AI-driven recruitment systems offer potential benefits in improving hiring efficiency and reach. However, without explicit attention to inclusivity, these systems risk perpetuating historical biases and reinforcing systemic inequalities. While ethical guidelines for inclusive AI exist, organisations face challenges in operationalising them, particularly in complex, real-world settings like online employment platforms. This paper investigates how inclusive design principles, grounded in diversity and inclusion guidelines, can be translated into requirements for AI-driven recruitment systems. We partnered with SEEK, a leading employment marketplace in the Asia-Pacific region, to conduct a co-design workshop focused on identifying and contextualising inclusivity requirements from AI-based hiring use cases. Using requirements engineering techniques of user stories, personas, and stakeholder reflection, we explored two use cases and conducted follow-up interviews six months later to evaluate the impact and sustainability of these efforts. Our findings reveal challenges in aligning inclusivity with business priorities, navigating trade-offs, and addressing data limitations. We present industry-informed lessons on how requirements engineering can support the operationalisation of inclusive AI principles, offering guidance for practitioners aiming to embed diversity and inclusion principles in AI systems. This work contributes to integrating ethical design into AI development lifecycles through stakeholder-driven requirements processes.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a class of methods widely used to support high-quality Recommender Systems (RSs) across several industries [6]. Studies have uncovered distinct advantages and limitations of CF in many real-world applications [5, 9]. Besides the inability to address the cold-start problem, sensitivity to data sparsity is among the main limitations recurrently associated with this class of RSs. Past work has extensively demonstrated that data sparsity critically impacts CF accuracy [2, 3, 4]. The proposed talk revisits the relation between data sparsity and CF from a new perspective, evincing that the former also impacts the fairness of recommendations. In particular, data sparsity might lead to unfair bias in domains where the volume of activity strongly correlates with personal characteristics that are protected by law (i.e., protected attributes). This concern is critical for RSs deployed in domains such as the recruitment domain, where RSs have been reported to automate or facilitate discriminatory behaviour [7]. Our work at SEEK deals with recommender algorithms that recommend jobs to candidates via SEEK’s multiple channels. While this talk focuses on our perspective of the problem in the job recommendation domain, the discussion is relevant to many other domains where recommenders potentially have a social or economic impact on the lives of individuals and groups.

This work is a companion reproducibility paper that presents a framework to reproduce our previous experiments and results reported in Werneck et al. (2021). In that previous paper, we introduced a systematic mapping process of points-of-interest (POI) recommendation methods and provided a uniform evaluation methodology based on metrics covering different aspects besides accuracy. Due to the lack of reproducible and extensible benchmarks, our work introduces a reproducibility framework for POI methods based on a collection of Python software libraries and a Docker image. Our proposal is composed of: (1) a package to perform a protocol that reproduces our systematic mapping process Werneck et al. (2021), containing all collected data, insightful views on current advances and opened challenges; and (2) an extensible benchmark to perform a protocol to reproduce experimental evaluations on POI recommendation, considering different datasets, metrics, and the strongest baselines in the literature. This work also demonstrates all processes required to instantiate its framework. Moreover, our work can be considered at least weakly reproducible, since we were able to reproduce the results of the previous paper, leading us to the same conclusions.

Offline evaluation has nowadays become a major step in developing Recommendation Systems in both academia and industry [4, 5]. While academia anchors on offline evaluation due to the lack of proper environments for conducting online tests with real users, the industry uses offline evaluation to filter the most promising solutions for further online testing, aiming at reducing costs and potential damage to customers. Despite the blunt advances observed on this topic recently, consolidating a reliable, replicable, flexible and efficient offline evaluation process capable of satisfactorily predicting online test results remains an open challenge [2]. The community still lacks an integrated and updated view on this topic, useful for practitioners to inspect and refine their current offline evaluation stack.

Advances in Recommender Systems (RSs) have been focused on improving the system's accuracy. However, accuracy alone is not enough to assess the practical effects. In real scenarios, diversity has been identified as a key dimension of recommendation utility. Thus, the main researches are focused in improve both, accuracy and diversity. This challenge remains an apparent dilemma that remains open and can boost sales by offering consumers both their mainstream and specific tastes. For this reason, we propose an approach to handle the accuracy-diversity dilemma. Our approach, based on a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), is a post-processing method to re-rank items from traditional RSs in order to improve diversity without accuracy losses. Experimental results in entertainment and e-commerce scenarios show that our strategy can improve users satisfaction. We improve the diversity up to 70% without significant accuracy losses.

In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art in topic modeling by means of the design and development of a novel (semi-formal) general topic modeling framework. The novel contributions of our solution include: (i) the introduction of new semantically-enhanced data representations for topic modeling based on pooling, and (ii) the proposal of a novel topic extraction strategy - ASToC - that solves the difficulty in representing topics in our semantically-enhanced information space. In our extensive experimentation evaluation, covering 12 datasets and 12 state-of-the-art baselines, totalizing 108 tests, we exceed (with a few ties) in almost 100 cases, with gains of more than 50% against the best baselines (achieving up to 80% against some runner-ups). We provide qualitative and quantitative statistical analyses of why our solutions work so well. Finally, we show that our method is able to improve document representation in automatic text classification.

