OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adapting user preference to online feedback in multi-round conversational recommendation
Authors: Kerui Xu, Jingxuan Yang, Jun Xu, Sheng Gao, Jun Guo, Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: Conference WSDM 2021
Year: 2021

This paper concerns user preference estimation in multi-round conversational recommender systems (CRS), which interacts with users by asking questions about attributes and recommending items multiple times in one conversation. Multi-round CRS such as EAR have been proposed in which the user's online feedback at both attribute level and item level can be utilized to estimate user preference and make recommendations. Though preliminary success has been shown, existing user preference models in CRS usually use the online feedback information as independent features or training instances, overlooking the relation between attribute-level and item-level feedback signals. The relation can be used to more precisely identify the reasons (e.g., some certain attributes) that trigger the rejection of an item, leading to more fine-grained utilization of the feedback information. To address aforementioned issue, this paper proposes a novel preference estimation model tailored for multi-round CRS, called Feedback-guided Preference Adaptation Network (FPAN). In FPAN, two gating modules are designed to respectively adapt the original user embedding and item-level feedback, both according to the online attribute-level feedback. The gating modules utilize the fine-grained attribute-level feedback to revise the user embedding and coarse-grained item-level feedback, achieving more accurate user preference estimation by considering the relation between feedback. Experimental results on two benchmarks showed that FPAN outperformed the state-of-the-art user preference models in CRS, and the multi-round CRS can also be enhanced by using FPAN as its recommender component.
Enhancing explicit and implicit feature interactions via information sharing for parallel deep ctr models
Authors: Bo Chen, Yichao Wang, Zhirong Liu, Ruiming Tang, Wei Guo, Hongkun Zheng, Weiwei Yao, Muyu Zhang, Xiuqiang He
Venue: Conference CIKM 2021
Year: 2021

Effectively modeling feature interactions is crucial for CTR prediction in industrial recommender systems. The state-of-the-art deep CTR models with parallel structure (e.g., DCN) learn explicit and implicit feature interactions through independent parallel networks. However, these models suffer from trivial sharing issues, namely insufficient sharing in hidden layers and excessive sharing in network input, limiting the model's expressiveness and effectiveness. Therefore, to enhance information sharing between explicit and implicit feature interactions, we propose a novel deep CTR model EDCN. EDCN introduces two advanced modules, namely bridge module and regulation module, which work collaboratively to capture the layer-wise interactive signals and learn discriminative feature distributions for each hidden layer of the parallel networks. Furthermore, two modules are lightweight and model-agnostic, which can be generalized well to mainstream parallel deep CTR models. Extensive experiments and studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of EDCN on two public datasets and one industrial dataset. Moreover, the compatibility of two modules over various parallel-structured models is verified, and they have been deployed onto the online advertising platform in Huawei, where a one-month A/B test demonstrates the improvement over the base parallel-structured model by 7.30% and 4.85% in terms of CTR and eCPM, respectively.
Rankflow: Joint optimization of multi-stage cascade ranking systems as flows
Authors: Jiarui Qin, Jiachen Zhu, Bo Chen, Zhirong Liu, Weiwen Liu, Ruiming Tang, Rui Zhang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Building a multi-stage cascade ranking system is a commonly used solution to balance the efficiency and effectiveness in modern information retrieval (IR) applications, such as recommendation and web search. Despite the popularity in practice, the literature specific on multi-stage cascade ranking systems is relatively scarce. The common practice is to train rankers of each stage independently using the same user feedback data (a.k.a., impression data), disregarding the data flow and the possible interactions between stages. This straightforward solution could lead to a sub-optimal system because of the sample selection bias (SSB) issue, which is especially damaging for cascade rankers due to the negative effect accumulated in the multiple stages. Worse still, the interactions between the rankers of each stage are not fully exploited. This paper provides an elaborate analysis of this commonly used solution to reveal its limitations. By studying the essence of cascade ranking, we propose a joint training framework named RankFlow to alleviate the SSB issue and exploit the interactions between the cascade rankers, which is the first systematic solution for this topic. We propose a paradigm of training cascade rankers that emphasizes the importance of fitting rankers on stage-specific data distributions instead of the unified user feedback distribution. We design the RankFlow framework based on this paradigm: The training data of each stage is generated by its preceding stages while the guidance signals not only come from the logs but its successors. Extensive experiments are conducted on various IR scenarios, including recommendation, web search and advertisement. The results verify the efficacy and superiority of RankFlow.
Incorporating Query Reformulating Behavior into Web Search Evaluation
Authors: Jia Chen, Yiqun Liu, Jiaxin Mao, Fan Zhang, Tetsuya Sakai, Weizhi Ma, Min Zhang, Shaoping Ma
Venue: Conference CIKM 2021
Year: 2021

