Natural language interfaces offer a compelling approach for music recommendation, enabling users to express complex preferences conversationally. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in this direction, their scalability in recommender systems is limited by high costs and latency. Retrieval-based approaches using smaller language models mitigate these issues but often rely on single-modal item representations, overlook long-term user preferences, and require full model retraining, posing challenges for real-world deployment. In this paper, we present JAM (Just Ask for Music), a lightweight and intuitive framework for natural language music recommendation. JAM models user-query-item interactions as vector translations in a shared latent space, inspired by knowledge graph embedding methods like TransE. To capture the complexity of music and user intent, JAM aggregates multimodal item features via cross-attention and sparse mixture-of-experts. We also introduce JAMSessions, a new dataset of over 100k user-query-item triples with anonymized user/item embeddings, uniquely combining conversational queries and user long-term preferences. Our results show that JAM provides accurate recommendations, produces intuitive representations suitable for practical use cases, and can be easily integrated with existing music recommendation stacks.

One particularly promising use case of Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation is the automatic generation of Natural Language (NL) user taste profiles from consumption data. These profiles offer interpretable and editable alternatives to opaque collaborative filtering representations, enabling greater transparency and user control. However, it remains unclear whether users consider these profiles to be an accurate representation of their taste, which is crucial for trust and usability. Moreover, because LLMs inherit societal and data-driven biases, profile quality may systematically vary across user and item characteristics. In this paper, we study this issue in the context of music streaming, where personalization is challenged by a large and culturally diverse catalog. We conduct a user study in which participants rate NL profiles generated from their own listening histories. We analyze whether identification with the profiles is biased by user attributes (e.g., mainstreamness, taste diversity) and item features (e.g., genre, country of origin). We also compare these patterns to those observed when using the profiles in a downstream recommendation task. Our findings highlight both the potential and limitations of scrutable, LLM-based profiling in personalized systems.

The problem of multi-label classification with missing labels (MLML) is a common challenge that is prevalent in several domains, e.g. image annotation and auto-tagging. In multi-label classification, each instance may belong to multiple class labels simultaneously. Due to the nature of the dataset collection and labelling procedure, it is common to have incomplete annotations in the dataset, i.e. not all samples are labelled with all the corresponding labels. However, the incomplete data labelling hinders the training of classification models. MLML has received much attention from the research community. However, in cases where a pre-trained model is fine-tuned on an MLML dataset, there has been no straightforward approach to tackle the missing labels, specifically when there is no information about which are the missing ones. In this paper, we propose a weighted loss function to account for the confidence in each label/sample pair that can easily be incorporated to fine-tune a pre-trained model on an incomplete dataset. Our experiment results show that using the proposed loss function improves the performance of the model as the ratio of missing labels increases.

News organizations employ personalized recommenders to target news articles to specific readers and thus foster engagement. Existing approaches rely on extensive user profiles. However frequently possible, readers rarely authenticate themselves on news publishers' websites. This paper proposes an approach for such cases. It provides a basic degree of personalization while complying with the key characteristics of news recommendation including news popularity, recency, and the dynamics of reading behavior. We extend existing research on the dynamics of news reading behavior by focusing both on the progress of reading interests over time and their relations. Reading interests are considered in three levels: short-, medium-, and long-term. Combinations of these are evaluated in terms of added value to the recommendation's performance and ensured news variety. Experiments with 17-month worth of logs from a German news publisher show that most frequent relations between news reading interests are constant in time but their probabilities change. Recommendations based on combined short-term and long-term interests result in increased accuracy while recommendations based on combined short-term and medium-term interests yield higher news variety.