OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Object matching in tweets with spatial models
Authors: Nilesh N. Dalvi, Ravi Kumar, Bo Pang
Venue: Conference WSDM 2012
Year: 2012

Despite their 140-character limitation, tweets embody a lot of valuable information, especially temporal and spatial. In this paper we study the geographic aspects of tweets, for a given object domain. We propose a user-level model for spatial encoding in tweets that goes beyond the explicit geo-coding or place name mentions; this model can be used to match objects to tweets. We illustrate our model and methodology using restaurants as the objects, and show a significant improvement in performance over using standard language models. En route, we obtain a method to geolocate users who tweet about geolocated objects; this may be of independent interest.
The Long-Standing Privacy Debate: Mobile Websites vs Mobile Apps
Authors: Elias P. Papadopoulos, Michalis Diamantaris, Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Thanasis Petsas, Sotiris Ioannidis, Evangelos P. Markatos
Venue: Conference WWW 2017
Year: 2017

The vast majority of online services nowadays, provide both a mobile friendly website and a mobile application to their users. Both of these choices are usually released for free, with their developers, usually gaining revenue by allowing advertisements from ad networks to be embedded into their content. In order to provide more personalized and thus more effective advertisements, ad networks usually deploy pervasive user tracking, raising this way significant privacy concerns. As a consequence, the users do not have to think only their convenience before deciding which choice to use while accessing a service: web or app, but also which one harms their privacy the least.
Opinion observer: Analyzing and comparing opinions on the web
Authors: Bing Liu, Minqing Hu, Junsheng Cheng
Venue: Conference WWW 2005
Year: 2005

The Web has become an excellent source for gathering consumer opinions. There are now numerous Web sites containing such opinions, e.g., customer reviews of products, forums, discussion groups, and blogs. This paper focuses on online customer reviews of products. It makes two contributions. First, it proposes a novel framework for analyzing and comparing consumer opinions of competing products. A prototype system called Opinion Observer is also implemented. The system is such that with a single glance of its visualization, the user is able to clearly see the strengths and weaknesses of each product in the minds of consumers in terms of various product features. This comparison is useful to both potential customers and product manufacturers. For a potential customer, he/she can see a visual side-by-side and feature-by-feature comparison of consumer opinions on these products, which helps him/her to decide which product to buy. For a product manufacturer, the comparison enables it to easily gather marketing intelligence and product benchmarking information. Second, a new technique based on language pattern mining is proposed to extract product features from Pros and Cons in a particular type of reviews. Such features form the basis for the above comparison. Experimental results show that the technique is highly effective and outperform existing methods significantly.
Representation interpretation with spatial encoding and multimodal analytics
Authors: Ninghao Liu, Mengnan Du, Xia Hu
Venue: Conference WSDM 2019
Year: 2019

Representation learning models map data instances into a low-dimensional vector space, thus facilitating the deployment of subsequent models such as classification and clustering models, or the implementation of downstream applications such as recommendation and anomaly detection. However, the outcome of representation learning is difficult to be directly understood by users, since each dimension of the latent space may not have any specific meaning. Understanding representation learning could be beneficial to many applications. For example, in recommender systems, knowing why a user instance is mapped to a certain position in the latent space may unveil the user's interests and profile. In this paper, we propose an interpretation framework to understand and describe how representation vectors distribute in the latent space. Specifically, we design a coding scheme to transform representation instances into spatial codes to indicate their locations in the latent space. Following that, a multimodal autoencoder is built for generating the description of a representation instance given its spatial codes. The coding scheme enables indication of position with different granularity. The incorporation of autoencoder makes the framework capable of dealing with different types of data. Several metrics are designed to evaluate interpretation results. Experiments under various application scenarios and different representation learning models are conducted to demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework.
A piggyback system for joint entity mention detection and linking in web queries
Authors: Marco Cornolti, Paolo Ferragina, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Stefan Rüd, Hinrich Schütze
Venue: Conference WWW 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper we study the problem of linking open-domain web-search queries towards entities drawn from the full entity inventory of Wikipedia articles. We introduce SMAPH-2, a second-order approach that, by piggybacking on a web search engine, alleviates the noise and irregularities that characterize the language of queries and puts queries in a larger context in which it is easier to make sense of them. The key algorithmic idea underlying SMAPH-2 is to first discover a candidate set of entities and then link-back those entities to their mentions occurring in the input query. This allows us to confine the possible concepts pertinent to the query to only the ones really mentioned in it. The link-back is implemented via a collective disambiguation step based upon a supervised ranking model that makes one joint prediction for the annotation of the complete query optimizing directly the F1 measure. We evaluate both known features, such as word embeddings and semantic relatedness among entities, and several novel features such as an approximate distance between mentions and entities (which can handle spelling errors). We demonstrate that SMAPH-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the [email protected] benchmark. We also publish GERDAQ (General Entity Recognition, Disambiguation and Annotation in Queries), a novel, public dataset built specifically for web-query entity linking via a crowdsourcing effort. SMAPH-2 outperforms the benchmarks by comparable margins also on GERDAQ.
Robust and collective entity disambiguation through semantic embeddings
Authors: Stefan Zwicklbauer, Christin Seifert, Michael Granitzer
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2016
Year: 2016