While batch evaluation plays a central part in Information Retrieval (IR) research, most evaluation metrics are based on user models which mainly focus on browsing and clicking behaviors. As users' perceived satisfaction may also be impacted by their search intent, constructing different user models across various search intent may help design better evaluation metrics. However, user intents are usually unobservable in practice. As query reformulating behaviors may reflect their search intents to a certain extent and highly correlate with users' perceived satisfaction for a specific query, these observable factors may be beneficial for the design of evaluation metrics. How to incorporate the search intent behind query reformulation into user behavior and satisfaction models remains under-investigated. To investigate the relationships among query reformulations, search intent, and user satisfaction, we explore a publicly available web search dataset and find that query reformulations can be a good proxy for inferring user intent, and therefore, reformulating actions may be beneficial for designing better web search effectiveness metrics. A group of Reformulation-Aware Metrics (RAMs) is then proposed to improve existing click model-based metrics. Experimental results on two public session datasets have shown that RAMs have significantly higher correlations with user satisfaction than existing evaluation metrics. In the robustness test, we have found that RAMs can achieve good performance when only a small proportion of satisfaction training labels are available. We further show that RAMs can be directly applied in a new dataset for offline evaluation once trained. This work shows the possibility of designing better evaluation metrics by incorporating fine-grained search context factors.
When Online Meets Offline: Exploring Periodicity for Travel Destination Prediction
Authors: Wanjie Tao, Liangyue Li, Chen Chen, Zulong Chen, Hong Wen
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Online travel platforms (OTPs), e.g., booking.com and Ctrip.com, deliver travel experiences to online users by providing travel-related products. One key problem facing OTPs is to predict users' future travel destination, which has many important applications, e.g., proactively recommending users flight tickets or hotels in the destination city. Although much progress has been made for the next POI recommendation, they are largely sub-optimal for travel destination prediction on OTPs, due to the unique characteristics exhibited from users' travel behaviors such as offline spatial-temporal periodicity and online multi-interest exploration. In this paper, we propose an online-offline periodicity-aware information gain network, OOPIN, for travel destination prediction on OTPs. The key components of the model are (1) an offline mobility pattern extractor, which extracts spatial-temporal periodicity along with the sequential dependencies from the visited city sequence; and (2) an online multi-interests exploration module that discovers destinations that the user might be interested in but not yet visited from their online interaction data.Comprehensive experiments on real-world OTP demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model for travel destination prediction compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Contextual Re-Ranking with Behavior Aware Transformers
Authors: Chen Qu 0001, Chenyan Xiong, Yizhe Zhang 0002, Corby Rosset, W. Bruce Croft, Paul N. Bennett
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we focus on the contextual document ranking task, which deals with the challenge of user interaction modeling for conversational search. Given a history of user feedback behaviors, such as issuing a query, clicking a document, and skipping a document, we propose to introduce behavior awareness to a neural ranker, resulting in a Hierarchical Behavior Aware Transformers (HBA-Transformers) model. The hierarchy is composed of an intra-behavior attention layer and an inter-behavior attention layer to let the system effectively distinguish and model different user behaviors. Our extensive experiments on the AOL session dataset demonstrate that the hierarchical behavior aware architecture is more powerful than a simple combination of history behaviors. Besides, we analyze the conversational property of queries. We show that coherent sessions tend to be more conversational and thus are more demanding in terms of considering history user behaviors.
Longitudinal Assessment of Reference Quality on Wikipedia
Authors: Aitolkyn Baigutanova, Jaehyeon Myung, Diego Sáez-Trumper, Ai-Jou Chou, Miriam Redi, Changwook Jung, Meeyoung Cha
Venue: Conference WWW 2023
Year: 2023

Wikipedia plays a crucial role in the integrity of the Web. This work analyzes the reliability of this global encyclopedia through the lens of its references. We operationalize the notion of reference quality by defining reference need (RN), i.e., the percentage of sentences missing a citation, and reference risk (RR), i.e., the proportion of non-authoritative references. We release Citation Detective, a tool for automatically calculating the RN score, and discover that the RN score has dropped by 20 percent point in the last decade, with more than half of verifiable statements now accompanying references. The RR score has remained below 1% over the years as a result of the efforts of the community to eliminate unreliable references. We propose pairing novice and experienced editors on the same Wikipedia article as a strategy to enhance reference quality. Our quasi-experiment indicates that such a co-editing experience can result in a lasting advantage in identifying unreliable sources in future edits. As Wikipedia is frequently used as the ground truth for numerous Web applications, our findings and suggestions on its reliability can have a far-reaching impact. We discuss the possibility of other Web services adopting Wiki-style user collaboration to eliminate unreliable content.
A Map of Science in Wikipedia
Authors: Puyu Yang, Giovanni Colavizza
Venue: Conference WWW 2022
Year: 2022

