OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Passage-Level Reading Behavior Model for Mobile Search
Authors: Zhijing Wu, Jiaxin Mao, Kedi Xu, Dandan Song, Heyan Huang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Reading is a vital and complex cognitive activity during users’ information-seeking process. Several studies have focused on understanding users’ reading behavior in desktop search. Their findings greatly contribute to the design of information retrieval models. However, little is known about how users read a result in mobile search, although search currently happens more frequently in mobile scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a lab-based user study to investigate users’ fine-grained reading behavior patterns in mobile search. We find that users’ reading attention allocation is strongly affected by several behavior biases, such as position and selection biases. Inspired by these findings, we propose a probabilistic generative model, the Passage-level Reading behavior Model (PRM), to model users’ reading behavior in mobile search. The PRM utilizes observable passage-level exposure and viewport duration events to infer users’ unobserved skimming event, reading event, and satisfaction perception during the reading process. Besides fitting the passage-level reading behavior, we utilize the fitted parameters of PRM to estimate the passage-level and document-level relevance. Experimental results show that PRM outperforms existing unsupervised relevance estimation models. PRM has strong interpretability and provides valuable insights into the understanding of how users seek and perceive useful information in mobile search.
A Survey of General Ontologies for the Cross-Industry Domain of Circular Economy
Authors: Huanyu Li, Mina Abd Nikooie Pour, Ying Li, Mikael Lindecrantz, Eva Blomqvist, Patrick Lambrix
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Circular Economy has the goal to reduce value loss and avoid waste by extending the life span of materials and products, including circulating materials or product parts before they become waste. Circular economy models (e.g., circular value networks) are typically complex and networked, involving different cross-industry domains. In the context of a circular value network, multiple actors, such as suppliers, manufacturers, recyclers, and product end-users, may be involved. In addition, there may be various flows of resources, energy, information and value throughout the network. This means that we face the challenge that the data and information from cross-industry domains in a circular economy model are not built on common ground, and as a result are difficult to understand and use for both humans and machines. Using ontologies to represent domain knowledge can enable actors and stakeholders from different industries in the circular economy to communicate using a common language. The knowledge domains involved include circular economy, sustainability, materials, products, manufacturing, and logistics. The objective of this paper is to investigate the landscape of current ontologies for these domains. This will enable us to in the future explore what existing knowledge can be adapted or used to develop ontologies for circular value networks.
A Dual Prompt Learning Framework for Few-Shot Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Yuting Yang, Wenqiang Lei, Pei Huang, Juan Cao, Jintao Li, Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) module is an essential component of task-oriented dialog systems to understand users’ goals and needs. Collecting dialogue state labels including slots and values can be costly, requiring experts to annotate all (slot, value) information for each turn in dialogues. It is also difficult to define all possible slots and values in advance, especially with the wide application of dialogue systems in more and more new-rising applications. In this paper, we focus on improving DST module to generate dialogue states in circumstances with limited annotations and knowledge about slot ontology. To this end, we design a dual prompt learning framework for few-shot DST. The dual framework aims to explore how to utilize the language understanding and generation capabilities of pre-trained language models for DST efficiently. Specifically, we consider the learning of slot generation and value generation as dual tasks, and two kinds of prompts are designed based on this dual structure to incorporate task-related knowledge of these two tasks respectively. In this way, the DST task can be formulated as a language modeling task efficiently under few-shot settings. To evaluate the proposed framework, we conduct experiments on two task-oriented dialogue datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art few-shot methods, but also can generate unseen slots. It indicates that DST-related knowledge can be probed from pre-trained language models and utilized to address low-resource DST efficiently with the help of prompt learning.
