1,720,977 research outputs found
Investigating the Robustness of Sequential Recommender Systems Against Training Data Perturbations
Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are widely employed to model user
behavior over time. However, their robustness in the face of perturbations in
training data remains a largely understudied yet critical issue. A fundamental
challenge emerges in previous studies aimed at assessing the robustness of
SRSs: the Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) similarity is not particularly suited for
this task as it is designed for infinite rankings of items and thus shows
limitations in real-world scenarios. For instance, it fails to achieve a
perfect score of 1 for two identical finite-length rankings. To address this
challenge, we introduce a novel contribution: Finite Rank-Biased Overlap
(FRBO), an enhanced similarity tailored explicitly for finite rankings. This
innovation facilitates a more intuitive evaluation in practical settings. In
pursuit of our goal, we empirically investigate the impact of removing items at
different positions within a temporally ordered sequence. We evaluate two
distinct SRS models across multiple datasets, measuring their performance using
metrics such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) and Rank List
Sensitivity. Our results demonstrate that removing items at the end of the
sequence has a statistically significant impact on performance, with NDCG
decreasing up to 60%. Conversely, removing items from the beginning or middle
has no significant effect. These findings underscore the criticality of the
position of perturbed items in the training data. As we spotlight the
vulnerabilities inherent in current SRSs, we fervently advocate for intensified
research efforts to fortify their robustness against adversarial perturbations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Mergenetic: a Simple Evolutionary Model Merging Library
Model merging allows combining the capabilities of existing models into a new one—post hoc, without additional training. This has made it increasingly popular thanks to its low cost and the availability of libraries that support merging on consumer GPUs. Recent work shows that pairing merging with evolutionary algorithms can boost performance, but no framework currently supports flexible experimentation with such strategies in language models. We introduce Mergenetic, an open-source library for evolutionary model merging. Mergenetic enables easy composition of merging methods and evolutionary algorithms, while incorporating lightweight fitness estimators to reduce evaluation costs. We describe its design and demonstrate that Mergenetic produces competitive results across tasks and languages using modest hardware. A video demo showcasing its main features is also provided.EPF
The Open Argument Mining Framework
Despite extensive research in Argument Mining (AM), the field faces significant challenges in limited reproducibility, difficulty in comparing systems due to varying task combinations, and a lack of interoperability caused by the heterogeneous nature of argumentation theory. These challenges are further exacerbated by the absence of dedicated tools, with most advancements remaining isolated research outputs rather than reusable systems. The oAMF (Open Argument Mining Framework) addresses these issues by providing an open-source, modular, and scalable platform that unifies diverse AM methods. Initially released with seventeen integrated modules, the oAMF serves as a starting point for researchers and developers to build, experiment with, and deploy AM pipelines while ensuring interoperability and allowing multiple theories of argumentation to co-exist within the same framework. Its flexible design supports integration via Python APIs, drag-and-drop tools, and web interfaces, streamlining AM development for research and industry setup, facilitating method comparison, and reproducibility.</p
DECAF: A Dynamically Extensible Corpus Analysis Framework
The study of generalization in Language Models (LMs) requires controlled experiments that can precisely measure complex linguistic variations between training and testing datasets. We introduce DECAF, a framework that enables the analysis and filtering of linguistically-annotated datasets down to the character level. Rather than creating new resources for each experiment, DECAF starts from datasets with existing linguistic annotations, and leverages them to analyze, filter, and generate highly controlled and reproducible experimental settings targeting specific research questions. We demonstrate DECAF’s functionality by adding 28 morphosyntactic annotation layers to the 115M-word BabyLM corpus and indexing the resulting 1.1B annotations to analyze its internal domain variance, and to create a controlled training data curriculum for a small-scale gender bias study. We release DECAF as an open-source Python library, along with the parsed and indexed version of BabyLM, as resources for future generalization research
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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