Andrew Collins

Joeran Beel, Andrew Collins, Akiko Aizawa

Recommender systems in academia are not widely available. This may be in part due to the difficulty and cost of developing and maintaining recommender systems. Many operators of academic products such as digital libraries and reference managers avoid this effort, although a recommender system could provide significant benefits to their users. In this paper, we introduce Mr. DLib's "Recommendations as-a-Service" (RaaS) API that allows operators of academic products to easily integrate a scientific recommender system into their products. Mr. DLib generates recommendations for research articles but in the future, recommendations may include call for papers, grants, etc. Operators of academic products can request recommendations from Mr. DLib and display these recommendations to their users. Mr. DLib can be integrated in just a few hours or days; creating an equivalent recommender system from scratch would require several months for an academic operator. Mr. DLib has been used by GESIS Sowiport and by the reference manager JabRef. Mr. DLib is open source and its goal is to facilitate the application of, and research on, scientific recommender systems. In this paper, we present the motivation for Mr. DLib, the architecture and details about the effectiveness. Mr. DLib has delivered 94m recommendations over a span of two years with an average click-through rate of 0.12%.

Andrew Collins, Laura Tierney, Joeran Beel

Recommendation algorithms perform differently if the users, recommendation contexts, applications, and user interfaces vary even slightly. It is similarly observed in other fields, such as combinatorial problem solving, that algorithms perform differently for each instance presented. In those fields, meta-learning is successfully used to predict an optimal algorithm for each instance, to improve overall system performance. Per-instance algorithm selection has thus far been unsuccessful for recommender systems. In this paper we propose a per-instance meta-learner that clusters data instances and predicts the best algorithm for unseen instances according to cluster membership. We test our approach using 10 collaborative- and 4 content-based filtering algorithms, for varying clustering parameters, and find a significant improvement over the best performing base algorithm at alpha=0.053 (MAE: 0.7107 vs LightGBM 0.7214; t-test). We also explore the performances of our base algorithms on a ratings dataset and empirically show that the error of a perfect algorithm selector monotonically decreases for larger pools of algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effective meta-learning technique for per-instance algorithm selection in recommender systems.

Joeran Beel, Bryan Tyrell, Edward Bergman et al.

Automated per-instance algorithm selection often outperforms single learners. Key to algorithm selection via meta-learning is often the (meta) features, which sometimes though do not provide enough information to train a meta-learner effectively. We propose a Siamese Neural Network architecture for automated algorithm selection that focuses more on 'alike performing' instances than meta-features. Our work includes a novel performance metric and method for selecting training samples. We introduce further the concept of 'Algorithm Performance Personas' that describe instances for which the single algorithms perform alike. The concept of 'alike performing algorithms' as ground truth for selecting training samples is novel and provides a huge potential as we believe. In this proposal, we outline our ideas in detail and provide the first evidence that our proposed metric is better suitable for training sample selection that standard performance metrics such as absolute errors.

Andrew Collins, Joeran Beel

The effectiveness of recommender system algorithms varies in different real-world scenarios. It is difficult to choose a best algorithm for a scenario due to the quantity of algorithms available, and because of their varying performances. Furthermore, it is not possible to choose one single algorithm that will work optimally for all recommendation requests. We apply meta-learning to this problem of algorithm selection for scholarly article recommendation. We train a random forest, gradient boosting machine, and generalized linear model, to predict a best-algorithm from a pool of content similarity-based algorithms. We evaluate our approach on an offline dataset for scholarly article recommendation and attempt to predict the best algorithm per-instance. The best meta-learning model achieved an average increase in F1 of 88% when compared to the average F1 of all base-algorithms (F1; 0.0708 vs 0.0376) and was significantly able to correctly select each base-algorithm (Paired t-test; p < 0.1). The meta-learner had a 3% higher F1 when compared to the single-best base-algorithm (F1; 0.0739 vs 0.0717). We further perform an online evaluation of our approach, conducting an A/B test through our recommender-as-a-service platform Mr. DLib. We deliver 148K recommendations to users between January and March 2019. User engagement was significantly increased for recommendations generated using our meta-learning approach when compared to a random selection of algorithm (Click-through rate (CTR); 0.51% vs. 0.44%, Chi-Squared test; p < 0.1), however our approach did not produce a higher CTR than the best algorithm alone (CTR; MoreLikeThis (Title): 0.58%).

Dominika Tkaczyk, Andrew Collins, Joeran Beel

Information about the contributions of individual authors to scientific publications is important for assessing authors' achievements. Some biomedical publications have a short section that describes authors' roles and contributions. It is usually written in natural language and hence author contributions cannot be trivially extracted in a machine-readable format. In this paper, we present 1) A statistical analysis of roles in author contributions sections, and 2) NaïveRole, a novel approach to extract structured authors' roles from author contribution sections. For the first part, we used co-clustering techniques, as well as Open Information Extraction, to semi-automatically discover the popular roles within a corpus of 2,000 contributions sections from PubMed Central. The discovered roles were used to automatically build a training set for NaïveRole, our role extractor approach, based on Naïve Bayes. NaïveRole extracts roles with a micro-averaged precision of 0.68, recall of 0.48 and F1 of 0.57. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to automatically extract author roles from research papers. This paper is an extended version of a previous poster published at JCDL 2018.

