Revealing intricate properties of communities in the bipartite structure of online social networks

International audienceMany real-world networks based on human activities exhibit a bipartite structure. Although bipartite graphs seem appropriate to analyse and model their properties, it has been shown that standard metrics fail to reproduce intricate patterns observed in real networks. In particular, the overlapping of the neighbourhood of communities are difficult to capture precisely. In this work, we tackle this issue by analysing the structure of 4 different real-world networks coming from online social activities. We first analyse their structure using standard metrics. Surprisingly, the clustering coefficient turns out to be less relevant than the redundancy coefficient to account for overlapping patterns. We then propose new metrics, namely the dispersion coefficient and the monopoly, and show that they help refining the study of bipartite overlaps. Finally, we compare the results obtained on real networks with the ones obtained on random bipartite models. This shows that the patterns captured by the redundancy and the dispersion coefficients are strongly related to the real nature of the observed overlaps

Exploiting the Bipartite Structure of Entity Grids for Document Coherence and Retrieval

International audienceDocument coherence describes how much sense text makes in terms of its logical organisation and discourse flow. Even though coherence is a relatively difficult notion to quantify precisely, it can be approximated automatically. This type of coherence modelling is not only interesting in itself, but also useful for a number of other text processing tasks, including Information Retrieval (IR), where adjusting the ranking of documents according to both their relevance and their coherence has been shown to increase retrieval effectiveness.The state of the art in unsupervised coherence modelling represents documents as bipartite graphs of sentences and discourse entities, and then projects these bipartite graphs into one–mode undirected graphs. However, one–mode projections may incur significant loss of the information present in the original bipartite structure. To address this we present three novel graph metrics that compute document coherence on the original bipartite graph of sentences and entities. Evaluation on standard settings shows that: (i) one of our coherence metrics beats the state of the art in terms of coherence accuracy; and (ii) all three of our coherence metrics improve retrieval effectiveness because, as closer analysis reveals, they capture aspects of document quality that go undetected by both keyword-based standard ranking and by spam filtering. This work contributes document coherence metrics that are theoretically principled, parameter-free, and useful to IR