Selecting the best scientific venue (i.e., conference/journal) for the submission of a research article constitutes a multifaceted challenge. Important aspects to consider are the suitability of research topics, a venue's prestige, and the probability of acceptance. The selection problem is exacerbated through the continuous emergence of additional venues. Previously proposed approaches for supporting authors in this process rely on complex recommender systems, e.g., based on Word2Vec or TextCNN. These, however, often elude an explanation for their recommendations. In this work, we propose an unsophisticated method that advances the state-of-the-art in two aspects: First, we enhance the interpretability of recommendations through non-negative matrix factorization based topic models; Second, we surprisingly can obtain competitive recommendation performance while using simpler learning methods.
Recommender systems are one of the most pervasive applications of machine learning in industry, with many services using them to match users to products or information. As such it is important to ask: what are the possible fairness risks, how can we quantify them, and how should we address them? In this paper we offer a set of novel metrics for evaluating algorithmic fairness concerns in recommender systems. In particular we show how measuring fairness based on pairwise comparisons from randomized experiments provides a tractable means to reason about fairness in rankings from recommender systems. Building on this metric, we offer a new regularizer to encourage improving this metric during model training and thus improve fairness in the resulting rankings. We apply this pairwise regularization to a large-scale, production recommender system and show that we are able to significantly improve the system's pairwise fairness.
News recommendation is critical for personalized news access. Most existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of users' historical news click behavior data, which may lead to privacy concerns and hazards. Federated Learning is a privacy-preserving framework for multiple clients to collaboratively train models without sharing their private data. However, the computation and communication cost of directly learning many existing news recommendation models in a federated way are unacceptable for user clients. In this paper, we propose an efficient federated learning framework for privacy-preserving news recommendation. Instead of training and communicating the whole model, we decompose the news recommendation model into a large news model maintained in the server and a light-weight user model shared on both server and clients, where news representations and user model are communicated between server and clients. More specifically, the clients request the user model and news representations from the server, and send their locally computed gradients to the server for aggregation. The server updates its global user model with the aggregated gradients, and further updates its news model to infer updated news representations. Since the local gradients may contain private information, we propose a secure aggregation method to aggregate gradients in a privacy-preserving way. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our method can reduce the computation and communication cost on clients while keep promising model performance.
Modern recommender systems usually present items as one-dimensional ranking list. Recently there is a trend in e-commerce that the recommended items are organized as two-dimensional grid-based panels where users can view the items in both vertical and horizontal directions. Presenting items in grid-based result panels poses new challenges to recommender systems because existing models are all designed to output sequential lists while the slots in a grid-based panel have no explicit order. Directly converting the item rankings into grids (e.g., pre-defining an order on the slots)overlooks the user-specific behavioral patterns on grid-based pan-els and inevitably hurts the user experiences. To address this issue, we propose a novel Markov decision process (MDP) to place the items in 2D grid-based result panels at the final re-ranking stage of the recommender systems. The model, referred to as Panel-MDP, takes an initial item ranking from the early stages as the input. Then, it defines the MDP discrete time steps as the ranks in the initial ranking list, and the actions as the slots in the grid-based panels, plus a NULL action. At each time step, Panel-MDP sequentially takes an action of selecting one slot for placing an item of the initial ranking list, or discarding the item if NULL action is selected. The process is continued until all of the slots are filled. The reinforcement learning algorithm of DQN is employed to implement and learn the parameters in the Panel-MDP. Experiments on a dataset collected from a widely-used e-commerce app demonstrated the superiority ofPanel-MDP in terms of recommending 2D grid-based result panels.
In this paper, we develop a neural attentive interpretable recommendation system, named NAIRS. A self-attention network, as a key component of the system, is designed to assign attention weights to interacted items of a user. This attention mechanism can distinguish the importance of the various interacted items in contributing to a user profile. Based on the user profiles obtained by the self-attention network, NAIRS offers personalized high-quality recommendation. Moreover, it develops visual cues to interpret recommendations. This demo application with the implementation of NAIRS enables users to interact with a recommendation system, and it persistently collects training data to improve the system. The demonstration and experimental results show the effectiveness of NAIRS.
