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Semantic parsing aims to transform natural language (NL) utterances into formal meaning representations (MRs), whereas an NL generator achieves the reverse: producing a NL description for some given MRs. Despite this intrinsic connection, the two tasks are often studied separately in prior work. In this paper, we model the duality of these two tasks via a joint learning framework, and demonstrate its effectiveness of boosting the performance on both tasks. Concretely, we propose a novel method of dual information maximization (DIM) to regularize the learning process, where DIM empirically maximizes the variational lower bounds of expected joint distributions of NL and MRs. We further extend DIM to a semi-supervision setup (SemiDIM), which leverages unlabeled data of both tasks. Experiments on three datasets of dialogue management and code generation (and summarization) show that performance on both semantic parsing and NL generation can be consistently improved by DIM, in both supervised and semi-supervised setups., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2019

Knowledge graphs capture structured information and relations between a set of entities or items. As such knowledge graphs represent an attractive source of information that could help improve recommender systems. However, existing approaches in this domain rely on manual feature engineering and do not allow for an end-to-end training. Here we propose Knowledge-aware Graph Neural Networks with Label Smoothness regularization (KGNN-LS) to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, our approach computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relationships for a given user. This way we transform the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph and then apply a graph neural network to compute personalized item embeddings. To provide better inductive bias, we rely on label smoothness assumption, which posits that adjacent items in the knowledge graph are likely to have similar user relevance labels/scores. Label smoothness provides regularization over the edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to a label propagation scheme on a graph. We also develop an efficient implementation that shows strong scalability with respect to the knowledge graph size. Experiments on four datasets show that our method outperforms state of the art baselines. KGNN-LS also achieves strong performance in cold-start scenarios where user-item interactions are sparse.

Recent studies into streaming media delivery suggest that performance gains from cache hierarchies such as Information-Centric Networks (ICNs) may be negated by Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DAS), the de facto method for retrieving multimedia content. The bitrate adaptation mechanisms that drive video streaming clash with caching hierarchies in ways that affect users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Cache performance also diminishes as consumers dynamically select content encoded at different bitrates. In this paper we use the evidence to draw a novel insight: in a cache hierarchy for adaptive streaming content, bitrates should be prioritized over or alongside popularity and hit rates. We build on this insight to propose RippleCache as a family of cache placement schemes that safeguard high-bitrate content at the edge and push low-bitrate content into the network core. Doing so reduces contention of cache resources, as well as congestion in the network. To validate RippleCache claims we construct two separate implementations. We design RippleClassic as a benchmark solution that optimizes content placement by maximizing a measure for cache hierarchies shown to have high correlation with QoE. In addition, our lighter-weight RippleFinder is then re-designed with distributed execution for application in large-scale systems. RippleCache performance gains are reinforced by evaluations in NS-3 against state-of-the-art baseline approaches, using standard measures of QoE as defined by the DASH Industry Forum. Measurements show that RippleClassic and RippleFinder deliver content that suffers less oscillation and rebuffering, as well as the highest levels of video quality, indicating overall improvements to QoE., Comment: submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

To alleviate sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering based recommender systems, researchers and engineers usually collect attributes of users and items, and design delicate algorithms to exploit these additional information. In general, the attributes are not isolated but connected with each other, which forms a knowledge graph (KG). In this paper, we propose Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks (KGCN), an end-to-end framework that captures inter-item relatedness effectively by mining their associated attributes on the KG. To automatically discover both high-order structure information and semantic information of the KG, we sample from the neighbors for each entity in the KG as their receptive field, then combine neighborhood information with bias when calculating the representation of a given entity. The receptive field can be extended to multiple hops away to model high-order proximity information and capture users' potential long-distance interests. Moreover, we implement the proposed KGCN in a minibatch fashion, which enables our model to operate on large datasets and KGs. We apply the proposed model to three datasets about movie, book, and music recommendation, and experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong recommender baselines., Comment: Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference

In this paper, we study a multi-step interactive recommendation problem, where the item recommended at current step may affect the quality of future recommendations. To address the problem, we develop a novel and effective approach, named CFRL, which seamlessly integrates the ideas of both collaborative filtering (CF) and reinforcement learning (RL). More specifically, we first model the recommender-user interactive recommendation problem as an agent-environment RL task, which is mathematically described by a Markov decision process (MDP). Further, to achieve collaborative recommendations for the entire user community, we propose a novel CF-based MDP by encoding the states of all users into a shared latent vector space. Finally, we propose an effective Q-network learning method to learn the agent's optimal policy based on the CF-based MDP. The capability of CFRL is demonstrated by comparing its performance against a variety of existing methods on real-world datasets.

Collaborative filtering often suffers from sparsity and cold start problems in real recommendation scenarios, therefore, researchers and engineers usually use side information to address the issues and improve the performance of recommender systems. In this paper, we consider knowledge graphs as the source of side information. We propose MKR, a Multi-task feature learning approach for Knowledge graph enhanced Recommendation. MKR is a deep end-to-end framework that utilizes knowledge graph embedding task to assist recommendation task. The two tasks are associated by cross&compress units, which automatically share latent features and learn high-order interactions between items in recommender systems and entities in the knowledge graph. We prove that cross&compress units have sufficient capability of polynomial approximation, and show that MKR is a generalized framework over several representative methods of recommender systems and multi-task learning. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that MKR achieves substantial gains in movie, book, music, and news recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines. MKR is also shown to be able to maintain a decent performance even if user-item interactions are sparse., Comment: In Proceedings of The 2019 Web Conference (WWW 2019)

User emotion analysis toward videos is to automatically recognize the general emotional status of viewers from the multimedia content embedded in the online video stream. Existing works fall in two categories: 1) visual-based methods, which focus on visual content and extract a specific set of features of videos. However, it is generally hard to learn a mapping function from low-level video pixels to high-level emotion space due to great intra-class variance. 2) textual-based methods, which focus on the investigation of user-generated comments associated with videos. The learned word representations by traditional linguistic approaches typically lack emotion information and the global comments usually reflect viewers' high-level understandings rather than instantaneous emotions. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose to jointly utilize video content and user-generated texts simultaneously for emotion analysis. In particular, we introduce exploiting a new type of user-generated texts, i.e., "danmu", which are real-time comments floating on the video and contain rich information to convey viewers' emotional opinions. To enhance the emotion discriminativeness of words in textual feature extraction, we propose Emotional Word Embedding (EWE) to learn text representations by jointly considering their semantics and emotions. Afterwards, we propose a novel visual-textual emotion analysis model with Deep Coupled Video and Danmu Neural networks (DCVDN), in which visual and textual features are synchronously extracted and fused to form a comprehensive representation by deep-canonically-correlated-autoencoder-based multi-view learning. Through extensive experiments on a self-crawled real-world video-danmu dataset, we prove that DCVDN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines., Comment: Draft, 25 pages

To sustain engaging conversation, it is critical for chatbots to make good use of relevant knowledge. Equipped with a knowledge base, chatbots are able to extract conversation-related attributes and entities to facilitate context modeling and response generation. In this work, we distinguish the uses of attribute and entity and incorporate them into the encoder-decoder architecture in different manners. Based on the augmented architecture, our chatbot, namely Mike, is able to generate responses by referring to proper entities from the collected knowledge. To validate the proposed approach, we build a movie conversation corpus on which the proposed approach significantly outperforms other four knowledge-grounded models.

We propose a chatbot, namely Mocha to make good use of relevant entities when generating responses. Augmented with meta-path information, Mocha is able to mention proper entities following the conversation flow., Comment: AAAI 2019