Entity disambiguation is the task of mapping ambiguous terms in natural-language text to its entities in a knowledge base. It finds its application in the extraction of structured data in RDF (Resource Description Framework) from textual documents, but equally so in facilitating artificial intelligence applications, such as Semantic Search, Reasoning and Question & Answering. We propose a new collective, graph-based disambiguation algorithm utilizing semantic entity and document embeddings for robust entity disambiguation. Robust thereby refers to the property of achieving better than state-of-the-art results over a wide range of very different data sets. Our approach is also able to abstain if no appropriate entity can be found for a specific surface form. Our evaluation shows, that our approach achieves significantly (>5%) better results than all other publicly available disambiguation algorithms on 7 of 9 datasets without data set specific tuning. Moreover, we discuss the influence of the quality of the knowledge base on the disambiguation accuracy and indicate that our algorithm achieves better results than non-publicly available state-of-the-art algorithms.
Mining for Causal Relationships: A Data-Driven Study of the Islamic State
Authors: Andrew Stanton, Amanda Thart, Ashish Jain, Priyank Vyas, Arpan Chatterjee, Paulo Shakarian
Venue: Conference KDD 2015
Year: 2015

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is a dominant insurgent group operating in Iraq and Syria that rose to prominence when it took over Mosul in June, 2014. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach to analyzing this group using a dataset consisting of 2200 incidents of military activity surrounding ISIS and the forces that oppose it (including Iraqi, Syrian, and the American-led coalition). We combine ideas from logic programming and causal reasoning to mine for association rules for which we present evidence of causality. We present relationships that link ISIS vehicle-bourne improvised explosive device (VBIED) activity in Syria with military operations in Iraq, coalition air strikes, and ISIS IED activity, as well as rules that may serve as indicators of spikes in indirect fire, suicide attacks, and arrests.
Unsupervised prediction of citation influences
Authors: Laura Dietz, Steffen Bickel, Tobias Scheffer
Venue: Conference ICML 2007
Year: 2007

Abstract Publication repositories contain an abundance of information about the \nevolution of scientific research areas. We address the problem of creating a \nvisualization of a research area that describes the flow of topics between \npapers, quantifies the impact that papers have on each other, and helps to \nidentify key contributions. To this end, we devise a probabilistic topic model \nthat explains the generation of documents; the model incorporates the aspects \nof topical innovation and topical inheritance via citations. We evaluate the \nmodel's ability to predict the strength of influence of citations against \nmanually rated citations.
Robust multivariate autoregression for anomaly detection in dynamic product ratings
Authors: Nikou Günnemann, Stephan Günnemann, Christos Faloutsos
Venue: Conference WWW 2014
Year: 2014

User provided rating data about products and services is one key feature of websites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, or Yelp. Since these ratings are rather static but might change over time, a temporal analysis of rating distributions provides deeper insights into the evolution of a products' quality. Given a time-series of rating distributions, in this work, we answer the following questions: (1) How to detect the base behavior of users regarding a product's evaluation over time? (2) How to detect points in time where the rating distribution differs from this base behavior, e.g., due to attacks or spontaneous changes in the product's quality? To achieve these goals, we model the base behavior of users regarding a product as a latent multivariate autoregressive process. This latent behavior is mixed with a sparse anomaly signal finally leading to the observed data. We propose an efficient algorithm solving our objective and we present interesting findings on various real world datasets.
Detecting anomalies in dynamic rating data: A robust probabilistic model for rating evolution
Authors: Stephan Günnemann, Nikou Günnemann, Christos Faloutsos
Venue: Conference KDD 2014
Year: 2014

