Conventional Learning-to-Rank (LTR) methods optimize the utility of the rankings to the users, but they are oblivious to their impact on the ranked items. However, there has been a growing understanding that the latter is important to consider for a wide range of ranking applications (e.g. online marketplaces, job placement, admissions). To address this need, we propose a general LTR framework that can optimize a wide range of utility metrics (e.g. NDCG) while satisfying fairness of exposure constraints with respect to the items. This framework expands the class of learnable ranking functions to stochastic ranking policies, which provides a language for rigorously expressing fairness specifications. Furthermore, we provide a new LTR algorithm called Fair-PG-Rank for directly searching the space of fair ranking policies via a policy-gradient approach. Beyond the theoretical evidence in deriving the framework and the algorithm, we provide empirical results on simulated and real-world datasets verifying the effectiveness of the approach in individual and group-fairness settings.

Nowadays, recommender systems are present in many daily activities such as online shopping, browsing social networks, etc. Given the rising demand for reinvigoration of the tourist industry through information technology, recommenders have been included into tourism websites such as Expedia, Booking or Tripadvisor, among others. Furthermore, the amount of scientific papers related to recommender systems for tourism is on solid and continuous growth since 2004. Much of this growth is due to social networks that, besides to offer researchers the possibility of using a great mass of available and constantly updated data, they also enable the recommendation systems to become more personalised, effective and natural. This paper reviews and analyses many research publications focusing on tourism recommender systems that use social networks in their projects. We detail their main characteristics, like which social networks are exploited, which data is extracted, the applied recommendation techniques, the methods of evaluation, etc. Through a comprehensive literature review, we aim to collaborate with the future recommender systems, by giving some clear classifications and descriptions of the current tourism recommender systems.

Predicting pregnancy has been a fundamental problem in women's health for more than 50 years. Previous datasets have been collected via carefully curated medical studies, but the recent growth of women's health tracking mobile apps offers potential for reaching a much broader population. However, the feasibility of predicting pregnancy from mobile health tracking data is unclear. Here we develop four models -- a logistic regression model, and 3 LSTM models -- to predict a woman's probability of becoming pregnant using data from a women's health tracking app, Clue by BioWink GmbH. Evaluating our models on a dataset of 79 million logs from 65,276 women with ground truth pregnancy test data, we show that our predicted pregnancy probabilities meaningfully stratify women: women in the top 10% of predicted probabilities have a 89% chance of becoming pregnant over 6 menstrual cycles, as compared to a 27% chance for women in the bottom 10%. We develop a technique for extracting interpretable time trends from our deep learning models, and show these trends are consistent with previous fertility research. Our findings illustrate the potential that women's health tracking data offers for predicting pregnancy on a broader population; we conclude by discussing the steps needed to fulfill this potential.

The effectiveness of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has been demonstrated in a wide range of graph-based machine learning tasks. However, the update of parameters in GCNs is only from labeled nodes, lacking the utilization of unlabeled data. In this paper, we apply Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT), an adversarial regularization method based on both labeled and unlabeled data, on the supervised loss of GCN to enhance its generalization performance. By imposing virtually adversarial smoothness on the posterior distribution in semi-supervised learning, VAT yields improvement on the Symmetrical Laplacian Smoothness of GCNs. In addition, due to the difference of property in features, we perturb virtual adversarial perturbations on sparse and dense features, resulting in GCN Sparse VAT (GCNSVAT) and GCN Dense VAT (GCNDVAT) algorithms, respectively. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our two methods across different training sizes. Our work paves the way towards better understanding the direction of improvement on GCNs in the future.

Over the past 15 years, the volume, richness and quality of data collected from the combined social networking platforms has increased beyond all expectation, providing researchers from a variety of disciplines to use it in their research. Perhaps more impactfully, it has provided the foundation for a range of new products and services, transforming industries such as advertising and marketing, as well as bringing the challenges of sharing personal data into the public consciousness. But how to make sense of the ever-increasing volume of big social data so that we can better understand and improve the user experience in increasingly complex, data-driven digital systems. This link with usability and the user experience of data-driven system bridges into the wider field of HCI, attracting interdisciplinary researchers as we see the demand for consumer technologies, software and systems, as well as the integration of social networks into our everyday lives. The fact that the data largely posted on social networks tends to be textual, provides a further link to linguistics, psychology and psycholinguistics to better understand the relationship between human behaviours offline and online. In this thesis, we present a novel conceptual framework based on a complex digital system using collected longitudinal datasets to predict system status based on the personality traits and emotions extracted from text posted by users. The system framework was built using a dataset collected from an online scholarship system in which 2000 students had their digital behaviour and social network behaviour collected for this study. We contextualise this research project with a wider review and critical analysis of the current psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction literature, which reveals a gap of mapping and understanding digital profiling against system status.

