Mining topic-specific concepts and definitions on the web
Traditionally, when one wants to learn about a particular topic, one reads a book or a survey paper. With the rapid expansion of the Web, learning in-depth knowledge about a topic from the Web is becoming increasingly important and popular. This is also due to the Web's convenience and its richness of information. In many cases, learning from the Web may even be essential because in our fast changing world, emerging topics appear constantly and rapidly. There is often not enough time for someone to write a book on such topics. To learn such emerging topics, one can resort to research papers. However, research papers are often hard to understand by non-researchers, and few research papers cover every aspect of the topic. In contrast, many Web pages often contain intuitive descriptions of the topic. To find such Web pages, one typically uses a search engine. However, current search techniques are not designed for in-depth learning. Top ranking pages from a search engine may not contain any description of the topic. Even if they do, the description is usually incomplete since it is unlikely that the owner of the page has good knowledge of every aspect of the topic. In this paper, we attempt a novel and challenging task, mining topic-specific knowledge on the Web. Our goal is to help people learn in-depth knowledge of a topic systematically on the Web. The proposed techniques first identify those sub-topics or salient concepts of the topic, and then find and organize those informative pages, containing definitions and descriptions of the topic and sub-topics, just like those in a book. Experimental results using 28 topics show that the proposed techniques are highly effective.

title: Dealing with different distributions in learning from
abstract: In the problem of learning with positive and unlabeled examples, existing research all assumes that positive examples P and the hidden positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experimental results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

title: Finding Actionable Knowledge via Automated Comparison
abstract: The problem of finding interesting and actionable patterns is a major challenge in data mining. It has been studied by many data mining researchers. The issue is that data mining algorithms often generate too many patterns, which make it very hard for the user to find those truly useful ones. Over the years many techniques have been proposed. However, few have made it to real-life applications. At the end of 2005, we built a data mining system for Motorola (called Opportunity Map) to enable the user to explore the space of a large number of rules in order to find actionable knowledge. The approach is based on the concept of rule cubes and operations on rule cubes. A rule cube is similar to a data cube, but stores rules. Since its deployment, some issues have also been identified during the regular use of the system in Motorola. One of the key issues is that although the operations on rule cubes are flexible, each operation is primitive and has to be initiated by the user. Finding a piece of actionable knowledge typically involves many operations and intense visual inspections, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. From interactions with our users, we identified a generic problem that is crucial for finding actionable knowledge. The problem involves extensive comparison of sub-populations and identification of the cause of their differences. This paper first defines the problem and then proposes an effective method to solve the problem automatically. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reported study of this problem. The new method has been added to the Opportunity Map system and is now in daily use in Motorola.

title: Discovering the set of fundamental rule changes
abstract: The world around us changes constantly. Knowing what has changed is an important part of our lives. For businesses, recognizing changes is also crucial. It allows businesses to adapt themselves to the changing market needs. In this paper, we study changes of association rules from one time period to another. One approach is to compare the supports and/or confidences of each rule in the two time periods and report the differences. This technique, however, is too simplistic as it tends to report a huge number of rule changes, and many of them are, in fact, simply the snowball effect of a small subset of fundamental changes. Here, we present a technique to highlight the small subset of fundamental changes. A change is fundamental if it cannot be explained by some other changes. The proposed technique has been applied to a number of real-life datasets. Experiments results show that the number of rules whose changes are unexplainable is quite small (about 20% of the total number of changes discovered), and many of these unexplainable changes reflect some fundamental shifts in the application domain.

title: Speed-up iterative frequent itemset mining with constraint changes
abstract: Mining of frequent itemsets is a fundamental data mining task. Past research has proposed many efficient algorithms for this purpose. Recent work also highlighted the importance of using constraints to focus the mining process to mine only those relevant itemsets. In practice, data mining is often an interactive and iterative process. The user typically changes constraints and runs the mining algorithm many times before being satisfied with the final results. This interactive process is very time consuming. Existing mining algorithms are unable to take advantage of this iterative process to use previous mining results to speed up the current mining process. This results in an enormous waste of time and computation. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to utilize previous mining results to improve the efficiency of current mining when constraints are changed. We first introduce the concept of tree boundary to summarize useful information available from previous mining. We then show that the tree boundary provides an effective and efficient framework for the new mining. The proposed technique has been implemented in the context of two existing frequent itemset mining algorithms, FP-tree and tree projection. Experiment results on both synthetic and real-life datasets show that the proposed approach achieves a dramatic saving of computation.

