Announcing a contest for the best RecSys-related limerick! Winner to be recognized at the 2012 conference.
Prize: 100 Euros, possibly to be split among multiple winners.
Post your limerick as a comment in response to this post. Keep it appropriate for all ages, please, but it’s OK if mathematical sophistication is required!
Answers to frequently questions that might get asked infrequently:
- Judges TBD.
- No, we don’t promise to be fair or careful in our judging.
- No, even if there are many submissions we will not announce an acceptance rate.
- No, you shouldn’t put it on your CV if you win, unless you already have tenure.
- Yes, if you win you should spend the money buying a round at a pub in Dublin, or possibly make a road trip to Limerick.
[Originally posted by Paul Resnick, before ownership of the blog was transferred.]
The ACM Recommender Systems Conference Blog 
At this time I am going away to do my breakfast, once having my breakfast coming yet again to read other news.
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Pingback: RecSys 2012: Beyond Five Stars
A RecSys lass, at certain private events,
Found her convexities brought joyful laments.
But she said, “Quit yer whinin’.
You’ll get yer hill climbin’.
Just give me some gradient descent.”
There was once this guy, quite busy
Who was smitten by a very pretty missy
His experiments ended badly
When he asked her (quite sadly)
So, what is your RMSE?
Limericks are fun
Although rhyming is quite hard
Do haikus count too?
The recsys-guys thought is was time
to give this arrogant guy a subtle sign:
One who gets on our nerves
will get what he deserves
And be ridiculed in many a rhyme
A bunch of scientists in Hong Kong
studied and researched incredibly long
Thanks to last years tutorial by Bart
They all were incredibly smart
And statistics went no longer wrong
There once was a conference in Dublin,
Where the best papers was given by a woman.
There was much to commend her,
And her good recommender.
But the rest of the attendees were all men.
Roses are red this netflix service seems to be too.
Why do you guys all implement fancy recommender systems,
if we in Europe cannot use this service too :o)
There was a professor from Maine,
Who wanted to purchase a plane.
But with no recommender,
He was forced to surrender
And has never been heard from again.
The recommender folks jumped up and pleaded
As cuts to their disk space proceeded,
But the boss said “you know,
According to Paulo
10 ratings are all that are needed.”
In looking for trends that are new
We turned to the wisdom of few
But so many were they
That we soon had to say
My ol’collaborative filter will do!
There once was a man named Student
Who thought stats for beer was most prudent
But Bart was a pest
And nixed the T-Test
So tonight’s Guinness will taste like effluent.
a grad student needed a favor
to study his new k-nearest neighbor
his study filled to the brim
with grad students like him
and Bart rejected his paper!
The dating site would, every visit,
Preferences contentful elicit.
The latent factors at play
Came in fifty shades of grey,
Giving recommendations surprisingly explicit.
I purchased my travel to Dublin
With joy and excitement a-bubblin’
But the recommender was flitting
And had overfitting
So now I’m hitchiking from Lublin
A researcher went on a caper
To publish the fruits of his labour
But he wasn’t from Belgium
And users came seldom
So RecSys rejected his paper
I found an obvious improvement to my meta-limerick. Updated version:
A system that’ll instantly render
Based on your birthplace and gender
Some puerile rhymes
At a length of five lines
Now that’d be a fun recommender!
(sorry for previous not-limerick posts, my intention was not damaging this interesting challenge. This one gets closer to a Limerick)
All apologies for my anti-poetry
it comes from my past in the country,
the cows sang along
n’ rain all day long.
I am this strange southern chemistry.
– Why are you recommending me Pink Floyd, last.fm?
– I can’t explain, you would not understand. This is not how I am.
A system that’ll instantly render
Based on your age and your gender
Some puerile rhymes
At a length of five lines
Now that’d be a fun recommender!
i once got a freak rec-o-mmendation
for dinner at a breakfast lo-cation
the system flawed in my eyes
this recsys wasn’t contextualized!
but my dinner was eggs, toast, and bacon
there’s a conference we all highly rate
where accuracy results won’t be sate
the algorithms proposed
make matrices decomposed
but will the recommendations ever be great?
Accurate and novel
transparent and diverse (gee!)
I’ll write a paper for Recsys
and I’ll travel to Ireland again!
OK, maybe one more:
Minneapolis and then Lausanne
Then New York and then Europe Again
Barcelona did rate
And Chicago is great
Next a Guinnes in Dublin, oh man!
That Pariser guy warns of a bubble
Which he says will cause all of us trouble.
Sure we’ll get what we want,
But the filter will haunt
As diversity lies in the rubble.
We researchers who gather at RecSys
Know transparency lies at the nexus
Of control and of trust.
So explain well, we must,
And we make algorithms complexes!
A young lad with his life all a-kilter
Found a date by collab-rative filter,
As his profile grew,
He found lasses anew.
And his date? The young lad he did jilt her.