The procure to pay process (P2P) in large enterprises is a back-end business process which deals with the procurement of products and services for enterprise operations. Procurement is done by issuing purchase orders to impaneled vendors and invoices submitted by vendors are paid after they go through a rigorous validation process. Agents orchestrating P2P process often encounter the problem of matching a product or service descriptions in the invoice to those in purchase order and verify if the ordered items are what have been supplied or serviced. For example, the description in the invoice and purchase order could be TRES 739mL CD KER Smooth and TRES 0.739L CD KER Smth which look different at word level but refer to the same item. In a typical P2P process, agents are asked to manually select the products which are similar before invoices are posted for payment. This step in the business process is manual, repetitive, cumbersome, and costly. Since descriptions are not well-formed sentences, we cannot apply existing semantic and syntactic text similarity approaches directly. In this paper, we present two approaches to solve the above problem using various types of available agent's recorded feedback data. If the agent's feedback is in the form of a relative ranking between descriptions, we use similarity ranking algorithm. If the agent's feedback is absolute such as match or no-match, we use classification similarity algorithm. We also present the threats to the validity of our approach and present a possible remedy making use of product taxonomy and catalog. We showcase the comparative effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches over many benchmarks and real-world data sets.
The United States is the largest distributor of legal services in the world, representing a $437 billion market. Of this, corporate legal departments pay law firms $80 billion for their services. Every month, legal departments receive and process invoices from these law firms and legal service providers. Legal invoice review is and has been a pain point for corporate legal department leaders. Complex and intricate, legal invoices often contain several hundred line-items that account for anything from tasks such as hands-on legal work to expenses such as copying, meals, and travel. The man-hour…
A personalized learning system needs a large pool of items for learners to solve. When working with a large pool of items, it is useful to measure the similarity of items. We outline a general approach to measuring the similarity of items and discuss specific measures for items used in introductory programming. Evaluation of quality of similarity measures is difficult. To this end, we propose an evaluation approach utilizing three levels of abstraction. We illustrate our approach to measuring similarity and provide evaluation using items from three diverse programming environments.
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）
Recommending new items to existing users has remained a challenging problem due to absence of user's past preferences for these items. The user personalized non-collaborative methods based on item features can be used to address this item cold-start problem. These methods rely on similarities between the target item and user's previous preferred items. While computing similarities based on item features, these methods overlook the interactions among the features of the items and consider them independently. Modeling interactions among features can be helpful as some features, when considered t…
We propose a novel learning framework to answer questions such as "if a user is purchasing a shirt, what other items will (s)he need with the shirt?" Our framework learns distributed representations for items from available textual data, with the learned representations representing items in a latent space expressing functional complementarity as well similarity. In particular, our framework places functionally similar items close together in the latent space, while also placing complementary items closer than non-complementary items, but farther away than similar items. In this study, we intr…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely searched in recommendation with various types of solutions. Recent success of Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) in CF demonstrates the effectiveness of modeling high-order relationships through graphs, while repetitive graph convolution and iterative batch optimization limit their efficiency. Instead, item similarity models attempt to construct direct relationships through efficient interaction encoding. Despite their great performance, the growing item numbers result in quadratic growth in similarity modeling process, posing critical scalability problems.…
Flytxt Mobile Solutions Pvt. Ltd.（Flytxt移动解决方案私人有限公司）；Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi（德里印度理工学院）
Standard Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms make use of interactions between users and items in the form of implicit or explicit ratings alone for generating recommendations. Similarity among users or items is calculated purely based on rating overlap in this case,without considering explicit properties of users or items involved, limiting their applicability in domains with very sparse rating spaces. In many domains such as movies, news or electronic commerce recommenders, considerable contextual data in text form describing item properties is available along with the rating data, which …
Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；FISCAL Technologies Ltd（FISCAL技术有限公司）
Businesses, governmental bodies and NGO's have an ever-increasing amount of data at their disposal from which they try to extract valuable information. Often, this needs to be done not only accurately but also within a short time frame. Clean and consistent data is therefore crucial. Data matching is the field that tries to identify instances in data that refer to the same real-world entity. In this study, machine learning techniques are combined with string similarity functions to the field of data matching. A dataset of invoices from a variety of businesses and organizations was preprocessed…
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；IBM Research Brazil（IBM巴西研究院）
