The chancellor says William Wragg showed courage in admitting he gave out MPs' phone numbers.

Sentence transformers are language models designed to perform semantic search. This study investigates the capacity of sentence transformers, fine-tuned on general question-answering datasets for asymmetric semantic search, to associate descriptions of human-generated routes across Great Britain with queries often used to describe hiking experiences. We find that sentence transformers have some zero-shot capabilities to understand quasi-geospatial concepts, such as route types and difficulty, suggesting their potential utility for routing recommendation systems.

To capture user preference, transformer models have been widely applied to model sequential user behavior data. The core of transformer architecture lies in the self-attention mechanism, which computes the pairwise attention scores in a sequence. Due to the permutation-equivariant nature, positional encoding is used to enhance the attention between token representations. In this setting, the pairwise attention scores can be derived by both semantic difference and positional difference. However, prior studies often model the two kinds of difference measurements in different ways, which potentially limits the expressive capacity of sequence modeling. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel transformer variant with complex vector attention, named EulerFormer, which provides a unified theoretical framework to formulate both semantic difference and positional difference. The EulerFormer involves two key technical improvements. First, it employs a new transformation function for efficiently transforming the sequence tokens into polar-form complex vectors using Euler's formula, enabling the unified modeling of both semantic and positional information in a complex rotation form.Secondly, it develops a differential rotation mechanism, where the semantic rotation angles can be controlled by an adaptation function, enabling the adaptive integration of the semantic and positional information according to the semantic contexts.Furthermore, a phase contrastive learning task is proposed to improve the isotropy of contextual representations in EulerFormer. Our theoretical framework possesses a high degree of completeness and generality. It is more robust to semantic variations and possesses moresuperior theoretical properties in principle. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Image created by Guillermo Calahorra-Candao using ChatGPT. Prompt: "create an image of a person conversing with a virtual voice assistant (just like Alexa, Siri, or Google), while simultaneously wondering if the assistant might actually be human". In an era where technology continuously reshapes our daily interactions, the rise of virtual voice assistants (VAs) like Alexa, Google Home, and Siri represents a significant leap. Originally designed to enhance smartphone usability, these VAs have transcended their initial purpose, finding their way into various consumer devices and altering the user experience landscape. However, despite their widespread integration, a notable reluctance in adopting voice shopping persists, primarily due to concerns regarding safety.

Over the last decades has emerged a rich literature on the evaluation of recommendation systems. However, less is written about how to efficiently combine different evaluation methods from this rich field into a single efficient evaluation funnel. In this paper we aim to build intuition for how to choose evaluation methods, by presenting a novel framework that simplifies the reasoning around the evaluation funnel for a recommendation system. Our contribution is twofold. First we present our framework for how to decompose the definition of success to construct efficient evaluation funnels, focusing on how to identify and discard non-successful iterations quickly. We show that decomposing the definition of success into smaller necessary criteria for success enables early identification of non-successful ideas. Second, we give an overview of the most common and useful evaluation methods, discuss their pros and cons, and how they fit into, and complement each other in, the evaluation process. We go through so-called offline and online evaluation methods such as counterfactual logging, validation, verification, A/B testing, and interleaving. The paper concludes with some general discussion and advice on how to design an efficient evaluation process for recommender systems.

Recommender systems have been actively studied and applied in various domains to deal with information overload. Although there are numerous studies on recommender systems for movies, music, and e-commerce, comparatively less attention has been paid to the recommender system for NFTs despite the continuous growth of the NFT market. This paper presents a recommender system for NFTs that utilizes a variety of data sources, from NFT transaction records to external item features, to generate precise recommendations that cater to individual preferences. We develop a data-efficient graph-based recommender system to efficiently capture the complex relationship between each item and users and generate node(item) embeddings which incorporate both node feature information and graph structure. Furthermore, we exploit inputs beyond user-item interactions, such as image feature, text feature, and price feature. Numerical experiments verify the performance of the graph-based recommender system improves significantly after utilizing all types of item features as side information, thereby outperforming all other baselines.

Personality Recognition in Conversation (PRC) aims to identify the personality traits of speakers through textual dialogue content. It is essential for providing personalized services in various applications of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), such as AI-based mental therapy and companion robots for the elderly. Most recent studies analyze the dialog content for personality classification yet overlook two major concerns that hinder their performance. First, crucial implicit factors contained in conversation, such as emotions that reflect the speakers' personalities are ignored. Second, only focusing on the input dialog content disregards the semantic understanding of personality itself, which reduces the interpretability of the results. In this paper, we propose Affective Natural Language Inference (Affective-NLI) for accurate and interpretable PRC. To utilize affectivity within dialog content for accurate personality recognition, we fine-tuned a pre-trained language model specifically for emotion recognition in conversations, facilitating real-time affective annotations for utterances. For interpretability of recognition results, we formulate personality recognition as an NLI problem by determining whether the textual description of personality labels is entailed by the dialog content. Extensive experiments on two daily conversation datasets suggest that Affective-NLI significantly outperforms (by 6%-7%) state-of-the-art approaches. Additionally, our Flow experiment demonstrates that Affective-NLI can accurately recognize the speaker's personality in the early stages of conversations by surpassing state-of-the-art methods with 22%-34%.

Recommender systems (RSs) are designed to provide personalized recommendations to users. Recently, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely introduced in RSs to improve recommendation accuracy. In this study, however, we demonstrate that RSs do not necessarily perform worse even if the KG is downgraded to the user-item interaction graph only (or removed). We propose an evaluation framework KG4RecEval to systematically evaluate how much a KG contributes to the recommendation accuracy of a KG-based RS, using our defined metric KGER (KG utilization efficiency in recommendation). We consider the scenarios where knowledge in a KG gets completely removed, randomly distorted and decreased, and also where recommendations are for cold-start users. Our extensive experiments on four commonly used datasets and a number of state-of-the-art KG-based RSs reveal that: to remove, randomly distort or decrease knowledge does not necessarily decrease recommendation accuracy, even for cold-start users. These findings inspire us to rethink how to better utilize knowledge from existing KGs, whereby we discuss and provide insights into what characteristics of datasets and KG-based RSs may help improve KG utilization efficiency.

In musical compositions that include vocals, lyrics significantly contribute to artistic expression. Consequently, previous studies have introduced the concept of a recommendation system that suggests lyrics similar to a user's favorites or personalized preferences, aiding in the discovery of lyrics among millions of tracks. However, many of these systems do not fully consider human perceptions of lyric similarity, primarily due to limited research in this area. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comparative analysis of computational methods for modeling lyric similarity with human perception. Results indicated that computational models based on similarities between embeddings from pre-trained BERT-based models, the audio from which the lyrics are derived, and phonetic components are indicative of perceptual lyric similarity. This finding underscores the importance of semantic, stylistic, and phonetic similarities in human perception about lyric similarity. We anticipate that our findings will enhance the development of similarity-based lyric recommendation systems by offering pseudo-labels for neural network development and introducing objective evaluation metrics.

The integration of LLMOps into personalized recommendation systems marks a significant advancement in managing LLM-driven applications. This innovation presents both opportunities and challenges for enterprises, requiring specialized teams to navigate the complexity of engineering technology while prioritizing data security and model interpretability. By leveraging LLMOps, enterprises can enhance the efficiency and reliability of large-scale machine learning models, driving personalized recommendations aligned with user preferences. Despite ethical considerations, LLMOps is poised for widespread adoption, promising more efficient and secure machine learning services that elevate user experience and shape the future of personalized recommendation systems.