But why?
I've added "why" links to the new "Pssst!" book recommendation feature. It'll give you an idea where your recommendations are coming from.
I'm nearly finished with yet another recommendation algorithm. Then I'll let them duke it out and users can decide which are the best. Or maybe I should have an algorithm to recommend an algorithm for you.
I'm nearly finished with yet another recommendation algorithm. Then I'll let them duke it out and users can decide which are the best. Or maybe I should have an algorithm to recommend an algorithm for you.
posted by Tim at 3:03 PM
23 Comments:
I can't wait: that's the kind of fight I actually like!
The 'why?' feature is nice, on the few occasions I actually don't know, or don't know precisely, why some things are being offered. It also shows that Dracula and Sheridan le Fanu between them give me waaay too many recommendations! :) A vampire lover I am not.
Is there a place we should report bugs, aside from in comments to blog posts? Maybe "bug reports" should be a feature...anyway, when uploading some covers I noticed that Arnold Toynbee's "Study of History" (ISBN 1566199379) is for some reason being treated as another edition of the completely unrelated book "A Christmas Story" (ISBN 0870990470)--the card for this book features a mix of tags, uploaded covers, and reviews from both books. I don't know if this is a symptom of a more general bug in the program that keeps track of multiple editions of the same book or if it's just an isolated thing, but I thought you should know...
Did someone already separate this book? That's the answer, but I'm confused if there's some other bug, or if someone saw this issue and did the separation.
Well, that's the problem with the current algorithm. The book-by-book suggestions work well, but the values they come up with are higher if the suggesting book's popularity is high. This means popular books have more "say" than others, when it should the opposite or at least unequal...
Working on it.
Arnold Toynbee's "Study of History" (ISBN 1566199379) is for some reason being treated as another edition of the completely unrelated book "A Christmas Story" (ISBN 0870990470)
Jessem, blog comments are generally a good place to discuss the blog post at hand. Bugs could either be emailed to Tim, or posted on the Google Group here, where everyone can assist and confirm/denounce the "bug".
"Study of History" does not appear to have "A Christmas Story" combined with it as an edition (it does not appear in the list of editions).
The only problem I could see is a user-provided cover and the sole review are for "A Christmas Story".
Perhaps someone had combined these two works incorrectly in the past, then later they had been seperated but the user-cover/review had somehow gotten left behind?
Sorry, it used to be common to bring up bugs in the comments threads but maybe that was before the Google group, which I had forgotten about. I posted a message about it in the group here.
"Study of History" does not appear to have "A Christmas Story" combined with it as an edition (it does not appear in the list of editions).
As I explain in the post, it's not in the "other copies and editions of this title" on the book information card, but the ISBN of "A Christmas Story" (0870990470) does appear in the "editions, by popularity" section, and Christmas-related tags still appear in the tags section.
I'm nearly finished with yet another recommendation algorithm. Then I'll let them duke it out and users can decide which are the best. Or maybe I should have an algorithm to recommend an algorithm for you.
I really think if you're going to give various versions of this and experiment with which is best, that it would be worthwhile to make a single list that takes both "also owned" and "also tagged" into account. There are surely a few books that are in both categories but on their own a bit too far down to make the top 100 that when combined would show up.
Also my recommendations for both seem too heavy in JK Rowling. Perhaps that's only because I've got a few translations of Harry in my list?
Frankly, I don't see a need of a new algorithm ... the "People with your books also have: non-fiction books" makes an almost PERFECT wish list of books that I would like to get!
My money's on the algorithm in the red trunks . . .
"The book-by-book suggestions work well, but the values they come up with are higher if the suggesting book's popularity is high."
Yea... My recommendations list (even with the "similarly tagged") starts with about 50 Harry Potter- and Lord of the Rings- related books... And I only own 2 and 1 books of those series, respectively! ToT Good thing you provided the "omit authors" feature...
