OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mis) Information Dissemination in WhatsApp: Gathering, Analyzing and Countermeasures
Authors: Gustavo Resende, Philipe F. Melo, Hugo Sousa, Johnnatan Messias, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jussara M. Almeida, Fabrício Benevenuto
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

WhatsApp has revolutionized the way people communicate and interact. It is not only cheaper than the traditional Short Message Service (SMS) communication but it also brings a new form of mobile communication: the group chats. Such groups are great forums for collective discussions on a variety of topics. In particular, in events of great social mobilization, such as strikes and electoral campaigns, WhatsApp group chats are very attractive as they facilitate information exchange among interested people. Yet, recent events have raised concerns about the spreading of misinformation in WhatsApp. In this work, we analyze information dissemination within WhatsApp, focusing on publicly accessible political-oriented groups, collecting all shared messages during major social events in Brazil: a national truck drivers' strike and the Brazilian presidential campaign. We analyze the types of content shared within such groups as well as the network structures that emerge from user interactions within and cross-groups. We then deepen our analysis by identifying the presence of misinformation among the shared images using labels provided by journalists and by a proposed automatic procedure based on Google searches. We identify the most important sources of the fake images and analyze how they propagate across WhatsApp groups and from/to other Web platforms.
Privacy-preserving AI services through data decentralization
Authors: Christian Meurisch, Bekir Bayrak, Max Mühlhäuser
Venue: Conference WWW 2020
Year: 2020

User services increasingly base their actions on AI models, e.g., to offer personalized and proactive support. However, the underlying AI algorithms require a continuous stream of personal data—leading to privacy issues, as users typically have to share this data out of their territory. Current privacy-preserving concepts are either not applicable to such AI-based services or to the disadvantage of any party. This paper presents PrivAI, a new decentralized and privacy-by-design platform for overcoming the need for sharing user data to benefit from personalized AI services. In short, PrivAI complements existing approaches to personal data stores, but strictly enforces the confinement of raw user data. PrivAI further addresses the resulting challenges by (1) dividing AI algorithms into cloud-based general model training, subsequent local personalization, and community-based sharing of model updates for new users; by (2) loading confidential AI models into a trusted execution environment, and thus, protecting provider’s intellectual property (IP). Our experiments show the feasibility and effectiveness of PrivAI with comparable performance as currently-practiced approaches.
Why Do People Buy Seemingly Irrelevant Items in Voice Product Search? On the Relation between Product Relevance and Customer Satisfaction in eCommerce
Authors: David Carmel, Elad Haramaty, Arnon Lazerson, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek
Venue: Conference WSDM 2020
Year: 2020

One emerging benefit of voice assistants is to facilitate product search experience, allowing users to express orally which products they seek, and taking actions on retrieved results such as adding them to their cart or sending the product details to their mobile phone for further examination. Looking at users' behavior in product search, supported by a digital voice assistant, we have observed an interesting phenomenon where users purchase or engage with search results that are objectively judged irrelevant to their queries. In this work, we analyze and characterize this phenomenon. We provide several hypotheses as to the reasons behind it, including users' personalized preferences, the product's popularity, the product's indirect relation with the query, the user's tolerance level, the query intent, and the product price. We address each hypothesis by conducting thorough data analyses and offer some insights with respect to users' purchase and engagement behavior with seemingly irrelevant results. We conclude with a discussion on how this analysis can be used to improve voice product search services.
Semantic product search
Authors: Priyanka Nigam, Yiwei Song, Vijai Mohan, Vihan Lakshman, Weitian Allen Ding, Ankit Shingavi, Choon Hui Teo, Hao Gu, Bing Yin
Venue: Conference KDD 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of semantic matching in product search, that is, given a customer query, retrieve all semantically related products from the catalog. Pure lexical matching via an inverted index falls short in this respect due to several factors: a) lack of understanding of hypernyms, synonyms, and antonyms, b) fragility to morphological variants (e.g. "woman" vs. "women"), and c) sensitivity to spelling errors. To address these issues, we train a deep learning model for semantic matching using customer behavior data. Much of the recent work on large-scale semantic search using deep learning focuses on ranking for web search. In contrast, semantic matching for product search presents several novel challenges, which we elucidate in this paper. We address these challenges by a) developing a new loss function that has an inbuilt threshold to differentiate between random negative examples, impressed but not purchased examples, and positive examples (purchased items), b) using average pooling in conjunction with n-grams to capture short-range linguistic patterns, c) using hashing to handle out of vocabulary tokens, and d) using a model parallel training architecture to scale across 8 GPUs. We present compelling offline results that demonstrate at least 4.7% improvement in Recall@100 and 14.5% improvement in mean average precision (MAP) over baseline state-of-the-art semantic search methods using the same tokenization method. Moreover, we present results and discuss learnings from online A/B tests which demonstrate the efficacy of our method.
Optimizing web search using web click-through data
Authors: Gui-Rong Xue, Hua-Jun Zeng, Zheng Chen, Yong Yu, Wei-Ying Ma, Wensi Xi, Weiguo Fan
Venue: Conference CIKM 2004
Year: 2004

