OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Query Answering Efficiency in Expert Networks Under Decentralized Search
Authors: Liang Ma, Mudhakar Srivatsa, Derya Cansever, Xifeng Yan, Sue Kase, Michelle Vanni
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Expert networks are formed by a group of expert-profes\-sionals with different specialties to collaboratively resolve specific queries. In such networks, when a query reaches an expert who does not have sufficient expertise, this query needs to be routed to other experts for further processing until it is completely solved; therefore, query answering efficiency is sensitive to the underlying query routing mechanism being used. Among all possible query routing mechanisms, decentralized search, operating purely on each expert's local information without any knowledge of network global structure, represents the most basic and scalable routing mechanism. However, there is still a lack of fundamental understanding of the efficiency of decentralized search in expert networks. In this regard, we investigate decentralized search by quantifying its performance under a variety of network settings. Our key findings reveal the existence of network conditions, under which decentralized search can achieve significantly short query routing paths (i.e., between O(log n) and O(log2 n) hops, n: total number of experts in the network). Based on such theoretical foundation, we then study how the unique properties of decentralized search in expert networks is related to the anecdotal small-world phenomenon. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work studying fundamental behaviors of decentralized search in expert networks. The developed performance bounds, confirmed by real datasets, can assist in predicting network performance and designing complex expert networks.
Hashtag Recommendation for Enterprise Applications
Authors: Dhruv Mahajan, Vishwajit Kolathur, Chetan Bansal, Suresh Parthasarathy, Sundararajan Sellamanickam, S. Sathiya Keerthi, Johannes Gehrke
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Hashtags have been popularly used in several social cum consumer network settings such as Twitter and Facebook. In this paper, we consider the problem of recommending hashtags for enterprise applications. These applications include emails (e.g., Outlook), enterprise social networks (e.g., Yammer) and special interest group email lists. This problem arises in an organization setting and hashtags are enterprise domain specific. One important aspect of our recommendation system is that we recommend hashtags for Inline hashtag scenario where recommendations change as the user inserts hashtags while typing the message. This involves working with partial content information. Besides this, we consider the conventional Post} hashtagging scenario where hashtags are recommended for the full message. We also consider an important (sub)scenario, viz., Auto-complete where hashtags are recommended with user provided partial information such as sub-string present in the hashtag. Auto-complete can be used with both Inline and Post scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, Inline, Auto-complete hashtag recommendations and hashtagging in enterprise applications have not been studied before. We propose to learn a joint model that uses features of three types, namely, temporal, structural and content. Our learning formulation handles all the hashtagging scenarios naturally. Comprehensive experimental study on five datasets of user email accounts collected by running an Outlook plugin (a key requirement for large scale industrial deployment), one dataset of special interest group email list and one enterprise social network data set shows that the proposed method performs significantly better than the state of the art methods used in consumer applications such as Twitter. The primary reason is that different feature types play dominant role in different scenarios and datasets. Since the joint model makes use of all feature types effectively, it performs better in almost all scenarios and datasets.
A Self-Organizing Map for Identifying InfluentialCommunities in Speech-based Networks
Authors: Sameen Mansha, Faisal Kamiran, Asim Karim, Aizaz Anwar
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Low-literate people are unable to use many mainstream social networks due to their text-based interfaces even though they constitute a major portion of the world population. Specialized speech-based networks (SBNs) are more accessible to low-literate users through their simple speech-based interfaces. While SBNs have the potential for providing value-adding services to a large segment of society they have been hampered by the need to operate in low-income segments on low budgets. The knowledge of influential users and communities in such networks can help in optimizing their operations. In this paper, we present a self-organizing map (SOM) for discovering and visualizing influential communities of users in SBNs. We demonstrate how a friendship graph is formed from call data records and present a method for estimating influences between users. Subsequently, we develop a SOM to cluster users based on their influence, thus identifying community-level influences and their roles in information propagation. We test our approach on Polly, a SBN developed for job ads dissemination among low-literate users. For comparison, we identify influential users with the benchmark greedy algorithm and relate them to the discovered communities. The results show that influential users are concentrated in influential communities and community-level information propagation provides a ready summary of influential users.
QART: A Tool for Quality Assurance in Real-Time in Contact Centers
Authors: Ragunathan Mariappan, Balaji Peddamuthu, Preethi R. Raajaratnam, Sandipan Dandapat, Neeta Pande, Shourya Roy
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

