8,900 research outputs found
Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing
In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown
great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social
media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that
enables us to work with these new big data streams. At the same time, many
challenging problems have been identified. First, there is often a mismatch
between how rapidly online data can change, and how rapidly algorithms are
updated, which means that there is limited reusability for algorithms trained
on past data as their performance decreases over time. Second, much of the work
is focusing on specific issues during a specific past period in time, even
though public health institutions would need flexible tools to assess multiple
evolving situations in real time. Third, most tools providing such capabilities
are proprietary systems with little algorithmic or data transparency, and thus
little buy-in from the global public health and research community. Here, we
introduce Crowdbreaks, an open platform which allows tracking of health trends
by making use of continuous crowdsourced labelling of public social media
content. The system is built in a way which automatizes the typical workflow
from data collection, filtering, labelling and training of machine learning
classifiers and therefore can greatly accelerate the research process in the
public health domain. This work introduces the technical aspects of the
platform and explores its future use cases
Information Extraction in Illicit Domains
Extracting useful entities and attribute values from illicit domains such as
human trafficking is a challenging problem with the potential for widespread
social impact. Such domains employ atypical language models, have `long tails'
and suffer from the problem of concept drift. In this paper, we propose a
lightweight, feature-agnostic Information Extraction (IE) paradigm specifically
designed for such domains. Our approach uses raw, unlabeled text from an
initial corpus, and a few (12-120) seed annotations per domain-specific
attribute, to learn robust IE models for unobserved pages and websites.
Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach can outperform feature-centric
Conditional Random Field baselines by over 18\% F-Measure on five annotated
sets of real-world human trafficking datasets in both low-supervision and
high-supervision settings. We also show that our approach is demonstrably
robust to concept drift, and can be efficiently bootstrapped even in a serial
computing environment.Comment: 10 pages, ACM WWW 201
The Skipping Behavior of Users of Music Streaming Services and its Relation to Musical Structure
The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the
point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the
main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users
stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution
of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in
time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown
that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also
independent of the cohort of users and, under stationary conditions, date of
observation. Finally, user behavioral data is used to train a predictor of the
musical structure of a song solely from its acoustic content; it is shown that
the use of such data, available in large quantities to music streaming
services, yields significant improvements in accuracy over the customary
fashion of training this class of algorithms, in which only smaller amounts of
hand-labeled data are available
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