Sen Hu, Yuxiang Wei, Jiaxin Ran, Xueran Han, Zhiyuan Yao, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen, Lei Zou. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Sen Hu, Zhiyu Zhang, Yuxiang Wei, Xueran Han, Zhenheng Tang, Ronghao Chen, Huacan Wang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Machine-learning based recommender system(RS) has become an effective means to help people automatically discover their interests. Existing models often represent the rich information for recommendation, such as items, users, and contexts, as embedding vectors and leverage them to predict users’ feedback. In the view of causal analysis, the associations between these embedding vectors and users’ feedback are a mixture of the causal part that describes why an item is preferred by a user, and the non-causal part that merely reflects the statistical dependencies between users and items, for example, the exposure mechanism, public opinions, display position, etc. However, existing RSs mostly ignored the striking differences between the causal parts and non-causal parts when using these embedding vectors. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic framework named IV4Rec that can effectively decompose the embedding vectors into these two parts, hence enhancing recommendation results. Specifically, we jointly consider users’ behaviors in search scenarios and recommendation scenarios. Adopting the concepts in causal analysis, we embed users’ search behaviors as instrumental variables (IVs), to help decompose original embedding vectors in recommendation, i.e., treatments. IV4Rec then combines the two parts through deep neural networks and uses the combined results for recommendation. IV4Rec is model-agnostic and can be applied to a number of existing RSs such as DIN and NRHUB. Experimental results on both public and proprietary industrial datasets demonstrate that IV4Rec consistently enhances RSs and outperforms a framework that jointly considers search and recommendation.

A Web-scale knowledge graph (KG) typically contains millions of entities and thousands of entity types. Due to the lack of a pre-defined data schema such as the ER model, entities in KGs are loosely coupled based on their relationships, which brings challenges for effective accesses of the KGs in a structured manner like SPARQL. This demonstration presents an entity-oriented exploratory search prototype system that is able to support search and explore KGs in a exploratory search manner, where local structures of KGs can be dynamically discovered and utilized for guiding users. The system applies a path-based ranking method for recommending similar entities and their relevant information as exploration pointers. The interface is designed to assist users to investigate a domain (particular type) of entities, as well as to explore the knowledge graphs in various relevant domains. The queries are dynamically formulated by tracing the users' dynamic clicking (exploration) behaviors. In this demonstration, we will show how our system visualize the underlying entity structures, as well as explain the semantic correlations among them in a unified interface, which not only assist users to learn about the properties of entities in many aspects but also guide them to further explore the information space.