Visual exploration and retrieval of XML document collections with the generic system X2

This article reports on the XML retrieval system X2 which has been developed at the University of Munich over the last five years. In a typical session with X2, the user first browses a structural summary of the XML database in order to select interesting elements and keywords occurring in documents. Using this intermediate result, queries combining structure and textual references are composed semiautomatically. After query evaluation, the full set of answers is presented in a visual and structured way. X2 largely exploits the structure found in documents, queries and answers to enable new interactive visualization and exploration techniques that support mixed IR and database-oriented querying, thus bridging the gap between these three views on the data to be retrieved. Another salient characteristic of X2 which distinguishes it from other visual query systems for XML is that it supports various degrees of detailedness in the presentation of answers, as well as techniques for dynamically reordering and grouping retrieved elements once the complete answer set has been computed

Understanding edge-connectivity in the Internet through core-decomposition

Internet is a complex network composed by several networks: the Autonomous Systems, each one designed to transport information efficiently. Routing protocols aim to find paths between nodes whenever it is possible (i.e., the network is not partitioned), or to find paths verifying specific constraints (e.g., a certain QoS is required). As connectivity is a measure related to both of them (partitions and selected paths) this work provides a formal lower bound to it based on core-decomposition, under certain conditions, and low complexity algorithms to find it. We apply them to analyze maps obtained from the prominent Internet mapping projects, using the LaNet-vi open-source software for its visualization

Conditional t-SNE: Complementary t-SNE embeddings through factoring out prior information

Dimensionality reduction and manifold learning methods such as t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) are routinely used to map high-dimensional data into a 2-dimensional space to visualize and explore the data. However, two dimensions are typically insufficient to capture all structure in the data, the salient structure is often already known, and it is not obvious how to extract the remaining information in a similarly effective manner. To fill this gap, we introduce \emph{conditional t-SNE} (ct-SNE), a generalization of t-SNE that discounts prior information from the embedding in the form of labels. To achieve this, we propose a conditioned version of the t-SNE objective, obtaining a single, integrated, and elegant method. ct-SNE has one extra parameter over t-SNE; we investigate its effects and show how to efficiently optimize the objective. Factoring out prior knowledge allows complementary structure to be captured in the embedding, providing new insights. Qualitative and quantitative empirical results on synthetic and (large) real data show ct-SNE is effective and achieves its goal