Personal Assistant Systems
Modeling Multi-interest News Sequence for News Recommendation
A session-based news recommender system recommends the next news to a user by modeling the potential interests embedded in a sequence of news read/clicked by her/him in a session. Generally, a user's interests are diverse, namely there are multiple interests corresponding to different types of news, e.g., news of distinct topics, within a session. %Modeling such multiple interests is critical for precise news recommendation. However, most of existing methods typically overlook such important characteristic and thus fail to distinguish and model the potential multiple interests of a user, impeding accurate recommendation of the next piece of news. Therefore, this paper proposes multi-interest news sequence (MINS) model for news recommendation. In MINS, a news encoder based on self-attention is devised on learn an informative embedding for each piece of news, and then a novel parallel interest network is devised to extract the potential multiple interests embedded in the news sequence in preparation for the subsequent next-news recommendations. The experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our model can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art compared models.
HICF: Hyperbolic Informative Collaborative Filtering
Yang, Menglin, Li, Zhihao, Zhou, Min, Liu, Jiahong, King, Irwin
Considering the prevalence of the power-law distribution in user-item networks, hyperbolic space has attracted considerable attention and achieved impressive performance in the recommender system recently. The advantage of hyperbolic recommendation lies in that its exponentially increasing capacity is well-suited to describe the power-law distributed user-item network whereas the Euclidean equivalent is deficient. Nonetheless, it remains unclear which kinds of items can be effectively recommended by the hyperbolic model and which cannot. To address the above concerns, we take the most basic recommendation technique, collaborative filtering, as a medium, to investigate the behaviors of hyperbolic and Euclidean recommendation models. The results reveal that (1) tail items get more emphasis in hyperbolic space than that in Euclidean space, but there is still ample room for improvement; (2) head items receive modest attention in hyperbolic space, which could be considerably improved; (3) and nonetheless, the hyperbolic models show more competitive performance than Euclidean models. Driven by the above observations, we design a novel learning method, named hyperbolic informative collaborative filtering (HICF), aiming to compensate for the recommendation effectiveness of the head item while at the same time improving the performance of the tail item. The main idea is to adapt the hyperbolic margin ranking learning, making its pull and push procedure geometric-aware, and providing informative guidance for the learning of both head and tail items. Extensive experiments back up the analytic findings and also show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The work is valuable for personalized recommendations since it reveals that the hyperbolic space facilitates modeling the tail item, which often represents user-customized preferences or new products.
AI Transforming The World
The world is fast evolving, with Artificial intelligence (AI) at the forefront in changing the world and the way we live. This article is Part 1 of a 2 part series. An important question: What is AI? For many people, it remains unclear what this technology is all about, so this is a good place to start the conversation. AI is a branch in computer science that deals with the intelligent behavior of machines.
AI-Powered Dating Apps
'iris Dating' is a new mobile app created by the Vice President of Development at Oracle, the computer technology corporation. Instead of tasking users with swiping endlessly on a random feed of single daters, the iris application learns the preferences of each user and populates their feeds with the people that they would be more interested in matching with. In addition to its streamlined processes, the iris Dating app also places an emphasis on safety and security. The application requires real-time selfie verification to prevent online impersonation and "catfishing." Additionally, the dating app assigns users a trust rating and rewards them for being consistently truthful and honest about themselves and their intentions.
Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K drops to $30, plus the rest of the week's best tech deals
Amazon Prime Day brought a flurry of deals earlier this week, but just because the shopping event has come and gone doesn't mean all of those savings have disappeared. In fact, there are a number of good tech deals still lingering today, so you still have the chance to save some money if you missed out a few days ago. Amazon's own Fire TV Stick 4K is down to $30 at the moment, only $5 more than it was on Prime Day proper, and the Echo Show 5 Kids is also on sale for $50. Apple's AirPods Pro are still at their Prime Day price of $170, and things like Samsung's T7 Shield SSD, the Beats Studio Buds and Roku's Streambar remain discounted, too. The AirPods Pro with the MagSafe case have been discounted to $170.
