The Document Similarity Network: A Novel Technique for Visualizing Relationships in Text Corpora

With the abundance of written information available online, it is useful to be able to automatically synthesize and extract meaningful information from text corpora. We present a unique method for visualizing relationships between documents in a text corpus. By using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to extract topics from the corpus, we create a graph whose nodes represent individual documents and whose edge weights indicate the distance between topic distributions in documents. These edge lengths are then scaled using multidimensional scaling techniques, such that more similar documents are clustered together. Applying this method to several datasets, we demonstrate that these graphs are useful in visually representing high-dimensional document clustering in topic-space

Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays with Cubit

Keyword search is a critical component in most content retrieval systems. Despite the emergence of completely decentralized and efficient peer-to-peer techniques for content distribution, there have not been similarly efficient, accurate, and decentralized mechanisms for content discovery based on approximate search keys. In this paper, we present a scalable and efficient peer-to-peer system called Cubit with a new search primitive that can efficiently find the k data items with keys most similar to a given search key. The system works by creating a keyword metric space that encompasses both the nodes and the objects in the system, where the distance between two points is a measure of the similarity between the strings that the points represent. It provides a loosely-structured overlay that can efficiently navigate this space. We evaluate Cubit through both a real deployment as a search plugin for a popular BitTorrent client and a large-scale simulation and show that it provides an efficient, accurate and robust method to handle imprecise string search in filesharing applications.This work was supported in part by NSF-TRUST 0424422 and NSF-CAREER 0546568 grants

A Novel ILP Framework for Summarizing Content with High Lexical Variety

Summarizing content contributed by individuals can be challenging, because people make different lexical choices even when describing the same events. However, there remains a significant need to summarize such content. Examples include the student responses to post-class reflective questions, product reviews, and news articles published by different news agencies related to the same events. High lexical diversity of these documents hinders the system's ability to effectively identify salient content and reduce summary redundancy. In this paper, we overcome this issue by introducing an integer linear programming-based summarization framework. It incorporates a low-rank approximation to the sentence-word co-occurrence matrix to intrinsically group semantically-similar lexical items. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets of student responses, product reviews, and news documents. Our approach compares favorably to a number of extractive baselines as well as a neural abstractive summarization system. The paper finally sheds light on when and why the proposed framework is effective at summarizing content with high lexical variety.Comment: Accepted for publication in the journal of Natural Language Engineering, 201

Summary Management in P2P Systems

International audienceSharing huge, massively distributed databases in P2P systems is inherently difficult. As the amount of stored data increases, data localization techniques become no longer suf- ficient. A practical approach is to rely on compact database summaries rather than raw database records, whose access is costly in large P2P systems. In this paper, we consider summaries that are synthetic, multidimensional views with two main virtues. First, they can be directly queried and used to approximately answer a query without exploring the original data. Second, as semantic indexes, they support locating relevant nodes based on data content. Our main contribution is to define a summary model for P2P systems, and the appropriate algorithms for summary management. Our performance evaluation shows that the cost of query routing is minimized, while incurring a low cost of summary maintenance