NOUS: Construction and Querying of Dynamic Knowledge Graphs

The ability to construct domain specific knowledge graphs (KG) and perform question-answering or hypothesis generation is a transformative capability. Despite their value, automated construction of knowledge graphs remains an expensive technical challenge that is beyond the reach for most enterprises and academic institutions. We propose an end-to-end framework for developing custom knowledge graph driven analytics for arbitrary application domains. The uniqueness of our system lies A) in its combination of curated KGs along with knowledge extracted from unstructured text, B) support for advanced trending and explanatory questions on a dynamic KG, and C) the ability to answer queries where the answer is embedded across multiple data sources.Comment: Codebase: https://github.com/streaming-graphs/NOU

A Selectivity based approach to Continuous Pattern Detection in Streaming Graphs

Cyber security is one of the most significant technical challenges in current times. Detecting adversarial activities, prevention of theft of intellectual properties and customer data is a high priority for corporations and government agencies around the world. Cyber defenders need to analyze massive-scale, high-resolution network flows to identify, categorize, and mitigate attacks involving networks spanning institutional and national boundaries. Many of the cyber attacks can be described as subgraph patterns, with prominent examples being insider infiltrations (path queries), denial of service (parallel paths) and malicious spreads (tree queries). This motivates us to explore subgraph matching on streaming graphs in a continuous setting. The novelty of our work lies in using the subgraph distributional statistics collected from the streaming graph to determine the query processing strategy. We introduce a "Lazy Search" algorithm where the search strategy is decided on a vertex-to-vertex basis depending on the likelihood of a match in the vertex neighborhood. We also propose a metric named "Relative Selectivity" that is used to select between different query processing strategies. Our experiments performed on real online news, network traffic stream and a synthetic social network benchmark demonstrate 10-100x speedups over selectivity agnostic approaches.Comment: in 18th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) (2015

EveTAR: Building a Large-Scale Multi-Task Test Collection over Arabic Tweets

This article introduces a new language-independent approach for creating a large-scale high-quality test collection of tweets that supports multiple information retrieval (IR) tasks without running a shared-task campaign. The adopted approach (demonstrated over Arabic tweets) designs the collection around significant (i.e., popular) events, which enables the development of topics that represent frequent information needs of Twitter users for which rich content exists. That inherently facilitates the support of multiple tasks that generally revolve around events, namely event detection, ad-hoc search, timeline generation, and real-time summarization. The key highlights of the approach include diversifying the judgment pool via interactive search and multiple manually-crafted queries per topic, collecting high-quality annotations via crowd-workers for relevancy and in-house annotators for novelty, filtering out low-agreement topics and inaccessible tweets, and providing multiple subsets of the collection for better availability. Applying our methodology on Arabic tweets resulted in EveTAR , the first freely-available tweet test collection for multiple IR tasks. EveTAR includes a crawl of 355M Arabic tweets and covers 50 significant events for which about 62K tweets were judged with substantial average inter-annotator agreement (Kappa value of 0.71). We demonstrate the usability of EveTAR by evaluating existing algorithms in the respective tasks. Results indicate that the new collection can support reliable ranking of IR systems that is comparable to similar TREC collections, while providing strong baseline results for future studies over Arabic tweets