OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to Distinguish Multi-User Coupling Behaviors for TV Recommendation
Authors: Jiarui Qin, Jiachen Zhu, Yankai Liu, Junchao Gao, Jianjie Ying, Chaoxiong Liu, Ding Wang, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Xiaozheng Wang, Jian Jiang, Cong Liu, Yong Yu, Haitao Zeng, Weinan Zhang
Venue: Conference WSDM 2023
Year: 2023

This paper is concerned with TV recommendation, where one major challenge is the coupling behavior issue that the behaviors of multiple users are coupled together and not directly distinguishable because the users share the same account. Unable to identify the current watching user and use the coupling behaviors directly could lead to sub-optimal recommendation results due to the noise introduced by the behaviors of other users. Most existing methods deal with this issue either by unsupervised clustering algorithms or depending on latent user representation learning with strong assumptions. However, they neglect to sophisticatedly model the current session behaviors, which carry the information of user identification. Another critical limitation of the existing models is the lack of supervision signal on distinguishing behaviors because they solely depend on the final click label, which is insufficient to provide effective supervision. To address the above problems, we propose the Coupling Sequence Model (COSMO) for TV recommendation. In COSMO, we design a session-aware co-attention mechanism that uses both the candidate item and session behaviors as the query to attend to the historical behaviors in a fine-grained manner. Furthermore, we propose to use the data of accounts with multiple devices (e.g., families with various TV sets), which means the behaviors of one account are generated on different devices. We regard the device information as weak supervision and propose a novel pair-wise attention loss for learning to distinguish the coupling behaviors. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests over a commercial TV service provider demonstrate the efficacy of COSMO compared to the existing models.
MetaPTP: An adaptive meta-optimized model for personalized spatial trajectory prediction
Authors: Yuan Xu, Jiajie Xu 0001, Jing Zhao 0040, Kai Zheng 0001, An Liu 0002, Lei Zhao 0001, Xiaofang Zhou 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2022
Year: 2022

Trajectory prediction is a fundamental problem for a wide spectrum of location-based applications. Existing methods can achieve inspiring results in predicting personal frequent routes conditioned on massive historical data. However, trajectory estimation may involve cold-start routes or users due to the data sparsity problem, which severely limits the performance of spatial trajectory prediction. Although meta-learning models can alleviate the cold-start problem, they simply utilize the same initialization for all tasks and thus cannot fit each user well due to users' varying travel preferences. To this end, we propose an adaptive meta-optimized model called MetaPTP for personalized spatial trajectory prediction. Specifically, it adopts a soft-clustering based method to guide the network initialization in a finer granularity, so that shared knowledge can be better transferred across users with similar travel preferences. Besides, towards model fine-tuning, an effective trajectory sampling method is introduced to generate meaningful support set, which simultaneously considers user preference and spatial trace similarities to provide task-related information for model adaptation. In addition, we design a weight generator to adaptively assign reasonable weights to trajectories in support set to avoid sub-optimal results which will occur when fine-tuning the initial network with the same weight for trajectories with different user preferences and spatial distributions. Finally, extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model.
Spatial- Temporal Graph Boosting Networks: Enhancing Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Gradient Boosting
Authors: Yujie Fan, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Huiyuan Chen, Yan Zheng, Liang Wang, Junpeng Wang, Xin Dai, Zhongfang Zhuang, Wei Zhang
Venue: Conference CIKM 2023
Year: 2023

Spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) are promising in solving real-world spatial-temporal forecasting problems. Recognizing the inherent sequential relationship of spatial-temporal data, it is natural to explore the integration of boosting training mechanism to further enhance the performance of STGNNs. However, few studies have touched this research area. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose spatial-temporal graph boosting networks, namely STGBN, which to the best of our knowledge is the first attempt to leverage gradient boosting for enhancing STGNNs. STGBN follows the general training procedure of conventional gradient boosting, but incorporates two distinctive designs to improve its efficiency in training on spatial-temporal graphs. Specifically, we design an incremental learning strategy that progressively includes spatial-temporal data into training. Additionally, we enforce an identical architecture for the base learner in all boosting iterations with each base learner inheriting from the one in the previous iteration. These designs facilitate rapid convergence of the base learner and expedite the overall training process. The base learner in STGBN is designed as a Transformer sandwich, which consists of two temporal Transformers on the top and bottom and a spatial Transformer in the middle. Structuring them in such a way helps the model capture long-range temporal dynamics, global spatial dependencies, and deep spatial-temporal interactions. We perform extensive spatial-temporal forecasting experiments on four spatial-temporal graph benchmarks. Promising results demonstrate the outstanding performance of STGBN against a wide range of state-of-the-art baseline models.
A Nonparametric Hierarchical Bayesian Framework for Information Filtering
Authors: Kai Yu, Volker Tresp, Shipeng Yu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2004
Year: 2004

