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Publications (194)
In this paper, we present a knowledge-aware recommendation model based on neuro-symbolic graph embeddings that encode first-order logic rules. Our approach is based on the intuition that is the basis of neuro-symbolic AI systems: to combine deep learning and symbolic reasoning in one single model, in order to take the best out of both the paradigms...
Violence perpetrated to their own partner is a social issue that can take place in different forms and in different settings (i.e., in person, online). These different forms of violence can be circumscribed into two broad categories known as Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Cyber Intimate Partner Violence (C-IPV). Social Media and technologies c...
The 10th edition of the Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems was held as part of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results, systems and techniques in the broad field of recommender systems. The workshop was organized...
Preference elicitation is a crucial step for every recommendation algorithm. In this paper, we present a strategy that allows users to express their preferences and needs through natural language statements. In particular, our natural language preference elicitation pipeline allows users to express preferences on objective movie features (e.g., act...
The Italian Public Administration (PA) relies on costly manual analyses to ensure the GDPR compliance of public documents and secure personal data. Despite recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have benefited many legal fields, the automation of workflows for data protection of public documents is still only marginally affected. The main...
Digital Assistants are overgrowing in the mobile application industry and are now implemented in various commercial devices. So far, their use in the health domain is limited and often narrowed to remote monitoring of specific patient pathology. The main contribution of this paper is HELENA, a conversational agent endowed with healthcare knowledge...
Preference elicitation is a crucial step for every recommendation algorithm. Traditional interaction strategies for eliciting users’ interests and needs range from button-based interfaces, where users have to select what they like among a set of fixed alternatives, to more recent conversational interfaces, where users have to reply to some question...
Conversational Recommender Systems have received widespread attention in both research and practice. They assist people in finding relevant and interesting items through a multi-turn conversation. The use of natural language interaction also allows users to express their preferences with more flexibility. However, these systems often have to work i...
Nowadays, online reviews are the main source to customer opinions. They are especially important in the realm of e-commerce, where reviews regarding products and services influence the purchase decisions of customers, as well as the reputation of the commerce websites. Unfortunately, not all the online reviews are truthful and trustworthy. Therefor...
In this article, we present MyrrorBot , a personal digital assistant implementing a natural language interface that allows the users to: (i) access online services, such as music, video, news, and food recommendation s, in a personalized way, by exploiting a strategy for implicit user modeling called holistic user profiling ; (ii) query their own u...
The automated analysis of medical documents has grown in research interest in recent years as a consequence of the social relevance of the thematic and the difficulties often encountered with short and very specific documents. In particular, this fervent area of research has stimulated the development of several techniques of automatic document cla...
Scientists in the marine domain process satellite images in order to extract information that can be used for monitoring, understanding, and forecasting of marine phenomena, such as turbidity, algal blooms and oil spills. The growing need for effective retrieval of related information has motivated the adoption of semantically aware strategies on s...
In this article, we present a framework to build post hoc natural language justifications that supports the suggestions generated by a recommendation algorithm. Our methodology is based on the intuition that reviews’ excerpts contain much relevant information that can be used to justify a recommendation; thus, we propose a black-box explanation str...
In this article we present a context-aware recommendation method that exploits graph-based data models and Personalized PageRank to provide users with recommendations.
In particular, our approach extends the basic graph-based representation that relies on users and items nodes by introducing a third class of nodes, that is to say, context nodes, wh...
Decision making is the cognitive process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on preferences, beliefs, and degree of importance given by the decision maker to objects or actions. For instance, choosing which movie to watch is a simple, small-sized decision-making process. Recommender systems help people to make this kind of choices, usual...
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in interest in lexical semantic change detection. Many are the existing approaches, data used, and evaluation strategies to detect semantic shifts. The classification of change words against stable words requires thresholds to label the degree of semantic change. In this work, we compare state-...
The paper presents DECiSION, an innovative framework in the field of Information Seeking Support Systems, able to retrieve all the data involved in a decision-making process, and to process, categorize and make them available in a useful form for the ultimate purpose of the user request. The platform is equipped with natural language understanding...
The necessity to know information about the real identity of an online subject is a highly relevant issue in User Profiling, especially for analysis from digital sources such as social media. The digital identity of a user does not always present explicit data about her offline life such as age, gender, work, and more. This problem makes the task o...
In this article, we present a platform that allows the creation of a comprehensive representation of the user that we call a holistic user model (HUM). Such a representation is based on the intuition that users’ personal data take different forms and come from several heterogeneous sources. Accordingly, we designed a pipeline that: (1) extracts per...
In this article, we present HealthAssistantBot, an intelligent virtual assistant able to talk with patients in order to understand their symptomatology, suggest doctors, and monitor treatments and health parameters. In a simple way, by exploiting a natural language-based interaction, the system allows the user to create her health profile, to descr...
Conversational Recommender Systems (CoRSs) implement a paradigm that allows users to interact in natural language with the system for defining their preferences and discovering items that best fit their needs. CoRSs can be straightforwardly implemented as chatbots that, nowadays, are becoming more and more popular for several applications, such as...
Natural Language Processing tasks recently achieved considerable interest and progresses following the development of numerous innovative artificial intelligence models released in recent years. The increase in available computing power has made possible the application of machine learning approaches on a considerable amount of textual data, demons...
Recent scientific studies on natural language processing (NLP) report the outstanding effectiveness observed in the use of context-dependent and task-free language understanding models such as ELMo, GPT, and BERT. Specifically, they have proved to achieve state of the art performance in numerous complex NLP tasks such as question answering and sent...
In this paper we present a methodology to justify recommendations that relies on the information extracted from users' reviews discussing the available items. The intuition behind the approach is to conceive the justification as a summary of the most relevant and distinguishing aspects of the item, automatically obtained by analyzing its reviews. T...
