Automatic taxonomy induction is crucial for web search, recommendation systems, and question answering. Manual curation of taxonomies is expensive in terms of human effort, making automatic taxonomy construction highly desirable. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Layer which is an in-context learning framework designed to induct taxonomies from a given set of entities. Chain-of-Layer breaks down the task into selecting relevant candidate entities in each layer and gradually building the taxonomy from top to bottom. To minimize errors, we introduce the Ensemble-based Ranking Filter to reduce the hallucinated content generated at each iteration. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Chain-of-Layer achieves state-of-the-art performance on four real-world benchmarks. Source code available at: https://github.com/qingkaizeng/chain-of-layer.

Automatic product description generation for e-commerce has witnessed significant advancement in the past decade. Product copy- writing aims to attract users' interest and improve user experience by highlighting product characteristics with textual descriptions. As the services provided by e-commerce platforms become diverse, it is necessary to adapt the patterns of automatically-generated descriptions dynamically. In this paper, we report our experience in deploying an E-commerce Prefix-based Controllable Copywriting Generation (EPCCG) system into the JD.com e-commerce product recommendation platform. The development of the system contains two main components: 1) copywriting aspect extraction; 2) weakly supervised aspect labelling; 3) text generation with a prefix-based language model; and 4) copywriting quality control. We conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed EPCCG. In addition, we introduce the deployed architecture which cooperates the EPCCG into the real-time JD.com e-commerce recommendation platform and the significant payoff since deployment. The codes for implementation are provided at https://github.com/xguo7/Automatic-Controllable-Product-Copywriting-for-E-Commerce.git.

Automatic construction of a taxonomy supports many applications in e-commerce, web search, and question answering. Existing taxonomy expansion or completion methods assume that new concepts have been accurately extracted and their embedding vectors learned from the text corpus. However, one critical and fundamental challenge in fixing the incompleteness of taxonomies is the incompleteness of the extracted concepts, especially for those whose names have multiple words and consequently low frequency in the corpus. To resolve the limitations of extraction-based methods, we propose GenTaxo to enhance taxonomy completion by identifying positions in existing taxonomies that need new concepts and then generating appropriate concept names. Instead of relying on the corpus for concept embeddings, GenTaxo learns the contextual embeddings from their surrounding graph-based and language-based relational information, and leverages the corpus for pre-training a concept name generator. Experimental results demonstrate that GenTaxo improves the completeness of taxonomies over existing methods.

People are looking for complementary contexts, such as team members of complementary skills for project team building and/or reading materials of complementary knowledge for effective student learning, to make their behaviors more likely to be successful. Complementarity has been revealed by behavioral sciences as one of the most important factors in decision making. Existing computational models that learn low-dimensional context representations from behavior data have poor scalability and recent network embedding methods only focus on preserving the similarity between the contexts. In this work, we formulate a behavior entry as a set of context items and propose a novel representation learning method, Multi-type Itemset Embedding , to learn the context representations preserving the itemset structures. We propose a measurement of complementarity between context items in the embedding space. Experiments demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods on behavior prediction and context recommendation. We discover that the complementary contexts and similar contexts are significantly different in human behaviors.

Data Science has been one of the most popular fields in higher education and research activities. It takes tons of time to read the experimental section of thousands of papers and figure out the performance of the data science techniques. In this work, we build an experimental evidence extraction system to automate the integration of tables (in the paper PDFs) into a database of experimental results. First, it crops the tables and recognizes the templates. Second, it classifies the column names and row names into “method”, “dataset”, or “evaluation metric”, and then unified all the table cells into (method, dataset, metric, score)-quadruples. We propose hybrid features including structural and semantic table features as well as an ensemble learning approach for column/row name classification and table unification. SQL statements can be used to answer questions such as whether a method is the state-of-the-art or whether the reported numbers are conflicting.

With the increasing popularity of portable devices with cameras (e.g., smartphones and tablets) and ubiquitous Internet connectivity, travelers can share their instant experience during the travel by posting photos they took to social media platforms. In this paper, we present a new image-driven poetry recommender system that takes a traveler's photo as input and recommends classical poems that can enrich the photo with aesthetically pleasing quotes from the poems. Three critical challenges exist to solve this new problem: i) how to extract the implicit artistic conception embedded in both poems and images? ii) How to identify the salient objects in the image without knowing the creator's intent? iii) How to accommodate the diverse user perceptions of the image and make a diversified poetry recommendation? The proposed iPoemRec system jointly addresses the above challenges by developing heterogeneous information network and neural embedding techniques. Evaluation results from real-world datasets and a user study demonstrate that our system can recommend highly relevant classical poems for a given photo and receive significantly higher user ratings compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Web research, data science, and artificial intelligence have been rapidly changing our life and society. Researchers and practitioners in the fields take a large amount of time to read literature and compare existing approaches. It would significantly improve their efficiency if there was a system that extracted and managed experimental evidences (say, a specific method achieves a score of a specific metric on a specific dataset) from tables of paper PDFs for search, exploration, and analytic. We build such a demonstration system, called Tablepedia, that use rule-based and learning-based methods to automate the “reading” of PDF tables. It has three modules: template recognition, unification, and SQL operations. We implement three functions to facilitate research and practice: (1) finding related methods and datasets, (2) finding top-performing baseline methods, and (3) finding conflicting reported numbers. A pointer to a screencast on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/310162310

Contextual behavior modeling uses data from multiple contexts to discover patterns for predictive analysis. However, existing behavior prediction models often face difficulties when scaling for massive datasets. In this work, we formulate a behavior as a set of context items of different types (such as decision makers, operators, goals and resources), consider an observable itemset as a behavior success, and propose a novel scalable method, "multi-type itemset embedding", to learn the context items' representations preserving the success structures. Unlike most of existing embedding methods that learn pair-wise proximity from connection between a behavior and one of its items, our method learns item embeddings collectively from interaction among all multi-type items of a behavior, based on which we develop a novel framework, LearnSuc, for (1) predicting the success rate of any set of items and (2) finding complementary items which maximize the probability of success when incorporated into an itemset. Extensive experiments demonstrate both effectiveness and efficency of the proposed framework.