An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

Deep learning describes a class of machine learning algorithms that are capable of combining raw inputs into layers of intermediate features. These algorithms have recently shown impressive results across a variety of domains. Biology and medicine are data-rich disciplines, but the data are complex and often ill-understood. Hence, deep learning techniques may be particularly well suited to solve problems of these fields. We examine applications of deep learning to a variety of biomedical problems-patient classification, fundamental biological processes and treatment of patients-and discuss whether deep learning will be able to transform these tasks or if the biomedical sphere poses unique challenges. Following from an extensive literature review, we find that deep learning has yet to revolutionize biomedicine or definitively resolve any of the most pressing challenges in the field, but promising advances have been made on the prior state of the art. Even though improvements over previous baselines have been modest in general, the recent progress indicates that deep learning methods will provide valuable means for speeding up or aiding human investigation. Though progress has been made linking a specific neural network's prediction to input features, understanding how users should interpret these models to make testable hypotheses about the system under study remains an open challenge. Furthermore, the limited amount of labelled data for training presents problems in some domains, as do legal and privacy constraints on work with sensitive health records. Nonetheless, we foresee deep learning enabling changes at both bench and bedside with the potential to transform several areas of biology and medicine.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2017.0387

Opportunities and obstacles for deep learning in biology and medicine.

Fault diagnosis is vital in manufacturing system, since early detections on the emerging problem can save invaluable time and cost. With the development of smart manufacturing, the data-driven fault diagnosis becomes a hot topic. However, the traditional data-driven fault diagnosis methods rely on the features extracted by experts. The feature extraction process is an exhausted work and greatly impacts the final result. Deep learning (DL) provides an effective way to extract the features of raw data automatically. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is an effective DL method. In this study, a new CNN based on LeNet-5 is proposed for fault diagnosis. Through a conversion method converting signals into two-dimensional (2-D) images, the proposed method can extract the features of the converted 2-D images and eliminate the effect of handcrafted features. The proposed method which is tested on three famous datasets, including motor bearing dataset, self-priming centrifugal pump dataset, and axial piston hydraulic pump dataset, has achieved prediction accuracy of 99.79%, 99.481%, and 100%, respectively. The results have been compared with other DL and traditional methods, including adaptive deep CNN, sparse filter, deep belief network, and support vector machine. The comparisons show that the proposed CNN-based data-driven fault diagnosis method has achieved significant improvements.

A New Convolutional Neural Network-Based Data-Driven Fault Diagnosis Method

This paper presents a survey on hate speech detection. Given the steadily growing body of social media content, the amount of online hate speech is also increasing. Due to the massive scale of the web, methods that automatically detect hate speech are required. Our survey describes key areas that have been explored to automatically recognize these types of utterances using natural language processing. We also discuss limits of those approaches.

/pdf/a-survey-on-hate-speech-detection-using-natural-language-1hnsqiizvn.pdf

A Survey on Hate Speech Detection using Natural Language Processing

We address the problem of hate speech detection in online user comments. Hate speech, defined as an "abusive speech targeting specific group characteristics, such as ethnicity, religion, or gender", is an important problem plaguing websites that allow users to leave feedback, having a negative impact on their online business and overall user experience. We propose to learn distributed low-dimensional representations of comments using recently proposed neural language models, that can then be fed as inputs to a classification algorithm. Our approach addresses issues of high-dimensionality and sparsity that impact the current state-of-the-art, resulting in highly efficient and effective hate speech detectors.

/pdf/hate-speech-detection-with-comment-embeddings-1pnoeb6kkn.pdf

Hate Speech Detection with Comment Embeddings

Search Ranking and Recommendations are fundamental problems of crucial interest to major Internet companies, including web search engines, content publishing websites and marketplaces. However, despite sharing some common characteristics a one-size-fits-all solution does not exist in this space. Given a large difference in content that needs to be ranked, personalized and recommended, each marketplace has a somewhat unique challenge. Correspondingly, at Airbnb, a short-term rental marketplace, search and recommendation problems are quite unique, being a two-sided marketplace in which one needs to optimize for host and guest preferences, in a world where a user rarely consumes the same item twice and one listing can accept only one guest for a certain set of dates. In this paper we describe Listing and User Embedding techniques we developed and deployed for purposes of Real-time Personalization in Search Ranking and Similar Listing Recommendations, two channels that drive 99% of conversions. The embedding models were specifically tailored for Airbnb marketplace, and are able to capture guest's short-term and long-term interests, delivering effective home listing recommendations. We conducted rigorous offline testing of the embedding models, followed by successful online tests before fully deploying them into production.

