Abstract

One of the most important and challenging problems in recommendation systems is that of modeling temporal behavior. Typically, modeling temporal behavior increases the cost of parameter inference and estimation. Along with it, it also poses the constraint of requiring a large amount of data for reliably learning the parameters of the model. Therefore, it is often difficult to model temporal behavior in large-scale real-world recommendation systems. In this work, we propose a deep neural network architecture which is based on a two level approach. We first generate document embeddings for every news article. We then use these embeddings and the previously read articles by a user to come up with her user profile. We then use this profile along with adequate positive and negative samples in order to train our model. The resulting model is then applied to a real-world data set. We compare it with a set of established baselines and the experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art. We also use the learned model to recommend articles to users who have had very little interaction with items, i.e., have read a very less amount of news articles. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of our model to solve the problem of item cold-start.

Abstract

Deep neural networks have yielded immense success in speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks for content based recommendation has received a relatively less amount of inspection. Also, different recommendation scenarios have their own issues which creates the need for different approaches for recommendation. One of the problems with news recommendation is that of handling temporal changes in user interests. Hence, modelling temporal behaviour in the domain of news recommendation becomes very important. In this work, we propose a recommendation model which uses semantic similarity between words as input to a 3-D Convolutional Neural Network in order to extract the temporal news reading pattern of the users. This in turn improves the quality of recommendations. We compare our model to a set of established baselines and the experimental results show that our model performs better than the state-of-the-art by 5.8% (Hit Ratio@10).

Abstract

It is very crucial for news aggregator websites which are recent in the market to actively engage its existing users. A recommendation system would help to tackle such a problem. However, due to the lack of sufficient amount of data, most of the state-of-the-art methods perform poorly in terms of recommending relevant news items to the users. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for Item-based Collaborative filtering for recommending news items using Markov Decision Process (MDP). Due to the sequential nature of news reading, we choose MDP to model our recommendation system as it is based on a sequence optimization paradigm. Further, we also incorporate factors like article freshness and similarity into our system by extrinsically modelling it in terms of reward for the MDP. We compare it with various other state-of-the-art methods. On a moderately low amount of data we see that our MDP-based approach outperforms the other approaches. One of the reasons for this is that the baselines fail to identify the underlying patterns within the sequence in which the articles are read by the users. Hence, the baselines are not able to generalize well.

Abstract

Social media is a rich source of information and opinion, with exponential data growth rate. However social media posts are difficult to analyze since they are brief, unstructured and noisy. Interestingly, many social media posts are about an entity or entities. Understanding which entity is central (Salient Entity) to a post, helps better analyze the post. In this paper we propose a model that aids in such analysis by identifying the Salient Entity in a social media post, tweets in particular. We present a supervised machine-learning model, to identify Salient Entity in a tweet and propose that the tweet is most likely about that particular entity. We have used the premise that, when an image accompanies a text, the text most likely is about the entity in that image, to build a dataset of tweets and salient entities. We trained our model using this dataset. Note that this does not restrict the applicability of our model in any way. We use tweets with images only to obtain objective ground truth data, while features for the model are derived from tweet text. Our experiments show that the model identifies Salient Named Entity with an F-measure of 0.63. We show the effectiveness of the proposed model for tweet-filtering and salience identification tasks. We have made the human annotated dataset and the source code of this model publicly available.

Abstract

Opportunistic reuse is a need based sourcing of software modules without a prior reuse plan. It is a common tactical approach in software development. Developers often reuse an external software module opportunistically to improve their productivity. But, studies have shown that this results in extensive refactoring and adds maintenance owes. We assert this problem to the mismatches between the software under development and the reused external module; caused because of their different assumptions and constraints. We highlight the problems of such opportunistic reuse practices with the help of a case study. In our study, we found issues such as unanticipated behavior, violated constraints, conflict in assumption, fragile structure, and software bloat. In this paper, we like to draw attention of the research community to the wide spread opportunistic reuse practices and the lack of methods to pro-actively identify and resolve the mismatches. We propose the need for supporting developers in reasoning before reuse from the perspective of identifying and fixing both local and global mismatches. Furthermore, we identify other opportunistic software development practices where similar issues can be observed and also suggest the research areas where further investigation can benefit developers in improving their productivity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