Rating data is ubiquitous on websites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, or Yelp. Since ratings are not static but given at various points in time, a temporal analysis of rating data provides deeper insights into the evolution of a product's quality. In this work, we tackle the following question: Given the time stamped rating data for a product or service, how can we detect the general rating behavior of users as well as time intervals where the ratings behave anomalous? We propose a Bayesian model that represents the rating data as sequence of categorical mixture models. In contrast to existing methods, our method does not require any aggregation of the input but it operates on the original time stamped data. To capture the dynamic effects of the ratings, the categorical mixtures are temporally constrained: Anomalies can occur in specific time intervals only and the general rating behavior should evolve smoothly over time. Our method automatically determines the intervals where anomalies occur, and it captures the temporal effects of the general behavior by using a state space model on the natural parameters of the categorical distributions. For learning our model, we propose an efficient algorithm combining principles from variational inference and dynamic programming. In our experimental study we show the effectiveness of our method and we present interesting discoveries on multiple real world datasets.
An experimental study on implicit social recommendation
Authors: Hao Ma
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2013
Year: 2013

Social recommendation problems have drawn a lot of attention recently due to the prevalence of social networking sites. The experiments in previous literature suggest that social information is very effective in improving traditional recommendation algorithms. However, explicit social information is not always available in most of the recommender systems, which limits the impact of social recommendation techniques. In this paper, we study the following two research problems: (1) In some systems without explicit social information, can we still improve recommender systems using implicit social information? (2) In the systems with explicit social information, can the performance of using implicit social information outperform that of using explicit social information? In order to answer these two questions, we conduct comprehensive experimental analysis on three recommendation datasets. The result indicates that: (1) Implicit user and item social information, including similar and dissimilar relationships, can be employed to improve traditional recommendation methods. (2) When comparing implicit social information with explicit social information, the performance of using implicit information is slightly worse. This study provides additional insights to social recommendation techniques, and also greatly widens the utility and spreads the impact of previous and upcoming social recommendation approaches.
Modeling language discrepancy for cross-lingual sentiment analysis
Authors: Qiang Chen, Chenliang Li, Wenjie Li
Venue: Conference CIKM 2017
Year: 2017

Language discrepancy is inherent and be part of human languages. Thereby, the same sentiment would be expressed in different patterns across different languages. Unfortunately, the language discrepancy is overlooked by existing works of cross-lingual sentiment analysis. How to accommodate the inherent language discrepancy in sentiment for better cross-lingual sentiment analysis is still an open question. In this paper, we aim to model the language discrepancy in sentiment expressions as intrinsic bilingual polarity correlations (IBPCs) for better cross-lingual sentiment analysis. Specifically, given a document of source language and its translated counterpart, we firstly devise a sentiment representation learning phase to extract monolingual sentiment representation for each document in this pair separately. Then, the two sentiment representations are transferred to be the points in a shared latent space, named hybrid sentiment space. The language discrepancy is then modeled as a fixed transfer vector under each particular polarity between the source and target languages in this hybrid sentiment space. Two relation-based bilingual sentiment transfer models (i.e., RBST-s, RBST-hp) are proposed to learn the fixped transfer vectors. The sentiment of a target-language document is then determined based on the transfer vector between it and its translated counterpart in the hybrid sentiment space. Extensive experiments over a real-world benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed models against several state-of-the-art alternatives.
Through a gender lens: learning usage patterns of emojis from large-scale android users
Authors: Zhenpeng Chen, Xuan Lu, Wei Ai, Huoran Li, Qiaozhu Mei, Xuanzhe Liu
Venue: Conference WWW 2018
Year: 2018

