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Recommender Systems have become a very useful tool for a large variety of domains. Researchers have been attempting to improve their algorithms in order to issue better predictions to the users. However, one of the current challenges in the area refers to how to properly evaluate the predictions generated by a recommender system. In the extent of offline evaluations, some traditional concepts of evaluation have been explored, such as accuracy, Root Mean Square Error and P@N for top-k recommendations. In recent years, more research have proposed some new concepts such as novelty, diversity and serendipity. These concepts have been addressed with the goal to satisfy the users' requirements. Numerous definitions and metrics have been proposed in previous work. On the absence of a specific summarization on evaluations of recommendation combining traditional metrics and recent progresses, this paper surveys and organizes the main research that present definitions about concepts and propose metrics or strategies to evaluate recommendations. In addition, this survey also settles the relationship between the concepts, categorizes them according to their objectives and suggests potential future topics on user satisfaction.

Legal case retrieval is a specialized IR task that involves retrieving supporting cases given a query case. Compared with traditional ad-hoc text retrieval, the legal case retrieval task is more challenging since the query case is much longer and more complex than common keyword queries. Besides that, the definition of relevance between a query case and a supporting case is beyond general topical relevance and it is therefore difficult to construct a large-scale case retrieval dataset, especially one with accurate relevance judgments. To address these challenges, we propose BERT-PLI, a novel model that utilizes BERT to capture the semantic relationships at the paragraph-level and then infers the relevance between two cases by aggregating paragraph-level interactions. We fine-tune the BERT model with a relatively small-scale case law entailment dataset to adapt it to the legal scenario and employ a cascade framework to reduce the computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark of the relevant case retrieval task in COLIEE 2019. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing solutions.

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Explainability and effectiveness are two key aspects for building recommender systems. Prior efforts mostly focus on incorporating side information to achieve better recommendation performance. However, these methods have some weaknesses: (1) prediction of neural network-based embedding methods are hard to explain and debug;(2) symbolic, graph-based approaches (e.g., meta path-based models) require manual efforts and domain knowledge to define patterns and rules, and ignore the item association types (e.g. substitutable and complementary). In this paper, we propose a novel joint learning framework to integrate induction of explainable rules from knowledge graph with construction of a rule-guided neural recommendation model. The framework encourages two modules to complement each other in generating effective and explainable recommendation: 1) inductive rules, mined from item-centric knowledge graphs, summarize common multi-hop relational patterns for inferring different item associations and provide human-readable explanation for model prediction; 2) recommendation module can be augmented by induced rules and thus have better generalization ability dealing with the cold-start issue. Extensive experiments 1 show that our proposed method has achieved significant improvements in item recommendation over baselines on real-world datasets. Our model demonstrates robust performance over "noisy" item knowledge graphs, generated by linking item names to related entities. ACM Reference Format:

Recent studies on recommendation have largely focused on exploring state-of-the-art neural networks to improve the expressiveness of models, while typically apply the Negative Sampling (NS) strategy for efficient learning. Despite effectiveness, two important issues have not been well-considered in existing methods: 1) NS suffers from dramatic fluctuation, making sampling-based methods difficult to achieve the optimal ranking performance in practical applications; 2) although heterogeneous feedback (e.g., view, click, and purchase) is widespread in many online systems, most existing methods leverage only one primary type of user feedback such as purchase. In this work, we propose a novel non-sampling transfer learning solution, named Efficient Heterogeneous Collaborative Filtering (EHCF) for Top-N recommendation. It can not only model fine-grained user-item relations, but also efficiently learn model parameters from the whole heterogeneous data (including all unlabeled data) with a rather low time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that EHCF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation methods in both traditional (single-behavior) and heterogeneous scenarios. Moreover, EHCF shows significant improvements in training efficiency, making it more applicable to real-world large-scale systems. Our implementation has been released 1 to facilitate further developments on efficient whole-data based neural methods.

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