Online Dating Is Great---for Investors. For Customers? It's Complicated.
Dating used to be about the end result. Its shift to an online business has made it about the journey. That might not be great for the longevity of consumers' relationships, but it should continue to benefit investors' love affair with publicly traded companies like Match Group and Bumble. Match's apps had nearly 100 million collective monthly active users as of the end of the first quarter. Meanwhile, the number of people willing to pay for so-called "freemium" dating apps continues to climb.
Effective and Efficient Training for Sequential Recommendation using Recency Sampling
Petrov, Aleksandr, Macdonald, Craig
Many modern sequential recommender systems use deep neural networks, which can effectively estimate the relevance of items but require a lot of time to train. Slow training increases expenses, hinders product development timescales and prevents the model from being regularly updated to adapt to changing user preferences. Training such sequential models involves appropriately sampling past user interactions to create a realistic training objective. The existing training objectives have limitations. For instance, next item prediction never uses the beginning of the sequence as a learning target, thereby potentially discarding valuable data. On the other hand, the item masking used by BERT4Rec is only weakly related to the goal of the sequential recommendation; therefore, it requires much more time to obtain an effective model. Hence, we propose a novel Recency-based Sampling of Sequences training objective that addresses both limitations. We apply our method to various recent and state-of-the-art model architectures - such as GRU4Rec, Figure 1: The SASRec [18] model trained with our proposed Caser, and SASRec. We show that the models enhanced with our training method outperforms BERT4Rec on the MovieLens-method can achieve performances exceeding or very close to stateof-the-art 20M dataset [14] and requires much less training time.
Towards Understanding Confusion and Affective States Under Communication Failures in Voice-Based Human-Machine Interaction
Kim, Sujeong, Garlapati, Abhinav, Lubin, Jonah, Tamrakar, Amir, Divakaran, Ajay
We present a series of two studies conducted to understand user's affective states during voice-based human-machine interactions. Emphasis is placed on the cases of communication errors or failures. In particular, we are interested in understanding "confusion" in relation with other affective states. The studies consist of two types of tasks: (1) related to communication with a voice-based virtual agent: speaking to the machine and understanding what the machine says, (2) non-communication related, problem-solving tasks where the participants solve puzzles and riddles but are asked to verbally explain the answers to the machine. We collected audio-visual data and self-reports of affective states of the participants. We report results of two studies and analysis of the collected data. The first study was analyzed based on the annotator's observation, and the second study was analyzed based on the self-report.
Flow Moods: Recommending Music by Moods on Deezer
Bontempelli, Théo, Chapus, Benjamin, Rigaud, François, Morlon, Mathieu, Lorant, Marin, Salha-Galvan, Guillaume
They allow users to discover new songs or artists they may like within large music catalogs, and they are known to improve the overall user experience on these services [5, 22]. In particular, the French music streaming service Deezer [7], offering 90 million music tracks to 16 million active users from 180 countries, extensively relies on its homemade Flow feature to recommend music. Flow materializes as a simple button, proposed to Deezer users on the homepage of the service. A click on this button launches a personalized and virtually infinite radio-style playlist of songs, computed internally using collaborative filtering methods [3, 16]. However, despite promising results over the past years, Flow used to ignore the moods of users when generating playlists.
Machine learning vs AI vs NLP: What's the difference? - TechCentral.ie
As time passes by, technology continues to evolve at an astonishing rate. This has been partly driven by the past few years due to the pandemic, which pushed organisations to adopt new technology and digitally transform at a faster rate, much faster than anyone thought possible within that frame of time. At this height of innovation, the constant galloping acceleration of technology is unrestrained. You might be asking yourself whether all these new developments are actually making life easier or making it more complex, especially as each year there's a constant stream of new features or functions produced by companies making it hard to stay on top of the new technology. It's fine to admit that it can be confusing to comprehend the purpose of the new technology and what it does.