Andrew Collins, Joeran Beel

Many recommendation algorithms are available to digital library recommender system operators. The effectiveness of algorithms is largely unreported by way of online evaluation. We compare a standard term-based recommendation approach to two promising approaches for related-article recommendation in digital libraries: document embeddings, and keyphrases. We evaluate the consistency of their performance across multiple scenarios. Through our recommender-as-a-service Mr. DLib, we delivered 33.5M recommendations to users of Sowiport and Jabref over the course of 19 months, from March 2017 to October 2018. The effectiveness of the algorithms differs significantly between Sowiport and Jabref (Wilcoxon rank-sum test; p < 0.05). There is a ~400% difference in effectiveness between the best and worst algorithm in both scenarios separately. The best performing algorithm in Sowiport (terms) is the worst performing in Jabref. The best performing algorithm in Jabref (keyphrases) is 70% worse in Sowiport, than Sowiport`s best algorithm (click-through rate; 0.1% terms, 0.03% keyphrases).

Joeran Beel, Andrew Collins, Oliver Kopp et al.

We introduce the first 'living lab' for scholarly recommender systems. This lab allows recommender-system researchers to conduct online evaluations of their novel algorithms for scholarly recommendations, i.e., recommendations for research papers, citations, conferences, research grants, etc. Recommendations are delivered through the living lab's API to platforms such as reference management software and digital libraries. The living lab is built on top of the recommender-system as-a-service Mr. DLib. Current partners are the reference management software JabRef and the CORE research team. We present the architecture of Mr. DLib's living lab as well as usage statistics on the first sixteen months of operating it. During this time, 1,826,643 recommendations were delivered with an average click-through rate of 0.21%.

Joeran Beel, Barry Smyth, Andrew Collins

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce and describe a new recommender-systems dataset (RARD II). It is based on data from Mr. DLib, a recommender-system as-a-service in the digital library and reference-management-software domain. As such, RARD II complements datasets from other domains such as books, movies, and music. The dataset encompasses 94m recommendations, delivered in the two years from September 2016 to September 2018. The dataset covers an item-space of 24m unique items. RARD II provides a range of rich recommendation data, beyond conventional ratings. For example, in addition to the usual (implicit) ratings matrices, RARD II includes the original recommendation logs, which provide a unique insight into many aspects of the algorithms that generated the recommendations. The logs enable researchers to conduct various analyses about a real-world recommender system. This includes the evaluation of meta-learning approaches for predicting algorithm performance. In this paper, we summarise the key features of this dataset release, describe how it was generated and discuss some of its unique features. Compared to its predecessor RARD, RARD II contains 64% more recommendations, 187% more features (algorithms, parameters, and statistics), 50% more clicks, 140% more documents, and one additional service partner (JabRef).

Andrew Collins, Dominika Tkaczyk, Joeran Beel

The effectiveness of recommendation algorithms is typically assessed with evaluation metrics such as root mean square error, F1, or click through rates, calculated over entire datasets. The best algorithm is typically chosen based on these overall metrics. However, there is no single-best algorithm for all users, items, and contexts. Choosing a single algorithm based on overall evaluation results is not optimal. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning-based approach to recommendation, which aims to select the best algorithm for each user-item pair. We evaluate our approach using the MovieLens 100K and 1M datasets. Our approach (RMSE, 100K: 0.973; 1M: 0.908) did not outperform the single-best algorithm, SVD++ (RMSE, 100K: 0.942; 1M: 0.887). We also develop a distinction between meta-learners that operate per-instance (micro-level), per-data subset (mid-level), and per-dataset (global level). Our evaluation shows that a hypothetically perfect micro-level meta-learner would improve RMSE by 25.5% for the MovieLens 100K and 1M datasets, compared to the overall-best algorithms used.

Andrew Collins, Dominika Tkaczyk, Akiko Aizawa et al.

"Position bias" describes the tendency of users to interact with items on top of a list with higher probability than with items at a lower position in the list, regardless of the items' actual relevance. In the domain of recommender systems, particularly recommender systems in digital libraries, position bias has received little attention. We conduct a study in a real-world recommender system that delivered ten million related-article recommendations to the users of the digital library Sowiport, and the reference manager JabRef. Recommendations were randomly chosen to be shuffled or non-shuffled, and we compared click-through rate (CTR) for each rank of the recommendations. According to our analysis, the CTR for the highest rank in the case of Sowiport is 53% higher than expected in a hypothetical non-biased situation (0.189% vs. 0.123%). Similarly, in the case of Jabref the highest rank received a CTR of 1.276%, which is 87% higher than expected (0.683%). A chi-squared test confirms the strong relationship between the rank of the recommendation shown to the user and whether the user decided to click it (p < 0.01 for both Jabref and Sowiport). Our study confirms the findings from other domains, that recommendations in the top positions are more often clicked, regardless of their actual relevance.