Membership Inference Attacks Against Sequential Recommender Systems
Authors: Zhihao Zhu, Chenwang Wu, Rui Fan, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of recommender systems to membership inference attacks, which determine whether a user’s historical data was utilized for model training, posing serious privacy leakage issues. Existing works assumed that member and non-member users follow different recommendation modes, and then infer membership based on the difference vector between the user’s historical behaviors and the recommendation list. The previous frameworks are invalid against inductive recommendations, such as sequential recommendations, since the disparities of difference vectors constructed by the recommendations between members and non-members become imperceptible. This motivates us to dig deeper into the target model. In addition, most MIA frameworks assume that they can obtain some in-distribution data from the same distribution of the target data, which is hard to gain in recommender system. To address these difficulties, we propose a Membership Inference Attack framework against sequential recommenders based on Model Extraction(ME-MIA). Specifically, we train a surrogate model to simulate the target model based on two universal loss functions. For a given behavior sequence, the loss functions ensure the recommended items and corresponding rank of the surrogate model are consistent with the target model’s recommendation. Due to the special training mode of the surrogate model, it is hard to judge which user is its member(non-member). Therefore, we establish a shadow model and use shadow model’s members(non-members) to train the attack model later. Next, we build a user feature generator to construct representative feature vectors from the shadow(surrogate) model. The crafting feature vectors are finally input into the attack model to identify users’ membership. Furthermore, to tackle the high cost of obtaining in-distribution data, we develop two variants of ME-MIA, realizing data-efficient and even data-free MIA by fabricating authentic in-distribution data. Notably, the latter is impossible in the previous works. Finally, we evaluate ME-MIA against multiple sequential recommendation models on three real-world datasets. Experimental results show that ME-MIA and its variants can achieve efficient extraction and outperform state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of attack performance.
A Single Vector Is Not Enough: Taxonomy Expansion via Box Embeddings
Authors: Song Jiang, Qiyue Yao, Qifan Wang, Yizhou Sun
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Taxonomies, which organize knowledge hierarchically, support various practical web applications such as product navigation in online shopping and user profile tagging on social platforms. Given the continued and rapid emergence of new entities, maintaining a comprehensive taxonomy in a timely manner through human annotation is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, expanding a taxonomy automatically with new entities is essential. Most existing methods for expanding taxonomies encode entities into vector embeddings (i.e., single points). However, we argue that vectors are insufficient to model the “is-a” hierarchy in taxonomy (asymmetrical relation), because two points can only represent pairwise similarity (symmetrical relation). To this end, we propose to project taxonomy entities into boxes (i.e., hyperrectangles). Two boxes can be "contained", "disjoint" and "intersecting", thus naturally representing an asymmetrical taxonomic hierarchy. Upon box embeddings, we propose a novel model BoxTaxo for taxonomy expansion. The core of BoxTaxo is to learn boxes for entities to capture their child-parent hierarchies. To achieve this, BoxTaxo optimizes the box embeddings from a joint view of geometry and probability. BoxTaxo also offers an easy and natural way for inference: examine whether the box of a given new entity is fully enclosed inside the box of a candidate parent from the existing taxonomy. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of BoxTaxo compared to vector based models.
Learning Disentangled Representation via Domain Adaptation for Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Jinpeng Li, Yingce Xia, Xin Cheng, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Dialogue summarization, which aims to generate a summary for an input dialogue, plays a vital role in intelligent dialogue systems. The end-to-end models have achieved satisfactory performance in summarization, but the success is built upon enough annotated data, which is costly to obtain, especially in the dialogue summarization. To leverage the rich external data, previous works first pre-train the model on the other domain data (e.g., the news domain), and then fine-tune it directly on the dialogue domain. The data from different domains are equally treated during the training process, while the vast differences between dialogues (usually informal, repetitive, and with multiple speakers) and conventional articles (usually formal and concise) are neglected. In this work, we propose to use a disentangled representation method to reduce the deviation between data in different domains, where the input data is disentangled into domain-invariant and domain-specific representations. The domain-invariant representation carries context information that is supposed to be the same across domains (e.g., news, dialogue) and the domain-specific representation indicates the input data belongs to a particular domain. We use adversarial learning and contrastive learning to constrain the disentangled representations to the target space. Furthermore, we propose two novel reconstruction strategies, namely backtracked and cross-track reconstructions, which aim to reduce the domain characteristics of out-of-domain data and mitigate the domain bias of the model. Experimental results on three public datasets show that our model significantly outperforms the strong baselines.
Learning Structural Co-occurrences for Structured Web Data Extraction in Low-Resource Settings
Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, Bowen Yu, Tingwen Liu, Tianyun Liu, Yubin Wang, Li Guo
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Extracting structured information from all manner of webpages is an important problem with the potential to automate many real-world applications. Recent work has shown the effectiveness of leveraging DOM trees and pre-trained language models to describe and encode webpages. However, they typically optimize the model to learn the semantic co-occurrence of elements and labels in the same webpage, thus their effectiveness depends on sufficient labeled data, which is labor-intensive. In this paper, we further observe structural co-occurrences in different webpages of the same website: the same position in the DOM tree usually plays the same semantic role, and the DOM nodes in this position also share similar surface forms. Motivated by this, we propose a novel method, Structor, to effectively incorporate the structural co-occurrences over DOM tree and surface form into pre-trained language models. Such structural co-occurrences help the model learn the task better under low-resource settings, and we study two challenging experimental scenarios: website-level low-resource setting and webpage-level low-resource setting, to evaluate our approach. Extensive experiments on the public SWDE dataset show that Structor significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models in both settings, and even achieves three times the performance of the strong baseline model in the case of extreme lack of training data.