As an interactive intelligent system, recommender systems are developed to give recommendations that match users' preferences. Since the emergence of recommender systems, a large majority of research focuses on objective accuracy criteria and less attention has been paid to how users interact with the system and the efficacy of interface designs fr...
User profiling is becoming increasingly holistic by including aspects of the user that until a few years ago seemed irrelevant. The content that users produce on the Internet and social networks is an essential source of information about their habits, preferences, and behaviors in many situations. One factor that has proved to be very important fo...
The broad diffusion over the Internet of songs streaming services points out the need for implementing efficient and personalized strategies for incrementing the fidelity of the customers. This scenario can collect enough information about the user and the items for successfully design a Recommender System for the automatic continuation of playlist...
Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) are systems that allow users of media applications, such as web TVs, to navigate scheduling information about current and upcoming programming. Personalized EPGs help users to overcome information overload in this domain, by exploiting recommender systems that automatically compile lists of novel and diverse video a...
Chatbots are becoming more and more popular for several applications like customer care, health care, medical diagnoses. Generally, they have an interaction with users based on natural language, buttons, or both. In this paper we study the user interaction with a content-based recommender system implemented as a Telegram chatbot. More specifically,...
As an interactive intelligent system, recommender systems are developed to give recommendations that match users' preferences. Since the emergence of recommender systems, a large majority of research focuses on objective accuracy criteria and less attention has been paid to how users interact with the system and the efficacy of interface designs fr...
In this paper we introduce the concept of holistic user profile, intended as a unique representation of a user that merges the heterogeneous footprints she spread on social networks and through personal devices, and we present a framework that supports the creation of such user models. Our holistic user model is based on the insight that each perso...
In this paper we present Myrror, a platform that supports the creation of a unique representation of the user that encodes several facets such as her interests, activities, habits, mood, social connections and so on. Such a representation, that we called holistic user model, is based on the footprints the user spread on social networks and through...
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the UMAP 2018 Workshops and Tutorials. In the 26th edition of the ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization there are four workshops and three tutorials.
In this paper we present a deep content-based recommender system (DeepCBRS) that exploits Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BRNNs) to learn an effective representation of the items to be recommended based on their textual description. Next, such a representation is extended by introducing structured features extracted from the Linked Open Da...
In this contribution we propose a hybrid recommendation framework based on classification algorithms such as Random Forests and Naive Bayes, which are fed with several heterogeneous groups of features. We split our features into two classes: classic features, as popularity-based, collaborative and content-based ones, and extended features gathered...
In this article we propose a framework that generates natural language explanations supporting the suggestions generated by a recommendation algorithm.
The cornerstone of our approach is the usage of Linked Open Data (LOD) for explanation aims. Indeed, the descriptive properties freely available in the LOD cloud (e.g., the author of a book or the d...
This paper describes the first edition of the “Solving language games” (NLP4FUN) task at the EVALITA 2018 campaign. The task consists in designing an artificial player for “The Guillotine” (La Ghigliottina, in Italian), a challenging language game which demands knowledge covering a broad range of topics. The game consists in finding a word which is...
The blue feeling is the sensation which affects people when they feel down, depressed, sad and more generally when they are in a bad feeling state. In some cases, it is a recurring situation in their everyday life and it can be the first symptom of more complex psychological diseases such as depression. In the last decade, as consequence of the qui...
In this article we propose a hybrid recommendation framework based on classification algorithms such as Random Forests and Naive Bayes, which are fed with several heterogeneous groups of features. We split our features into two classes: classic features, as popularity-based, collaborative and content-based ones, and extended features gathered from...
As intelligent interactive systems, recommender systems focus on determining predictions that fit the wishes and needs of users. Still, a large majority of recommender systems research focuses on accuracy criteria and much less attention is paid to how users interact with the system, and in which way the user interface has an influence on the selec...
In this paper we propose a multi-criteria recommender system based on collaborative filtering (CF) techniques, which exploits the information conveyed by users' reviews to provide a multi-faceted representation of users' interests.
To this end, we exploited a framework for opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which automatically extracts relevant...
The recent spread of Linked Open Data (LOD) fueled the research in the area of Recommender Systems, since the (semantic) data points available in the LOD cloud can be exploited to improve the performance of recommendation algorithms by enriching item representations with new and relevant features.In this article we investigate the impact of the fea...
In recent years we are witnessing a growing spread of social media footprints, as the consequence of the wide use of applications such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, which allow people to share content that might provide information about personal preferences and aptitudes. Among the traits that can be inferred, empathy is the ability to feel an...
In this article we propose a hybrid recommendation framework based on classification algorithms as Random Forests and Naive Bayes. We fed the framework with several heterogeneous groups of features, and we investigate to what extent features gathered from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud (as the genre of a movie or the writer of a book)) as well as...
In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in a top-N content-based recommendation scenario. Specifically, we propose a deep architecture which adopts Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks to jointly learn two embeddings representing the items to be recommended as well as the preferences of the user. Next, g...
The use of social media, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is nowadays very common and quite for sure each one of us has at least a digital profile on them. The information left of these platforms such as likes, posts, tweets and photos are very informative and can be used for deducting our preferences, tendencies and behaviors. The analysis of...
Conversational recommender systems produce personalized recommendations of potentially useful items by utilizing natural language dialogues for detecting user preferences, as well as for providing recommendations. In this work we investigate the role of affective factors such as attitudes, emotions, likes and dislikes in conversational recommender...
In this article we investigate how the knowledge available in the Linked Open Data cloud (LOD) can be exploited to improve the effectiveness of a semantics-aware graph-based recommendation framework based on Personalized PageRank (PPR). In our approach we extended the classic bipartite data model, in which only user-item connections are modeled, by...