Event detection from click-through data via query clustering

The web is an index of real-world events and lot of knowledge can be mined from the web resources and their derivatives. Event detection is one recent research topic triggered from the domain of web data mining with the increasing popularity of search engines. In the visitor-centric approach, the click-through data generated by the web search engines is the start up resource with the intuition: often such data is event-driven. In this thesis, a retrospective algorithm is proposed to detect such real-world events from the click-through data. This approach differs from the existing work as it: (i) considers the click-through data as collaborative query sessions instead of mere web logs and try to understand user behavior (ii) tries to integrate the semantics, structure, and content of queries and pages (iii) aims to achieve the overall objective via Query Clustering. The problem of event detection is transformed into query clustering by generating clusters - hybrid cover graphs; each hybrid cover graph corresponds to a real-world event. The evolutionary pattern for the co-occurrences of query-page pairs in a hybrid cover graph is imposed for the quality purpose over a moving window period. Also, the approach is experimentally evaluated on a commercial search engine\u27s data collected over 3 months with about 20 million web queries and page clicks from 650000 users. The results outperform the most recent work in this domain in terms of number of events detected, F-measures, entropy, recall etc. --Abstract, page iv

Suggestions for fresh search queries by mining mircoblog topics

Query suggestion of Web search has been an effective approach to help users quickly express their information need and more accurately get the information they need. All major web-search engines and most proposed methods that suggest queries rely on query logs of search engine to determine possible query suggestions. However, for search systems, it is much more difficult to effectively suggest relevant queries to a fresh search query which has no or few historical evidences in query logs. In this paper, we propose a suggestion approach for fresh queries by mining the new social network media, i.e, mircoblog topics. We leverage the comment information in the microblog topics to mine potential suggestions. We utilize word frequency statistics to extract a set of ordered candidate words. As soon as a user starts typing a query word, words that match with the partial user query word are selected as completions of the partial query word and are offered as query suggestions. We collect a dataset from Sina microblog topics and compare the final results by selecting different suggestion context source. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in suggesting queries with high quality. Our conclusion is that the suggestion context source of a topic consists of the tweets from authenticated Sina users is more effective than the tweets from all Sina users. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013

Dynamic Document Annotation for Efficient Data Retrieval

Document annotation is considered as one of the most popular methods, where metadata present in document is used to search documents from a large text documents database. Few application domains such as scientific networks, blogs share information in a large amount is usually in unstructured data text documents. Manual annotation of each document becomes a tedious task. Annotations facilitate the task of finding the document topic and assist the reader to quickly overview and understand document. Dynamic document annotation provides a solution to such type of problems. Dynamic annotation of documents is generally considered as a semi-supervised learning task. The documents are dynamically assigned to one of a set of predefined classes based on the features extracted from their textual content. This paper proposes survey on Collaborative Adaptive Data sharing platform (CADS) for document annotation and use of query workload to direct the annotation process. A key novelty of CADS is that it learns with time the most important data attributes of the application, and uses this knowledge to guide the data insertion and querying

Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms

This paper is written for (social science) researchers seeking to analyze the wealth of social media now available. It presents a comprehensive review of software tools for social networking media, wikis, really simple syndication feeds, blogs, newsgroups, chat and news feeds. For completeness, it also includes introductions to social media scraping, storage, data cleaning and sentiment analysis. Although principally a review, the paper also provides a methodology and a critique of social media tools. Analyzing social media, in particular Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, has become a major research and business activity due to the availability of web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services. This has led to an ‘explosion’ of data services, software tools for scraping and analysis and social media analytics platforms. It is also a research area undergoing rapid change and evolution due to commercial pressures and the potential for using social media data for computational (social science) research. Using a simple taxonomy, this paper provides a review of leading software tools and how to use them to scrape, cleanse and analyze the spectrum of social media. In addition, it discussed the requirement of an experimental computational environment for social media research and presents as an illustration the system architecture of a social media (analytics) platform built by University College London. The principal contribution of this paper is to provide an overview (including code fragments) for scientists seeking to utilize social media scraping and analytics either in their research or business. The data retrieval techniques that are presented in this paper are valid at the time of writing this paper (June 2014), but they are subject to change since social media data scraping APIs are rapidly changing