Understanding the Behaviors of Toxic Accounts on Reddit
Authors: Deepak Kumar, Jeff T. Hancock, Kurt Thomas, Zakir Durumeric
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Toxic comments are the top form of hate and harassment experienced online. While many studies have investigated the types of toxic comments posted online, the effects that such content has on people, and the impact of potential defenses, no study has captured the behaviors of the accounts that post toxic comments or how such attacks are operationalized. In this paper, we present a measurement study of 929K accounts that post toxic comments on Reddit over an 18 month period. Combined, these accounts posted over 14 million toxic comments that encompass insults, identity attacks, threats of violence, and sexual harassment. We explore the impact that these accounts have on Reddit, the targeting strategies that abusive accounts adopt, and the distinct patterns that distinguish classes of abusive accounts. Our analysis informs the nuanced interventions needed to curb unwanted toxic behaviors online.
Multi-Source Domain Adaptation via Latent Domain Reconstruction
Authors: Jun Zhou, Chilin Fu, Xiaolu Zhang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Multi-Source Domain Adaptation (MSDA) is widely used in various machine learning scenarios for domain shifts between labeled source domains and unlabeled target domains. Conventional MSDA methods are built on a strong hypothesis that data samples from the same source belong to the same domain with the same latent distribution. However, in practice sources and their latent domains are not necessarily one-to-one correspondence. To tackle this problem, a novel Multi-source Reconstructed Domain Adaptation (MRDA) framework for MSDA is proposed. We use an Expectation-Maximization (EM) mechanism that iteratively reconstructs the source domains to recover the latent domains and performs domain adaptation on the reconstructed domains. Specifically, in the E-step, we cluster the samples from multiple sources into different latent domains, and a soft assignment strategy is proposed to avoid cluster imbalance. In the M-step, we freeze the latent domains clustered in the E-step and optimize the objective function for domain adaptation, and a global-specific feature extractor is used to capture both domain-invariant and domain-specific features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can reconstruct source domains and perform domain adaptation on the reconstructed domains effectively, thus significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines (e.g., 1% to 3.1% absolute improvement in AUC).
Job Type Extraction for Service Businesses
Authors: Cheng Li, Yaping Qi, Hayk Zakaryan, Mingyang Zhang, Michael Bendersky, Yonghua Wu, Marc Najork
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Google My Business (GMB) is a platform that hosts business profiles, which will be displayed when a user issues a relevant query on Google Search or Google Maps. GMB businesses provide a wide variety of services, from home cleaning and repair, to legal consultation. However, the exact details of the service provided (a.k.a. job types), are often missing in business profiles. This places the burden of finding these details on the users. To alleviate this burden, we built a pipeline to automatically extract the job types from business websites. We share the various challenges we faced while developing this pipeline, and how we effectively addressed these challenges by (1) utilizing structured content to tackle the cold start problem for dataset collection; (2) exploiting context information to improve model performance without hurting scalability; and (3) formulating the extraction problem as a retrieval task to improve both generalizability, efficiency, and coverage. The pipeline has been deployed for over a year and is scalable enough to be periodically refreshed. The extracted job types are serving users of Google Search and Google Maps, with significant improvements in both precision and coverage.
Learning to Simulate Daily Activities via Modeling Dynamic Human Needs
Authors: Yuan Yuan, Huandong Wang, Jingtao Ding, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Daily activity data that records individuals’ various types of activities in daily life are widely used in many applications such as activity scheduling, activity recommendation, and policymaking. Though with high value, its accessibility is limited due to high collection costs and potential privacy issues. Therefore, simulating human activities to produce massive high-quality data is of great importance to benefit practical applications. However, existing solutions, including rule-based methods with simplified assumptions of human behavior and data-driven methods directly fitting real-world data, both cannot fully qualify for matching reality. In this paper, motivated by the classic psychological theory, Maslow’s need theory describing human motivation, we propose a knowledge-driven simulation framework based on generative adversarial imitation learning. To enhance the fidelity and utility of the generated activity data, our core idea is to model the evolution of human needs as the underlying mechanism that drives activity generation in the simulation model. Specifically, this is achieved by a hierarchical model structure that disentangles different need levels, and the use of neural stochastic differential equations that successfully captures piecewise-continuous characteristics of need dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of data fidelity and utility. Besides, we present the insightful interpretability of the need modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Activity-Simulation-SAND.
