arXiv subjects

Nava Tintarev

Publications and source records attributed to Nava Tintarev.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Diversity in News Recommendations

News diversity in the media has for a long time been a foundational and uncontested basis for ensuring that the communicative needs of individuals and society at large are met. Today, people increasingly rely on online content and recommender systems to consume information challenging the traditional concept of news diversity. In addition, the very concept of diversity, which differs between disciplines, will need to be re-evaluated requiring a interdisciplinary investigation, which requires a new level of mutual cooperation between computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars. Based on the outcome of a multidisciplinary workshop, we have the following recommendations, directed at researchers, funders, legislators, regulators, and the media industry: 1. Do more research on news recommenders and diversity. 2. Create a safe harbor for academic research with industry data. 3. Optimize the role of public values in news recommenders. 4. Create a meaningful governance framework. 5. Fund a joint lab to spearhead the needed interdisciplinary research, boost practical innovation, develop. reference solutions, and transfer insights into practice.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Helping users discover perspectives: Enhancing opinion mining with joint topic models

Support or opposition concerning a debated claim such as abortion should be legal can have different underlying reasons, which we call perspectives. This paper explores how opinion mining can be enhanced with joint topic modeling, to identify distinct perspectives within the topic, providing an informative overview from unstructured text. We evaluate four joint topic models (TAM, JST, VODUM, and LAM) in a user study assessing human understandability of the extracted perspectives. Based on the results, we conclude that joint topic models such as TAM can discover perspectives that align with human judgments. Moreover, our results suggest that users are not influenced by their pre-existing stance on the topic of abortion when interpreting the output of topic models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Operationalizing Framing to Support Multiperspective Recommendations of Opinion Pieces

Diversity in personalized news recommender systems is often defined as dissimilarity, and based on topic diversity (e.g., corona versus farmers strike). Diversity in news media, however, is understood as multiperspectivity (e.g., different opinions on corona measures), and arguably a key responsibility of the press in a democratic society. While viewpoint diversity is often considered synonymous with source diversity in communication science domain, in this paper, we take a computational view. We operationalize the notion of framing, adopted from communication science. We apply this notion to a re-ranking of topic-relevant recommended lists, to form the basis of a novel viewpoint diversification method. Our offline evaluation indicates that the proposed method is capable of enhancing the viewpoint diversity of recommendation lists according to a diversity metric from literature. In an online study, on the Blendle platform, a Dutch news aggregator platform, with more than 2000 users, we found that users are willing to consume viewpoint diverse news recommendations. We also found that presentation characteristics significantly influence the reading behaviour of diverse recommendations. These results suggest that future research on presentation aspects of recommendations can be just as important as novel viewpoint diversification methods to truly achieve multiperspectivity in online news environments.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Contextual Personalized Re-Ranking of Music Recommendations through Audio Features

Users are able to access millions of songs through music streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer. Access to such large catalogs, created a need for relevant song recommendations. However, user preferences are highly subjective in nature and change according to context (e.g., music that is suitable in the morning is not as suitable in the evening). Moreover, the music one user may prefer in a given context may be different from what another user prefers in the same context (i.e., what is considered good morning music differs across users). Accurately representing these preferences is essential to creating accurate and effective song recommendations. User preferences for songs can be based on high level audio features, such as tempo and valence. In this paper, we therefore propose a contextual re-ranking algorithm, based on audio feature representations of user preferences in specific contextual conditions. We evaluate the performance of our re-ranking algorithm using the #NowPlaying-RS dataset, which exists of user listening events crawled from Twitter and is enriched with song audio features. We compare a global (context for all users) and personalized (context for each user) model based on these audio features. The global model creates an audio feature representation of each contextual condition based on the preferences of all users. Unlike the global model, the personalized model creates user-specific audio feature representations of contextual conditions, and is measured across 333 distinct users. We show that the personalized model outperforms the global model when evaluated using the precision and mean average precision metrics.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Eliciting User Preferences for Personalized Explanations for Video Summaries

Video summaries or highlights are a compelling alternative for exploring and contextualizing unprecedented amounts of video material. However, the summarization process is commonly automatic, non-transparent and potentially biased towards particular aspects depicted in the original video. Therefore, our aim is to help users like archivists or collection managers to quickly understand which summaries are the most representative for an original video. In this paper, we present empirical results on the utility of different types of visual explanations to achieve transparency for end users on how representative video summaries are, with respect to the original video. We consider four types of video summary explanations, which use in different ways the concepts extracted from the original video subtitles and the video stream, and their prominence. The explanations are generated to meet target user preferences and express different dimensions of transparency: concept prominence, semantic coverage, distance and quantity of coverage. In two user studies we evaluate the utility of the visual explanations for achieving transparency for end users. Our results show that explanations representing all of the dimensions have the highest utility for transparency, and consequently, for understanding the representativeness of video summaries.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2017

Ephemeral Context to Support Robust and Diverse Music Recommendations

While prior work on context-based music recommendation focused on fixed set of contexts (e.g. walking, driving, jogging), we propose to use multiple sensors and external data sources to describe momentary (ephemeral) context in a rich way with a very large number of possible states (e.g. jogging fast along in downtown of Sydney under a heavy rain at night being tired and angry). With our approach, we address the problems which current approaches face: 1) a limited ability to infer context from missing or faulty sensor data; 2) an inability to use contextual information to support novel content discovery.

cs.IR↗