Based on a large data set of emoji using behavior collected from smartphone users over the world, this paper investigates gender-specific usage of emojis. We present various interesting findings that evidence a considerable difference in emoji usage by female and male users. Such a difference is significant not just in a statistical sense; it is sufficient for a machine learning algorithm to accurately infer the gender of a user purely based on the emojis used in their messages. In real world scenarios where gender inference is a necessity, models based on emojis have unique advantages over existing models that are based on textual or contextual information. Emojis not only provide language-independent indicators, but also alleviate the risk of leaking private user information through the analysis of text and metadata.
Leveraging large amounts of weakly supervised data for multi-language sentiment classification
Authors: Jan Deriu, Aurélien Lucchi, Valeria De Luca, Aliaksei Severyn, Simon Müller, Mark Cieliebak, Thomas Hofmann, Martin Jaggi
Venue: Conference WWW 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents a novel approach for multi-lingual sentiment classification in short texts. This is a challenging task as the amount of training data in languages other than English is very limited. Previously proposed multi-lingual approaches typically require to establish a correspondence to English for which powerful classifiers are already available. In contrast, our method does not require such supervision. We leverage large amounts of weakly-supervised data in various languages to train a multi-layer convolutional network and demonstrate the importance of using pre-training of such networks. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on various multi-lingual datasets, including the recent SemEval-2016 sentiment prediction benchmark (Task 4), where we achieved state-of-the-art performance. We also compare the performance of our model trained individually for each language to a variant trained for all languages at once. We show that the latter model reaches slightly worse - but still acceptable - performance when compared to the single language model, while benefiting from better generalization properties across languages.
Sentence-level sentiment classification with weak supervision
Authors: Fangzhao Wu, Jia Zhang, Zhigang Yuan, Sixing Wu, Yongfeng Huang, Jun Yan
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2017
Year: 2017

Sentence-level sentiment classification is important to understand users' fine-grained opinions. Existing methods for sentence-level sentiment classification are mainly based on supervised learning. However, it is difficult to obtain sentiment labels of sentences since manual annotation is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an approach for sentence-level sentiment classification without the need of sentence labels. More specifically, we propose a unified framework to incorporate two types of weak supervision, i.e., document-level and word-level sentiment labels, to learn the sentence-level sentiment classifier. In addition, the contextual information of sentences and words extracted from unlabeled sentences is incorporated into our approach to enhance the learning of sentiment classifier. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of sentence-level sentiment classification.
Relay-linking models for prominence and obsolescence in evolving networks
Authors: Mayank Singh, Rajdeep Sarkar, Pawan Goyal, Animesh Mukherjee, Soumen Chakrabarti
Venue: Conference KDD 2017
Year: 2017

The rate at which nodes in evolving social networks acquire links (friends, citations) shows complex temporal dynamics. Preferential attachment and link copying models, while enabling elegant analysis, only capture rich-gets-richer effects, not aging and decline. Recent aging models are complex and heavily parameterized; most involve estimating 1-3 parameters per node. These parameters are intrinsic: they explain decline in terms of events in the past of the same node, and do not explain, using the network, where the linking attention might go instead. We argue that traditional characterization of linking dynamics are insufficient to judge the faithfulness of models. We propose a new temporal sketch of an evolving graph, and introduce several new characterizations of a network's temporal dynamics. Then we propose a new family of frugal aging models with no per-node parameters and only two global parameters. Our model is based on a surprising inversion or undoing of triangle completion, where an old node relays a citation to a younger follower in its immediate vicinity. Despite very few parameters, the new family of models shows remarkably better fit with real data. Before concluding, we analyze temporal signatures for various research communities yielding further insights into their comparative dynamics. To facilitate reproducible research, we shall soon make all the codes and the processed dataset available in the public domain.
Illuminating an Ecosystem of Partisan Websites
Authors: Shweta Bhatt, Sagar Joglekar, Shehar Bano, Nishanth Sastry
Venue: Conference WWW 2018
Year: 2018

This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally curated list of 668 hyper-partisan websites and their corresponding Facebook pages, and identify key characteristics that mediate the traffic flow within this ecosystem. We uncover a pattern of new websites being established in the run up to the elections, and abandoned after. Such websites form an ecosystem, creating links from one website to another, and by 'liking' each others' Facebook pages. These practices are highly effective in directing user traffic internally within the ecosystem in a highly partisan manner, with right-leaning sites linking to and liking other right-leaning sites and similarly left-leaning sites linking to other sites on the left, thus forming a filter bubble amongst news producers similar to the filter bubble which has been widely observed among consumers of partisan news. Whereas there is activity along both left- and right-leaning sites, right-leaning sites are more evolved, accounting for a disproportionate number of abandoned websites and partisan internal links. We also examine demographic characteristics of consumers of hyper partisan news and find that some of the more populous demographic groups in the US tend to be consumers of more right-leaning sites.