860 research outputs found
iCrawl: Improving the Freshness of Web Collections by Integrating Social Web and Focused Web Crawling
Researchers in the Digital Humanities and journalists need to monitor,
collect and analyze fresh online content regarding current events such as the
Ebola outbreak or the Ukraine crisis on demand. However, existing focused
crawling approaches only consider topical aspects while ignoring temporal
aspects and therefore cannot achieve thematically coherent and fresh Web
collections. Especially Social Media provide a rich source of fresh content,
which is not used by state-of-the-art focused crawlers. In this paper we
address the issues of enabling the collection of fresh and relevant Web and
Social Web content for a topic of interest through seamless integration of Web
and Social Media in a novel integrated focused crawler. The crawler collects
Web and Social Media content in a single system and exploits the stream of
fresh Social Media content for guiding the crawler.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference
on Digital Libraries 201
Enhancing Undergraduate AI Courses through Machine Learning Projects
It is generally recognized that an undergraduate introductory Artificial Intelligence course is challenging to teach. This is, in part, due to the diverse and seemingly disconnected core topics that are typically covered. The paper presents work funded by the National Science Foundation to address this problem and to enhance the student learning experience in the course. Our work involves the development of an adaptable framework for the presentation of core AI topics through a unifying theme of machine learning. A suite of hands-on semester-long projects are developed, each involving the design and implementation of a learning system that enhances a commonly-deployed application. The projects use machine learning as a unifying theme to tie together the core AI topics. In this paper, we will first provide an overview of our model and the projects being developed and will then present in some detail our experiences with one of the projects – Web User Profiling which we have used in our AI class
Unsupervised robust nonparametric learning of hidden community properties
We consider learning of fundamental properties of communities in large noisy
networks, in the prototypical situation where the nodes or users are split into
two classes according to a binary property, e.g., according to their opinions
or preferences on a topic. For learning these properties, we propose a
nonparametric, unsupervised, and scalable graph scan procedure that is, in
addition, robust against a class of powerful adversaries. In our setup, one of
the communities can fall under the influence of a knowledgeable adversarial
leader, who knows the full network structure, has unlimited computational
resources and can completely foresee our planned actions on the network. We
prove strong consistency of our results in this setup with minimal assumptions.
In particular, the learning procedure estimates the baseline activity of normal
users asymptotically correctly with probability 1; the only assumption being
the existence of a single implicit community of asymptotically negligible
logarithmic size. We provide experiments on real and synthetic data to
illustrate the performance of our method, including examples with adversaries.Comment: Experiments with new types of adversaries adde
Forming Within-site Topical Information Space to Facilitate Online Free-Choice Learning
Locating specific and structured information in the World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming increasingly difficult, because of the rapid growth of the Web and the distributed nature of information. Although existing search engines do a good job in ranking web pages based on topical relevance, they provide limited assistance for free-choice learners to leverage the nonlinear nature of information spaces for knowledge acquisition. We hypothesize that free-choice learners would benefit more from structured topical information spaces than a list of individual pages across multiple websites. We conceptualize a within-site topical information space as a sphere formed by linked pages centering on a web page. In this paper, we investigate techniques and heuristics to form the space. In particular, we propose a hybrid method that relies on not only content-based characteristics and user queries, but also a site\u27s global structure. Experimental results show that consideration of website topology provides good improvement to page relevance estimation, indicating the clustering tendency of relevant pages
Folks in Folksonomies: Social Link Prediction from Shared Metadata
Web 2.0 applications have attracted a considerable amount of attention
because their open-ended nature allows users to create light-weight semantic
scaffolding to organize and share content. To date, the interplay of the social
and semantic components of social media has been only partially explored. Here
we focus on Flickr and Last.fm, two social media systems in which we can relate
the tagging activity of the users with an explicit representation of their
social network. We show that a substantial level of local lexical and topical
alignment is observable among users who lie close to each other in the social
network. We introduce a null model that preserves user activity while removing
local correlations, allowing us to disentangle the actual local alignment
between users from statistical effects due to the assortative mixing of user
activity and centrality in the social network. This analysis suggests that
users with similar topical interests are more likely to be friends, and
therefore semantic similarity measures among users based solely on their
annotation metadata should be predictive of social links. We test this
hypothesis on the Last.fm data set, confirming that the social network
constructed from semantic similarity captures actual friendship more accurately
than Last.fm's suggestions based on listening patterns.Comment: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1718487.171852
- …