2,345 research outputs found
An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities
In online discussion communities, users can interact and share information
and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create
multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by
deceiving others or manipulating discussions. In this work, we study
sockpuppetry across nine discussion communities, and show that sockpuppets
differ from ordinary users in terms of their posting behavior, linguistic
traits, as well as social network structure. Sockpuppets tend to start fewer
discussions, write shorter posts, use more personal pronouns such as "I", and
have more clustered ego-networks. Further, pairs of sockpuppets controlled by
the same individual are more likely to interact on the same discussion at the
same time than pairs of ordinary users. Our analysis suggests a taxonomy of
deceptive behavior in discussion communities. Pairs of sockpuppets can vary in
their deceptiveness, i.e., whether they pretend to be different users, or their
supportiveness, i.e., if they support arguments of other sockpuppets controlled
by the same user. We apply these findings to a series of prediction tasks,
notably, to identify whether a pair of accounts belongs to the same underlying
user or not. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of deception in
online discussion communities and paves the way towards the automatic detection
of sockpuppets.Comment: 26th International World Wide Web conference 2017 (WWW 2017
XML Matchers: approaches and challenges
Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences
between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic
in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the
past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models
(e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years,
the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed
a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching
approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between
concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known
techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on
DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical
structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching
process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research
area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and
classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the
specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we
introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main
components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each
of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We
consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing
approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction
of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally,
we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two
challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering
and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.Comment: 34 pages, 8 tables, 7 figure
Improving the translation environment for professional translators
When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side.
This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project
Learning About Meetings
Most people participate in meetings almost every day, multiple times a day.
The study of meetings is important, but also challenging, as it requires an
understanding of social signals and complex interpersonal dynamics. Our aim
this work is to use a data-driven approach to the science of meetings. We
provide tentative evidence that: i) it is possible to automatically detect when
during the meeting a key decision is taking place, from analyzing only the
local dialogue acts, ii) there are common patterns in the way social dialogue
acts are interspersed throughout a meeting, iii) at the time key decisions are
made, the amount of time left in the meeting can be predicted from the amount
of time that has passed, iv) it is often possible to predict whether a proposal
during a meeting will be accepted or rejected based entirely on the language
(the set of persuasive words) used by the speaker
Mining Missing Hyperlinks from Human Navigation Traces: A Case Study of Wikipedia
Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web. They are
especially important for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: an article can
often only be understood in the context of related articles, and hyperlinks
make it easy to explore this context. But important links are often missing,
and several methods have been proposed to alleviate this problem by learning a
linking model based on the structure of the existing links. Here we propose a
novel approach to identifying missing links in Wikipedia. We build on the fact
that the ultimate purpose of Wikipedia links is to aid navigation. Rather than
merely suggesting new links that are in tune with the structure of existing
links, our method finds missing links that would immediately enhance
Wikipedia's navigability. We leverage data sets of navigation paths collected
through a Wikipedia-based human-computation game in which users must find a
short path from a start to a target article by only clicking links encountered
along the way. We harness human navigational traces to identify a set of
candidates for missing links and then rank these candidates. Experiments show
that our procedure identifies missing links of high quality
A Data Mining Toolbox for Collaborative Writing Processes
Collaborative writing (CW) is an essential skill in academia and industry. Providing support during the process of CW can be useful not only for achieving better quality documents, but also for improving the CW skills of the writers. In order to properly support collaborative writing, it is essential to understand how ideas and concepts are developed during the writing process, which consists of a series of steps of writing activities. These steps can be considered as sequence patterns comprising both time events and the semantics of the changes made during those steps. Two techniques can be combined to examine those patterns: process mining, which focuses on extracting process-related knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system; and semantic analysis, which focuses on extracting knowledge about what the student wrote or edited. This thesis contributes (i) techniques to automatically extract process models of collaborative writing processes and (ii) visualisations to describe aspects of collaborative writing. These two techniques form a data mining toolbox for collaborative writing by using process mining, probabilistic graphical models, and text mining. First, I created a framework, WriteProc, for investigating collaborative writing processes, integrated with the existing cloud computing writing tools in Google Docs. Secondly, I created new heuristic to extract the semantic nature of text edits that occur in the document revisions and automatically identify the corresponding writing activities. Thirdly, based on sequences of writing activities, I propose methods to discover the writing process models and transitional state diagrams using a process mining algorithm, Heuristics Miner, and Hidden Markov Models, respectively. Finally, I designed three types of visualisations and made contributions to their underlying techniques for analysing writing processes. All components of the toolbox are validated against annotated writing activities of real documents and a synthetic dataset. I also illustrate how the automatically discovered process models and visualisations are used in the process analysis with real documents written by groups of graduate students. I discuss how the analyses can be used to gain further insight into how students work and create their collaborative documents
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