The performance of web search engines may often deteriorate due to the diversity and noisy information contained within web pages. User click-through data can be used to introduce more accurate description (metadata) for web pages, and to improve the search performance. However, noise and incompleteness, sparseness, and the volatility of web pages and are three major challenges for research work on user click-through log mining. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative reinforced algorithm to utilize the user click-through data to improve search performance. The algorithm fully explores the interrelations between and web pages, and effectively finds virtual queries for web pages and overcomes the challenges discussed above. Experiment results on a large set of MSN click-through log data show a significant improvement on search performance over the naive query log mining algorithm as well as the baseline search engine.
Making Sense of Entities and Quantities in Web Tables
Authors: Yusra Ibrahim, Mirek Riedewald, Gerhard Weikum
Venue: Conference CIKM 2016
Year: 2016

HTML tables and spreadsheets on the Internet or in enterprise intranets often contain valuable information, but are created ad-hoc. As a result, they usually lack systematic names for column headers and clear vocabulary for cell values. This limits the re-use of such tables and creates a huge heterogeneity problem when comparing or aggregating multiple tables.
Web-scale Knowledge Collection
Authors: Colin Lockard, Prashant Shiralkar, Xin Luna Dong, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Venue: Conference WSDM 2020
Year: 2020

How do we surface the large amount of information present in HTML documents on the Web, from news articles to scientific papers to Rotten Tomatoes pages to tables of sports scores? Such information can enable a variety of applications including knowledge base construction, question answering, recommendation, and more. In this tutorial, we present approaches for Information Extraction (IE) from Web data that can be differentiated along two key dimensions: 1) the diversity in data modality that is leveraged, e.g. text, visual, XML/HTML, and 2) the thrust to develop scalable approaches with zero to limited human supervision. We cover the key ideas and intuition behind existing approaches to emphasize their applicability and potential in various settings.
Profiling the Potential of Web Tables for Augmenting Cross-domain Knowledge Bases
Authors: Dominique Ritze, Oliver Lehmberg, Yaser Oulabi, Christian Bizer
Venue: Conference WWW 2016
Year: 2016

Cross-domain knowledge bases such as DBpedia, YAGO, or the Google Knowledge Graph have gained increasing attention over the last years and are starting to be deployed within various use cases. However, the content of such knowledge bases is far from being complete, far from always being correct, and suffers from deprecation (i.e. population numbers become outdated after some time). Hence, there are efforts to leverage various types of Web data to complement, update and extend such knowledge bases. A source of Web data that potentially provides a very wide coverage are millions of relational HTML tables that are found on the Web. The existing work on using data from Web tables to augment cross-domain knowledge bases reports only aggregated performance numbers. The actual content of the Web tables and the topical areas of the knowledge bases that can be complemented using the tables remain unclear. In this paper, we match a large, publicly available Web table corpus to the DBpedia knowledge base. Based on the matching results, we profile the potential of Web tables for augmenting different parts of cross-domain knowledge bases and report detailed statistics about classes, properties, and instances for which missing values can be filled using Web table data as evidence. In order to estimate the potential quality of the new values, we empirically examine the Local Closed World Assumption and use it to determine the maximal number of correct facts that an ideal data fusion strategy could generate. Using this as ground truth, we compare three data fusion strategies and conclude that knowledge-based trust outperforms PageRank- and voting-based fusion.
Oag: Toward linking large-scale heterogeneous entity graphs
Authors: Fanjin Zhang, Xiao Liu, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong, Peiran Yao, Jie Zhang, Xiaotao Gu, Yan Wang, Bin Shao, Rui Li, Kuansan Wang
Venue: Conference KDD 2019
Year: 2019

