OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Semantic Matching in APP Search
Authors: Juchao Zhuo, Zeqian Huang, Yunfeng Liu, Zhanhui Kang, Xun Cao, Mingzhi Li, Long Jin
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2015

Past years, with the growth of smart-phones and applications, APP market has become an important mobile internet portal. As an important function in application market, APP search gains lots of attentions.However, mismatch between queries and APP is the most critical problem in APP search because of less text within term matching search engine. In this talk, we describe a semantic matching architecture in APP search--which mining topics and tags in big data. It enriches query and APP representations with topics and tags to achieve semantic matching in search. Some challenge must be considered: 1) How to extract tag-APP relationship from large web text. 2) How to use machine learning technologies to process de-noising and computing confidence. 3) How to hybrid ranking apps retrieved by different matching method. These will be introduced in some of our related works and as examples to describe how semantic matching is used in Tencent MyApp, an application market which serving hundreds of millions of users.
Information Evolution in Social Networks
Authors: Lada A. Adamic, Thomas M. Lento, Eytan Adar, Pauline C. Ng
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Social networks readily transmit information, albeit with less than perfect fidelity. We present a large-scale measurement of this imperfect information copying mechanism by examining the dissemination and evolution of thousands of memes, collectively replicated hundreds of millions of times in the online social network Facebook. The information undergoes an evolutionary process that exhibits several regularities. A meme's mutation rate characterizes the population distribution of its variants, in accordance with the Yule process. Variants further apart in the diffusion cascade have greater edit distance, as would be expected in an iterative, imperfect replication process. Some text sequences can confer a replicative advantage; these sequences are abundant and transfer "laterally" between different memes. Subpopulations of the social network can preferentially transmit a specific variant of a meme if the variant matches their beliefs or culture. Understanding the mechanism driving change in diffusing information has important implications for how we interpret and harness the information that reaches us through our social networks.
Kangaroo: Workload-Aware Processing of Range Data and Range Queries in Hadoop
Authors: Ahmed M. Aly, Hazem Elmeleegy, Yan Qi, Walid G. Aref
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Despite the importance and widespread use of range data, e.g., time intervals, spatial ranges, etc., little attention has been devoted to study the processing and querying of range data in the context of big data. The main challenge relies in the nature of the traditional index structures e.g., B-Tree and R-Tree, being centralized by nature, and hence are almost crippled when deployed in a distributed environment. To address this challenge, this paper presents Kangaroo, a system built on top of Hadoop to optimize the execution of range queries over range data. The main idea behind Kangaroo is to split the data into non-overlapping partitions in a way that minimizes the query execution time. Kangaroo is query workload-aware, i.e., results in partitioning layouts that minimize the query processing time of given query patterns. In this paper, we study the design challenges Kangaroo addresses in order to be deployed on top of a distributed file system, i.e., HDFS. We also study four different partitioning schemes that Kangaroo can support. With extensive experiments using real range data of more than one billion records and real query workload of more than 30,000 queries, we show that the partitioning schemes of Kangaroo can significantly reduce the I/O of range queries on range data.
On the Efficiency of the Information Networks in Social Media
Authors: Mahmoudreza Babaei, Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz, Isabel Valera, Krishna P. Gummadi, Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Social media sites are information marketplaces, where users produce and consume a wide variety of information and ideas. In these sites, users typically choose their information sources, which in turn determine what specific information they receive, how much information they receive and how quickly this information is shown to them. In this context, a natural question that arises is how efficient are social media users at selecting their information sources. In this work, we propose a computational framework to quantify users' efficiency at selecting information sources. Our framework is based on the assumption that the goal of users is to acquire a set of unique pieces of information. To quantify user's efficiency, we ask if the user could have acquired the same pieces of information from another set of sources more efficiently. We define three different notions of efficiency -- link, in-flow, and delay -- corresponding to the number of sources the user follows, the amount of (redundant) information she acquires and the delay with which she receives the information. Our definitions of efficiency are general and applicable to any social media system with an underlying in- formation network, in which every user follows others to receive the information they produce. In our experiments, we measure the efficiency of Twitter users at acquiring different types of information. We find that Twitter users exhibit sub-optimal efficiency across the three notions of efficiency, although they tend to be more efficient at acquiring non- popular pieces of information than they are at acquiring popular pieces of information. We then show that this lack of efficiency is a consequence of the triadic closure mechanism by which users typically discover and follow other users in social media. Thus, our study reveals a tradeoff between the efficiency and discoverability of information sources. Finally, we develop a heuristic algorithm that enables users to be significantly more efficient at acquiring the same unique pieces of information.
Serving a Billion Personalized News Feeds
Authors: Lars Backstrom
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Feed ranking's goal is to provide perople with over a billion personalized experiences. We strive to provide the most compelling content to each person, personalized to them so that they are most likely to see the content that is most interesting to them.
Transductive Classification on Heterogeneous Information Networks with Edge Betweenness-based Normalization
Authors: Phiradet Bangcharoensap, Tsuyoshi Murata, Hayato Kobayashi, Nobuyuki Shimizu
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