In this paper, we describe an automatic real-time quality assurance system QART (pronounced cart) for contact center chats. QART performs multi-faceted analysis on dialogue utterances, as they happen, using sophisticated statistical and rule-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques. It covers various aspects inspired by today's Quality Assurance and Customer Satisfaction Scoring(C-Sat) practices as well as introduces novel components such as incremental dialogue summarization capability. QART front-end is an interactive dashboard providing views of ongoing dialogues at different granularity, enabling contact center supervisors to monitor and take corrective actions as needed. It is developed on state of the art stream computing platform Apache Spark Streaming with HBase datastore and Python Flask front end.
Learning to Re-Rank Questions in Community Question Answering Using Advanced Features
Authors: Giovanni Da San Martino, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Salvatore Romeo, Antonio Uva, Alessandro Moschitti
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

We study the impact of different types of features for question ranking in community Question Answering: bag-of-words models (BoW), syntactic tree kernels (TKs) and rank features. It should be noted that structural kernels have never been applied to the question reranking task, i.e., question to question similarity, where they have to model paraphrase relations. Additionally, the informal text, typically present in forums, poses new challenges to the use of TKs. We compare our learning to rank (L2R) algorithms against a strong baseline given by the Google rank (GR). The results show that (i) our shallow structures used in TKs are robust enough to noisy data and (ii) improving GR requires effective BoW features and TKs along with an accurate model of GR features in the used L2R algorithm.
Estimating Time Models for News Article Excerpts
Authors: Arunav Mishra, Klaus Berberich
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

It is often difficult to ground text to precise time intervals due to the inherent uncertainty arising from either missing or multiple expressions at year, month, and day time granularities. We address the problem of estimating an excerpt-time model capturing the temporal scope of a given news article excerpt as a probability distribution over chronons. For this, we propose a semi-supervised distribution propagation framework that leverages redundancy in the data to improve the quality of estimated time models. Our method generates an event graph with excerpts as nodes and models various inter-excerpt relations as edges. It then propagates empirical excerpt-time models estimated for temporally annotated excerpts, to those that are strongly related but miss annotations. In our experiments, we first generate a test query set by randomly sampling 100 Wikipedia events as queries. For each query, making use of a standard text retrieval model, we then obtain top-10 documents with an average of 150 excerpts. From these, each temporally annotated excerpt is considered as gold standard. The evaluation measures are first computed for each gold standard excerpt for a single query, by comparing the estimated model with our method to the empirical model from the original expressions. Final scores are reported by averaging over all the test queries. Experiments on the English Gigaword corpus show that our method estimates significantly better time models than several baselines taken from the literature.
CyberSafety 2016: The First International Workshop on Computational Methods in CyberSafety
Authors: Shivakant Mishra, Qin Lv, Richard Han, Jeremy Blackburn
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

The theme of cybersafety is an important emerging research topic on the Internet that manifests itself daily as users navigate the Web and networked applications. Examples of cybersafety issues include cyberbullying, cyberthreats, recruiting minors via Internet services for nefarious purposes, using deceptive means to dupe vulnerable populations, exhibiting misbehaving behaviors such as using profanity or flashing in online video chats, and many others. These issues have a direct negative impact on the social, psychological and in some cases physical well-being of the end users. An important characteristic of these issues is that they fall in a grey legal area, where perpetrators may claim freedom of speech or rights to free expression despite causing harm. The main goal of this inaugural workshop on cybersafety is to bring together the researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, government and research labs working in the area of cybersafety to discuss the unique challenges in addressing various cybersafety issues and to share experiences, solutions, tools, and techniques. The focus is on the detection, prevention and mitigation of various cybersafety issues, as well as education and promoting safe practices.
Improving Search Results with Prior Similar Queries
Authors: Yashar Moshfeghi, Kristiyan Velinov, Peter Triantafillou
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

