Structural Regularities in Text-based Entity Vector Spaces

Entity retrieval is the task of finding entities such as people or products in response to a query, based solely on the textual documents they are associated with. Recent semantic entity retrieval algorithms represent queries and experts in finite-dimensional vector spaces, where both are constructed from text sequences. We investigate entity vector spaces and the degree to which they capture structural regularities. Such vector spaces are constructed in an unsupervised manner without explicit information about structural aspects. For concreteness, we address these questions for a specific type of entity: experts in the context of expert finding. We discover how clusterings of experts correspond to committees in organizations, the ability of expert representations to encode the co-author graph, and the degree to which they encode academic rank. We compare latent, continuous representations created using methods based on distributional semantics (LSI), topic models (LDA) and neural networks (word2vec, doc2vec, SERT). Vector spaces created using neural methods, such as doc2vec and SERT, systematically perform better at clustering than LSI, LDA and word2vec. When it comes to encoding entity relations, SERT performs best.Comment: ICTIR2017. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval. 201

Understanding online political networks: The case of the far-right and far-left in Greece

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.This paper examines the connectivity among political networks on Twitter. We explore dynamics inside and between the far right and the far left, as well as the relation between the structure of the network and sentiment. The 2015 Greek political context offers a unique opportunity to investigate political communication in times of political intensity and crisis. We explore interactions inside and between political networks on Twitter in the run up to the elections of three different ballots: the parliamentary election of 25 January, the bailout referendum of 5 July, the snap election of 20 September; we, then, compare political action during campaigns with that during routinized politics.This work received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme (Horizon2020/2014–2020), under grant agreement 688380

Determining the Presence of Political Parties in Social Circles

We derive the political climate of the social circles of Twitter users using a weakly-supervised approach. By applying random walks over a sub-sample of Twitter's social graph we infer a distribution indicating the presence of eight Flemish political parties in users' social circles in the months before the 2014 elections. The graph structure is induced through a combination of connection and retweet features and combines information of over a million tweets and 14 million follower connections. We solely exploit the social graph structure and do not rely on tweet content. For validation we compare the affiliation of politically active Twitter users with the most-influential party in their network. On a validation set of around 700 politically active individuals we achieve F_1 scores of 0.85 and greater. We asked the Twitter community to evaluate our classification performance. More than half of the 2258 users who responded reported a score higher than 60 out of 100

Determining the Presence of Political Parties in Social Circles

We derive the political climate of the social circles of Twitter users using a weakly-supervised approach. By applying random walks over a sub-sample of Twitter's social graph we infer a distribution indicating the presence of eight Flemish political parties in users' social circles in the months before the 2014 elections. The graph structure is induced through a combination of connection and retweet features and combines information of over a million tweets and 14 million follower connections. We solely exploit the social graph structure and do not rely on tweet content. For validation we compare the affiliation of politically active Twitter users with the most-influential party in their network. On a validation set of around 700 politically active individuals we achieve F_1 scores of 0.85 and greater. We asked the Twitter community to evaluate our classification performance. More than half of the 2258 users who responded reported a score higher than 60 out of 100