Leyu Lin

Yuan Yao, Bowen Dong, Ao Zhang et al.

Recent works have shown promising results of prompt tuning in stimulating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing works focus on prompt-tuning generative PLMs that are pre-trained to generate target tokens, such as BERT. It is still unknown whether and how discriminative PLMs, e.g., ELECTRA, can be effectively prompt-tuned. In this work, we present DPT, the first prompt tuning framework for discriminative PLMs, which reformulates NLP tasks into a discriminative language modeling problem. Comprehensive experiments on text classification and question answering show that, compared with vanilla fine-tuning, DPT achieves significantly higher performance, and also prevents the unstable problem in tuning large PLMs in both full-set and low-resource settings. The source code and experiment details of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/DPT.

Yiqing Wu, Ruobing Xie, Yongchun Zhu et al.

Multi-behavior recommendation (MBR) aims to jointly consider multiple behaviors to improve the target behavior's performance. We argue that MBR models should: (1) model the coarse-grained commonalities between different behaviors of a user, (2) consider both individual sequence view and global graph view in multi-behavior modeling, and (3) capture the fine-grained differences between multiple behaviors of a user. In this work, we propose a novel Multi-behavior Multi-view Contrastive Learning Recommendation (MMCLR) framework, including three new CL tasks to solve the above challenges, respectively. The multi-behavior CL aims to make different user single-behavior representations of the same user in each view to be similar. The multi-view CL attempts to bridge the gap between a user's sequence-view and graph-view representations. The behavior distinction CL focuses on modeling fine-grained differences of different behaviors. In experiments, we conduct extensive evaluations and ablation tests to verify the effectiveness of MMCLR and various CL tasks on two real-world datasets, achieving SOTA performance over existing baselines. Our code will be available on \url{https://github.com/wyqing20/MMCLR}

Junjie Zhang, Yupeng Hou, Ruobing Xie et al.

Recently, there has been an emergence of employing LLM-powered agents as believable human proxies, based on their remarkable decision-making capability. However, existing studies mainly focus on simulating human dialogue. Human non-verbal behaviors, such as item clicking in recommender systems, although implicitly exhibiting user preferences and could enhance the modeling of users, have not been deeply explored. The main reasons lie in the gap between language modeling and behavior modeling, as well as the incomprehension of LLMs about user-item relations. To address this issue, we propose AgentCF for simulating user-item interactions in recommender systems through agent-based collaborative filtering. We creatively consider not only users but also items as agents, and develop a collaborative learning approach that optimizes both kinds of agents together. Specifically, at each time step, we first prompt the user and item agents to interact autonomously. Then, based on the disparities between the agents' decisions and real-world interaction records, user and item agents are prompted to reflect on and adjust the misleading simulations collaboratively, thereby modeling their two-sided relations. The optimized agents can also propagate their preferences to other agents in subsequent interactions, implicitly capturing the collaborative filtering idea. Overall, the optimized agents exhibit diverse interaction behaviors within our framework, including user-item, user-user, item-item, and collective interactions. The results show that these agents can demonstrate personalized behaviors akin to those of real-world individuals, sparking the development of next-generation user behavior simulation.

Haojie Zhang, Mingfei Liang, Ruobing Xie et al.

In this work, we revisit the Transformer-based pre-trained language models and identify two different types of information confusion in position encoding and model representations, respectively. Firstly, we show that in the relative position encoding, the joint modeling about relative distances and directions brings confusion between two heterogeneous information. It may make the model unable to capture the associative semantics of the same distance and the opposite directions, which in turn affects the performance of downstream tasks. Secondly, we notice the BERT with Mask Language Modeling (MLM) pre-training objective outputs similar token representations (last hidden states of different tokens) and head representations (attention weights of different heads), which may make the diversity of information expressed by different tokens and heads limited. Motivated by the above investigation, we propose two novel techniques to improve pre-trained language models: Decoupled Directional Relative Position (DDRP) encoding and MTH pre-training objective. DDRP decouples the relative distance features and the directional features in classical relative position encoding. MTH applies two novel auxiliary regularizers besides MLM to enlarge the dissimilarities between (a) last hidden states of different tokens, and (b) attention weights of different heads. These designs allow the model to capture different categories of information more clearly, as a way to alleviate information confusion in representation learning for better optimization. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Junjie Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Yupeng Hou et al.

