Related papers: From Optimizing Engagement to Measuring Value

This technical report discusses three metrics of user engagement with online media. They are Commenting frequency, Voting frequency, and Voting balance. These relative figures can be derived from established, basic statistics available for…

A large number of studies on social media compare the behaviour of users from different political parties. As a basic step, they employ a predictive model for inferring their political affiliation. The accuracy of this model can change the…

Nowadays, the numerical models of real-world structures are more precise, more complex and, of course, more time-consuming. Despite the growth of a computational effort, the exploration of model behaviour remains a complex task. The…

While working on a software specification, designers usually need to evaluate different architectural alternatives to be sure that quality criteria are met. Even when these quality aspects could be expressed in terms of multiple software…

We propose a new efficient online algorithm to learn the parameters governing the purchasing behavior of a utility maximizing buyer, who responds to prices, in a repeated interaction setting. The key feature of our algorithm is that it can…

Amid the recent uptake of Generative AI, sociotechnical scholars and critics have traced a multitude of resulting harms, with analyses largely focused on values and axiology (e.g., bias). While value-based analyses are crucial, we argue…

A common phenomena in modern recommendation systems is the use of feedback from one user to infer the `value' of an item to other users. This results in an exploration vs. exploitation trade-off, in which items of possibly low value have to…

Search engines intentionally influence user behavior by picking and ranking the list of results. Users engage with the highest results both because of their prominent placement and because they are typically the most relevant documents.…

Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…

Experimentation and Measurement (E&M) capabilities allow organizations to accurately assess the impact of new propositions and to experiment with many variants of existing products. However, until now, the question of measuring the…

Predicting when an individual will adopt a new behavior is an important problem in application domains such as marketing and public health. This paper examines the perfor- mance of a wide variety of social network based measurements…

With the growing popularity of online social media, identifying influential users in these social networks has become very popular. Existing works have studied user attributes, network structure and user interactions when measuring user…

Personalized content on social platforms can exacerbate negative phenomena such as polarization, partly due to the feedback interactions between recommendations and the users. In this paper, we present a control-theoretic recommender system…

Millions of online discussions are generated everyday on social media platforms. Topic modelling is an efficient way of better understanding large text datasets at scale. Conventional topic models have had limited success in online…

User modeling plays an important role in delivering customized web services to the users and improving their engagement. However, most user models in the literature do not explicitly consider the temporal behavior of users. More recently,…

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed globally, creating pluralistic systems that can accommodate the diverse preferences and values of users worldwide becomes essential. We introduce EVALUESTEER, a benchmark to measure LLMs' and…

Enhancing user engagement through interactions plays an essential role in socially-driven dialogues. While prior works have optimized models to reason over relevant knowledge or plan a dialogue act flow, the relationship between user…

With the advancement of web technology and its growth, there is a huge volume of data present in the web for internet users and a lot of data is generated too. Internet has become a platform for online learning, exchanging ideas and sharing…

Personalized recommendation systems shape much of user choice online, yet their targeted nature makes separating out the value of recommendation and the underlying goods challenging. We build a discrete choice model that embeds…

The harmful impacts of algorithmic decision systems have recently come into focus, with many examples of systems such as machine learning (ML) models amplifying existing societal biases. Most metrics attempting to quantify disparities…