A huge number of academic papers are coming out from a lot of conferences and journals these days. In these circumstances, most researchers rely on key-based search or browsing through proceedings of top conferences and journals to find their related work. To ease this difficulty, we propose a Personalized Academic Research Paper Recommendation System, which recommends related articles, for each researcher, that may be interesting to her/him. In this paper, we first introduce our web crawler to retrieve research papers from the web. Then, we define similarity between two research papers based on the text similarity between them. Finally, we propose our recommender system developed using collaborative filtering methods. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our system recommends good quality research papers.
Recurrent recommender systems have been successful in capturing the temporal dynamics in users' activity trajectories. However, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are known to have difficulty learning long-term dependencies. As a consequence, RNN-based recommender systems tend to overly focus on short-term user interests. This is referred to as the recency bias, which could negatively affect the long-term user experience as well as the health of the ecosystem. In this paper, we introduce the recency dropout technique, a simple yet effective data augmentation technique to alleviate the recency bias in recurrent recommender systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of recency dropout in various experimental settings including a simulation study, offline experiments, as well as live experiments on a large-scale industrial recommendation platform.
Recommendation systems are widely used by different user service providers specially those who have interactions with the large community of users. This paper introduces a recommender system based on community detection. The recommendation is provided using the local and global similarities between users. The local information is obtained from communities, and the global ones are based on the ratings. Here, a new fuzzy community detection using the personalized PageRank metaphor is introduced. The fuzzy membership values of the users to the communities are utilized to define a similarity measure. The method is evaluated by using two well-known datasets: MovieLens and FilmTrust. The results show that our method outperforms recent recommender systems.
Session-based recommendation aims to predict a user's next action based on previous actions in the current session. The major challenge is to capture authentic and complete user preferences in the entire session. Recent work utilizes graph structure to represent the entire session and adopts Graph Neural Network to encode session information. This modeling choice has been proved to be effective and achieved remarkable results. However, most of the existing studies only consider each item within the session independently and do not capture session semantics from a high-level perspective. Such limitation often leads to severe information loss and increases the difficulty of capturing long-range dependencies within a session. Intuitively, compared with individual items, a session snippet, i.e., a group of locally consecutive items, is able to provide supplemental user intents which are hardly captured by existing methods. In this work, we propose to learn multi-granularity consecutive user intent unit to improve the recommendation performance. Specifically, we creatively propose Multi-granularity Intent Heterogeneous Session Graph which captures the interactions between different granularity intent units and relieves the burden of long-dependency. Moreover, we propose the Intent Fusion Ranking module to compose the recommendation results from various granularity user intents. Compared with current methods that only leverage intents from individual items, IFR benefits from different granularity user intents to generate more accurate and comprehensive session representation, thus eventually boosting recommendation performance. We conduct extensive experiments on five session-based recommendation datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Reorganizing implicit feedback of users as a user-item interaction graph facilitates the applications of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) in recommendation tasks. In the interaction graph, edges between user and item nodes function as the main element of GCNs to perform information propagation and generate informative representations. Nevertheless, an underlying challenge lies in the quality of interaction graph, since observed interactions with less-interested items occur in implicit feedback (say, a user views micro-videos accidentally). This means that the neighborhoods involved with such false-positive edges will be influenced negatively and the signal on user preference can be severely contaminated. However, existing GCN-based recommender models leave such challenge under-explored, resulting in suboptimal representations and performance. In this work, we focus on adaptively refining the structure of interaction graph to discover and prune potential false-positive edges. Towards this end, we devise a new GCN-based recommender model, \emph{Graph-Refined Convolutional Network} (GRCN), which adjusts the structure of interaction graph adaptively based on status of model training, instead of remaining the fixed structure. In particular, a graph refining layer is designed to identify the noisy edges with the high confidence of being false-positive interactions, and consequently prune them in a soft manner. We then apply a graph convolutional layer on the refined graph to distill informative signals on user preference. Through extensive experiments on three datasets for micro-video recommendation, we validate the rationality and effectiveness of our GRCN. Further in-depth analysis presents how the refined graph benefits the GCN-based recommender model.
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