Hierarchical Classification and its Application in University Search

Web search engines have been adopted by most universities for searching webpages in their own domains. Basically, a user sends keywords to the search engine and the search engine returns a flat ranked list of webpages. However, in university search, user queries are usually related to topics. Simple keyword queries are often insufficient to express topics as keywords. On the other hand, most E-commerce sites allow users to browse and search products in various hierarchies. It would be ideal if hierarchical browsing and keyword search can be seamlessly combined for university search engines. The main difficulty is to automatically classify and rank a massive number of webpages into the topic hierarchies for universities. In this thesis, we use machine learning and data mining techniques to build a novel hybrid search engine with integrated hierarchies for universities, called SEEU (Search Engine with hiErarchy for Universities). Firstly, we study the problem of effective hierarchical webpage classification. We develop a parallel webpage classification system based on Support Vector Machines. With extensive experiments on the well-known ODP (Open Directory Project) dataset, we empirically demonstrate that our hierarchical classification system is very effective and outperforms the traditional flat classification approaches significantly. Secondly, we study the problem of integrating hierarchical classification into the ranking system of keywords-based search engines. We propose a novel ranking framework, called ERIC (Enhanced Ranking by hIerarchical Classification), for search engines with hierarchies. Experimental results on four large-scale TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) web search datasets show that our ranking system with hierarchical classification outperforms the traditional flat keywords-based search methods significantly. Thirdly, we propose a novel active learning framework to improve the performance of hierarchical classification, which is important for ranking webpages in hierarchies. From our experiments on the benchmark text datasets, we find that our active learning framework can achieve good classification performance yet save a considerable number of labeling effort compared with the state-of-the-art active learning methods for hierarchical text classification. Fourthly, based on the proposed classification and ranking methods, we present a novel hierarchical classification framework for mining academic topics from university webpages. We build an academic topic hierarchy based on the commonly accepted Wikipedia academic disciplines. Based on this hierarchy, we train a hierarchical classifier and apply it to mine academic topics. According to our comprehensive analysis, the academic topics mined by our method are reasonable and consistent with the real-world topic distribution in universities. Finally, we combine all the proposed techniques together and implement the SEEU search engine. According to two usability studies conducted in the ECE and the CS departments at our university, SEEU is favored by the majority of participants. To conclude, the main contribution of this thesis is a novel search engine, called SEEU, for universities. We discuss the challenges toward building SEEU and propose effective machine learning and data mining methods to tackle them. With extensive experiments on well-known benchmark datasets and real-world university webpage datasets, we demonstrate that our system is very effective. In addition, two usability studies of SEEU in our university show that SEEU has a great promise for university search

Popularity Prediction of Reddit Texts

Popularity prediction is a useful technique for marketers to anticipate the success of marketing campaigns, to build recommendation systems that suggest new products to consumers, and to develop targeted advertising. Researchers likewise use popularity prediction to measure how popularity changes within a community or within a given timespan. In this paper, I explore ways to predict popularity of posts in reddit.com, which is a blend of news aggregator and community forum. I frame popularity prediction as a text classification problem and attempt to solve it by first identifying topics in the text and then classifying whether the topics identified are more characteristic of popular or unpopular texts. This classifier is then used to label unseen texts as popular or not dependent on the topics found in these new posts. I explore the use of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and term frequency-inverse document frequency for topic identification and naïve Bayes classifiers and support vector machines for classification. The relation between topics and popularity is dynamic -- topics in Reddit communities can wax and wane in popularity. Despite the inherent variability, the methods explored in the paper are effective, showing prediction accuracy between 60% and 75%. The study contributes to the field in various ways. For example, it provides novel data for research and development, not only for text classification but also for the study of relation between topics and popularity in general. The study also helps us better understand different topic identification and classification methods by illustrating their effectiveness on real-life data from a fast-changing and multi-purpose websit

Beyond Sentiment: The Manifold of Human Emotions

Sentiment analysis predicts the presence of positive or negative emotions in a text document. In this paper we consider higher dimensional extensions of the sentiment concept, which represent a richer set of human emotions. Our approach goes beyond previous work in that our model contains a continuous manifold rather than a finite set of human emotions. We investigate the resulting model, compare it to psychological observations, and explore its predictive capabilities. Besides obtaining significant improvements over a baseline without manifold, we are also able to visualize different notions of positive sentiment in different domains.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

Two-Level Text Classification Using Hybrid Machine Learning Techniques

Nowadays, documents are increasingly being associated with multi-level category hierarchies rather than a flat category scheme. To access these documents in real time, we need fast automatic methods to navigate these hierarchies. Today’s vast data repositories such as the web also contain many broad domains of data which are quite distinct from each other e.g. medicine, education, sports and politics. Each domain constitutes a subspace of the data within which the documents are similar to each other but quite distinct from the documents in another subspace. The data within these domains is frequently further divided into many subcategories. Subspace Learning is a technique popular with non-text domains such as image recognition to increase speed and accuracy. Subspace analysis lends itself naturally to the idea of hybrid classifiers. Each subspace can be processed by a classifier best suited to the characteristics of that particular subspace. Instead of using the complete set of full space feature dimensions, classifier performances can be boosted by using only a subset of the dimensions. This thesis presents a novel hybrid parallel architecture using separate classifiers trained on separate subspaces to improve two-level text classification. The classifier to be used on a particular input and the relevant feature subset to be extracted is determined dynamically by using a novel method based on the maximum significance value. A novel vector representation which enhances the distinction between classes within the subspace is also developed. This novel system, the Hybrid Parallel Classifier, was compared against the baselines of several single classifiers such as the Multilayer Perceptron and was found to be faster and have higher two-level classification accuracies. The improvement in performance achieved was even higher when dealing with more complex category hierarchies