The task of determining item similarity is a crucial one in a recommender system. This constitutes the base upon which the recommender system will work to determine which items are more likely to be enjoyed by a user, resulting in more user engagement. In this paper we tackle the problem of determining song similarity based solely on song metadata (such as the performer, and song title) and on tags contributed by users. We evaluate our approach under a series of different machine learning algorithms. We conclude that tf-idf achieves better results than Word2Vec to model the dataset to feature …
We consider the problem of learning soft assignments of $N$ items to $K$ categories given two sources of information: an item-category similarity matrix, which encourages items to be assigned to categories they are similar to (and to not be assigned to categories they are dissimilar to), and an item-item similarity matrix, which encourages similar items to have similar assignments. We propose a simple quadratic programming model that captures this intuition. We give necessary conditions for its solution to be unique, define an out-of-sample mapping, and derive a simple, effective training algo…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国高等科学技术研究院）
We consider the problem of recovering a binary rating matrix as well as clusters of users and items based on a partially observed matrix together with side-information in the form of social and item similarity graphs. These two graphs are both generated according to the celebrated stochastic block model (SBM). We develop lower and upper bounds on sample complexity that match for various scenarios. Our information-theoretic results quantify the benefits of the availability of the social and item similarity graphs. Further analysis reveals that under certain scenarios, the social and item simila…
Despite the prevalence of collaborative filtering in recommendation systems, there has been little theoretical development on why and how well it works, especially in the "online" setting, where items are recommended to users over time. We address this theoretical gap by introducing a model for online recommendation systems, cast item recommendation under the model as a learning problem, and analyze the performance of a cosine-similarity collaborative filtering method. In our model, each of $n$ users either likes or dislikes each of $m$ items. We assume there to be $k$ types of users, and all …
Recommender systems recommend items more accurately by analyzing users' potential interest on different brands' items. In conjunction with users' rating similarity, the presence of users' implicit feedbacks like clicking items, viewing items specifications, watching videos etc. have been proved to be helpful for learning users' embedding, that helps better rating prediction of users. Most existing recommender systems focus on modeling of ratings and implicit feedbacks ignoring users' explicit feedbacks. Explicit feedbacks can be used to validate the reliability of the particular users and can …
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）
In this paper, we design and analyze MC2G (Matrix Completion with 2 Graphs), an algorithm that performs matrix completion in the presence of social and item similarity graphs. MC2G runs in quasilinear time and is parameter free. It is based on spectral clustering and local refinement steps. The expected number of sampled entries required for MC2G to succeed (i.e., recover the clusters in the graphs and complete the matrix) matches an information-theoretic lower bound up to a constant factor for a wide range of parameters. We show via extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets th…
Computing similarity between a query and a document is fundamental in any information retrieval system. In search engines, computing query-document similarity is an essential step in both retrieval and ranking stages. In eBay search, document is an item and the query-item similarity can be computed by comparing different facets of the query-item pair. Query text can be compared with the text of the item title. Likewise, a category constraint applied on the query can be compared with the listing category of the item. However, images are one signal that are usually present in the items but are n…
University of Applied Science and Technology（应用科学与技术大学）；University of Kurdistan（库尔德斯坦大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
The use of recommender systems has increased dramatically to assist online social network users in the decision-making process and selecting appropriate items. On the other hand, due to many different items, users cannot score a wide range of them, and usually, there is a scattering problem for the matrix created for users. To solve the problem, the trust-based recommender systems are applied to predict the score of the desired item for the user. Various criteria have been considered to define trust, and the degree of trust between users is usually calculated based on these criteria. In this r…
Model-based methods for recommender systems have been studied extensively for years. Modern recommender systems usually resort to 1) representation learning models which define user-item preference as the distance between their embedding representations, and 2) embedding-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search to tackle the efficiency problem introduced by large-scale corpus. While providing efficient retrieval, the embedding-based retrieval pattern also limits the model capacity since the form of user-item preference measure is restricted to the distance between their embedding repres…
iLambda；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；Kent State University（肯特州立大学）
Similar product recommendation is one of the most common scenes in e-commerce. Many recommendation algorithms such as item-to-item Collaborative Filtering are working on measuring item similarities. In this paper, we introduce our real-time personalized algorithm to model product similarity and real-time user interests. We also introduce several other baseline algorithms including an image-similarity-based method, item-to-item collaborative filtering, and item2vec, and compare them on our large-scale real-world e-commerce dataset. The algorithms which achieve good offline results are also test…
This paper studies the item-to-item recommendation problem in recommender systems from a new perspective of metric learning via implicit feedback. We develop and investigate a personalizable deep metric model that captures both the internal contents of items and how they were interacted with by users. There are two key challenges in learning such model. First, there is no explicit similarity annotation, which deviates from the assumption of most metric learning methods. Second, these approaches ignore the fact that items are often represented by multiple sources of meta data and different user…
