Options
Lawlor, Aonghus
Preferred name
Lawlor, Aonghus
Official Name
Lawlor, Aonghus
Research Output
Now showing 1 - 10 of 18
- PublicationMining Product Experiences from User Generated Reviews: A Recommender Systems Perspective(2014-09)
; ; ; We have employed algorithms described in to mine opinions from TripAdvisor hotel reviews; we have experimented with different parameters to learn which provided more meaningful extractions. Secondly, we have considered opinion summarization and search similar to. We have implemented a retrieval strategy that accepts natural language queries based on opinions from reviews. Additionally, we have proposed various methods of summarizing opinions based on statistical metrics. Currently, we are experimenting with feature quality metrics. Our aim is to establish a relevance score that describes the usefulness of extracted opinions. We are also running recommendation experiments using different versions the extracted opinions.179 - PublicationAn Analysis of Recommender Algorithms for Online News(2014-09-18)
; ; ; This paper presents the recommendation algorithms used by the Insight UCD team participating in the CLEF-NewsREEL 2014 online news recommendation challenge.478 - PublicationA Multi-Domain Analysis of Explanation-Based Recommendation using User-Generated ReviewsThis paper extends recent work on the use of explanations in recommender systems. In particular, we show how explanations can be used to rank as well as justify recommendations, then we compare the results to more conventional recommendation approaches, in three large-scale application domains.
155 - PublicationExploring Customer Reviews for Music Genre Classification and Evolutionary Studies(2016-08-11)
; ; ; In this paper, we explore a large multimodal dataset of about 65k albums constructed from a combination of Amazon customer reviews, MusicBrainz metadata and AcousticBrainz audio descriptors. Review texts are further enriched with named entity disambiguation along with polarity information derived from an aspect-based sentiment analysis framework. This dataset constitutes the cornerstone of two main contributions: First, we perform experiments on music genre classification, exploring a variety of feature types, including semantic, sentimental and acoustic features. These experiments show that modeling semantic information contributes to outperforming strong bag-of-words baselines. Second, we provide a diachronic study of the criticism of music genres via a quantitative analysis of the polarity associated to musical aspects over time. Our analysis hints at a potential correlation between key cultural and geopolitical events and the language and evolving sentiments found in music reviews.503 - PublicationA Distributed Asynchronous Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Recommender Systems(ACM, 2020-09-26)
; ; ; ; ; ; In this paper we propose DADRL, a distributed, asynchronous reinforcement learning recommender system based on the asynchronous advantage actor-critic model (A3C), which combines ideas from A3C and federated learning (FL). The proposed algorithm keeps the user preferences or interactions on local devices and uses a combination of on-device, local recommendation models and a complementary global model. The global model is trained only by the loss gradients of the local models, rather than directly using user preferences or interactions data. We demonstrate, using well-known datasets and benchmark algorithms, how this approach can deliver performance that is comparable with the current state-of-the-art while enhancing user privacy.402 - PublicationGenerating Personalised and Opinionated Review Summaries(2015)
; ; ; This paper describes a novel approach for summarising user-generated reviews for the purpose of explaining recommendations. Wedemonstrate our approach using TripAdvisor reviews.152 - PublicationFedFast: Going Beyond Average for Faster Training of Federated Recommender Systems(ACM, 2020-08-27)
; ; ; ; ; ; ; Federated learning (FL) is quickly becoming the de facto standard for the distributed training of deep recommendation models, us-ing on-device user data and reducing server costs. In a typical FLprocess, a central server tasks end-users to train a shared recommen-dation model using their local data. The local models are trained over several rounds on the users’ devices and the server combinesthem into a global model, which is sent to the devices for the pur-pose of providing recommendations. Standard FL approaches userandomly selected users for training at each round, and simply average their local models to compute the global model. The resulting federated recommendation models require significant client effortto train and many communication rounds before they converge to asatisfactory accuracy. Users are left with poor quality recommendations until the late stages of training. We present a novel technique, FedFast, to accelerate distributed learning which achieves goodaccuracy for all users very early in the training process. We achievethis by sampling from a diverse set of participating clients in each training round and applying an active aggregation method that propagates the updated model to the other clients. Consequently, with FedFast the users benefit from far lower communication costsand more accurate models that can be consumed anytime during the training process even at the very early stages. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across a variety of benchmark datasetsand in comparison to state-of-the-art recommendation techniques522Scopus© Citations 92 - PublicationNews Recommenders: Real-Time, Real-Life ExperiencesIn this paper we share our experiences of working with a real-time news recommendation framework with real-world user and news data. We discuss the challenges faced while working in such a noisy but uniquely real-world context. Specifically, we focus on an initial evaluation of a 12 different news recommendation algorithms across 7 different German news sites, including general news, sports, business, and technology related news sites. We compare the performance of these algorithms, paying particular attention to their relative click-through rates and how this can vary with time of day and news domain.
584Scopus© Citations 5 - PublicationOn the Use of Opinionated Explanations to Rank and Justify Recommendations(Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2016-05-18)
; ; Explanations are an important part of modern recommendersystems. They help users to make better decisions, improvethe conversion rate of browsers into buyers, and lead togreater user satisfaction in the long-run. In this paper, we extendrecent work on generating explanations by mining userreviews. We show how this leads to a novel explanation formatthat can be tailored for the needs of the individual user.Moreover, we demonstrate how the explanations themselvescan be used to rank recommendations so that items which canbe associated with a more compelling explanation are rankedahead of items that have a less compelling explanation. Weevaluate our approach using a large-scale, real-world TripAdvisordataset.174 - PublicationUsing Case-Based Reasoning to Predict Marathon Performance and Recommend Tailored Training PlansTraining for the marathon, especially a first marathon, is always a challenge. Many runners struggle to find the right balance between their workouts and their recovery, often leading to sub-optimal performance on race-day or even injury during training. We describe and evaluate a novel case-based reasoning system to help marathon runners as they train in two ways. First, it uses a case-base of training/workouts and race histories to predict future marathon times for a target runner, throughout their training program, helping runners to calibrate their progress and, ultimately, plan their race-day pacing. Second, the system recommends tailored training plans to runners, adapted for their current goal-time target, and based on the training plans of similar runners who have achieved this time. We evaluate the system using a dataset of more than 21,000 unique runners and 1.5 million training/workout sessions.
77Scopus© Citations 17