Turn-Taking Behavior in a Human Tutoring Corpus by Zahra Rahimi
In their research, Zahra and Homa, analyze turn-taking behavior between students in a human-human spoken tutoring system. This analysis could be helpful in understanding how users from different demographics interact with a tutor. In this study, they use sequences of speech and silence over time to mark ‘Active’ and ‘In-active’ states the dialogues between the tutor and the student. Considering both the tutor and student together we have four different combinations of these states, in which each one of them being active or inactive. The next step is to learn (using a semi-Markov process) a model from the dialogues. Using this model, they are able to measure the association of these models with features such as gender, scores obtained in the pre-test etc. The experiments provide some interesting results such as female students speak simultaneously longer with the tutor than male students; while their activities are less than their male counterparts. Also, for the students with a lower pre-test scores, the tutor tended to speak for longer time.
Content-Based Cross-Domain Recommendations Using Segmented Models by Shaghayegh Sahebi
Sherry presented her work on the job recommendation systems in her talk. This was done as part of her internship at LinkedIn last summer. The site originally used a single model to make job recommendations to the users by selecting features from their profiles. But, these profiles tend to vary a lot according to the job function the users play and the industry they are in. Professionals in academia, for example, may put a very different set of information on their resume as opposed to a banking executive. With this new study, they wish to segment users using these very features (current job function and industry etc.) before sending them to the recommender systems. This allows them to develop an efficient method of feature augmentation and adapt their algorithms.
The model was built and evaluated based on some pre-collected data. They evaluated the accuracy of the system in recommending the jobs that the users applied to. This, however, restricted them to a certain extent and an online A/B testing is still under process. We’ll have to wait and watch for the results to find out if they do better than the one-size-fits-all model that is currently in place.
Further Reading
- Z. Rahimi, Homa B. Hashemi “Turn-Taking Behavior in Human Tutoring Corpus.” AIED 2013. Available: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39112-5_111