In the past decades, recommender systems have attracted much attention in both research and industry communities, and a large number of studies have been devoted to developing effective recommendation models. Basically speaking, these models mainly learn the underlying user preference from historical behavior data, and then estimate the user-item matching relationships for recommendations. Inspired by the recent progress on large language models (LLMs), we take a different approach to developing the recommendation models, considering recommendation as instruction following by LLMs. The key idea is that the preferences or needs of a user can be expressed in natural language descriptions (called instructions), so that LLMs can understand and further execute the instruction for fulfilling the recommendation task. Instead of using public APIs of LLMs, we instruction tune an open-source LLM (3B Flan-T5-XL), in order to better adapt LLMs to recommender systems. For this purpose, we first design a general instruction format for describing the preference, intention, task form and context of a user in natural language. Then we manually design 39 instruction templates and automatically generate a large amount of user-personalized instruction data (252K instructions) with varying types of preferences and intentions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we instantiate the instruction templates into several widely-studied recommendation (or search) tasks, and conduct extensive experiments on these tasks with real-world datasets. Experiment results show that the proposed approach can outperform several competitive baselines, including the powerful GPT-3.5, on these evaluation tasks. Our approach sheds light on developing more user-friendly recommender systems, in which users can freely communicate with the system and obtain more accurate recommendations via natural language instructions.

Chong Liu, Xiaoyang Liu, Rongqin Zheng et al.

Sequential recommendation methods are increasingly important in cutting-edge recommender systems. Through leveraging historical records, the systems can capture user interests and perform recommendations accordingly. State-of-the-art sequential recommendation models proposed very recently combine contrastive learning techniques for obtaining high-quality user representations. Though effective and performing well, the models based on contrastive learning require careful selection of data augmentation methods and pretext tasks, efficient negative sampling strategies, and massive hyper-parameters validation. In this paper, we propose an ultra-simple alternative for obtaining better user representations and improving sequential recommendation performance. Specifically, we present a simple yet effective \textbf{C}onsistency \textbf{T}raining method for sequential \textbf{Rec}ommendation (CT4Rec) in which only two extra training objectives are utilized without any structural modifications and data augmentation. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and one large newly crawled industrial corpus demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms SOTA models by a large margin and with much less training time than these based on contrastive learning. Online evaluation on real-world content recommendation system also achieves 2.717\% improvement on the click-through rate and 3.679\% increase on the average click number per capita. Further exploration reveals that such a simple method has great potential for CTR prediction. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ct4rec/CT4Rec.git}.

Ruobing Xie, Qi Liu, Liangdong Wang et al.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to provide better recommendation results in the target domain with the help of the source domain, which is widely used and explored in real-world systems. However, CDR in the matching (i.e., candidate generation) module struggles with the data sparsity and popularity bias issues in both representation learning and knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel Contrastive Cross-Domain Recommendation (CCDR) framework for CDR in matching. Specifically, we build a huge diversified preference network to capture multiple information reflecting user diverse interests, and design an intra-domain contrastive learning (intra-CL) and three inter-domain contrastive learning (inter-CL) tasks for better representation learning and knowledge transfer. The intra-CL enables more effective and balanced training inside the target domain via a graph augmentation, while the inter-CL builds different types of cross-domain interactions from user, taxonomy, and neighbor aspects. In experiments, CCDR achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations in a real-world system. Currently, we have deployed our CCDR on WeChat Top Stories, affecting plenty of users. The source code is in https://github.com/lqfarmer/CCDR.

Yongchun Zhu, Zhenwei Tang, Yudan Liu et al.

Cold-start problem is still a very challenging problem in recommender systems. Fortunately, the interactions of the cold-start users in the auxiliary source domain can help cold-start recommendations in the target domain. How to transfer user's preferences from the source domain to the target domain, is the key issue in Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) which is a promising solution to deal with the cold-start problem. Most existing methods model a common preference bridge to transfer preferences for all users. Intuitively, since preferences vary from user to user, the preference bridges of different users should be different. Along this line, we propose a novel framework named Personalized Transfer of User Preferences for Cross-domain Recommendation (PTUPCDR). Specifically, a meta network fed with users' characteristic embeddings is learned to generate personalized bridge functions to achieve personalized transfer of preferences for each user. To learn the meta network stably, we employ a task-oriented optimization procedure. With the meta-generated personalized bridge function, the user's preference embedding in the source domain can be transformed into the target domain, and the transformed user preference embedding can be utilized as the initial embedding for the cold-start user in the target domain. Using large real-world datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of PTUPCDR on both cold-start and warm-start stages. The code has been available at https://github.com/easezyc/WSDM2022-PTUPCDR.