These days' discussion forums provide dependable solutions to the problems related to multiple domains and areas. However, due to the presence of huge amount of less-informative/inappropriate posts, the identification of the appropriate problem-solution pairs has become a challenging task. The emergence of a variety of topics, domains and areas has made the task of manual labelling of the problem solution-post pairs a very costly and time consuming task. To solve these issues, we concentrate on deep semantic and logical relation between terms. For this, we introduce a novel semantic correlation graph to represent the text. The proposed representation helps us in the identification of topical and semantic relation between terms at a fine grain level. Next, we apply the improved version of personalised pagerank using random walk with restarts. The main aim is to improve the rank score of terms having direct or indirect relation with terms in the given question. Finally, we introduce the use of the node overlapping version of GAAC to find the actual span of answer text. Our experimental results show that the devised system performs better than the existing unsupervised systems.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel N-gram (N> = 1) filtration technique for keyphrase extraction. To filter the sophisticated candidate keyphrases (N-grams), we introduce the combined use of: 1) statistical feature (obtained by using weighted betweenness centrality scores of words, which is generally used to identify the border nodes/edges in community detection techniques); 2) co-location strength (calculated by using nearest neighbour Dbpedia texts). We also introduce the use of N-gram (N> = 1) graph, which reduces the bias effect of lower length N-grams in the ranking process and preserves the semantics of words (phraseness), based upon local context. To capture the theme of the document and to reduce the effect of noisy terms in the ranking process, we apply an information theoretic framework for key-player detection on the proposed N-gram graph. Our experimental results show that the devised system performs better than the current state-of-the-art unsupervised systems and comparable/better than supervised systems.

Abstract

An overwhelming amount of data is generated everyday on social media, encompassing a wide spectrum of topics. With almost every business decision depending on customer opinion, mining of social media data needs to be quick and easy. For a data analyst to keep up with the agility and the scale of the data, it is impossible to bank on fully supervised techniques to mine topics and their associated sentiments from social media. Motivated by this, we propose a weakly supervised approach (named, TweetGrep) that lets the data analyst easily define a topic by few keywords and adapt a generic sentiment classifier to the topic–by jointly modeling topics and sentiments using label regularization. Experiments with diverse datasets show that TweetGrep beats the state-ofthe-art models for both the tasks of retrieving topical tweets and analyzing the sentiment of the tweets (average improvement of 4.97% and 6.91% respectively in terms of area under the curve). Further, we show that TweetGrep can also be adopted in a novel task of hashtag disambiguation, which significantly outperforms the baseline methods.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning representations for authors from bibliographic co-authorship networks. Existing methods for deep learning on graphs, such as DeepWalk, suffer from link sparsity problem as they focus on modeling the link information only. We hypothesize that capturing both the content and link information in a unified way will help mitigate the sparsity problem. To this end, we present a novel model'Author2Vec', which learns low-dimensional author representations such that authors who write similar content and share similar network structure are closer in vector space. Such embeddings are useful in a variety of applications such as link prediction, node classification, recommendation and visualization. The author embeddings we learn are empirically shown to outperform DeepWalk by 2.35% and 0.83% for link prediction and clustering task respectively.

Abstract

Extractive summarization techniques typically aim to maximize the information coverage of the summary with respect to the original corpus and report accuracies in ROUGE scores. Automated text summarization techniques should consider the dimensions of comprehensibility, coherence and readability. In the current work, we identify the discourse structure which provides the context for the creation of a sentence. We leverage the information from the structure to frame a monotone (non-decreasing) sub-modular scoring function for generating comprehensible summaries. Our approach improves the overall quality of comprehensibility of the summary in terms of human evaluation and gives sufficient content coverage with comparable ROUGE score. We also formulate a metric to measure summary comprehensibility in terms of Contextual Independence of a sentence. The metric is shown to be representative of human judgement of text comprehensibility.