TEA: Time-aware Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Yu Liu, Wen Hua, Kexuan Xin, Saeid Hosseini, Xiaofang Zhou
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify equivalent entities between knowledge graphs (KGs), which is a key technique to improve the coverage of existing KGs. Current EA models largely ignore the importance of time information contained in KGs and treat relational facts or attribute values of entities as time-invariant. However, real-world entities could evolve over time, making the knowledge of the aligned entities very different in multiple KGs. This may cause incorrect matching between KGs if such entity dynamics is ignored. In this paper, we propose a time-aware entity alignment (TEA) model that discovers the entity evolving behaviour by exploring the time contexts in KGs and aggregates various contextual information to make the alignment decision. In particular, we address two main challenges in the TEA model: 1) How to identify highly-correlated temporal facts; 2) How to capture entity dynamics and incorporate it to learn a more informative entity representation for the alignment task. Experiments on real-world datasets1 verify the superiority of our TEA model over state-of-the-art entity aligners.
EDNet: Attention-Based Multimodal Representation for Classification of Twitter Users Related to Eating Disorders
Authors: Mohammad Abuhassan, Tarique Anwar, Chengfei Liu, Hannah K. Jarman, Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Social media platforms provide rich data sources in several domains. In mental health, individuals experiencing an Eating Disorder (ED) are often hesitant to seek help through conventional healthcare services. However, many people seek help with diet and body image issues on social media. To better distinguish at-risk users who may need help for an ED from those who are simply commenting on ED in social environments, highly sophisticated approaches are required. Assessment of ED risks in such a situation can be done in various ways, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Hence, there is a need for and potential benefit of a more complex multimodal approach. To this end, we collect historical tweets, user biographies, and online behaviours of relevant users from Twitter, and generate a reasonably large labelled benchmark dataset. Thereafter, we develop an advanced multimodal deep learning model called EDNet using these data to identify the different types of users with ED engagement (e.g., potential ED sufferers, healthcare professionals, or communicators) and distinguish them from those not experiencing EDs on Twitter. EDNet consists of five deep neural network layers. With the help of its embedding, representation and behaviour modeling layers, it effectively learns the multimodalities of social media. In our experiments, EDNet consistently outperforms all the baseline techniques by significant margins. It achieves an accuracy of up to 94.32% and F1 score of up to 93.91% F1 score. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study to propose a multimodal approach for user-level classification according to their engagement with ED content on social media.
Promoting Inactive Members in Edge-Building Marketplace
Authors: Ayan Acharya, Siyuan Gao, Borja Ocejo, Kinjal Basu, Ankan Saha, Sathiya Keerthi Selvaraj, Rahul Mazumder, Parag Agrawal, Aman Gupta
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

Social networks are platforms where content creators and consumers share and consume content. The edge recommendation system, which determines who a member should connect with, significantly impacts the reach and engagement of the audience on such networks. This paper emphasizes improving the experience of inactive members (IMs) who do not have a large connection network by recommending better connections. To that end, we propose a multi-objective linear optimization framework and solve it using accelerated gradient descent. We report our findings regarding key business metrics related to user engagement on LinkedIn, a professional network with over 850 million members.
Testing Cluster Properties of Signed Graphs
Authors: Florian Adriaens, Simon Apers
Venue: WWW
Year: 2023

This work initiates the study of property testing in signed graphs, where every edge has either a positive or a negative sign. We show that there exist sublinear query and time algorithms for testing three key properties of signed graphs: balance (or 2-clusterability), clusterability and signed triangle freeness. We consider both the dense graph model, where one queries the adjacency matrix entries of a signed graph, and the bounded-degree model, where one queries for the neighbors of a node and the sign of the connecting edge. Our algorithms use a variety of tools from unsigned graph property testing, as well as reductions from one setting to the other. Our main technical contribution is a sublinear algorithm for testing clusterability in the bounded-degree model. This contrasts with the property of k-clusterability in unsigned graphs, which is not testable with a sublinear number of queries in the bounded-degree model. We experimentally evaluate the complexity and usefulness of several of our testers on real-life and synthetic datasets.