Yongchun Zhu, Yudan Liu, Ruobing Xie et al.

In recommender systems and advertising platforms, marketers always want to deliver products, contents, or advertisements to potential audiences over media channels such as display, video, or social. Given a set of audiences or customers (seed users), the audience expansion technique (look-alike modeling) is a promising solution to identify more potential audiences, who are similar to the seed users and likely to finish the business goal of the target campaign. However, look-alike modeling faces two challenges: (1) In practice, a company could run hundreds of marketing campaigns to promote various contents within completely different categories every day, e.g., sports, politics, society. Thus, it is difficult to utilize a common method to expand audiences for all campaigns. (2) The seed set of a certain campaign could only cover limited users. Therefore, a customized approach based on such a seed set is likely to be overfitting. In this paper, to address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage framework named Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics (MetaHeac) which has been deployed in WeChat Look-alike System. In the offline stage, a general model which can capture the relationships among various tasks is trained from a meta-learning perspective on all existing campaign tasks. In the online stage, for a new campaign, a customized model is learned with the given seed set based on the general model. According to both offline and online experiments, the proposed MetaHeac shows superior effectiveness for both content marketing campaigns in recommender systems and advertising campaigns in advertising platforms. Besides, MetaHeac has been successfully deployed in WeChat for the promotion of both contents and advertisements, leading to great improvement in the quality of marketing. The code has been available at \url{https://github.com/easezyc/MetaHeac}.

Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Ruobing Xie et al.

Knowledge graphs typically undergo open-ended growth of new relations. This cannot be well handled by relation extraction that focuses on pre-defined relations with sufficient training data. To address new relations with few-shot instances, we propose a novel bootstrapping approach, Neural Snowball, to learn new relations by transferring semantic knowledge about existing relations. More specifically, we use Relational Siamese Networks (RSN) to learn the metric of relational similarities between instances based on existing relations and their labeled data. Afterwards, given a new relation and its few-shot instances, we use RSN to accumulate reliable instances from unlabeled corpora; these instances are used to train a relation classifier, which can further identify new facts of the new relation. The process is conducted iteratively like a snowball. Experiments show that our model can gather high-quality instances for better few-shot relation learning and achieves significant improvement compared to baselines. Codes and datasets are released on https://github.com/thunlp/Neural-Snowball.

Yihong Gu, Jun Yan, Hao Zhu et al.

Most language modeling methods rely on large-scale data to statistically learn the sequential patterns of words. In this paper, we argue that words are atomic language units but not necessarily atomic semantic units. Inspired by HowNet, we use sememes, the minimum semantic units in human languages, to represent the implicit semantics behind words for language modeling, named Sememe-Driven Language Model (SDLM). More specifically, to predict the next word, SDLM first estimates the sememe distribution gave textual context. Afterward, it regards each sememe as a distinct semantic expert, and these experts jointly identify the most probable senses and the corresponding word. In this way, SDLM enables language models to work beyond word-level manipulation to fine-grained sememe-level semantics and offers us more powerful tools to fine-tune language models and improve the interpretability as well as the robustness of language models. Experiments on language modeling and the downstream application of headline gener- ation demonstrate the significant effect of SDLM. Source code and data used in the experiments can be accessed at https:// github.com/thunlp/SDLM-pytorch.

Yiqing Wu, Ruobing Xie, Zhao Zhang et al.

The graph-based recommendation has achieved great success in recent years. However, most existing graph-based recommendations focus on capturing user preference based on positive edges/feedback, while ignoring negative edges/feedback (e.g., dislike, low rating) that widely exist in real-world recommender systems. How to utilize negative feedback in graph-based recommendations still remains underexplored. In this study, we first conducted a comprehensive experimental analysis and found that (1) existing graph neural networks are not well-suited for modeling negative feedback, which acts as a high-frequency signal in a user-item graph. (2) The graph-based recommendation suffers from the representation degeneration problem. Based on the two observations, we propose a novel model that models positive and negative feedback from a frequency filter perspective called Dual-frequency Graph Neural Network for Sign-aware Recommendation (DFGNN). Specifically, in DFGNN, the designed dual-frequency graph filter (DGF) captures both low-frequency and high-frequency signals that contain positive and negative feedback. Furthermore, the proposed signed graph regularization is applied to maintain the user/item embedding uniform in the embedding space to alleviate the representation degeneration problem. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Codes of our model will be released upon acceptance.

