0000000000132940

AUTHOR

Zhaochun Ren

0000-0002-9076-6565

Vectors of Pairwise Item Preferences

Neural embedding has been widely applied as an effective category of vectorization methods in real-world recommender systems. However, its exploration of users’ explicit feedback on items, to create good quality user and item vectors is still limited. Existing neural embedding methods only consider the items that are accessed by the users, but neglect the scenario when a user gives high or low rating to a particular item. In this paper, we propose Pref2Vec, a method to generate vector representations of pairwise item preferences, users and items, which can be directly utilized for machine learning tasks. Specifically, Pref2Vec considers users’ pairwise item preferences as elementary units. …

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User session level diverse reranking of search results

Most Web search diversity approaches can be categorized as Document Level Diversification (DocLD), Topic Level Diversification (TopicLD) or Term Level Diversification (TermLD). DocLD selects the relevant documents with minimal content overlap to each other. It does not take the coverage of query subtopics into account. TopicLD solves this by modeling query subtopics explicitly. However, the automatic mining of query subtopics is difficult. TermLD tries to cover as many query topic terms as possible, which reduces the task of finding a query's subtopics into finding a set of representative topic terms. In this paper, we propose a novel User Session Level Diversification (UserLD) approach bas…

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Social Collaborative Viewpoint Regression with Explainable Recommendations

A recommendation is called explainable if it not only predicts a numerical rating for an item, but also generates explanations for users' preferences. Most existing methods for explainable recommendation apply topic models to analyze user reviews to provide descriptions along with the recommendations they produce. So far, such methods have neglected user opinions and influences from social relations as a source of information for recommendations, even though these are known to improve the rating prediction. In this paper, we propose a latent variable model, called social collaborative viewpoint regression (sCVR), for predicting item ratings based on user opinions and social relations. To th…

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Linear Feature Extraction for Ranking

We address the feature extraction problem for document ranking in information retrieval. We then propose LifeRank, a Linear feature extraction algorithm for Ranking. In LifeRank, we regard each document collection for ranking as a matrix, referred to as the original matrix. We try to optimize a transformation matrix, so that a new matrix (dataset) can be generated as the product of the original matrix and a transformation matrix. The transformation matrix projects high-dimensional document vectors into lower dimensions. Theoretically, there could be very large transformation matrices, each leading to a new generated matrix. In LifeRank, we produce a transformation matrix so that the generat…

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