No Arabic abstract
We introduce the concept of emph{expected exposure} as the average attention ranked items receive from users over repeated samples of the same query. Furthermore, we advocate for the adoption of the principle of equal expected exposure: given a fixed information need, no item should receive more or less expected exposure than any other item of the same relevance grade. We argue that this principle is desirable for many retrieval objectives and scenarios, including topical diversity and fair ranking. Leveraging user models from existing retrieval metrics, we propose a general evaluation methodology based on expected exposure and draw connections to related metrics in information retrieval evaluation. Importantly, this methodology relaxes classic information retrieval assumptions, allowing a system, in response to a query, to produce a emph{distribution over rankings} instead of a single fixed ranking. We study the behavior of the expected exposure metric and stochastic rankers across a variety of information access conditions, including emph{ad hoc} retrieval and recommendation. We believe that measuring and optimizing expected exposure metrics using randomization opens a new area for retrieval algorithm development and progress.
Based on the success of recommender systems in e-commerce, there is growing interest in their use in matching markets (e.g., labor). While this holds potential for improving market fluidity and fairness, we show in this paper that naively applying existing recommender systems to matching markets is sub-optimal. Considering the standard process where candidates apply and then get evaluated by employers, we present a new recommendation framework to model this interaction mechanism and propose efficient algorithms for computing personalized rankings in this setting. We show that the optimal rankings need to not only account for the potentially divergent preferences of candidates and employers, but they also need to account for capacity constraints. This makes conventional ranking systems that merely rank by some local score (e.g., one-sided or reciprocal relevance) highly sub-optimal -- not only for an individual user, but also for societal goals (e.g., low unemployment). To address this shortcoming, we propose the first method for jointly optimizing the rankings for all candidates in the market to explicitly maximize social welfare. In addition to the theoretical derivation, we evaluate the method both on simulated environments and on data from a real-world networking-recommendation system that we built and fielded at a large computer science conference.
Different from shopping at retail stores, consumers on e-commerce platforms usually cannot touch or try products before purchasing, which means that they have to make decisions when they are uncertain about the outcome (e.g., satisfaction level) of purchasing a product. To study peoples preferences, economics researchers have proposed the hypothesis of Expected Utility (EU) that models the subject value associated with an individuals choice as the statistical expectations of that individuals valuations of the outcomes of this choice. Despite its success in studies of game theory and decision theory, the effectiveness of EU, however, is mostly unknown in e-commerce recommendation systems. Previous research on e-commerce recommendation interprets the utility of purchase decisions either as a function of the consumed quantity of the product or as the gain of sellers/buyers in the monetary sense. As most consumers just purchase one unit of a product at a time and most alternatives have similar prices, such modeling of purchase utility is likely to be inaccurate in practice. In this paper, we interpret purchase utility as the satisfaction level a consumer gets from a product and propose a recommendation framework using EU to model consumers behavioral patterns. We assume that consumer estimates the expected utilities of all the alternatives and choose products with maximum expected utility for each purchase. To deal with the potential psychological biases of each consumer, we introduce the usage of Probability Weight Function (PWF) and design our algorithm based on Weighted Expected Utility (WEU). Empirical study on real-world e-commerce datasets shows that our proposed ranking-based recommendation framework achieves statistically significant improvement against both classical Collaborative Filtering/Latent Factor Models and state-of-the-art deep models in top-K recommendation.
High quality user feedback data is essential to training and evaluating a successful music recommendation system, particularly one that has to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders. Most existing music datasets suffer from noisy feedback and self-selection biases inherent in the data collected by music platforms. Using the Piki Music dataset of 500k ratings collected over a two-year time period, we evaluate the performance of classic recommendation algorithms on three important stakeholders: consumers, well-known artists and lesser-known artists. We show that a matrix factorization algorithm trained on both likes and dislikes performs significantly better compared to one trained only on likes for all three stakeholders.
Services and applications based on the Memento Aggregator can suffer from slow response times due to the federated search across web archives performed by the Memento infrastructure. In an effort to decrease the response times, we established a cache system and experimented with machine learning models to predict archival holdings. We reported on the experimental results in previous work and can now, after these optimizations have been in production for two years, evaluate their efficiency, based on long-term log data. During our investigation we find that the cache is very effective with a 70-80% cache hit rate for human-driven services. The machine learning prediction operates at an acceptable average recall level of 0.727 but our results also show that a more frequent retraining of the models is needed to further improve prediction accuracy.
In knowledge bases such as Wikidata, it is possible to assert a large set of properties for entities, ranging from generic ones such as name and place of birth to highly profession-specific or background-specific ones such as doctoral advisor or medical condition. Determining a preference or ranking in this large set is a challenge in tasks such as prioritisation of edits or natural-language generation. Most previous approaches to ranking knowledge base properties are purely data-driven, that is, as we show, mistake frequency for interestingness. In this work, we have developed a human-annotated dataset of 350 preference judgments among pairs of knowledge base properties for fixed entities. From this set, we isolate a subset of pairs for which humans show a high level of agreement (87.5% on average). We show, however, that baseline and state-of-the-art techniques achieve only 61.3% precision in predicting human preferences for this subset. We then analyze what contributes to one property being rated as more important than another one, and identify that at least three factors play a role, namely (i) general frequency, (ii) applicability to similar entities and (iii) semantic similarity between property and entity. We experimentally analyze the contribution of each factor and show that a combination of techniques addressing all the three factors achieves 74% precision on the task. The dataset is available at www.kaggle.com/srazniewski/wikidatapropertyranking.