Related papers: Balanced News Using Constrained Bandit-based Perso…
News recommender systems play an increasingly influential role in shaping information access within democratic societies. However, tailoring recommendations to users' specific interests can result in the divergence of information streams.…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
Contextual bandits, which leverage the baseline features of sequentially arriving individuals to optimize cumulative rewards while balancing exploration and exploitation, are critical for online decision-making. Existing approaches…
Effective solving of constraint problems often requires choosing good or specific search heuristics. However, choosing or designing a good search heuristic is non-trivial and is often a manual process. In this paper, rather than manually…
Recommendation systems when employed in markets play a dual role: they assist users in selecting their most desired items from a large pool and they help in allocating a limited number of items to the users who desire them the most. Despite…
Growing polarization of the news media has been blamed for fanning disagreement, controversy and even violence. Early identification of polarized topics is thus an urgent matter that can help mitigate conflict. However, accurate measurement…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
Performance of machine learning algorithms depends critically on identifying a good set of hyperparameters. While recent approaches use Bayesian optimization to adaptively select configurations, we focus on speeding up random search through…
Recently, bandit optimization has received significant attention in real-world safety-critical systems that involve repeated interactions with humans. While there exist various algorithms with performance guarantees in the literature,…
We investigate the feasibility of learning from a mix of both fully-labeled supervised data and contextual bandit data. We specifically consider settings in which the underlying learning signal may be different between these two data…
We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…
Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is…
Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…
In this study, we applied the ``personalized diversity nudge framework'' with the goal of expanding user reading coverage in terms of news locality (i.e., domestic and world news). We designed a novel topic-locality dual calibration…
Texts like news, encyclopedias, and some social media strive for objectivity. Yet bias in the form of inappropriate subjectivity - introducing attitudes via framing, presupposing truth, and casting doubt - remains ubiquitous. This kind of…
People are shifting from traditional news sources to online news at an incredibly fast rate. However, the technology behind online news consumption promotes content that confirms the users' existing point of view. This phenomenon has led to…
Data that is gathered adaptively --- via bandit algorithms, for example --- exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data --- the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased…
In this paper, we demonstrate Untrue News, a new search engine for fake stories. Untrue News is easy to use and offers useful features such as: a) a multi-language option combining fake stories from different countries and languages around…
One of missions for personalization systems and recommender systems is to show content items according to users' personal interests. In order to achieve such goal, these systems are learning user interests over time and trying to present…
Media bias and its extreme form, fake news, can decisively affect public opinion. Especially when reporting on policy issues, slanted news coverage may strongly influence societal decisions, e.g., in democratic elections. Our paper makes…