Information filtering has made considerable progress in recent years. The predominant approaches are content-based methods and collaborative methods. Researchers have largely concentrated on either of the two approaches since a principled unifying framework is still lacking. This paper suggests that both approaches can be combined under a hierarchical Bayesian framework. Individual content-based user profiles are generated and collaboration between various user models is achieved via a common learned prior distribution. However, it turns out that a parametric distribution (e.g. Gaussian) is too restrictive to describe such a common learned prior distribution. We thus introduce a nonparametric common prior, which is a sample generated from a Dirichlet process which assumes the role of a hyper prior. We describe effective means to learn this nonparametric distribution, and apply it to learn users' information needs. The resultant algorithm is simple and understandable, and offers a principled solution to combine content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. Within our framework, we are now able to interpret various existing techniques from a unifying point of view. Finally we demonstrate the empirical success of the proposed information filtering methods.
Temporal-Contextual Recommendation in Real-Time
Authors: Yifei Ma, Balakrishnan (Murali) Narayanaswamy, Haibin Lin, Hao Ding 0003
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Personalized real-time recommendation has had a profound impact on retail, media, entertainment and other industries. However, developing recommender systems for every use case is costly, time consuming and resource-intensive. To fill this gap, we present a black-box recommender system that can adapt to a diverse set of scenarios without the need for manual tuning. We build on techniques that go beyond simple matrix factorization to incorporate important new sources of information: the temporal order of events [Hidasi et al., 2015], contextual information to bootstrap cold-start users, metadata information about items [Rendle 2012] and the additional information surrounding each event. Additionally, we address two fundamental challenges when putting recommender systems in the real-world: how to efficiently train them with even millions of unique items and how to cope with changing item popularity trends [Wu et al., 2017]. We introduce a compact model, which we call hierarchical recurrent network with meta data (HRNN-meta) to address the real-time and diverse metadata needs; we further provide efficient training techniques via importance sampling that can scale to millions of items with little loss in performance. We report significant improvements on a wide range of real-world datasets and provide intuition into model capabilities with synthetic experiments. Parts of HRNN-meta have been deployed in production at scale for customers to use at Amazon Web Services and serves as the underlying recommender engine for thousands of websites.
Translating pieces of words
Authors: Paul McNamee, James Mayfield
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2005
Year: 2005

Translation for cross-language information retrieval need not be word-based. We show that character n-grams in one language can be 'translated' into character n-grams of another language. We demonstrate that such translations produce retrieval results on par with, and often exceeding, those of word-based and stem-based translation.
Hybrid CNN Based Attention with Category Prior for User Image Behavior Modeling
Authors: Xin Chen, Qingtao Tang, Ke Hu, Yue Xu, Shihang Qiu, Jia Cheng, Jun Lei
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

User historical behaviors are proved useful for Click Through Rate (CTR) prediction in online advertising system. In Meituan, one of the largest e-commerce platform in China, an item is typically displayed with its image and whether a user clicks the item or not is usually influenced by its image, which implies that user's image behaviors are helpful for understanding user's visual preference and improving the accuracy of CTR prediction. Existing user image behavior models typically use a two-stage architecture, which extracts visual embeddings of images through off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in the first stage, and then jointly trains a CTR model with those visual embeddings and non-visual features. We find that the two-stage architecture is sub-optimal for CTR prediction. Meanwhile, precisely labeled categories in online ad systems contain abundant visual prior information, which can enhance the modeling of user image behaviors. However, off-the-shelf CNNs without category prior may extract category unrelated features, limiting CNN's expression ability. To address the two issues, we propose a hybrid CNN based attention module, unifying user's image behaviors and category prior, for CTR prediction. Our approach achieves significant improvements in both online and offline experiments on a billion scale real serving dataset.
Exploring adapter-based transfer learning for recommender systems: Empirical studies and practical insights
Authors: Junchen Fu, Fajie Yuan, Yu Song, Zheng Yuan, Mingyue Cheng, Shenghui Cheng, Jiaqi Zhang, Jie Wang, Yunzhu Pan
Venue: Conference WSDM 2024
Year: 2024