This paper proposes a novel method for transductive classification on heterogeneous information networks composed of multiple types of vertices. Such networks naturally represent many real-world Web data such as DBLP data (author, paper, and conference). Given a network where some vertices are labeled, the classifier aims to predict labels for the remaining vertices by propagating the labels to the entire network. In the label propagation process, many studies reduce the importance of edges connecting to a high-degree vertex. The assumption is unsatisfactory when reliability of a label of a vertex cannot be implied from its degree. On the basis of our intuition that edges bridging across communities are less trustworthy, we adapt edge betweenness to imply the importance of edges. Since directly applying the conventional edge betweenness is inefficient on heterogeneous networks, we propose two additional refinements. First, the centrality utilizes the fact that networks contain multiple types of vertices. Second, the centrality ignores flows originating from endpoints of considering edges. The experimental results on real-world datasets show our proposed method is more effective than a state-of-the-art method, GNetMine. On average, our method yields 92.79 ± 1.25% accuracy on a DBLP network even if only 1.92% of vertices are labeled. Our simple weighting scheme results in more than 5 percentage points increase in accuracy compared with GNetMine.
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Individual Sequential Data Sanitization
Authors: Luca Bonomi, Liyue Fan, Hongxia Jin
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Fine-grained, personal data has been largely, continuously generated nowadays, such as location check-ins, web histories, physical activities, etc. Those data sequences are typically shared with untrusted parties for data analysis and promotional services. However, the individually-generated sequential data contains behavior patterns and may disclose sensitive information if not properly sanitized. Furthermore, the utility of the released sequence can be adversely affected by sanitization techniques. In this paper, we study the problem of individual sequence data sanitization with minimum utility loss, given user-specified sensitive patterns. We propose a privacy notion based on information theory and sanitize sequence data via generalization. We show the optimization problem is hard and develop two efficient heuristic solutions. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on real-world datasets and the results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solutions.
Multi-view Machines
Authors: Bokai Cao, Hucheng Zhou, Guoqiang Li, Philip S. Yu
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

With rapidly growing amount of data available on the web, it becomes increasingly likely to obtain data from different perspectives for multi-view learning. Some successive examples of web applications include recommendation and target advertising. Specifically, to predict whether a user will click an ad in a query context, there are available features extracted from user profile, ad information and query description, and each of them can only capture part of the task signals from a particular aspect/view. Different views provide complementary information to learn a practical model for these applications. Therefore, an effective integration of the multi-view information is critical to facilitate the learning performance. In this paper, we propose a general predictor, named multi-view machines (MVMs), that can effectively explore the full-order interactions between features from multiple views. A joint factorization is applied for the interaction parameters which makes parameter estimation more accurate under sparsity and renders the model with the capacity to avoid overfitting. Moreover, MVMs can work in conjunction with different loss functions for a variety of machine learning tasks. The advantages of MVMs are illustrated through comparison with other methods for multi-view prediction, including support vector machines (SVMs), support tensor machines (STMs) and factorization machines (FMs). A stochastic gradient descent method and a distributed implementation on Spark are presented to learn the MVM model. Through empirical studies on two real-world web application datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MVMs on modeling feature interactions in multi-view data. A 3.51\% accuracy improvement is shown on MVMs over FMs for the problem of movie rating prediction, and 0.57\% for ad click prediction.
You've got Mail, and Here is What you Could do With It!: Analyzing and Predicting Actions on Email Messages
Authors: Dotan Di Castro, Zohar Shay Karnin, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