Shuai Yang, Lixin Zhang, Feng Xia et al.

There are roughly three stages in real industrial recommendation systems, candidates generation (retrieval), ranking and reranking. Individual-level diversity and system-level diversity are both important for industrial recommender systems. The former focus on each single user's experience, while the latter focus on the difference among users. Graph-based retrieval strategies are inevitably hijacked by heavy users and popular items, leading to the convergence of candidates for users and the lack of system-level diversity. Meanwhile, in the reranking phase, Determinantal Point Process (DPP) is deployed to increase individual-level diverisity. Heavily relying on the semantic information of items, DPP suffers from clickbait and inaccurate attributes. Besides, most studies only focus on one of the two levels of diversity, and ignore the mutual influence among different stages in real recommender systems. We argue that individual-level diversity and system-level diversity should be viewed as an integrated problem, and we provide an efficient and deployable solution for web-scale recommenders. Generally, we propose to employ the retrieval graph information in diversity-based reranking, by which to weaken the hidden similarity of items exposed to users, and consequently gain more graph explorations to improve the system-level diveristy. Besides, we argue that users' propensity for diversity changes over time in content feed recommendation. Therefore, with the explored graph, we also propose to capture the user's real-time personalized propensity to the diversity. We implement and deploy the combined system in WeChat App's Top Stories used by hundreds of millions of users. Offline simulations and online A/B tests show our solution can effectively improve both user engagement and system revenue.

Yongchun Zhu, Ruobing Xie, Fuzhen Zhuang et al.

Recently, embedding techniques have achieved impressive success in recommender systems. However, the embedding techniques are data demanding and suffer from the cold-start problem. Especially, for the cold-start item which only has limited interactions, it is hard to train a reasonable item ID embedding, called cold ID embedding, which is a major challenge for the embedding techniques. The cold item ID embedding has two main problems: (1) A gap is existing between the cold ID embedding and the deep model. (2) Cold ID embedding would be seriously affected by noisy interaction. However, most existing methods do not consider both two issues in the cold-start problem, simultaneously. To address these problems, we adopt two key ideas: (1) Speed up the model fitting for the cold item ID embedding (fast adaptation). (2) Alleviate the influence of noise. Along this line, we propose Meta Scaling and Shifting Networks to generate scaling and shifting functions for each item, respectively. The scaling function can directly transform cold item ID embeddings into warm feature space which can fit the model better, and the shifting function is able to produce stable embeddings from the noisy embeddings. With the two meta networks, we propose Meta Warm Up Framework (MWUF) which learns to warm up cold ID embeddings. Moreover, MWUF is a general framework that can be applied upon various existing deep recommendation models. The proposed model is evaluated on three popular benchmarks, including both recommendation and advertising datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate its superior performance and compatibility.

Yongchun Zhu, Kaikai Ge, Fuzhen Zhuang et al.

Cold-start problems are enormous challenges in practical recommender systems. One promising solution for this problem is cross-domain recommendation (CDR) which leverages rich information from an auxiliary (source) domain to improve the performance of recommender system in the target domain. In these CDR approaches, the family of Embedding and Mapping methods for CDR (EMCDR) is very effective, which explicitly learn a mapping function from source embeddings to target embeddings with overlapping users. However, these approaches suffer from one serious problem: the mapping function is only learned on limited overlapping users, and the function would be biased to the limited overlapping users, which leads to unsatisfying generalization ability and degrades the performance on cold-start users in the target domain. With the advantage of meta learning which has good generalization ability to novel tasks, we propose a transfer-meta framework for CDR (TMCDR) which has a transfer stage and a meta stage. In the transfer (pre-training) stage, a source model and a target model are trained on source and target domains, respectively. In the meta stage, a task-oriented meta network is learned to implicitly transform the user embedding in the source domain to the target feature space. In addition, the TMCDR is a general framework that can be applied upon various base models, e.g., MF, BPR, CML. By utilizing data from Amazon and Douban, we conduct extensive experiments on 6 cross-domain tasks to demonstrate the superior performance and compatibility of TMCDR.