Adapters, a plug-in neural network module with some tunable parameters, have emerged as a parameter-efficient transfer learning technique for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks, especially for natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) fields. Meanwhile, learning recommendation models directly from raw item modality features --- e.g., texts of NLP and images of CV --- can enable effective and transferable recommender systems (called TransRec). In view of this, a natural question arises:can adapter-based learning techniques achieve parameter-efficient TransRec with good performance? To this end, we perform empirical studies to address several key sub-questions. First, we ask whether the adapter-based TransRec performs comparably to TransRec based on standard full-parameter fine-tuning? does it hold for recommendation with different item modalities, e.g., textual RS and visual RS. If yes, we benchmark these existing adapters, which have been shown to be effective in NLP and CV tasks, in item recommendation tasks. Third, we carefully study several key factors for the adapter-based TransRec in terms of where and how to insert these adapters? Finally, we look at the effects of adapter-based TransRec by either scaling up its source training data or scaling down its target training data. Our paper provides key insights and practical guidance on unified & transferable recommendation --- a less studied recommendation scenario. We release our codes and other materials at https://github.com/westlake-repl/Adapter4Rec/.
Learning fine-grained user interests for micro-video recommendation
Authors: Yu Shang, Chen Gao, Jiansheng Chen, Depeng Jin, Meng Wang, Yong Li
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2023
Year: 2023

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of online micro-video platforms, in which the recommender system plays an essential role in overcoming the information overloading problem and providing personalized content for users. Although some progress has been achieved in the micro-video recommendation, there are still some limitations in learning the representations of user interests and video features. Specifically, the user modeling in existing works is performed at a coarse-grained level, i.e., video level. However, in micro-video recommendation, the user feedback is at a continuous form---users can skip over a video at each frame---which reveals fine-grained user preferences. In this work, we approach the problem of learning fine-grained user preferences for micro-video recommendation by first collecting two real-world datasets. To address the challenges of preference modeling and weak supervision signal, we propose a solution named FRAME (short for Fine-gRAined preference-modeling for Micro-video rEcommendation). Specifically, we first adopt visual feature extraction and transformation to maintain the fine-grained video embeddings. We then propose graph convolution layers to learn the user preference from complex and fine-grained user-clip relations, and hybrid-supervision objectives for enhancing the supervision signal. The experimental results on two collected real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. We release the datasets and codes in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/FRAME, which we believe can benefit the community.
Zero-shot Clarifying Question Generation for Conversational Search
Authors: Zhenduo Wang, Yuancheng Tu, Corby Rosset, Nick Craswell, Ming Wu, Qingyao Ai
Venue: Conference WWW 2023
Year: 2023

A long-standing challenge for search and conversational assistants is query intention detection in ambiguous queries. Asking clarifying questions in conversational search has been widely studied and considered an effective solution to resolve query ambiguity. Existing work have explored various approaches for clarifying question ranking and generation. However, due to the lack of real conversational search data, they have to use artificial datasets for training, which limits their generalizability to real-world search scenarios. As a result, the industry has shown reluctance to implement them in reality, further suspending the availability of real conversational search interaction data. The above dilemma can be formulated as a cold start problem of clarifying question generation and conversational search in general. Furthermore, even if we do have large-scale conversational logs, it is not realistic to gather training data that can comprehensively cover all possible queries and topics in open-domain search scenarios. The risk of fitting bias when training a clarifying question retrieval/generation model on incomprehensive dataset is thus another important challenge. In this work, we innovatively explore generating clarifying questions in a zero-shot setting to overcome the cold start problem and we propose a constrained clarifying question generation system which uses both question templates and query facets to guide the effective and precise question generation. The experiment results show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines by a large margin. Human annotations to our model outputs also indicate our method generates 25.2\% more natural questions, 18.1\% more useful questions, 6.1\% less unnatural and 4\% less useless questions.
MM-Rec: Visiolinguistic Model Empowered Multimodal News Recommendation
Authors: Chuhan Wu, Fangzhao Wu, Tao Qi, Chao Zhang, Yongfeng Huang, Tong Xu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

News representation is critical for news recommendation. Most existing methods learn news representations only from news texts while ignoring the visual information of news. In fact, users may click news not only due to the interest in news titles but also the attraction of news images. Thus, images are useful for representing news and predicting news clicks. Pretrained visiolinguistic models are powerful in multi-modal understanding, which can represent news from both textual and visual contents. In this paper, we propose a multimodal news recommendation method that can incorporate both textual and visual information of news to learn multimodal news representations. We first extract region-of-interests (ROIs) from news images via object detection. We then use a pre-trained visiolinguistic model to encode both news texts and image ROIs and model their inherent relatedness using co-attentional Transformers. In addition, we propose a crossmodal candidate-aware attention network to select relevant historical clicked news for the accurate modeling of user interest in candidate news. Experiments validate that incorporating multimodal news information can effectively improve the performance of news recommendation.
User-oriented text segmentation evaluation measure
Authors: Martin Franz, J. Scott McCarley, Jian-Ming Xu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2007
Year: 2007