With email traffic increasing, leading Web mail services have started to offer features that assist users in reading and processing their inboxes. One approach is to identify "important" messages, while a complementary one is to bundle messages, especially machine-generated ones, in pre-defined categories. We rather propose here to go back to the task at hand and consider what actions the users might conduct on received messages. We thoroughly studied, in a privacy-preserving manner, the actions of a large number of users in Yahoo mail, and found out that the most frequent actions are typically read, reply, delete and a sub-type of delete, delete-without-read. We devised a learning framework for predicting these four actions, for users with various levels of activity per action. Our framework leverages both vertical learning for personalization and horizontal learning for regularization purposes. In order to verify the quality of our predictions, we conducted a large-scale experiment involving users who had previously agreed to participate in such research studies. Our results show that, for recall values of 90%, we can predict important actions such as read or reply at precision levels up to 40% for active users, which we consider pretty encouraging for an assistance task. For less active users, we show that our regularization achieves an increase in AUC of close to 50%. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide a unified framework of this scale for predicting multiple actions on Web email, which hopefully provides a new ground for inventing new user experiences to help users process their inboxes.
Enforcing k-anonymity in Web Mail Auditing
Authors: Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek, Ran Wolff, Eyal Zohar
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

We study the problem of k-anonymization of mail messages in the realistic scenario of auditing mail traffic in a major commercial Web mail service. Mail auditing is necessary in various Web mail debugging and quality assurance activities, such as anti-spam or the qualitative evaluation of novel mail features. It is conducted by trained professionals, often referred to as "auditors", who are shown messages that could expose personally identifiable information. We address here the challenge of k-anonymizing such messages, focusing on machine generated mail messages that represent more than 90% of today's mail traffic. We introduce a novel message signature Mail-Hash, specifically tailored to identifying structurally-similar messages, which allows us to put such messages in a same equivalence class. We then define a process that generates, for each class, masked mail samples that can be shown to auditors, while guaranteeing the k-anonymity of users. The productivity of auditors is measured by the amount of non-hidden mail content they can see every day, while considering normal working conditions, which set a limit to the number of mail samples they can review. In addition, we consider k-anonymity over time since, by definition of k-anonymity, every new release places additional constraints on the assignment of samples. We describe in details the results we obtained over actual Yahoo mail traffic, and thus demonstrate that our methods are feasible at Web mail scale. Given the constantly growing concern of users over their email being scanned by others, we argue that it is critical to devise such algorithms that guarantee k-anonymity, and implement associated processes in order to restore the trust of mail users.
Multi-Score Position Auctions
Authors: Denis Xavier Charles, Nikhil R. Devanur, Balasubramanian Sivan
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

In this paper we propose a general family of position auctions used in paid search, which we call multi-score position auctions. These auctions contain the GSP auction and the GSP auction with squashing as special cases. We show experimentally that these auctions contain special cases that perform better than the GSP auction with squashing, in terms of revenue, and the number of clicks on ads. In particular, we study in detail the special case that squashes the first slot alone and show that this beats pure squashing (which squashes all slots uniformly). We study the equilibria that arise in this special case to examine both the first order and the second order effect of moving from the squashing-all-slots auction to the squash-only-the-top-slot auction. For studying the second order effect, we simulate auctions using the value-relevance correlated distribution suggested in Lahaie and Pennock [2007]. Since this distribution is derived from a study of value and relevance distributions in Yahoo! we believe the insights derived from this simulation to be valuable. For measuring the first order effect, in addition to the said simulation, we also conduct experiments using auction data from Bing over several weeks that includes a random sample of all auctions.
Mobile App Tagging
Authors: Ning Chen, Steven C. H. Hoi, Shaohua Li, Xiaokui Xiao
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Mobile app tagging aims to assign a list of keywords indicating core functionalities, main contents, key features or concepts of a mobile app. Mobile app tags can be potentially useful for app ecosystem stakeholders or other parties to improve app search, browsing, categorization, and advertising, etc. However, most mainstream app markets, e.g., Google Play, Apple App Store, etc., currently do not explicitly support such tags for apps. To address this problem, we propose a novel auto mobile app tagging framework for annotating a given mobile app automatically, which is based on a search-based annotation paradigm powered by machine learning techniques. Specifically, given a novel query app without tags, our proposed framework (i) first explores online kernel learning techniques to retrieve a set of top-N similar apps that are semantically most similar to the query app from a large app repository; and (ii) then mines the text data of both the query app and the top-N similar apps to discover the most relevant tags for annotating the query app. To evaluate the efficacy of our proposed framework, we conduct an extensive set of experiments on a large real-world dataset crawled from Google Play. The encouraging results demonstrate that our technique is effective and promising.
A Semantic Graph based Topic Model for Question Retrieval in Community Question Answering
Authors: Long Chen, Joemon M. Jose, Haitao Yu, Fajie Yuan, Dell Zhang
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