In recent decades, the rapid growth of Internet adoption is offering opportunities for convenient and inexpensive access to scientific information. Wikipedia, one of the largest encyclopedias worldwide, has become a reference in this respect, and has attracted widespread attention from scholars. However, a clear understanding of the scientific sources underpinning Wikipedia's contents remains elusive. In this work, we rely on an open dataset of citations from Wikipedia to map the relationship between Wikipedia articles and scientific journal articles. We find that most journal articles cited from Wikipedia belong to STEM fields, in particular biology and medicine ($47.6$\% of citations; $46.1$\% of cited articles). Furthermore, Wikipedia's biographies play an important role in connecting STEM fields with the humanities, especially history. These results contribute to our understanding of Wikipedia's reliance on scientific sources, and its role as knowledge broker to the public.
Octopus: Comprehensive and Elastic User Representation for the Generation of Recommendation Candidates
Authors: Zheng Liu 0011, Jianxun Lian, Junhan Yang, Defu Lian, Xing Xie 0001
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2020
Year: 2020

Candidate generation is a critical task for recommendation system, which is technically challenging from two perspectives. On the one hand, recommendation system requires the comprehensive inclusion of user's interested candidates, yet typical deep user modeling approaches would represent each user as an onefold vector, which is hard to capture user's diverse interests. On the other hand, for the sake of practicability, the candidate generation process needs to be both accurate and efficient. Although existing "multi-channel structures'', like memory networks, are more capable of representing user's diverse interests, they may bring in substantial irrelevant candidates and lead to rapid growth of temporal cost. As a result, it remains a tough issue to comprehensively acquire user's interested items in a practical way.
Interacting viruses in networks: can both survive?
Authors: Alex Beutel, B. Aditya Prakash, Roni Rosenfeld, Christos Faloutsos
Venue: Conference KDD 2012
Year: 2012

Suppose we have two competing ideas/products/viruses, that propagate over a social or other network. Suppose that they are strong/virulent enough, so that each, if left alone, could lead to an epidemic. What will happen when both operate on the network? Earlier models assume that there is perfect competition: if a user buys product 'A' (or gets infected with virus 'X'), she will never buy product 'B' (or virus 'Y'). This is not always true: for example, a user could install and use both Firefox and Google Chrome as browsers. Similarly, one type of flu may give partial immunity against some other similar disease.
State space models for forecasting water quality variables: an application in aquaculture prawn farming
Authors: Joel Janek Dabrowski, Ashfaqur Rahman, Andrew George, Stuart Arnold, John McCulloch
Venue: Conference KDD 2018
Year: 2018

A novel approach to deterministic modelling of diurnal water quality parameters in aquaculture prawn ponds is presented. The purpose is to provide assistance to prawn pond farmers in monitoring pond water quality with limited data. Obtaining sufficient water quality data is generally a challenge in commercial prawn farming applications. Farmers can sustain large losses in their crop if water quality is not well managed. The model presented provides a means for modelling and forecasting various water quality parameters. It is inspired by data dynamics and does not rely on physical ecosystem modelling. The model is constructed within the Bayesian filtering framework. The Kalman filter and the unscented Kalman filer are applied for inference. The results demonstrate generalisability to both variables and environments. The ability for short term forecasting with mean absolute percentage errors between 0.5% and 11% is demonstrated.
To return or to explore: Modelling human mobility and dynamics in cyberspace
Authors: Tianran Hu, Yinglong Xia, Jiebo Luo
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