This paper describes a novel approach to re-ranking search engine result pages (SERP): Its fundamental principle is to re-rank results to a given query, based on exploiting evidence gathered from past similar search queries. Our approach is inspired by collaborative filtering, with the main challenge being to find the set of similar queries, while also taking efficiency into account. In particular, our approach aims to address this challenge by proposing a combination of a similarity graph and a locality sensitive hashing scheme. We construct a set of features from our similarity graph and build a prediction model using the Hoeffding decision tree algorithm. We have evaluated the effectiveness of our model in terms of P@1, MAP@10, and nDCG@10, using the Yandex Data Challenge data set. We have compared the performance of our model against two baselines, namely, the Yandex initial ranking and the decision tree model learnt on the same set of features when extracted based on query repetition (i.e. excluding the evidence of similar queries in our approach). Our results reveal that the proposed approach consistently and (statistically) significantly outperforms both baselines.
GStreamMiner: A GPU-accelerated Data Stream Mining Framework
Authors: Chandima Hewa Nadungodage, Yuni Xia, John Jaehwan Lee
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Due to the continuous, unbounded, and dynamic characteristics of the streaming data, mining data streams becomes a very challenging task. When analyzing online data streams, it is necessary to produce accurate results in a very short amount of time. The parallel processing power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can be used to accelerate the processing and produce results in a timely manner. In this paper, we present GStreamMiner, a GPU-accelerated data stream mining framework and demonstrate its application using outlier detection over continuous streaming data as a case study. The demo software provides a visual interface which is continuously get updated with new results as the data stream progresses. It also facilitates the users to compare the performance of the GPU and CPU versions of the outlier detection algorithm.
Using Machine Learning to Improve the Email Experience
Authors: Marc Najork
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Email is an essential communication medium for billions of people, with most users relying on web-based email services. Two recent trends are changing the email experience: smartphones have become the primary tool for accessing online services including email, and machine learning has come of age. Smartphones have a number of compelling properties (they are location-aware, usually with us, and allow us to record and share photos and videos), but they also have a few limitations, notably limited screen size and small and tedious virtual keyboards. Over the past few years, Google researchers and engineers have leveraged machine learning to ameliorate these weaknesses, and in the process created novel experiences. In this talk, I will give three examples of machine learning improving the email experience. The first example describes how we are improving email search. Displaying the most relevant results as the query is being typed is particularly useful on smartphones due to the aforementioned limitations. Combining hand-crafted and machine-learned rankers is powerful, but training learned rankers requires a relevance-labeled training set. User privacy prohibits us from employing raters to produce relevance labels. Instead, we leverage implicit feedback (namely clicks) provided by the users themselves. Using click logs as training data in a learning-to-rank setting is intriguing, since there is a vast and continuous supply of fresh training data. However, the click stream is biased towards queries that receive more clicks -- e.g. queries for which we already return the best result in the top-ranked position. I will summarize our work on neutralizing that bias.
Link Prediction in Heterogeneous Social Networks
Authors: Sumit Negi, Santanu Chaudhury
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

A heterogeneous social network is characterized by multiple link types which makes the task of link prediction in such networks more involved. In the last few years collective link prediction methods have been proposed for the problem of link prediction in heterogeneous networks. These methods capture the correlation between different types of links and utilize this information in the link prediction task. In this paper we pose the problem of link prediction in heterogeneous networks as a multi-task, metric learning (MTML) problem. For each link-type (relation) we learn a corresponding distance measure, which utilizes both network and node features. These link-type specific distance measures are learnt in a coupled fashion by employing the Multi-Task Structure Preserving Metric Learning (MT-SPML) setup. We further extend the MT-SPML method to account for task correlations, robustness to non-informative features and non-stationary degree distribution across networks. Experiments on the Flickr and DBLP network demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach vis-à-vis competitive baselines.
FolkTrails: Interpreting Navigation Behavior in a Social Tagging System
Authors: Thomas Niebler, Martin Becker, Daniel Zoller, Stephan Doerfel, Andreas Hotho
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Social tagging systems have established themselves as a quick and easy way to organize information by annotating resources with tags. In recent work, user behavior in social tagging systems was studied, that is, how users assign tags, and consume content. However, it is still unclear how users make use of the navigation options they are given. Understanding their behavior and differences in behavior of different user groups is an important step towards assessing the effectiveness of a navigational concept and improving it to better suit the users' needs. In this work, we investigate navigation trails in the popular scholarly social tagging system BibSonomy from six years of log data. We discuss dynamic browsing behavior of the general user population and show that different navigational subgroups exhibit different navigational traits. Furthermore, we provide strong evidence that the semantic nature of the underlying folksonomy is an essential factor for explaining navigation.
Influence Maximization for Complementary Goods: Why Parties Fail to Cooperate?
Authors: Han-Ching Ou, Chung-Kuang Chou, Ming-Syan Chen
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

