Natural language processing has made progress in incorporating human context into its models, but whether it is more effective to use group-wise attributes (e.g., over-45-year-olds) or model individuals remains open. Group attributes are technically easier but coarse: not all 45-year-olds write the same way. In contrast, modeling individuals captures the complexity of each person's identity. It allows for a more personalized representation, but we may have to model an infinite number of users and require data that may be impossible to get. We compare modeling human context via group attributes, individual users, and combined approaches. Combining group and individual features significantly benefits user-level regression tasks like age estimation or personality assessment from a user's documents. Modeling individual users significantly improves the performance of single document-level classification tasks like stance and topic detection. We also find that individual-user modeling does well even without user's historical data.

Compliance with the European Union's Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation is challenging for online platforms, and assessing their compliance can be difficult for public authorities. This is partly due to the lack of automated tools for assessing the information (e.g., software documentation) platforms provide concerning ranking transparency. Our study tackles this issue in two ways. First, we empirically evaluate the compliance of six major platforms (Amazon, Bing, Booking, Google, Tripadvisor, and Yahoo), revealing substantial differences in their documentation. Second, we introduce and test automated compliance assessment tools based on ChatGPT and information retrieval technology. These tools are evaluated against human judgments, showing promising results as reliable proxies for compliance assessments. Our findings could help enhance regulatory compliance and align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10.3, which seeks to reduce inequality, including business disparities, on these platforms.

In a modern DBMS, working memory is frequently the limiting factor when processing in-memory analytic query operations such as joins, sorting, and aggregation. Existing resource estimation approaches for a DBMS estimate the resource consumption of a query by computing an estimate of each individual database operator in the query execution plan. Such an approach is slow and error-prone as it relies upon simplifying assumptions, such as uniformity and independence of the underlying data. Additionally, the existing approach focuses on individual queries separately and does not factor in other queries in the workload that may be executed concurrently. In this research, we are interested in query performance optimization under concurrent execution of a batch of queries (a workload). Specifically, we focus on predicting the memory demand for a workload rather than providing separate estimates for each query within it. We introduce the problem of workload memory prediction and formalize it as a distribution regression problem. We propose Learned Workload Memory Prediction (LearnedWMP) to improve and simplify estimating the working memory demands of workloads. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation, we show that LearnedWMP reduces the memory estimation error of the state-of-the-practice method by up to 47.6%. Compared to an alternative single-query model, during training and inferencing, the LearnedWMP model and its variants were 3x to 10x faster. Moreover, LearnedWMP-based models were at least 50% smaller in most cases. Overall, the results demonstrate the advantages of the LearnedWMP approach and its potential for a broader impact on query performance optimization.

This study provides evidence that personality can be reliably predicted from activity data collected through mobile phone sensors. Employing a set of well informed indicators calculable from accelerometer records and movement patterns, we were able to predict users' personality up to a 0.78 F1 score on a two class problem. Given the fast growing number of data collected from mobile phones, our novel personality indicators open the door to exciting avenues for future research in social sciences. Our results reveal distinct behavioral patterns that proved to be differentially predictive of big five personality traits. They potentially enable cost effective, questionnaire free investigation of personality related questions at an unprecedented scale. We show how a combination of rich behavioral data obtained with smartphone sensing and the use of machine learning techniques can help to advance personality research and can inform both practitioners and researchers about the different behavioral patterns of personality. These findings have practical implications for organizations harnessing mobile sensor data for personality assessment, guiding the refinement of more precise and efficient prediction models in the future.

Opinionated users often seek information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs while dismissing contradictory evidence due to confirmation bias. This conduct hinders their ability to consider alternative stances when searching the web. Despite this, few studies have analyzed how the diversification of search results on disputed topics influences the search behavior of highly opinionated users. To this end, we present a preregistered user study (n = 257) investigating whether different levels (low and high) of bias metrics and search results presentation (with or without AI-predicted stances labels) can affect the stance diversity consumption and search behavior of opinionated users on three debated topics (i.e., atheism, intellectual property rights, and school uniforms). Our results show that exposing participants to (counter-attitudinally) biased search results increases their consumption of attitude-opposing content, but we also found that bias was associated with a trend toward overall fewer interactions within the search page. We also found that 19% of users interacted with queries and search pages but did not select any search results. When we removed these participants in a post-hoc analysis, we found that stance labels increased the diversity of stances consumed by users, particularly when the search results were biased. Our findings highlight the need for future research to explore distinct search scenario settings to gain insight into opinionated users' behavior.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe impacts on health systems worldwide. Its critical nature and the increased interest of individuals and organizations to develop countermeasures to the problem has led to a surge of new studies in scientific journals. Objetive: We sought to develop a tool that incorporates, in a novel way, aspects of Information Retrieval (IR) and Extraction (IE) applied to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). The main focus of this paper is to provide researchers with a better search tool for COVID-19 related papers, helping them find reference papers and hightlight relevant entities in text. Method: We applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to model, based on research aspects, the topics of all English abstracts in CORD-19. Relevant named entities of each abstract were extracted and linked to the corresponding UMLS concept. Regular expressions and the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm were used to rank relevant papers. Results: Our tool has shown the potential to assist researchers by automating a topic-based search of CORD-19 papers. Nonetheless, we identified that more fine-tuned topic modeling parameters and increased accuracy of the research aspect classifier model could lead to a more accurate and reliable tool. Conclusion: We emphasize the need of new automated tools to help researchers find relevant COVID-19 documents, in addition to automatically extracting useful information contained in them. Our work suggests that combining different algorithms and models could lead to new ways of browsing COVID-19 paper data.

Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) is an important similarity measure between two distributions, used in computer vision and many other application domains. However, its exact calculation is computationally and memory intensive, which hinders its scalability and applicability for large-scale problems. Various approximate EMD algorithms have been proposed to reduce computational costs, but they suffer lower accuracy and may require additional memory usage or manual parameter tuning. In this paper, we present a novel approach, NNS-EMD, to approximate EMD using Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS), in order to achieve high accuracy, low time complexity, and high memory efficiency. The NNS operation reduces the number of data points compared in each NNS iteration and offers opportunities for parallel processing. We further accelerate NNS-EMD via vectorization on GPU, which is especially beneficial for large datasets. We compare NNS-EMD with both the exact EMD and state-of-the-art approximate EMD algorithms on image classification and retrieval tasks. We also apply NNS-EMD to calculate transport mapping and realize color transfer between images. NNS-EMD can be 44x to 135x faster than the exact EMD implementation, and achieves superior accuracy, speedup, and memory efficiency over existing approximate EMD methods.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been recently extensively incorporated into industrial and domain applications. For example, NLP is used for speeding up processes, e.g., automation classification of types of customer feedback or filtering out spam emails, information extraction, e.g., named entity recognition to extract symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments from medical records, or auto-completing input forms with language models. Despite the broad integration, domain-specific NLP applications may require practicing more user-driven methodologies to address user needs with these applications. Often, the data-driven approach falls short in exploring the needs of the domain users (Yang, 2018). On the one hand, domain users are often integrated into development at the late test phase to evaluate the usability of ML/NLP applications (Carney, 2019). Unlike user-driven software development, the development of NLP applications depends mainly on data availability or experimenting with machine learning (ML)/NLP trends and thus is a major driver of application development. On the other hand, the user-driven development of a domain-specific ML/NLP application in medicine showed that close collaboration with the domain users in the earlier stages increases the effectiveness of the final product (Yang, 2017). Therefore, integrating user experience (UX) and human-computer interaction (HCI) research into ML/NLP research addresses users' needs, fuses their expertise, and increases intuitiveness, transparency, simplicity, and trust for the system users (Boukhelifa et al, 2018; Paleyes et al, 2022).

Generative Retrieval (GR), autoregressively decoding relevant document identifiers given a query, has been shown to perform well under the setting of small-scale corpora. By memorizing the document corpus with model parameters, GR implicitly achieves deep interaction between query and document. However, such a memorizing mechanism faces three drawbacks: (1) Poor memory accuracy for fine-grained features of documents; (2) Memory confusion gets worse as the corpus size increases; (3) Huge memory update costs for new documents. To alleviate these problems, we propose the Generative Dense Retrieval (GDR) paradigm. Specifically, GDR first uses the limited memory volume to achieve inter-cluster matching from query to relevant document clusters. Memorizing-free matching mechanism from Dense Retrieval (DR) is then introduced to conduct fine-grained intra-cluster matching from clusters to relevant documents. The coarse-to-fine process maximizes the advantages of GR's deep interaction and DR's scalability. Besides, we design a cluster identifier constructing strategy to facilitate corpus memory and a cluster-adaptive negative sampling strategy to enhance the intra-cluster mapping ability. Empirical results show that GDR obtains an average of 3.0 R@100 improvement on NQ dataset under multiple settings and has better scalability.

In this paper, we investigate the intersection of large generative AI models and cloud-native computing architectures. Recent large models such as ChatGPT, while revolutionary in their capabilities, face challenges like escalating costs and demand for high-end GPUs. Drawing analogies between large-model-as-a-service (LMaaS) and cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS), we describe an AI-native computing paradigm that harnesses the power of both cloud-native technologies (e.g., multi-tenancy and serverless computing) and advanced machine learning runtime (e.g., batched LoRA inference). These joint efforts aim to optimize costs-of-goods-sold (COGS) and improve resource accessibility. The journey of merging these two domains is just at the beginning and we hope to stimulate future research and development in this area.