Linking entities from different sources is a fundamental task in building open knowledge graphs. Despite much research conducted in related fields, the challenges of linkinglarge-scale heterogeneous entity graphs are far from resolved. Employing two billion-scale academic entity graphs (Microsoft Academic Graph and AMiner) as sources for our study, we propose a unified framework --- LinKG --- to address the problem of building a large-scale linked entity graph. LinKG is coupled with three linking modules, each of which addresses one category of entities. To link word-sequence-based entities (e.g., venues), we present a long short-term memory network-based method for capturing the dependencies. To link large-scale entities (e.g., papers), we leverage locality-sensitive hashing and convolutional neural networks for scalable and precise linking. To link entities with ambiguity (e.g., authors), we propose heterogeneous graph attention networks to model different types of entities. Our extensive experiments and systematical analysis demonstrate that LinKG can achieve linking accuracy with an F1-score of 0.9510, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art. LinKG has been deployed to Microsoft Academic Search and AMiner to integrate the two large graphs. We have published the linked results---the Open Academic Graph (OAG)\footnote\urlhttps://www.openacademic.ai/oag/ , making it the largest publicly available heterogeneous academic graph to date.
Amazon search: The joy of ranking products
Authors: Daria Sorokina, Erick Cantú-Paz
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2016
Year: 2016

Amazon is one of the world's largest e-commerce sites and Amazon Search powers the majority of Amazon's sales. As a consequence, even small improvements in relevance ranking both positively influence the shopping experience of millions of customers and significantly impact revenue. In the past, Amazon's product search engine consisted of several hand-tuned ranking functions using a handful of input features. A lot has changed since then. In this talk we are going to cover a number of relevance algorithms used in Amazon Search today. We will describe a general machine learning framework used for ranking within categories, blending separate rankings in All Product Search, NLP techniques used for matching queries and products, and algorithms targeted at unique tasks of specific categories --- books and fashion.
Event-Driven Analysis of Crowd Dynamics in the Black Lives Matter Online Social Movement
Authors: Hao Peng, Ceren Budak, Daniel M. Romero
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Online social movements (OSMs) play a key role in promoting democracy in modern society. Most online activism is largely driven by critical offline events. Among many studies investigating collective behavior in OSMs, few has explored the interaction between crowd dynamics and their offline context. Here, focusing on the Black Lives Matter OSM and utilizing an event-driven approach on a dataset of 36 million tweets and thousands of offline events, we study how different types of offline events-police violence and heightened protests-influence crowd behavior over time. We find that police violence events and protests play important roles in the recruitment process. Moreover, by analyzing the re-participation dynamics and patterns of social interactions, we find that, in the long term, users who joined the movement during police violence events and protests show significantly more commitment than those who joined during other times. However, users recruited during other times are more committed to the movement than the other two groups in the short term. Furthermore, we observe that social ties formed during police violence events are more likely to be sustained over time than those formed during other times. Contrarily, ties formed during protests are the least likely to be maintained. Altogether, our results shed light on the impact of bursting events on the recruitment, retention, and communication patterns of collective behavior in the Black Lives Matter OSM.
Ranking in heterogeneous social media
Authors: Min-Hsuan Tsai, Charu C. Aggarwal, Thomas S. Huang
Venue: Conference WSDM 2014
Year: 2014

The problem of image search has been studied extensively in recent years because of the large and increasing repositories of images on the web, social media, and other linked networks. Most of the available techniques for keyword-based image search on the web use the text in the surrounding or linked text in order to retrieve related images. Many image repositories on the web are built upon social media platforms such as Flickr. Such platforms provide a rich level of information in terms of the user linkage information to images, tags or other comments which are contributed by the users. It is reasonable to assume that the content of the images, users and other social cues such as tags and comments are often related to one another. Therefore, such cues can be useful for improving the effectiveness of search and ranking algorithms. In this paper, we propose SocialRank, which is a technique for using social hints in order to improve the image search and ranking process. Furthermore, we propose a holistic framework to combine social tags, social network text, linkage between actors and images, as well as the actual image features in order to create a ranking technique for image search. We design a PageRank-like method which can combine these different methods in order to provide an effective method for image search and ranking in social networks.
Inform: Individual fairness on graph mining
Authors: Jian Kang 0008, Jingrui He, Ross Maciejewski, Hanghang Tong
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Algorithmic bias and fairness in the context of graph mining have largely remained nascent. The sparse literature on fair graph mining has almost exclusively focused on group-based fairness notation. However, the notion of individual fairness, which promises the fairness notion at a much finer granularity, has not been well studied. This paper presents the first principled study of Individual Fairness on gRaph Mining (InFoRM). First, we present a generic definition of individual fairness for graph mining which naturally leads to a quantitative measure of the potential bias in graph mining results. Second, we propose three mutually complementary algorithmic frameworks to mitigate the proposed individual bias measure, namely debiasing the input graph, debiasing the mining model and debiasing the mining results. Each algorithmic framework is formulated from the optimization perspective, using effective and efficient solvers, which are applicable to multiple graph mining tasks. Third, accommodating individual fairness is likely to change the original graph mining results without the fairness consideration. We conduct a thorough analysis to develop an upper bound to characterize the cost (i.e., the difference between the graph mining results with and without the fairness consideration). We perform extensive experimental evaluations on real-world datasets to demonstrate the efficacy and generality of the proposed methods.
Fairness-Aware PageRank
Authors: Sotiris Tsioutsiouliklis, Evaggelia Pitoura, Panayiotis Tsaparas, Ilias Kleftakis, Nikos Mamoulis
Venue: Conference WWW 2021
Year: 2021