title: Entity discovery and assignment for opinion mining applications
abstract: Opinion mining became an important topic of study in recent years due to its wide range of applications. There are also many companies offering opinion mining services. One problem that has not been studied so far is the assignment of entities that have been talked about in each sentence. Let us use forum discussions about products as an example to make the problem concrete. In a typical discussion post, the author may give opinions on multiple products and also compare them. The issue is how to detect what products have been talked about in each sentence. If the sentence contains the product names, they need to be identified. We call this problem entity discovery. If the product names are not explicitly mentioned in the sentence but are implied due to the use of pronouns and language conventions, we need to infer the products. We call this problem entity assignment. These problems are important because without knowing what products each sentence talks about the opinion mined from the sentence is of little use. In this paper, we study these problems and propose two effective methods to solve the problems. Entity discovery is based on pattern discovery and entity assignment is based on mining of comparative sentences. Experimental results using a large number of forum posts demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. Our system has also been successfully tested in a commercial setting.

title: Measuring the meaning in time series clustering of text search queries
abstract: We use a combination of proven methods from time series analysis and machine learning to explore the relationship between temporal and semantic similarity in web query logs; we discover that the combination of correlation and cycles is a good, but not perfect, sign of semantic relationship.

title: An effective parameter extraction method based on memetic differential evolution algorithm
abstract: This paper provides an effective method for parameter extraction of microelectronic devices and elements. A novel method, memetic differential evolution (MDE) algorithm, is proposed in this paper. By combining differential evolution (DE) algorithm, mutations in immune algorithm (IA), and special operators for parameter extraction, MDE possesses characteristics of high accuracy, stability, generality, and efficiency. The effectiveness of the method has been shown by two typical examples, including small-signal equivalent circuit models for an AlGaN/GaN HEMT device up to 40GHz, as well as an equivalent circuit model for on-chip differential spiral inductors. In both cases, the initial values and parameter ranges of the elements in the equivalent circuits are hard to determine in optimization. The results and comparisons with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and canonical DE algorithm, demonstrate the superiority of MDE in terms of accuracy and generality.

title: A Novel Fuzzy Neural Network with Fast Training and Accurate Generalization
abstract: For the reason of all parameters in a conventional fuzzy neural network (FNN) needed to be adjusted iteratively, learning can be very slow and may suffer from local minima. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel FNN in this paper, which shows a fast speed and accurate generalization. First we state the universal approximation theorem for an FNN with random membership function parameters (FNN-RM). Since all the membership function parameters are arbitrarily chosen, the proposed FNN-RM algorithm needs to adjust only the output weights of FNNs. Experimental results on function approximation and classification problems show that the new algorithm not only provides thousands of times of speed-up over traditional learning algorithms, but also produces better generalization performance in comparison to other FNNs.

title: Accessible image search
abstract: There are about 8% of men and 0.8% of women suffering from colorblindness. We show that the existing image search techniques cannot provide satisfactory results for these users, since many images will not be well perceived by them due to the loss of color information. In this paper, we introduce a scheme named Accessible Image Search (AIS) to accommodate these users. Different from the general image search scheme that aims at returning more relevant results, AIS further takes into account the colorblind accessibilities of the returned results, i.e., the image qualities in the eyes of colorblind users. The scheme includes two components: accessibility assessment and accessibility improvement. For accessibility assessment, we introduce an analysisbased method and a learning-based method. Based on the measured accessibility scores, different reranking methods can be performed to prioritize the images with high accessibilities. In accessibility improvement component, we propose an efficient recoloring algorithm to modify the colors of the images such that they can be better perceived by colorblind users. We also propose the Accessibility Average Precision (AAP) for AIS as a complementary performance evaluation measure to the conventional relevance-based evaluation methods. Experimental results with more than 60,000 images and 20 anonymous colorblind users demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed scheme.

title: A small listener for heterogeneous mobile devices: a service enabler with a uniform Web object view
abstract: We recently developed "system on mobile devices" (SyD) middleware for rapidly developing and deploying collaborative distributed applications over a collection of autonomous Web objects and data-stores, independent of the underlying device, data, or network. SyDListener is a key component of SyD middleware. SyDListener provides a set of interfaces and classes that allows distributed SyD-based application components to communicate seamlessly in mobile environments. SyDListener provides a uniform object view of the underlying server application and enables client applications to remotely invoke those methods using XML messages. SyDListener is implemented as a multi-threaded wrapper with simple persistence management and asynchronous invocation functionality for J2ME mobile information device profile (MIDP) on connected limited device configuration (CLDL) devices. We discuss the functionality, architecture, implementation, and performance of SyDListener. We believe it is the first comprehensive working prototype of its kind for Java-enabled handhelds with a small footprint of 10 KB.