Community Question Answering (CQA) services, such as Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers, have become popular with users as one of the central paradigms for satisfying users' information needs. The task of question retrieval aims to resolve one's query directly by finding the most relevant questions (together with their answers) from an archive of past questions. However, as the text of each question is short, there is usually a lexical gap between the queried question and the past questions. To alleviate this problem, we present a hybrid approach that blends several language modelling techniques for question retrieval, namely, the classic (query-likelihood) language model, the state-of-the-art translation-based language model, and our proposed semantics-based language model. The semantics of each candidate question is given by a probabilistic topic model which makes use of local and global semantic graphs for capturing the hidden interactions among entities (e.g., people, places, and concepts) in question-answer pairs. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our approach can significantly outperform existing ones.
Click Models for Web Search and their Applications to IR: WSDM 2016 Tutorial
Authors: Aleksandr Chuklin, Ilya Markov, Maarten de Rijke
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

In this tutorial we give an overview of click models for web search. We show how the framework of probabilistic graphical models helps to explain user behavior, build new evaluation metrics and perform simulations. The tutorial discusses foundational aspects alongside experimental details and applications, with live demos and discussions of publicly available resources.
Hierarchical Semi-supervised Classification with Incomplete Class Hierarchies
Authors: Bhavana Dalvi, Aditya Kumar Mishra, William W. Cohen
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

In an entity classification task, topic or concept hierarchies are often incomplete. Previous work by Dalvi et al. [12] has showed that in non-hierarchical semi-supervised classification tasks, the presence of such unanticipated classes can cause semantic drift for seeded classes. The Exploratory learning [12] method was proposed to solve this problem; however it is limited to the flat classification task. This paper builds such exploratory learning methods for hierarchical classification tasks.
Improving IP Geolocation using Query Logs
Authors: Ovidiu Dan, Vaibhav Parikh, Brian D. Davison
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

IP geolocation databases map IP addresses to their geographical locations. These databases are important for several applications such as local search engine relevance, credit card fraud protection, geotargetted advertising, and online content delivery. While they are the most popular method of geolocation, they can have low accuracy at the city level. In this paper we evaluate and improve IP geolocation databases using data collected from search engine logs. We generate a large ground-truth dataset using real time global positioning data extracted from search engine logs. We show that incorrect geolocation information can have a negative impact on implicit user metrics. Using the dataset we measure the accuracy of three state-of-the-art commercial IP geolocation databases. We then introduce a technique to improve existing geolocation databases by mining explicit locations from query logs. We show significant accuracy gains in 44 to 49 out of the top 50 countries, depending on the IP geolocation database. Finally, we validate the approach with a large scale A/B experiment that shows improvements in several user metrics.
Large-Scale Deep Learning For Building Intelligent Computer Systems
Authors: Jeffrey Dean
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

For the past five years, the Google Brain team has focused on conducting research in difficult problems in artificial intelligence, on building large-scale computer systems for machine learning research, and, in collaboration with many teams at Google, on applying our research and systems to dozens of Google products. Our group has recently open-sourced the TensorFlow system (tensorflow.org), a system designed to easily express machine ideas, and to quickly train, evaluate and deploy machine learning systems. In this talk, I'll highlight some of the design decisions we made in building TensorFlow, discuss research results produced within our group, and describe ways in which these ideas have been applied to a variety of problems in Google's products, usually in close collaboration with other teams.
User Modeling in Large Social Networks
Authors: Yuxiao Dong
Venue: WSDM
Year: 2016

This proposal aims to harness the power of data, social, and network sciences to model user behavior in social networks. Specifically, we focus on individual users and investigate the interplay between their behavior and subsequently emergent social phenomena. Work in this proposal unveils the significant social strategies that are used by people to satisfy their social needs. We apply computational methods to address user modeling problems, including demographic inference, link recommendation, and social impact prediction. The proposed research work can be translated into applications in large social systems, such as mobile communication, online social media, and academic collaboration.