Algorithmic fairness has attracted significant attention in the past years. In this paper, we consider fairness for link analysis and in particular for the celebrated Pagerank algorithm. Given that the nodes in a network belong to groups (for example, based on demographic or other characteristics), we provide a parity-based definition of fairness that imposes constraints on the proportion of Pagerank allocated to the members of each group. We propose two families of fair Pagerank algorithms: the first (Fairness-Sensitive Pagerank) modifies the jump vector of the Pagerank algorithm to enforce fairness; the second (Locally Fair Pagerank) imposes a fair behavior per node. We then define a stronger fairness requirement, termed universal personalized fairness, that asks that the derived personalized pageranks of all nodes are fair. We prove that the locally fair algorithms achieve also universal personalized fairness, and furthermore, we prove that this is the only family of algorithms with this property, establishing an equivalence between universal personalized fairness and local fairness. We also consider the problem of achieving fairness while minimizing the utility loss with respect to the original Pagerank algorithm. We present experiments with real and synthetic networks that examine the fairness of the original Pagerank and demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively the properties of our algorithms.
Category-aware Collaborative Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Renqin Cai, Jibang Wu, Aidan San, Chong Wang, Hongning Wang
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2021
Year: 2021

Sequential recommendation is the task of predicting the next items for users based on their interaction history. Modeling the dependence of the next action on the past actions accurately is crucial to this problem. Moreover, sequential recommendation often faces serious sparsity of item-to-item transitions in a user's action sequence, which limits the practical utility of such solutions.
Attentive Sequential Models of Latent Intent for Next Item Recommendation
Authors: Md. Mehrab Tanjim, Congzhe Su, Ethan Benjamin, Diane Hu, Liangjie Hong, Julian J. McAuley
Venue: Conference WWW 2020
Year: 2020

Users exhibit different intents across e-commerce services (e.g. discovering items, purchasing gifts, etc.) which drives them to interact with a wide variety of items in multiple ways (e.g. click, add-to-cart, add-to-favorites, purchase). To give better recommendations, it is important to capture user intent, in addition to considering their historic interactions. However these intents are by definition latent, as we observe only a user’s interactions, and not their underlying intent. To discover such latent intents, and use them effectively for recommendation, in this paper we propose an Attentive Sequential model of Latent Intent (ASLI in short). Our model first learns item similarities from users’ interaction histories via a self-attention layer, then uses a Temporal Convolutional Network layer to obtain a latent representation of the user’s intent from her actions on a particular category. We use this representation to guide an attentive model to predict the next item. Results from our experiments show that our model can capture the dynamics of user behavior and preferences, leading to state-of-the-art performance across datasets from two major e-commerce platforms, namely Etsy and Alibaba.
Learning transferrable parameters for long-tailed sequential user behavior modeling
Authors: Jianwen Yin, Chenghao Liu, Weiqing Wang 0001, Jianling Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Sequential user behavior modeling plays a crucial role in online user-oriented services, such as product purchasing, news feed consumption, and online advertising. The performance of sequential modeling heavily depends on the scale and quality of historical behaviors. However, the number of user behaviors inherently follows a long-tailed distribution, which has been seldom explored. In this work, we argue that focusing on tail users could bring more benefits and address the long tails issue by learning transferrable parameters from both optimization and feature perspectives. Specifically, we propose a gradient alignment optimizer and adopt an adversarial training scheme to facilitate knowledge transfer from the head to the tail. Such methods can also deal with the cold-start problem of new users. Moreover, it could be directly adaptive to various well-established sequential models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets verify the superiority of our framework compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.