I've got a weird bug issue that probably doesn't have anything to do with the new recommendation feature. Under reviews, where it shows how many other people have reviewed the same book as you, I've got a cluster of 4 books with (-1 review each). I know ElfQuest isn't terribly popular, but negative results?
on the "(-1 other reviews)" thing ... I think this is what is screwing up the "social data" icons (where books with reviews are not showing up with the "talk bubble") ... as of this morning the past 5 books I'd added (all in the past 2 weeks) did not have the talk bubble version of the icon, despite having reviews associated with them ... and all five had that "-1" ranking on the review list ... for some reason, this evening TWO of the books had dropped off that list and (a miracle!) their icons had acquired the talk bubble ... the other three books, however, were both on the "& others" review list at -1 and lacked the talk bubble on the icon ... so I can't help to think that the icon problem is a side-effect of what ever is causing that "-1" glitch!
- BTRIPP
I wish LT has another CC processor where I could subscribe with instead just paypal. They CC processor won't accept cc worldwide, juts countries they serve
Replying to Tartalom. A quick guess would be someone combining "T Wolfe" and "Thomas Wolfe" etc into Tom Wolfe.
...Separating the authors out isn't enough ~ after doing that, the merged books may need individually re-separating too (Tom Wolfe separate/combine works section); so they _then_ return to their spiritual author home. I'm sure another thinger will be able to explain it more clearly than me at this (Aust) hour.
Tim.. it's hard sometimes to find where a merged author has been merged TO.. e.g. the message at Thomas Wolfe author page says "combined with Thomas Wolfe" - not "go to Tom Wolfe". This adds to confusion. Is fixing this on the (long) list of requested changes? cheers, ryn
Lisa: Email me and let's work something out. Most countries are served well, but you can send me a cheque is you want. I'll upgrade your account as soon as you say you will.
On separating authors: I've got the details worked out. Now I need to implement it. :)
Can you put separating hopelessly entangled works on your list too? I can't see anyway for a user to separate this.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/833463
Kathryn [kathrynnd]
Hey! Don't forget that AL GORe invented the ALGORithm. :*)
Keep-on-a-coding....
Can you put separating hopelessly entangled works on your list too? I can't see anyway for a user to separate this.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/833463
Kathryn, I don't see what the trouble is. The list of books below your main title (The Christmas Story from the Gospels of Matthew & Luke by Toynbee) are those that are similarly tagged. In other words, these books simply have the same tags that you've assigned to your title. LibraryThing is not saying that they are the Toynbee book!
Or am I missing something here?
anonymous:
This has been hashed out on the Google Group. A _single edition_ (i.e. an atomic, inseparable LibraryThing unit) contains one copy of _The Christmas Story_ and two copies of _A Study of History_. Two of them were manually entered, and have no ISBN; the only MARC record associated with the edition is for _The Christmas Story_, and nobody over at the Google Group was able to figure out how they'd become intertwined or how, short of asking all three people involved to re-enter the work in question, to fix it (since it's not a case of overzealous combination, or of bad Amazon data. It's a real puzzle.
I second the "bug report" area instead of spending energy on "why" and various minor areas. Are we getting too social and not technical enough? My catalog is recently all messed. I need a display of the author's last name in alphabetical order but am getting a screen now that gives me my first entry as Lewis, followed by Andrews and then Ursula and on and on in a most unalphabetical mess. Very hard to handle. SOS
Can you detail that a bit more? Can you sort by other fields? You know that clicking on a column sorts by that, right? It is just the author column?
Tim
The "why" feature is nifty - thanks!
I also like the new (?) feature on the statistics page which notes the languages of one's collections.
One question about it though - how is that determined? I have about 34 books in Russian, and none of them showed up, and I know I have more than 2 books in Japanese. (If there was a box in the book-info field that one could type in a language tag, I'd be more than willing to do so, especially since I've already tagged these books as "foreign language" and "Russian" or "foreign language" and "Japanese", respectively.
Thanks again for all your hard work! :)
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