aspects of the scene with minimal redundancy. We propose a solution to this problem using multi-user image collections from the Internet. Our solution examines the distribution of images in the collection to select a set of canonical views to form the scene summary, using clustering techniques on visual features. The summaries we compute also lend themselves naturally to the browsing of image collections, and can be augmented by analyzing user-specified image tag data. We demonstrate the approach using a collection of images of the city of Rome, showing the ability to automatically decompose the images into separate scenes, and identify canonical views for each scene.