Ruobing Xie, Yalong Wang, Rui Wang et al.

An effective online recommendation system should jointly capture users' long-term and short-term preferences in both users' internal behaviors (from the target recommendation task) and external behaviors (from other tasks). However, it is extremely challenging to conduct fast adaptations to real-time new trends while making full use of all historical behaviors in large-scale systems, due to the real-world limitations in real-time training efficiency and external behavior acquisition. To address these practical challenges, we propose a novel Long Short-Term Temporal Meta-learning framework (LSTTM) for online recommendation. It arranges user multi-source behaviors in a global long-term graph and an internal short-term graph, and conducts different GAT-based aggregators and training strategies to learn user short-term and long-term preferences separately. To timely capture users' real-time interests, we propose a temporal meta-learning method based on MAML under an asynchronous optimization strategy for fast adaptation, which regards recommendations at different time periods as different tasks. In experiments, LSTTM achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations. It has been deployed on a widely-used online recommendation system named WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users.

Chaojun Xiao, Ruobing Xie, Yuan Yao et al.

Existing sequential recommendation methods rely on large amounts of training data and usually suffer from the data sparsity problem. To tackle this, the pre-training mechanism has been widely adopted, which attempts to leverage large-scale data to perform self-supervised learning and transfer the pre-trained parameters to downstream tasks. However, previous pre-trained models for recommendation focus on leverage universal sequence patterns from user behaviour sequences and item information, whereas ignore capturing personalized interests with the heterogeneous user information, which has been shown effective in contributing to personalized recommendation. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance pre-trained models with heterogeneous user information, called User-aware Pre-training for Recommendation (UPRec). Specifically, UPRec leverages the user attributes andstructured social graphs to construct self-supervised objectives in the pre-training stage and proposes two user-aware pre-training tasks. Comprehensive experimental results on several real-world large-scale recommendation datasets demonstrate that UPRec can effectively integrate user information into pre-trained models and thus provide more appropriate recommendations for users.

Ruobing Xie, Qi Liu, Shukai Liu et al.

Recently, real-world recommendation systems need to deal with millions of candidates. It is extremely challenging to conduct sophisticated end-to-end algorithms on the entire corpus due to the tremendous computation costs. Therefore, conventional recommendation systems usually contain two modules. The matching module focuses on the coverage, which aims to efficiently retrieve hundreds of items from large corpora, while the ranking module generates specific ranks for these items. Recommendation diversity is an essential factor that impacts user experience. Most efforts have explored recommendation diversity in ranking, while the matching module should take more responsibility for diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel Heterogeneous graph neural network framework for diversified recommendation (GraphDR) in matching to improve both recommendation accuracy and diversity. Specifically, GraphDR builds a huge heterogeneous preference network to record different types of user preferences, and conduct a field-level heterogeneous graph attention network for node aggregation. We also innovatively conduct a neighbor-similarity based loss to balance both recommendation accuracy and diversity for the diversified matching task. In experiments, we conduct extensive online and offline evaluations on a real-world recommendation system with various accuracy and diversity metrics and achieve significant improvements. We also conduct model analyses and case study for a better understanding of our model. Moreover, GraphDR has been deployed on a well-known recommendation system, which affects millions of users. The source code will be released.

Chaojun Xiao, Yuan Yao, Ruobing Xie et al.

Distant supervision (DS) has been widely used to generate auto-labeled data for sentence-level relation extraction (RE), which improves RE performance. However, the existing success of DS cannot be directly transferred to the more challenging document-level relation extraction (DocRE), since the inherent noise in DS may be even multiplied in document level and significantly harm the performance of RE. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pre-trained model for DocRE, which denoises the document-level DS data via multiple pre-training tasks. Experimental results on the large-scale DocRE benchmark show that our model can capture useful information from noisy DS data and achieve promising results.

Zheni Zeng, Chaojun Xiao, Yuan Yao et al.

Recommender systems aim to provide item recommendations for users, and are usually faced with data sparsity problem (e.g., cold start) in real-world scenarios. Recently pre-trained models have shown their effectiveness in knowledge transfer between domains and tasks, which can potentially alleviate the data sparsity problem in recommender systems. In this survey, we first provide a review of recommender systems with pre-training. In addition, we show the benefits of pre-training to recommender systems through experiments. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research for recommender systems with pre-training.