Identifying relationships between items is a key task of an online recommender system, in order to help users discover items that are functionally complementary or visually compatible. In domains like clothing recommendation, this task is particularly challenging since a successful system should be capable of handling a large corpus of items, a huge amount of relationships among them, as well as the high-dimensional and semantically complicated features involved. Furthermore, the human notion of "compatibility" to capture goes beyond mere similarity: For two items to be compatible---whether je…
Most if not all on-line item-to-item recommendation systems rely on estimation of a distance like measure (rank) of similarity between items. For on-line recommendation systems, time sensitivity of this similarity measure is extremely important. We observe that recommendation "recency" can be straightforwardly and transparently maintained by iterative reduction of ranks of inactive items. The paper briefly summarizes algorithmic developments based on this self-explanatory observation. The basic idea behind this work is patented in a context of online recommendation systems.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Memory-based collaborative filtering methods like user or item k-nearest neighbors (kNN) are a simple yet effective solution to the recommendation problem. The backbone of these methods is the estimation of the empirical similarity between users/items. In this paper, we analyze the spectral properties of the Pearson and the cosine similarity estimators, and we use tools from random matrix theory to argue that they suffer from noise and eigenvalues spreading. We argue that, unlike the Pearson correlation, the cosine similarity naturally possesses the desirable property of eigenvalue shrinkage f…
Increased public interest in healthy lifestyles has motivated the study of algorithms that encourage people to follow a healthy diet. Applying collaborative filtering to build recommendation systems in domains where only implicit feedback is available is also a rapidly growing research area. In this report we combine these two trends by developing a recommendation system to suggest ingredients that can be added to a partial recipe. We implement the item-based collaborative filtering algorithm using a high-dimensional, sparse dataset of recipes, which inherently contains only implicit feedback.…
Item neighbourhood methods for collaborative filtering learn a weighted graph over the set of items, where each item is connected to those it is most similar to. The prediction of a user's rating on an item is then given by that rating of neighbouring items, weighted by their similarity. This paper presents a new neighbourhood approach which we call item fields, whereby an undirected graphical model is formed over the item graph. The resulting prediction rule is a simple generalization of the classical approaches, which takes into account non-local information in the graph, allowing its best r…
There is increasing realization in neuroscience that information is represented in the brain, e.g., neocortex, hippocampus, in the form sparse distributed codes (SDCs), a kind of cell assembly. Two essential questions are: a) how are such codes formed on the basis of single trials, and how is similarity preserved during learning, i.e., how do more similar inputs get mapped to more similar SDCs. I describe a novel Modular Sparse Distributed Code (MSDC) that provides simple, neurally plausible answers to both questions. An MSDC coding field (CF) consists of Q WTA competitive modules (CMs), each …
Recent social recommender systems benefit from friendship graph to make an accurate recommendation, believing that friends in a social network have exactly the same interests and preferences. Some studies have benefited from hard clustering algorithms (such as K-means) to determine the similarity between users and consequently to define degree of friendships. In this paper, we went a step further to identify true friends for making even more realistic recommendations. we calculated the similarity between users, as well as the dependency between a user and an item. Our hypothesis is that due to…
Dynamic Graph with Similarity-Aware Attention Graph Neural Network for Recommender Systems
Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；SRM University Andhra Pradesh（安得拉邦SRM大学）；Mangalagiri, Andhra Pradesh 522502, India（安得拉邦马加拉加里522502, 印度）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；INRIA Lille（里尔法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；University of Insubria（因苏布里亚大学）
Pairwise clustering, in general, partitions a set of items via a known similarity function. In our treatment, clustering is modeled as a transductive prediction problem. Thus rather than beginning with a known similarity function, the function instead is hidden and the learner only receives a random sample consisting of a subset of the pairwise similarities. An additional set of pairwise side-information may be given to the learner, which then determines the inductive bias of our algorithms. We measure performance not based on the recovery of the hidden similarity function, but instead on how …
The aim of the recommender systems is to provide relevant and potentially interesting information to each user. This is fulfilled by utilizing the already recorded tendencies of similar users or detecting items similar to interested items of the user. Challenges such as data sparsity and cold start problem are addressed in recent studies. Utilizing social information not only enhances the prediction accuracy but also tackles the data sparseness challenges. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using direct and indirect trust information in a memory-based collaborative filtering recommend…
University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）
Recommendation systems get expanding significance because of their applications in both the scholarly community and industry. With the development of additional data sources and methods of extracting new information other than the rating history of clients on items, hybrid recommendation algorithms, in which some methods have usually been combined to improve performance, have become pervasive. In this work, we first introduce a novel method to extract the implicit relationship between content features using a sort of well-known methods from the natural language processing domain, namely Word2V…