With the wide adoption of multi-community structure in many popular online platforms, human mobility across online communities has drawn increasing attention from both academia and industry. In this work, we study the statistical patterns that characterize human movements in cyberspace. Inspired by previous work on human mobility in physical space, we decompose human online activities into return and exploration - two complementary types of movements. We then study how people perform these two movements, respectively. We first propose a preferential return model that uncovers the preferential properties of people returning to multiple online communities. Interestingly, this model echos the previous findings on human mobility in physical space. We then present a preferential exploration model that characterizes exploration movements from a novel online community-group perspective. Our experiments quantitatively reveal the patterns of people exploring new communities, which share striking similarities with online return movements in terms of underlying principles. By combining the mechanisms of both return and exploration together, we are able to obtain an overall model that characterizes human mobility patterns in cyberspace at the individual level. We further investigate human online activities using our models, and discover valuable insights on the mobility patterns across online communities. Our models explain the empirically observed human online movement trajectories remarkably well, and more importantly, sheds better light on the understanding of human cyberspace dynamics.
Non-Linear Mining of Social Activities in Tensor Streams
Authors: Koki Kawabata, Yasuko Matsubara, Takato Honda, Yasushi Sakurai
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Given a large time-evolving event series such as Google web-search logs, which are collected according to various aspects, i.e., timestamps, locations and keywords, how accurately can we forecast their future activities? How can we reveal significant patterns that allow us to long-term forecast from such complex tensor streams? In this paper, we propose a streaming method, namely, CubeCast, that is designed to capture basic trends and seasonality in tensor streams and extract temporal and multi-dimensional relationships between such dynamics. Our proposed method has the following properties: (a) it is effective: it finds both trends and seasonality and summarizes their dynamics into simultaneous non-linear latent space. (b) it is automatic: it automatically recognizes and models such structural patterns without any parameter tuning or prior information. (c) it is scalable: it incrementally and adaptively detects shifting points of patterns for a semi-infinite collection of tensor streams. Extensive experiments that we conducted on real datasets demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively and efficiently find meaningful patterns for generating future values, and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms for time series forecasting in terms of forecasting accuracy and computational time.
Modeling dwell time engagement on visual multimedia
Authors: Hemank Lamba, Neil Shah
Venue: Conference KDD 2019
Year: 2019

Visual multimedia is one of the most prevalent sources of modern online content and engagement. However, despite its prevalence, little is known about user engagement with such content. For instance, how can we model engagement for a specific content or viewer sample, and across multiple samples? Can we model and discover patterns in these interactions, and detect outlying behaviors corresponding to abnormal engagement? In this paper, we study these questions in depth. Understanding these questions has implications in user modeling and understanding, ranking, trust and safety and more. For analysis, we consider content and viewer dwell time (engagement duration) behaviors with images and videos on Snapchat Stories, one of the largest multimedia-driven social sharing services. To our knowledge, we are the first to model and analyze dwell time behaviors on such media. Specifically, our contributions include (a) individual modeling: we propose and evaluate the ŁFmodel, ŁTmodel and \Vmodel parametric models to describe dwell times of unlooped/looped media and viewers which outperform alternatives, (b) aggregate modeling: we show how to flexibly summarize the respective joint distributions of multivariate parametrized fits across many samples using Vine Copulas in the analog \ALFmodel, \ALTmodel and \AVmodel models, which enable inferences regarding aggregate behavioral patterns, and offer the ability to simulate real-looking engagement data (c) anomaly detection: we demonstrate our aggregate models can robustly detect anomalies present during training ($0.9+$ AUROC across most attack models), and also enable discovery of real dwell time anomalies.
The Web as a Jungle: Non-Linear Dynamical Systems for Co-evolving Online Activities
Authors: Yasuko Matsubara, Yasushi Sakurai, Christos Faloutsos
Venue: Conference WWW 2015
Year: 2015

Given a large collection of co-evolving online activities, such as searches for the keywords "Xbox", "PlayStation" and "Wii", how can we find patterns and rules? Are these keywords related? If so, are they competing against each other? Can we forecast the volume of user activity for the coming month? We conjecture that online activities compete for user attention in the same way that species in an ecosystem compete for food. We present ECOWEB, (i.e., Ecosystem on the Web), which is an intuitive model designed as a non-linear dynamical system for mining large-scale co-evolving online activities. Our second contribution is a novel, parameter-free, and scalable fitting algorithm, ECOWEB-FIT, that estimates the parameters of ECOWEB. Extensive experiments on real data show that ECOWEB is effective, in that it can capture long-range dynamics and meaningful patterns such as seasonalities, and practical, in that it can provide accurate long-range forecasts. ECOWEB consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and execution speed.
Winner takes all: competing viruses or ideas on fair-play networks
Authors: B. Aditya Prakash, Alex Beutel, Roni Rosenfeld, Christos Faloutsos
Venue: Conference WWW 2012
Year: 2012

Given two competing products (or memes, or viruses etc.) spreading over a given network, can we predict what will happen at the end, that is, which product will 'win', in terms of highest market share? One may naively expect that the better product (stronger virus) will just have a larger footprint, proportional to the quality ratio of the products (or strength ratio of the viruses). However, we prove the surprising result that, under realistic conditions, for any graph topology, the stronger virus completely wipes-out the weaker one, thus not merely 'winning' but 'taking it all'. In addition to the proofs, we also demonstrate our result with simulations over diverse, real graph topologies, including the social-contact graph of the city of Portland OR (about 31 million edges and 1 million nodes) and internet AS router graphs. Finally, we also provide real data about competing products from Google-Insights, like Facebook-Myspace, and we show again that they agree with our analysis.