Wen Wang, Wei Zhang, Shukai Liu et al.

Session-based target behavior prediction aims to predict the next item to be interacted with specific behavior types (e.g., clicking). Although existing methods for session-based behavior prediction leverage powerful representation learning approaches to encode items' sequential relevance in a low-dimensional space, they suffer from several limitations. Firstly, they focus on only utilizing the same type of user behavior for prediction, but ignore the potential of taking other behavior data as auxiliary information. This is particularly crucial when the target behavior is sparse but important (e.g., buying or sharing an item). Secondly, item-to-item relations are modeled separately and locally in one behavior sequence, and they lack a principled way to globally encode these relations more effectively. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Multi-relational Graph Neural Network model for Session-based target behavior Prediction, namely MGNN-SPred for short. Specifically, we build a Multi-Relational Item Graph (MRIG) based on all behavior sequences from all sessions, involving target and auxiliary behavior types. Based on MRIG, MGNN-SPred learns global item-to-item relations and further obtains user preferences w.r.t. current target and auxiliary behavior sequences, respectively. In the end, MGNN-SPred leverages a gating mechanism to adaptively fuse user representations for predicting next item interacted with target behavior. The extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MGNN-SPred by comparing with state-of-the-art session-based prediction methods, validating the benefits of leveraging auxiliary behavior and learning item-to-item relations over MRIG.

Ruobing Xie, Yanan Lu, Fen Lin et al.

Question answering (QA) aims to understand questions and find appropriate answers. In real-world QA systems, Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) based QA is usually a practical and effective solution, especially for some complicated questions (e.g., How and Why). Recent years have witnessed the great successes of knowledge graphs (KGs) in KBQA systems, while there are still few works focusing on making full use of KGs in FAQ-based QA. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Anchor based Question Answering (KAQA) framework for FAQ-based QA to better understand questions and retrieve more appropriate answers. More specifically, KAQA mainly consists of three modules: knowledge graph construction, query anchoring and query-document matching. We consider entities and triples of KGs in texts as knowledge anchors to precisely capture the core semantics, which brings in higher precision and better interpretability. The multi-channel matching strategy also enables most sentence matching models to be flexibly plugged in our KAQA framework to fit different real-world computation limitations. In experiments, we evaluate our models on both offline and online query-document matching tasks on a real-world FAQ-based QA system in WeChat Search, with detailed analysis, ablation tests and case studies. The significant improvements confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the KAQA framework in real-world FAQ-based QA.

Yudan Liu, Kaikai Ge, Xu Zhang et al.

Recently, deep learning models play more and more important roles in contents recommender systems. However, although the performance of recommendations is greatly improved, the "Matthew effect" becomes increasingly evident. While the head contents get more and more popular, many competitive long-tail contents are difficult to achieve timely exposure because of lacking behavior features. This issue has badly impacted the quality and diversity of recommendations. To solve this problem, look-alike algorithm is a good choice to extend audience for high quality long-tail contents. But the traditional look-alike models which widely used in online advertising are not suitable for recommender systems because of the strict requirement of both real-time and effectiveness. This paper introduces a real-time attention based look-alike model (RALM) for recommender systems, which tackles the challenge of conflict between real-time and effectiveness. RALM realizes real-time look-alike audience extension benefiting from seeds-to-user similarity prediction and improves the effectiveness through optimizing user representation learning and look-alike learning modeling. For user representation learning, we propose a novel neural network structure named attention merge layer to replace the concatenation layer, which significantly improves the expressive ability of multi-fields feature learning. On the other hand, considering the various members of seeds, we design global attention unit and local attention unit to learn robust and adaptive seeds representation with respect to a certain target user. At last, we introduce seeds clustering mechanism which not only reduces the time complexity of attention units prediction but also minimizes the loss of seeds information at the same time. According to our experiments, RALM shows superior effectiveness and performance than popular look-alike models.

Ganbin Zhou, Ping Luo, Jingwu Chen et al.

