Related papers: From Optimizing Engagement to Measuring Value
Web agents, like OpenAI's Operator and Google's Project Mariner, are powerful agentic systems pushing the boundaries of Large Language Models (LLM). They can autonomously interact with the internet at the user's behest, such as navigating…
Many web systems rank and present a list of items to users, from recommender systems to search and advertising. An important problem in practice is to evaluate new ranking policies offline and optimize them before they are deployed. We…
Analyzing interaction data provides an opportunity to learn about users, uncover their underlying goals, and create intelligent visualization systems. The first step for intelligent response in visualizations is to enable computers to infer…
Social media have substantially altered the way brands and businesses advertise: Online Social Networks provide brands with more versatile and dynamic channels for advertisement than traditional media (e.g., TV and radio). Levels of…
Recommender systems are essential tools in the digital era, providing personalized content to users in areas like e-commerce, entertainment, and social media. Among the many approaches developed to create these systems, latent factor models…
Though it has been recognized that recommending serendipitous (i.e., surprising and relevant) items can be helpful for increasing users' satisfaction and behavioral intention, how to measure serendipity in the offline environment is still…
In current presence or availability systems, the method of presenting a user's state often supposes an instantaneous notion of that state - for example, a visualization is rendered or an inference is made about the potential actions that…
Optimizing industrial search ranking models solely for user engagement signals often introduces systematic biases, prioritizing popular or price-anchored items that may not satisfy semantic intent. We present a production-scale multi-task…
Comment sections below online news articles enjoy growing popularity among readers. However, the overwhelming number of comments makes it infeasible for the average news consumer to read all of them and hinders engaging discussions. Most…
Online media provides opportunities for marketers through which they can deliver effective brand messages to a wide range of audiences. Advertising technology platforms enable advertisers to reach their target audience by delivering ad…
The performance of prediction models is often based on "abstract metrics" that estimate the model's ability to limit residual errors between the observed and predicted values. However, meaningful evaluation and selection of prediction…
User models play an important role in interaction design, supporting automation of interaction design choices. In order to do so, model parameters must be estimated from user data. While very large amounts of user data are sometimes…
Topic popularity prediction in social networks has drawn much attention recently. Various elegant models have been proposed for this issue. However, different datasets and evaluation metrics they use lead to low comparability. So far there…
Recommender systems have become a ubiquitous part of modern web applications. They help users discover new and relevant items. Today's users, through years of interaction with these systems have developed an inherent understanding of how…
Traditional recommender systems present a relatively static list of recommendations to a user where the feedback is typically limited to an accept/reject or a rating model. However, these simple modes of feedback may only provide limited…
Twitter, a popular social network, presents great opportunities for on-line machine learning research. However, previous research has focused almost entirely on learning from passively collected data. We study the problem of learning to…
Sentiment analysis is one of the most widely used techniques in text analysis. Recent advancements with Large Language Models have made it more accurate and accessible than ever, allowing researchers to classify text with only a plain…
In the era of "big data", it is becoming more of a challenge to not only build state-of-the-art predictive models, but also gain an understanding of what's really going on in the data. For example, it is often of interest to know which, if…
Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…
In the last couple decades, social network services like Twitter have generated large volumes of data about users and their interests, providing meaningful business intelligence so organizations can better understand and engage their…