Related papers: Investigating the effects of Goodreads challenges …
Goodreads has launched the Readers Choice Awards since 2009 where users are able to nominate/vote books of their choice, released in the given year. In this work, we question if the number of votes that a book would receive (aka the…
A book's success/popularity depends on various parameters - extrinsic and intrinsic. In this paper, we study how the book reading characteristics might influence the popularity of a book. Towards this objective, we perform a cross-platform…
Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more…
Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in…
The growth of social reading platforms such as Goodreads and LibraryThing enables us to analyze reading activity at very large scale and in remarkable detail. But twenty-first century systems give us a perspective only on contemporary…
Data is an essential resource for studying recommender systems. While there has been significant work on improving and evaluating state-of-the-art models and measuring various properties of recommender system outputs, less attention has…
The presence of gender stereotypes in many aspects of society is a well-known phenomenon. In this paper, we focus on studying and quantifying such stereotypes and bias in the Man Bookers Prize winning fiction. We consider 275 books…
This work quantifies the effects of signaling and performing gender on the success of reviews written on the popular amazon shopping platform. Highly rated reviews play an important role in e-commerce since they are prominently displayed…
Readability is on the cusp of a revolution. Fixed text is becoming fluid as a proliferation of digital reading devices rewrite what a document can do. As past constraints make way for more flexible opportunities, there is great need to…
More and more people use the Internet to work on duties of their daily work routine. To find the right information online, Web search engines are the tools of their choice. Apart from finding facts, people use Web search engines to also…
Judging the readability of text has many important applications, for instance when performing text simplification or when sourcing reading material for language learners. In this paper, we present a 518 participant study which investigates…
This paper explores various socioeconomic factors that contribute to individual financial success using machine learning algorithms and approaches. Financial success, a critical aspect of all individual's well-being, is a complex concept…
Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies have explored the…
Collaborative filtering algorithms find useful patterns in rating and consumption data and exploit these patterns to guide users to good items. Many of the patterns in rating datasets reflect important real-world differences between the…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
Using questions in written text is an effective strategy to enhance readability. However, what makes an active reading question good, what the linguistic role of these questions is, and what is their impact on human reading remains…
Algorithmic rankers have a profound impact on our increasingly data-driven society. From leisurely activities like the movies that we watch, the restaurants that we patronize; to highly consequential decisions, like making educational and…
Charts are used to measure relative success for a large variety of cultural items. Traditional music charts have been shown to follow self-organizing principles with regard to the distribution of item lifetimes, the on-chart residence…
In a rapidly globalizing and digital world, content such as book and product reviews created by people from diverse cultures are read and consumed by others from different corners of the world. In this paper, we investigate the extent and…
The proliferation of online communities has created exciting opportunities to study the mechanisms that explain group success. While a growing body of research investigates community success through a single measure -- typically, the number…