We consider the problem where companies provide different types of products and want to promote their products through viral marketing simultaneously. Most previous works assume products are purely competitive. Different from them, our work considers that each product has a pairwise relationship which can be from strongly competitive to strongly complementary to each other's product. The problem is to maximize the spread size with the presence of different opponents with different relationships on the network. We propose Interacting Influence Maximization (IIM) game to model such problems by extending the model of the Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM) game studied by previous works, which considers purely competitive relationship. As for the theoretical approach, we prove that the Nash equilibrium of highly complementary products of different companies may still be very inefficient due to the selfishness of companies. We do so by introducing a well-known concept in game theory, called Price of Stability (PoS) of the extensive-form game. We prove that in any k selfish players symmetric complementary IIM game, the overall spread of the products can be reduced to as less as 1/k of the optimal spread. Since companies may fail to cooperate with one another, we propose different competitive objective functions that companies may consider and deal with separately. We propose a scalable strategy for maximizing influence differences, called TOPBOSS that is guaranteed to beat the first player in a single-round two-player second-move game. In the experiment, we first propose a learning method to learn the ILT model, which we propose for IIM game, from both synthetic and real data to validate the effectiveness of ILT. We then exhibit that the performance of several heuristic strategies in the traditional influence maximization problem can be improved by acquiring the knowledge of the existence of competitive/complementary products in the network. Finally, we compare the TOPBOSS with different heuristic algorithms in real data and demonstrate the merits of TOPBOSS.
BIGtensor: Mining Billion-Scale Tensor Made Easy
Authors: Namyong Park, Byungsoo Jeon, Jungwoo Lee, U Kang
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Many real-world data are naturally represented as tensors, or multi-dimensional arrays. Tensor decomposition is an important tool to analyze tensors for various applications such as latent concept discovery, trend analysis, clustering, and anomaly detection. However, existing tools for tensor analysis do not scale well for billion-scale tensors or offer limited functionalities. In this paper, we propose BIGtensor, a large-scale tensor mining library that tackles both of the above problems. Carefully designed for scalability, BIGtensor decomposes at least 100× larger tensors than the current state of the art. Furthermore, BIGtensor provides a variety of distributed tensor operations and tensor generation methods. We demonstrate how BIGtensor can help users discover hidden concepts and analyze trends from large-scale tensors that are hard to be processed by existing tensor tools.
RAP: Scalable RPCA for Low-rank Matrix Recovery
Authors: Chong Peng, Zhao Kang, Ming Yang, Qiang Cheng
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Recovering low-rank matrices is a problem common in many applications of data mining and machine learning, such as matrix completion and image denoising. Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) has emerged for handling such kinds of problems; however, the existing RPCA approaches are usually computationally expensive, due to the fact that they need to obtain the singular value decomposition (SVD) of large matrices. In this paper, we propose a novel RPCA approach that eliminates the need for SVD of large matrices. Scalable algorithms are designed for several variants of our approach, which are crucial for real world applications on large scale data. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach both quantitatively and visually.
Geotagging Named Entities in News and Online Documents
Authors: Jiangwei Yu Rafiei, Davood Rafiei
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

News sources generate constant streams of text with many references to real world entities; understanding the content from such sources often requires effectively detecting the geographic foci of the entities. We study the problem of associating geography to named entities in online documents. More specifically, given a named entity and a page (or a set of pages) where the entity is mentioned, the problem being studied is how the geographic focus of the name can be resolved at a location granularity (e.g. city or country), assuming that the name has a geographic focus. We further study dispersion, and show that the dispersion of a name can be estimated with a good accuracy, allowing a geo-centre to be detected at an exact dispersion level. Two key features of our approach are: (i) minimal assumption is made on the structure of the mentions hence the approach can be applied to a diverse and heterogeneous set of web pages, and (ii) the approach is unsupervised, leveraging shallow English linguistic features and the large volume of location data in public domain.
Efficient Algorithms for the Two Locus Problem in Genome-Wide Association Study: Algorithms for the Two Locus Problem
Authors: Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Subrata Saha
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2016

Advances made in sequencing technology have resulted in the sequencing of thousands of genomes. Novel analysis tools are needed to process these data and extract useful information. Such tools could aid in personalized medicine. As an example, we could identify the causes for a disease by comparing the genomes of people who have the disease and those who do not have this disease. Given that human variability happens due to single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), we could focus our attention on these SNPs. Investigations that try to understand human variability using SNPs fall under genome-wide association study (GWAS). A crucial step in GWAS is the identification of the correlation between genotypes (SNPs) and phenotypes (i.e., characteristics such as the presence of a disease). This step can be modeled as the k-locus problem (where k is any integer). A number of algorithms have been proposed in the literature for this problem when k = 2. In this paper we present an algorithm for solving the 2-locus problem that is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the previous best known algorithms.