9,768 research outputs found
Transforming Graph Representations for Statistical Relational Learning
Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic
due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological,
information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of
statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this
article, we examine a range of representation issues for graph-based relational
data. Since the choice of relational data representation for the nodes, links,
and features can dramatically affect the capabilities of SRL algorithms, we
survey approaches and opportunities for relational representation
transformation designed to improve the performance of these algorithms. This
leads us to introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation
transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and
node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. In particular, the
transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their
existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight
or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We
motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey and
compare competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general
conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight
challenges that remain to be addressed
Entity Ranking on Graphs: Studies on Expert Finding
Todays web search engines try to offer services for finding various information in addition to simple web pages, like showing locations or answering simple fact queries. Understanding the association of named entities and documents is one of the key steps towards such semantic search tasks. This paper addresses the ranking of entities and models it in a graph-based relevance propagation framework. In particular we study the problem of expert finding as an example of an entity ranking task. Entity containment graphs are introduced that represent the relationship between text fragments on the one hand and their contained entities on the other hand. The paper shows how these graphs can be used to propagate relevance information from the pre-ranked text fragments to their entities. We use this propagation framework to model existing approaches to expert finding based on the entity's indegree and extend them by recursive relevance propagation based on a probabilistic random walk over the entity containment graphs. Experiments on the TREC expert search task compare the retrieval performance of the different graph and propagation models
WISER: A Semantic Approach for Expert Finding in Academia based on Entity Linking
We present WISER, a new semantic search engine for expert finding in
academia. Our system is unsupervised and it jointly combines classical language
modeling techniques, based on text evidences, with the Wikipedia Knowledge
Graph, via entity linking.
WISER indexes each academic author through a novel profiling technique which
models her expertise with a small, labeled and weighted graph drawn from
Wikipedia. Nodes in this graph are the Wikipedia entities mentioned in the
author's publications, whereas the weighted edges express the semantic
relatedness among these entities computed via textual and graph-based
relatedness functions. Every node is also labeled with a relevance score which
models the pertinence of the corresponding entity to author's expertise, and is
computed by means of a proper random-walk calculation over that graph; and with
a latent vector representation which is learned via entity and other kinds of
structural embeddings derived from Wikipedia.
At query time, experts are retrieved by combining classic document-centric
approaches, which exploit the occurrences of query terms in the author's
documents, with a novel set of profile-centric scoring strategies, which
compute the semantic relatedness between the author's expertise and the query
topic via the above graph-based profiles.
The effectiveness of our system is established over a large-scale
experimental test on a standard dataset for this task. We show that WISER
achieves better performance than all the other competitors, thus proving the
effectiveness of modelling author's profile via our "semantic" graph of
entities. Finally, we comment on the use of WISER for indexing and profiling
the whole research community within the University of Pisa, and its application
to technology transfer in our University
Random walks on mutual microRNA-target gene interaction network improve the prediction of disease-associated microRNAs
Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to play an important role in pathological initiation, progression and maintenance. Because identification in the laboratory of disease-related miRNAs is not straightforward, numerous network-based methods have been developed to predict novel miRNAs in silico. Homogeneous networks (in which every node is a miRNA) based on the targets shared between miRNAs have been widely used to predict their role in disease phenotypes. Although such homogeneous networks can predict potential disease-associated miRNAs, they do not consider the roles of the target genes of the miRNAs. Here, we introduce a novel method based on a heterogeneous network that not only considers miRNAs but also the corresponding target genes in the network model. Results: Instead of constructing homogeneous miRNA networks, we built heterogeneous miRNA networks consisting of both miRNAs and their target genes, using databases of known miRNA-target gene interactions. In addition, as recent studies demonstrated reciprocal regulatory relations between miRNAs and their target genes, we considered these heterogeneous miRNA networks to be undirected, assuming mutual miRNA-target interactions. Next, we introduced a novel method (RWRMTN) operating on these mutual heterogeneous miRNA networks to rank candidate disease-related miRNAs using a random walk with restart (RWR) based algorithm. Using both known disease-associated miRNAs and their target genes as seed nodes, the method can identify additional miRNAs involved in the disease phenotype. Experiments indicated that RWRMTN outperformed two existing state-of-the-art methods: RWRMDA, a network-based method that also uses a RWR on homogeneous (rather than heterogeneous) miRNA networks, and RLSMDA, a machine learning-based method. Interestingly, we could relate this performance gain to the emergence of "disease modules" in the heterogeneous miRNA networks used as input for the algorithm. Moreover, we could demonstrate that RWRMTN is stable, performing well when using both experimentally validated and predicted miRNA-target gene interaction data for network construction. Finally, using RWRMTN, we identified 76 novel miRNAs associated with 23 disease phenotypes which were present in a recent database of known disease-miRNA associations. Conclusions: Summarizing, using random walks on mutual miRNA-target networks improves the prediction of novel disease-associated miRNAs because of the existence of "disease modules" in these networks
Combining implicit and explicit topic representations for result diversification
Result diversification deals with ambiguous or multi-faceted queries by providing documents that cover as many subtopics of a query as possible. Various approaches to subtopic modeling have been proposed. Subtopics have been extracted internally, e.g., from retrieved documents, and externally, e.g., from Web resources such as query logs. Internally modeled subtopics are often implicitly represented, e.g., as latent topics, while externally modeled subtopics are often explicitly represented, e.g., as reformulated queries.
We propose a framework that: i) combines both implicitly and explicitly represented subtopics; and ii) allows flexible combination of multiple external resources in a transparent and unified manner. Specifically, we use a random walk based approach to estimate the similarities of the explicit subtopics mined from a number of heterogeneous resources: click logs, anchor text, and web n-grams. We then use these similarities to regularize the latent topics extracted from the top-ranked documents, i.e., the internal (implicit) subtopics. Empirical results show that regularization with explicit subtopics extracted from the right resource leads to improved diversification results, indicating that the proposed regularization with (explicit) external resources forms better (implicit) topic models. Click logs and anchor text are shown to be more effective resources than web n-grams under current experimental settings. Combining resources does not always lead to better results, but achieves a robust performance. This robustness is important for two reasons: it cannot be predicted which resources will be most effective for a given query, and it is not yet known how to reliably determine the optimal model parameters for building implicit topic models
Discriminative Link Prediction using Local Links, Node Features and Community Structure
A link prediction (LP) algorithm is given a graph, and has to rank, for each
node, other nodes that are candidates for new linkage. LP is strongly motivated
by social search and recommendation applications. LP techniques often focus on
global properties (graph conductance, hitting or commute times, Katz score) or
local properties (Adamic-Adar and many variations, or node feature vectors),
but rarely combine these signals. Furthermore, neither of these extremes
exploit link densities at the intermediate level of communities. In this paper
we describe a discriminative LP algorithm that exploits two new signals. First,
a co-clustering algorithm provides community level link density estimates,
which are used to qualify observed links with a surprise value. Second, links
in the immediate neighborhood of the link to be predicted are not interpreted
at face value, but through a local model of node feature similarities. These
signals are combined into a discriminative link predictor. We evaluate the new
predictor using five diverse data sets that are standard in the literature. We
report on significant accuracy boosts compared to standard LP methods
(including Adamic-Adar and random walk). Apart from the new predictor, another
contribution is a rigorous protocol for benchmarking and reporting LP
algorithms, which reveals the regions of strengths and weaknesses of all the
predictors studied here, and establishes the new proposal as the most robust.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
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