Ghazaleh Haratinezhad Torbati after defending her Thesis. Photo: private
On June 27, Ghazaleh Haratinezhad Torbati successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Textual User Profiles for Search-based Recommendation”. Ghazaleh Haratinezhad Torbati joined Saarland University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in September 2018 as a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Director Gerhard Weikum. She was a member of both the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science and the International Max Planck Research School. Her doctoral degree was awarded by Saarland University.
The abstract of her Thesis:
Search-based recommendation is a paradigm that combines users’ long-term profiles with their current search queries to guide the recommendation process. This dissertation investigates how user-generated text can serve as a valuable source for constructing textual user profiles, with an emphasis on transparency and scrutability, enabling users to understand and control their profiles. It makes three key contributions:
(1) demonstrating the effectiveness of sparse, questionnaire-based profiles for capturing core preferences;
(2) leveraging user-to-user chat data as a novel, richer profiling source; and
(3) developing methods to distill concise profiles from long, noisy review texts using a range of techniques.