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Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of interest, users' tastes, and the `virality' of information, i.e., its propensity to be…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…
This work aims to study a count response random variable, the number of citations of a research paper, affected by some explanatory variables through a suitable regression model. Due to the fact that the count variable exhibits substantial…
Sentiment Analysis Systems (SASs) are data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that, given a piece of text, assign one or more numbers conveying the polarity and emotional intensity expressed in the input. Like other automatic…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) facilitate access to a variety of data allowing researchers to analyze users' behavior and develop user behavioral analysis models. These models rely heavily on the observed data which is usually biased due to…
Imagine a food recommender system -- how would we check if it is \emph{causing} and fostering unhealthy eating habits or merely reflecting users' interests? How much of a user's experience over time with a recommender is caused by the…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
Collaborative filtering systems heavily depend on user feedback expressed in product ratings to select and rank items to recommend. In this study we explore how users value different collaborative explanation styles following the user-based…
In this paper we introduce an iterative voting algorithm and then use it to obtain a rating method which is very robust against collusion attacks as well as random and biased raters. Unlike the previous iterative methods, our method is not…
Many recommendation systems rely on point-wise models, which score items individually. However, point-wise models generating scores for a video are unable to account for other videos being recommended in a query. Due to this, diversity has…
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…
Evaluating the helpfulness of online reviews supports consumers who must sift through large volumes of online reviews. Online review platforms have increasingly adopted review evaluating systems, which let users evaluate whether reviews are…
Online consumer reviews play a crucial role in guiding purchase decisions by offering insights into product quality, usability, and performance. However, the increasing volume of user-generated reviews has led to information overload,…
Our paper contributes to the literature recommending approaches to make online reviews more credible and representative. We analyze data from four diverse major online retailers and find that verified customers who are prompted (by an…
Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…
Community Question-Answering platforms, such as Stack Overflow (SO), are valuable knowledge exchange and problem-solving resources. These platforms incorporate mechanisms to assess the quality of answers and participants' expertise, ideally…
Social media are massive marketplaces where ideas and news compete for our attention. Previous studies have shown that quality is not a necessary condition for online virality and that knowledge about peer choices can distort the…
Recommender systems operate in closed feedback loops, where user interactions reinforce popularity bias, leading to over-recommendation of already popular items while under-exposing niche or novel content. Existing bias mitigation methods,…
Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…
Resolving disagreement in manual annotation typically consists of removing unreliable annotators and using a label aggregation strategy such as majority vote or expert opinion to resolve disagreement. These may have the side-effect of…