In this paper, we propose a general framework that allows developers to filter, summarize and analyze user reviews written about applications on App Stores. Our framework extracts automatically relevant features from reviews of apps (e.g., information about functionalities, bugs, requirements, etc) and analyzes the sentiment associated with each of them. Our framework has three main building blocks, namely, (i) topic modeling, (ii) sentiment analysis and (iii) summarization interface. The topic modeling block aims at finding semantic topics from textual comments, extracting the target features based on the most relevant words of each discovered topic. The sentiment analysis block detects the sentiment associated with each discovered feature. The summarization interface provides to developers an intuitive visualization of the features (i.e., topics) and their associated sentiment, providing richer information than a 'star rating' strategy. Our evaluation shows that the topic modeling block is able to organize information provided by users in subcategories that facilitate the understanding of which features more positively/negatively impact the overall evaluation of the application. Regarding user satisfaction, we can observe that, in spite of the star rating being a good measure of evaluation, the Sentiment Analysis technique is more accurate in capturing the sentiment transmitted by the user by means of a comment.

Social media applications have assumed an important role in decision-making process of users, affecting their choices about products and services. In this context, understanding and modeling opinions, as well as opinion-leaders, have implications for several tasks, such as recommendation, advertising, brand evaluation etc. Despite the intrinsic relation between opinions and opinion-leaders, most recent works focus exclusively on either understanding the opinions, by Sentiment Analysis (SA) proposals, or identifying opinion-leaders using Influential Users Detection (IUD). This paper presents a preliminary evaluation about a combined analysis of SA and IUD. In this sense, we propose a methodology to quantify factors in real domains that may affect such analysis, as well as the potential benefits of combining SA Methods with IUD ones. Empirical assessments on a sample of tweets about the Brazilian president reveal that the collective opinion and the set of top opinion-leaders over time are inter-related. Further, we were able to identify distinct characteristics of opinion propagation, and that the collective opinion may be accurately estimated by using a few top-k opinion-leaders. These results point out the combined analysis of SA and IUD as a promising research direction to be further exploited.

Automatic text classification (TC) continues to be a relevant research topic and several TC algorithms have been proposed. However, the majority of TC algorithms assume that the underlying data distribution does not change over time. In this work, we are concerned with the challenges imposed by the temporal dynamics observed in textual data sets. We provide evidence of the existence of temporal effects in three textual data sets, reflected by variations observed over time in the class distribution, in the pairwise class similarities, and in the relationships between terms and classes. We then quantify, using a series of full factorial design experiments, the impact of these effects on four well‐known TC algorithms. We show that these temporal effects affect each analyzed data set differently and that they restrict the performance of each considered TC algorithm to different extents. The reported quantitative analyses, which are the original contributions of this article, provide valuable new insights to better understand the behavior of TC algorithms when faced with nonstatic (temporal) data distributions and highlight important requirements for the proposal of more accurate classification models.

This paper explores a method for incorporating into a recommender system explicit representations of user's preferences over non-content attributes such as popularity, recency, and similarity of recommended items. We show how such attributes can be modeled as a preference vector that can be used in a vector-space content-based recommender, and how that content-based recommender can be integrated with various collaborative filtering techniques through re-weighting of Top-M recommendations. We evaluate this approach on several recommender systems datasets and collaborative filtering methods, and find that incorporating the three preference attributes can lead to a substantial increase in Top-50 precision while also enhancing diversity and novelty.

Automatic Document Classification (ADC) is still one of the major information retrieval problems. It usually employs a supervised learning strategy, where we first build a classification model using pre-classified documents and then use this model to classify unseen documents. The majority of supervised algorithms consider that all documents provide equally important information. However, in practice, a document may be considered more or less important to build the classification model according to several factors, such as its timeliness, the venue where it was published in, its authors, among others. In this paper, we are particularly concerned with the impact that temporal effects may have on ADC and how to minimize such impact. In order to deal with these effects, we introduce a temporal weighting function (TWF) and propose a methodology to determine it for document collections. We applied the proposed methodology to ACM-DL and Medline and found that the TWF of both follows a lognormal. We then extend three ADC algorithms (namely kNN, Rocchio and Naïve Bayes) to incorporate the TWF. Experiments showed that the temporally-aware classifiers achieved significant gains, outperforming (or at least matching) state-of-the-art algorithms.

Online auction services have reached great popularity and revenue over the last years. A key component for this success is the seller. Few studies proposed analyzing how the seller and the auction configuration affect the negotiation results. In this work we propose a methodology to characterize online auctions by the seller's perspective. This methodology is based on: (1) recognizing the characteristics of the variables related to the auction results and (2) capturing the correlation among these variables to identify seller profiles and selling strategies. We applied our methodology to a real case study, using an eBay dataset, to validate two hypotheses about sellers and their practices. These results are useful to understand the complex mechanisms that guide ending prices, success (or failure), and the attraction of bids in online auctions, which can support decision strategies for buyers and sellers.

Due to the increasing amount of information being stored and accessible through the Web, Automatic Document Classification (ADC) has become an important research topic. ADC usually employs a supervised learning strategy, where we first build a classification model using pre-classified documents and then use it to classify unseen documents. One major challenge in building classifiers is dealing with the temporal evolution of the characteristics of the documents and the classes to which they belong. However, most of the current techniques for ADC do not consider this evolution while building and using the models. Previous results show that the performance of classifiers may be affected by three different temporal effects (class distribution, term distribution and class similarity). Further, it is shown that using just portions of the pre-classified documents, which we call contexts, for building the classifiers, result in better performance, as a consequence of the minimization of the aforementioned effects.

Due to the increasing amount of information present on the Web, Automatic Document Classification (ADC) has become an important research topic. ADC usually follows a standard supervised learning strategy, where we first build a model using preclassified documents and then use it to classify new unseen documents. One major challenge for ADC in many scenarios is that the characteristics of the documents and the classes to which they belong may change over time. However, most of the current techniques for ADC are applied without taking into account the temporal evolution of the collection of documents