We introduce $\textit{semi-unsupervised learning}$, an extreme case of semi-supervised learning with ultra-sparse categorisation where some classes have no labels in the training set. That is, in the training data some classes are sparsely labelled and other classes appear only as unlabelled data. Many real-world datasets are conceivably of this type. We demonstrate that effective learning in this regime is only possible when a model is capable of capturing both semi-supervised and unsupervised learning. We develop two deep generative models for classification in this regime that extend previous deep generative models designed for semi-supervised learning. By changing their probabilistic structure to contain a mixture of Gaussians in their continuous latent space, these new models can learn in both unsupervised and semi-unsupervised paradigms. We demonstrate their performance both for semi-unsupervised and unsupervised learning on various standard datasets. We show that our models can learn in an semi-unsupervised manner on Fashion-MNIST. Here we artificially mask out all labels for half of the classes of data and keep $2\%$ of labels for the remaining classes. Our model is able to learn effectively, obtaining a trained classifier with $(77.2\pm1.3)\%$ test set accuracy. We also can train on Fashion-MNIST unsupervised, obtaining $(75.2\pm1.5)\%$ test set accuracy. Additionally, doing the same for MNIST unsupervised we get $(96.3\pm0.9)\%$ test set accuracy, which is state-of-the art for fully probabilistic deep generative models.

Information retrieval systems are evolving from document retrieval to answer retrieval. Web search logs provide large amounts of data about how people interact with ranked lists of documents, but very little is known about interaction with answer texts. In this paper, we use Amazon Mechanical Turk to investigate three answer presentation and interaction approaches in a non-factoid question answering setting. We find that people perceive and react to good and bad answers very differently, and can identify good answers relatively quickly. Our results provide the basis for further investigation of effective answer interaction and feedback methods.

The wide spread use of online recruitment services has led to information explosion in the job market. As a result, the recruiters have to seek the intelligent ways for Person Job Fit, which is the bridge for adapting the right job seekers to the right positions. Existing studies on Person Job Fit have a focus on measuring the matching degree between the talent qualification and the job requirements mainly based on the manual inspection of human resource experts despite of the subjective, incomplete, and inefficient nature of the human judgement. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel end to end Ability aware Person Job Fit Neural Network model, which has a goal of reducing the dependence on manual labour and can provide better interpretation about the fitting results. The key idea is to exploit the rich information available at abundant historical job application data. Specifically, we propose a word level semantic representation for both job requirements and job seekers' experiences based on Recurrent Neural Network. Along this line, four hierarchical ability aware attention strategies are designed to measure the different importance of job requirements for semantic representation, as well as measuring the different contribution of each job experience to a specific ability requirement. Finally, extensive experiments on a large scale real world data set clearly validate the effectiveness and interpretability of the APJFNN framework compared with several baselines.

Detecting epileptic seizure through analysis of the electroencephalography (EEG) signal becomes a standard method for the diagnosis of epilepsy. In a manual way, monitoring of long term EEG is tedious and error prone. Therefore, a reliable automatic seizure detection method is desirable. A critical challenge to automatic seizure detection is that seizure morphologies exhibit considerable variabilities. In order to capture essential seizure patterns, this paper leverages an attention mechanism and a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model to exploit both spatially and temporally discriminating features and account for seizure variabilities. The attention mechanism is to capture spatial features more effectively according to the contributions of brain areas to seizures. The BiLSTM model is to extract more discriminating temporal features in the forward and the backward directions. By accounting for both spatial and temporal variations of seizures, the proposed method is more robust across subjects. The testing results over the noisy real data of CHB-MIT show that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. In both mixing-patients and cross-patient experiments, the average sensitivity and specificity are both higher while their corresponding standard deviations are lower than the methods in comparison.

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