Existing document filtering systems learn user profiles based on user relevance feedback on documents. In some cases, users may have prior knowledge about what features are important. For example, a Spanish speaker may only want news written in Spanish, and thus a relevant document should contain the feature "Language: Spanish"; a researcher focusing on HIV knows an article with the medical subject "Subject: AIDS" is very likely to be relevant to him her. Semi-structured documents with rich metadata are increasingly prevalent on the Internet. Motivated by the well-adopted faceted search interface in e-commerce, we study the exploitation of user prior knowledge on faceted features for semi-structured document filtering. We envision two faceted feedback mechanisms, and propose a novel user profile learning algorithm that can incorporate user feedback on features. To evaluate the proposed work, we use two data sets from the TREC filtering track, and conduct a user study on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our experiment results show that user feedback on faceted features is useful for filtering. The proposed user profile learning algorithm can effectively learn from user feedback on both documents and features, and performs better than several existing methods.
@cite_9: It is difficult to apply machine learning to new domains because often we lack labeled problem instances. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem that leverages domain knowledge in the form of affinities between input features and classes. For example, in a baseball vs. hockey text classification problem, even without any labeled data, we know that the presence of the word puck is a strong indicator of hockey. We refer to this type of domain knowledge as a labeled feature. In this paper, we propose a method for training discriminative probabilistic models with labeled features and unlabeled instances. Unlike previous approaches that use labeled features to create labeled pseudo-instances, we use labeled features directly to constrain the model's predictions on unlabeled instances. We express these soft constraints using generalized expectation (GE) criteria --- terms in a parameter estimation objective function that express preferences on values of a model expectation. In this paper we train multinomial logistic regression models using GE criteria, but the method we develop is applicable to other discriminative probabilistic models. The complete objective function also includes a Gaussian prior on parameters, which encourages generalization by spreading parameter weight to unlabeled features. Experimental results on text classification data sets show that this method outperforms heuristic approaches to training classifiers with labeled features. Experiments with human annotators show that it is more beneficial to spend limited annotation time labeling features rather than labeling instances. For example, after only one minute of labeling features, we can achieve 80 accuracy on the ibm vs. mac text classification problem using GE-FL, whereas ten minutes labeling documents results in an accuracy of only 77
This paper differs from the prior work by focusing on a different task: adaptive information filtering. Some of the techniques we tried in this paper are motivated by the prior work. The new user profile learning algorithm proposed in this paper is motivated by @cite_9 , however, with significant differences. First, our algorithm is designed to incorporate two types of user feedback, that is, to learn from labeled instances and features simultaneously in order to fit the filtering task where users may provide mixed types of feedback. In our algorithm, we use a unified loss function to combine user feedback on both instances and features. Secondly, our model is designed to capture the sufficiency and necessity of user-labeled features. The assumption of our model is users can identify important features and an important feature should have a high correlation with the document label. To measure this correlation, we propose the concepts of sufficiency and necessity and explicitly capture them in our algorithm.