Tracking the History and Evolution of Entities: Entity-centric Temporal Analysis of Large Social Media Archives

How did the popularity of the Greek Prime Minister evolve in 2015? How did the predominant sentiment about him vary during that period? Were there any controversial sub-periods? What other entities were related to him during these periods? To answer these questions, one needs to analyze archived documents and data about the query entities, such as old news articles or social media archives. In particular, user-generated content posted in social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, can be seen as a comprehensive documentation of our society, and thus meaningful analysis methods over such archived data are of immense value for sociologists, historians and other interested parties who want to study the history and evolution of entities and events. To this end, in this paper we propose an entity-centric approach to analyze social media archives and we define measures that allow studying how entities were reflected in social media in different time periods and under different aspects, like popularity, attitude, controversiality, and connectedness with other entities. A case study using a large Twitter archive of four years illustrates the insights that can be gained by such an entity-centric and multi-aspect analysis.Comment: This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in the International Journal on Digital Libraries (2018

New Alignment Methods for Discriminative Book Summarization

We consider the unsupervised alignment of the full text of a book with a human-written summary. This presents challenges not seen in other text alignment problems, including a disparity in length and, consequent to this, a violation of the expectation that individual words and phrases should align, since large passages and chapters can be distilled into a single summary phrase. We present two new methods, based on hidden Markov models, specifically targeted to this problem, and demonstrate gains on an extractive book summarization task. While there is still much room for improvement, unsupervised alignment holds intrinsic value in offering insight into what features of a book are deemed worthy of summarization.Comment: This paper reflects work in progres

Data Summarizations for Scalable, Robust and Privacy-Aware Learning in High Dimensions

The advent of large-scale datasets has offered unprecedented amounts of information for building statistically powerful machines, but, at the same time, also introduced a remarkable computational challenge: how can we efficiently process massive data? This thesis presents a suite of data reduction methods that make learning algorithms scale on large datasets, via extracting a succinct model-specific representation that summarizes the full data collection—a coreset. Our frameworks support by design datasets of arbitrary dimensionality, and can be used for general purpose Bayesian inference under real-world constraints, including privacy preservation and robustness to outliers, encompassing diverse uncertainty-aware data analysis tasks, such as density estimation, classification and regression. We motivate the necessity for novel data reduction techniques in the first place by developing a reidentification attack on coarsened representations of private behavioural data. Analysing longitudinal records of human mobility, we detect privacy-revealing structural patterns, that remain preserved in reduced graph representations of individuals’ information with manageable size. These unique patterns enable mounting linkage attacks via structural similarity computations on longitudinal mobility traces, revealing an overlooked, yet existing, privacy threat. We then propose a scalable variational inference scheme for approximating posteriors on large datasets via learnable weighted pseudodata, termed pseudocoresets. We show that the use of pseudodata enables overcoming the constraints on minimum summary size for given approximation quality, that are imposed on all existing Bayesian coreset constructions due to data dimensionality. Moreover, it allows us to develop a scheme for pseudocoresets-based summarization that satisfies the standard framework of differential privacy by construction; in this way, we can release reduced size privacy-preserving representations for sensitive datasets that are amenable to arbitrary post-processing. Subsequently, we consider summarizations for large-scale Bayesian inference in scenarios when observed datapoints depart from the statistical assumptions of our model. Using robust divergences, we develop a method for constructing coresets resilient to model misspecification. Crucially, this method is able to automatically discard outliers from the generated data summaries. Thus we deliver robustified scalable representations for inference, that are suitable for applications involving contaminated and unreliable data sources. We demonstrate the performance of proposed summarization techniques on multiple parametric statistical models, and diverse simulated and real-world datasets, from music genre features to hospital readmission records, considering a wide range of data dimensionalities.Nokia Bell Labs, Lundgren Fund, Darwin College, University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Cambridg