Extraction of temporal networks from term co-occurrences in online textual sources

A stream of unstructured news can be a valuable source of hidden relations between different entities, such as financial institutions, countries, or persons. We present an approach to continuously collect online news, recognize relevant entities in them, and extract time-varying networks. The nodes of the network are the entities, and the links are their co-occurrences. We present a method to estimate the significance of co-occurrences, and a benchmark model against which their robustness is evaluated. The approach is applied to a large set of financial news, collected over a period of two years. The entities we consider are 50 countries which issue sovereign bonds, and which are insured by Credit Default Swaps (CDS) in turn. We compare the country co-occurrence networks to the CDS networks constructed from the correlations between the CDS. The results show relatively small, but significant overlap between the networks extracted from the news and those from the CDS correlations

Automated construction and analysis of political networks via open government and media sources

We present a tool to generate real world political networks from user provided lists of politicians and news sites. Additional output includes visualizations, interactive tools and maps that allow a user to better understand the politicians and their surrounding environments as portrayed by the media. As a case study, we construct a comprehensive list of current Texas politicians, select news sites that convey a spectrum of political viewpoints covering Texas politics, and examine the results. We propose a ”Combined” co-occurrence distance metric to better reflect the relationship between two entities. A topic modeling technique is also proposed as a novel, automated way of labeling communities that exist within a politician’s ”extended” network.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Tagging and Tag Recommendation

Tagging has emerged as one of the best ways of associating metadata with objects (e.g., videos, texts) in Web 2.0 applications. Consisting of freely chosen keywords assigned to objects by users, tags represent a simpler, cheaper, and a more natural way of organizing content than a fixed taxonomy with a controlled vocabulary. Moreover, recent studies have demonstrated that among other textual features such as title, description, and user comments, tags are the most effective to support information retrieval (IR) services such as search, automatic classification, and content recommendation. In this context, tag recommendation services aim at assisting users in the tagging process, allowing users to select some of the recommended tags or to come up with new ones. Besides improving user experience, tag recommendation services potentially improve the quality of the generated tags, benefiting IR services that rely on tags as data sources. Besides the obvious benefit of improving the description of the objects, tag recommendation can be directly applied in IR services such as search and query expansion. In this chapter, we will provide the main concepts related to tagging systems, as well as an overview of tag recommendation techniques, dividing them into two stages of the tag recommendation process: (1) the candidate tag extraction and (2) the candidate tag ranking

Automatic tagging and geotagging in video collections and communities

Automatically generated tags and geotags hold great promise to improve access to video collections and online communi- ties. We overview three tasks offered in the MediaEval 2010 benchmarking initiative, for each, describing its use scenario, definition and the data set released. For each task, a reference algorithm is presented that was used within MediaEval 2010 and comments are included on lessons learned. The Tagging Task, Professional involves automatically matching episodes in a collection of Dutch television with subject labels drawn from the keyword thesaurus used by the archive staff. The Tagging Task, Wild Wild Web involves automatically predicting the tags that are assigned by users to their online videos. Finally, the Placing Task requires automatically assigning geo-coordinates to videos. The specification of each task admits the use of the full range of available information including user-generated metadata, speech recognition transcripts, audio, and visual features