Recently, improving the relevance and diversity of dialogue system has attracted wide attention. For a post x, the corresponding response y is usually diverse in the real-world corpus, while the conventional encoder-decoder model tends to output the high-frequency (safe but trivial) responses and thus is difficult to handle the large number of responding styles. To address these issues, we propose the Atom Responding Machine (ARM), which is based on a proposed encoder-composer-decoder network trained by a teacher-student framework. To enrich the generated responses, ARM introduces a large number of molecule-mechanisms as various responding styles, which are conducted by taking different combinations from a few atom-mechanisms. In other words, even a little of atom-mechanisms can make a mickle of molecule-mechanisms. The experiments demonstrate diversity and quality of the responses generated by ARM. We also present generating process to show underlying interpretability for the result.

Zhengyan Zhang, Cheng Yang, Zhiyuan Liu et al.

There is recently a surge in approaches that learn low-dimensional embeddings of nodes in networks. As there are many large-scale real-world networks, it's inefficient for existing approaches to store amounts of parameters in memory and update them edge after edge. With the knowledge that nodes having similar neighborhood will be close to each other in embedding space, we propose COSINE (COmpresSIve NE) algorithm which reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the training process by parameters sharing among similar nodes. COSINE applies graph partitioning algorithms to networks and builds parameter sharing dependency of nodes based on the result of partitioning. With parameters sharing among similar nodes, COSINE injects prior knowledge about higher structural information into training process which makes network embedding more efficient and effective. COSINE can be applied to any embedding lookup method and learn high-quality embeddings with limited memory and shorter training time. We conduct experiments of multi-label classification and link prediction, where baselines and our model have the same memory usage. Experimental results show that COSINE gives baselines up to 23% increase on classification and up to 25% increase on link prediction. Moreover, time of all representation learning methods using COSINE decreases from 30% to 70%.

Ganbin Zhou, Rongyu Cao, Xiang Ao et al.

In this study, we focus on extracting knowledgeable snippets and annotating knowledgeable documents from Web corpus, consisting of the documents from social media and We-media. Informally, knowledgeable snippets refer to the text describing concepts, properties of entities, or relations among entities, while knowledgeable documents are the ones with enough knowledgeable snippets. These knowledgeable snippets and documents could be helpful in multiple applications, such as knowledge base construction and knowledge-oriented service. Previous studies extracted the knowledgeable snippets using the pattern-based method. Here, we propose the semantic-based method for this task. Specifically, a CNN based model is developed to extract knowledgeable snippets and annotate knowledgeable documents simultaneously. Additionally, a "low-level sharing, high-level splitting" structure of CNN is designed to handle the documents from different content domains. Compared with building multiple domain-specific CNNs, this joint model not only critically saves the training time, but also improves the prediction accuracy visibly. The superiority of the proposed method is demonstrated in a real dataset from Wechat public platform.

Huiming Jin, Hao Zhu, Zhiyuan Liu et al.

Sememes are minimum semantic units of concepts in human languages, such that each word sense is composed of one or multiple sememes. Words are usually manually annotated with their sememes by linguists, and form linguistic common-sense knowledge bases widely used in various NLP tasks. Recently, the lexical sememe prediction task has been introduced. It consists of automatically recommending sememes for words, which is expected to improve annotation efficiency and consistency. However, existing methods of lexical sememe prediction typically rely on the external context of words to represent the meaning, which usually fails to deal with low-frequency and out-of-vocabulary words. To address this issue for Chinese, we propose a novel framework to take advantage of both internal character information and external context information of words. We experiment on HowNet, a Chinese sememe knowledge base, and demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin, and maintains a robust performance even for low-frequency words.

Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Fen Lin et al.

Knowledge graphs (KGs), which could provide essential relational information between entities, have been widely utilized in various knowledge-driven applications. Since the overall human knowledge is innumerable that still grows explosively and changes frequently, knowledge construction and update inevitably involve automatic mechanisms with less human supervision, which usually bring in plenty of noises and conflicts to KGs. However, most conventional knowledge representation learning methods assume that all triple facts in existing KGs share the same significance without any noises. To address this problem, we propose a novel confidence-aware knowledge representation learning framework (CKRL), which detects possible noises in KGs while learning knowledge representations with confidence simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce the triple confidence to conventional translation-based methods for knowledge representation learning. To make triple confidence more flexible and universal, we only utilize the internal structural information in KGs, and propose three kinds of triple confidences considering both local and global structural information. In experiments, We evaluate our models on knowledge graph noise detection, knowledge graph completion and triple classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our confidence-aware models achieve significant and consistent improvements on all tasks, which confirms the capability of CKRL modeling confidence with structural information in both KG noise detection and knowledge representation learning.