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Approaches to recommendation are typically evaluated in one of two ways: (1) via a (simulated) online experiment, often seen as the gold standard, or (2) via some offline evaluation procedure, where the goal is to approximate the outcome of…
A central problem in ranking is to design a ranking measure for evaluation of ranking functions. In this paper we study, from a theoretical perspective, the widely used Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG)-type ranking measures.…
Ranking evaluation metrics are a fundamental element of design and improvement efforts in information retrieval. We observe that most popular metrics disregard information portrayed in the scores used to derive rankings, when available.…
The many metrics employed for the evaluation of search engine results have not themselves been conclusively evaluated. We propose a new measure for a metric's ability to identify user preference of result lists. Using this measure, we…
Ranking is used for a wide array of problems, most notably information retrieval (search). There are a number of popular approaches to the evaluation of ranking such as Kendall's $\tau$, Average Precision, and nDCG. When dealing with…
Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…
Online competitive games have become increasingly popular. To ensure an exciting and competitive environment, these games routinely attempt to match players with similar skill levels. Matching players is often accomplished through a rating…
Online competitive games have become a mainstream entertainment platform. To create a fair and exciting experience, these games use rating systems to match players with similar skills. While there has been an increasing amount of research…
Traditionally the probabilistic ranking principle is used to rank the search results while the ranking based on expected profits is used for paid placement of ads. These rankings try to maximize the expected utilities based on the user…
Traditional Information Retrieval (IR) metrics, such as nDCG, MAP, and MRR, assume that human users sequentially examine documents with diminishing attention to lower ranks. This assumption breaks down in Retrieval Augmented Generation…
Traditional approaches to ranking in web search follow the paradigm of rank-by-score: a learned function gives each query-URL combination an absolute score and URLs are ranked according to this score. This paradigm ensures that if the score…
In practical reinforcement learning (RL), the discount factor used for estimating value functions often differs from that used for defining the evaluation objective. In this work, we study the effect that this discrepancy of discount…
Sponsored search is an indispensable business model and a major revenue contributor of almost all the search engines. From the advertisers' side, participating in ranking the search results by paying for the sponsored search advertisement…
User review data is helpful in alleviating the data sparsity problem in many recommender systems. In review-based recommendation methods, review data is considered as auxiliary information that can improve the quality of learned user/item…
A ranking is an ordered sequence of items, in which an item with higher ranking score is more preferred than the items with lower ranking scores. In many information systems, rankings are widely used to represent the preferences over a set…
Supervised approaches for text summarisation suffer from the problem of mismatch between the target labels/scores of individual sentences and the evaluation score of the final summary. Reinforcement learning can solve this problem by…
NDCG, namely Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain, is a widely used ranking metric in information retrieval and machine learning. However, efficient and provable stochastic methods for maximizing NDCG are still lacking, especially for deep…
This paper closely examines theoretical and practical aspects of the widely used discounted cash flows (DCF) valuation method. It assesses its potentials as well as several weaknesses. A special emphasize is being put on the valuation of…
Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…
Evaluating the financial performance of manufacturing firms requires consideration of both the time value of money and the relative importance of multiple decision criteria. Conventional approaches relying solely on deterministic…