Real-time Personalization using Embeddings for Search Ranking at Airbnb

In recent years online advertising has become increasingly ubiquitous and effective. Advertisements shown to visitors fund sites and apps that publish digital content, manage social networks, and operate e-mail services. Given such large variety of internet resources, determining an appropriate type of advertising for a given platform has become critical to financial success. Native advertisements, namely ads that are similar in look and feel to content, have had great success in news and social feeds. However, to date there has not been a winning formula for ads in e-mail clients. In this paper we describe a system that leverages user purchase history determined from e-mail receipts to deliver highly personalized product ads to Yahoo Mail users. We propose to use a novel neural language-based algorithm specifically tailored for delivering effective product recommendations, which was evaluated against baselines that included showing popular products and products predicted based on co-occurrence. We conducted rigorous offline testing using a large-scale product purchase data set, covering purchases of more than 29 million users from 172 e-commerce websites. Ads in the form of product recommendations were successfully tested on online traffic, where we observed a steady 9% lift in click-through rates over other ad formats in mail, as well as comparable lift in conversion rates. Following successful tests, the system was launched into production during the holiday season of 2014.

E-commerce in Your Inbox: Product Recommendations at Scale

Search engines represent one of the most popular web services, visited by more than 85% of internet users on a daily basis. Advertisers are interested in making use of this vast business potential, as very clear intent signal communicated through the issued query allows effective targeting of users. This idea is embodied in a sponsored search model, where each advertiser maintains a list of keywords they deem indicative of increased user response rate with regards to their business. According to this targeting model, when a query is issued all advertisers with a matching keyword are entered into an auction according to the amount they bid for the query, and the winner gets to show their ad. One of the main challenges is the fact that a query may not match many keywords, resulting in lower auction value, lower ad quality, and lost revenue for advertisers and publishers. Possible solution is to expand a query into a set of related queries and use them to increase the number of matched ads, called query rewriting. To this end, we propose rewriting method based on a novel query embedding algorithm, which jointly models query content as well as its context within a search session. As a result, queries with similar content and context are mapped into vectors close in the embedding space, which allows expansion of a query via simple K-nearest neighbor search in the projected space. The method was trained on more than 12 billion sessions, one of the largest corpuses reported thus far, and evaluated on both public TREC data set and in-house sponsored search data set. The results show the proposed approach significantly outperformed existing state-of-the-art, strongly indicating its benefits and the monetization potential.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2766462.2767709

Context- and Content-aware Embeddings for Query Rewriting in Sponsored Search

We consider the problem of learning distributed representations for documents in data streams. The documents are represented as low-dimensional vectors and are jointly learned with distributed vector representations of word tokens using a hierarchical framework with two embedded neural language models. In particular, we exploit the context of documents in streams and use one of the language models to model the document sequences, and the other to model word sequences within them. The models learn continuous vector representations for both word tokens and documents such that semantically similar documents and words are close in a common vector space. We discuss extensions to our model, which can be applied to personalized recommendation and social relationship mining by adding further user layers to the hierarchy, thus learning user-specific vectors to represent individual preferences. We validated the learned representations on a public movie rating data set from MovieLens, as well as on a large-scale Yahoo News data comprising three months of user activity logs collected on Yahoo servers. The results indicate that the proposed model can learn useful representations of both documents and word tokens, outperforming the current state-of-the-art by a large margin.

/pdf/hierarchical-neural-language-models-for-joint-representation-2p0xh25k34.pdf

Mihajlo Grbovic

Papers

Hate Speech Detection with Comment Embeddings

Real-time Personalization using Embeddings for Search Ranking at Airbnb

E-commerce in Your Inbox: Product Recommendations at Scale

Context- and Content-aware Embeddings for Query Rewriting in Sponsored Search

Hierarchical Neural Language Models for Joint Representation of Streaming Documents and their Content