The paper describes a user oriented performance evaluation measure for text segmentation. Experiments show that the proposed measure differentiates well between error distributions with varying user impact.
Enriching textbooks with images
Authors: Rakesh Agrawal, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Anitha Kannan, Krishnaram Kenthapadi
Venue: Conference CIKM 2011
Year: 2011

Textbooks have a direct bearing on the quality of education imparted to the students. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that the educational content of textbooks should provide rich learning experience to the students. Recent studies on understanding learning behavior suggest that the incorporation of digital visual material can greatly enhance learning. However, textbooks used in many developing regions are largely text-oriented and lack good visual material. We propose techniques for finding images from the web that are most relevant for augmenting a section of the textbook, while respecting the constraint that the same image is not repeated in different sections of the same chapter. We devise a rigorous formulation of the image assignment problem and present a polynomial time algorithm for solving the problem optimally. We also present two image mining algorithms that utilize orthogonal signals and hence obtain different sets of relevant images. Finally, we provide an ensembling algorithm for combining the assignments. To empirically evaluate our techniques, we use a corpus of high school textbooks in use in India. Our user study utilizing the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform indicates that the proposed techniques are able to obtain images that can help increase the understanding of the textbook material.
Latent aspect mining via exploring sparsity and intrinsic information
Authors: Yinqing Xu, Tianyi Lin, Wai Lam, Zirui Zhou, Hong Cheng, Anthony Man-Cho So
Venue: Conference CIKM 2014
Year: 2014

We investigate latent aspect mining problem that aims at automatically discovering aspect information from a collection of review texts in a domain in an unsupervised manner. One goal is to discover a set of aspects which are previously unknown for the domain, and predict the user's ratings on each aspect for each review. Another goal is to detect key terms for each aspect. Existing works on predicting aspect ratings fail to handle the aspect sparsity problem in the review texts leading to unreliable prediction. We propose a new generative model to tackle the latent aspect mining problem in an unsupervised manner. By considering the user and item side information of review texts, we introduce two latent variables, namely, user intrinsic aspect interest and item intrinsic aspect quality facilitating better modeling of aspect generation leading to improvement on the accuracy and reliability of predicted aspect ratings. Furthermore, we provide an analytical investigation on the Maximum A Posterior (MAP) optimization problem used in our proposed model and develop a new block coordinate gradient descent algorithm to efficiently solve the optimization with closed-form updating formulas. We also study its convergence analysis. Experimental results on the two real-world product review corpora demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models.
Automatic gloss finding for a knowledge base using ontological constraints
Authors: Bhavana Bharat Dalvi, Einat Minkov, Partha Pratim Talukdar, William W. Cohen
Venue: Conference WSDM 2015
Year: 2015

While there has been much research on automatically constructing structured Knowledge Bases (KBs), most of it has focused on generating facts to populate a KB. However, a useful KB must go beyond facts. For example, glosses (short natural language definitions) have been found to be very useful in tasks such as Word Sense Disambiguation. However, the important problem of Automatic Gloss Finding, i.e., assigning glosses to entities in an initially gloss-free KB, is relatively unexplored. We address that gap in this paper. In particular, we propose GLOFIN, a hierarchical semi-supervised learning algorithm for this problem which makes effective use of limited amounts of supervision and available ontological constraints. To the best of our knowledge, GLOFIN is the first system for this task. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate GLOFIN's effectiveness. It is encouraging to see that GLOFIN outperforms other state-of-the-art SSL algorithms, especially in low supervision settings. We also demonstrate GLOFIN's robustness to noise through experiments on a wide variety of KBs, ranging from user contributed (e.g., Freebase) to automatically constructed (e.g., NELL). To facilitate further research in this area, we have made the datasets and code used in this paper publicly available.
LONLIES: Estimating Property Values for Long Tail Entities
Authors: Mina H. Farid, Ihab F. Ilyas, Steven Euijong Whang, Cong Yu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2016
Year: 2016

Web search engines often retrieve answers for queries about popular entities from a growing knowledge base that is populated by a continuous information extraction process. However, less popular entities are not frequently mentioned on the web and are generally interesting to fewer users; these entities reside on the long tail of information. Traditional knowledge base construction techniques that rely on the high frequency of entity mentions to extract accurate facts about these mentions have little success with entities that have low textual support. We present Lonlies, a system for estimating property values of long tail entities by leveraging their relationships to head topics and entities. We demonstrate (1) how Lonlies builds communities of entities that are relevant to a long tail entity utilizing a text corpus and a knowledge base; (2) how Lonlies determines which communities to use in the estimation process; (3) how we aggregate estimates from community entities to produce final estimates, and (4) how users interact with Lonlies to provide feedback to improve the final estimation results.