Ya-Hui An

Ya-Hui An, Muthu Kumar Chandresekaran, Min-Yen Kan et al.

New learning resources are created and minted in Massive Open Online Courses every week -- new videos, quizzes, assessments and discussion threads are deployed and interacted with -- in the era of on-demand online learning. However, these resources are often artificially siloed between platforms and artificial web application models. Facilitating the linking between such resources facilitates learning and multimodal understanding, bettering learners' experience. We create a framework for MOOC Uniform Identifier for Resources (MUIR). MUIR enables applications to refer and link to such resources in a cross-platform way, allowing the easy minting of identifiers to MOOC resources, akin to #hashtags. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach to the automatic identification, linking and resolution -- a task known as Wikification -- of learning resources mentioned on MOOC discussion forums, from a harvested collection of 100K+ resources. Our Wikification system achieves a high initial rate of 54.6% successful resolutions on key resource mentions found in discussion forums, demonstrating the utility of the MUIR framework. Our analysis on this new problem shows that context is a key factor in determining the correct resolution of such mentions.

Ya-Hui An, Qiang Dong, Quan Yuan et al.

Nowadays, recommender systems (RSes) are becoming increasingly important to individual users and business marketing, especially in the online e-commerce scenarios. However, while the majority of recommendation algorithms proposed in the literature have focused their efforts on improving prediction accuracy, other important aspects of recommendation quality, such as diversity of recommendations, have been more or less overlooked. In the latest decade, recommendation diversity has drawn more research attention, especially in the models based on user-item bipartite networks. In this paper, we introduce a family of approaches to extract fabricated experts from users in RSes, named as the Expert Tracking Approaches (ExTrA for short), and explore the capability of these fabricated experts in improving the recommendation diversity, by highlighting them in a well-known bipartite network-based method, called the Mass Diffusion (MD for short) model. These ExTrA-based models are compared with two state-of-the-art MD-improved models HHP and BHC, with respect to recommendation accuracy and diversity. Comprehensive empirical results on three real-world datasets MovieLens, Netflix and RYM show that, our proposed ExTrA-based models can achieve significant diversity gain while maintain comparable level of recommendation accuracy.

Ya-Hui An, Liangming Pan, Min-Yen Kan et al.

In discussions hosted on discussion forums for MOOCs, references to online learning resources are often of central importance. They contextualize the discussion, anchoring the discussion participants' presentation of the issues and their understanding. However they are usually mentioned in free text, without appropriate hyperlinking to their associated resource. Automated learning resource mention hyperlinking and categorization will facilitate discussion and searching within MOOC forums, and also benefit the contextualization of such resources across disparate views. We propose the novel problem of learning resource mention identification in MOOC forums. As this is a novel task with no publicly available data, we first contribute a large-scale labeled dataset, dubbed the Forum Resource Mention (FoRM) dataset, to facilitate our current research and future research on this task. We then formulate this task as a sequence tagging problem and investigate solution architectures to address the problem. Importantly, we identify two major challenges that hinder the application of sequence tagging models to the task: (1) the diversity of resource mention expression, and (2) long-range contextual dependencies. We address these challenges by incorporating character-level and thread context information into a LSTM-CRF model. First, we incorporate a character encoder to address the out-of-vocabulary problem caused by the diversity of mention expressions. Second, to address the context dependency challenge, we encode thread contexts using an RNN-based context encoder, and apply the attention mechanism to selectively leverage useful context information during sequence tagging. Experiments on FoRM show that the proposed method improves the baseline deep sequence tagging models notably, significantly bettering performance on instances that exemplify the two challenges.

Ya-Hui An, Qiang Dong, Chong-Jing Sun et al.

In last decades, diversity and accuracy have been regarded as two important measures in evaluating a recommendation model. However, a clear concern is that a model focusing excessively on one measure will put the other one at risk, thus it is not easy to greatly improve diversity and accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to enhance the Resource-Allocation (RA) similarity in resource transfer equations of diffusion-like models, by giving a tunable exponent to the RA similarity, and traversing the value of the exponent to achieve the optimal recommendation results. In this way, we can increase the recommendation scores (allocated resource) of many unpopular objects. Experiments on three benchmark data sets, MovieLens, Netflix, and RateYourMusic show that the modified models can yield remarkable performance improvement compared with the original ones.

Da-Cheng Nie, Ya-Hui An, Qiang Dong et al.

Recent decade has witnessed the increasing popularity of recommender systems, which help users acquire relevant commodities and services from overwhelming resources on Internet. Some simple physical diffusion processes have been used to design effective recommendation algorithms for user-object bipartite networks, typically mass diffusion (MD) and heat conduction (HC) algorithms which have different advantages respectively on accuracy and diversity. In this paper, we investigate the effect of weight assignment in the hybrid of MD and HC, and find that a new hybrid algorithm of MD and HC with balanced weights will achieve the optimal recommendation results, we name it balanced diffusion (BD) algorithm. Numerical experiments on three benchmark data sets, MovieLens, Netflix and RateYourMusic (RYM), show that the performance of BD algorithm outperforms the existing diffusion-based methods on the three important recommendation metrics, accuracy, diversity and novelty. Specifically, it can not only provide accurately recommendation results, but also yield higher diversity and novelty in recommendations by accurately recommending unpopular objects.