Large scale homophily analysis in twitter using a twixonomy

In this paper we perform a large-scale homophily analysis on Twitter using a hierarchical representation of users' interests which we call a Twixonomy. In order to build a population, community, or single-user Twixonomy we first associate "topical" friends in users' friendship lists (i.e. friends representing an interest rather than a social relation between peers) with Wikipedia categories. A wordsense disambiguation algorithm is used to select the appropriate wikipage for each topical friend. Starting from the set of wikipages representing "primitive" interests, we extract all paths connecting these pages with topmost Wikipedia category nodes, and we then prune the resulting graph G efficiently so as to induce a direct acyclic graph. This graph is the Twixonomy. Then, to analyze homophily, we compare different methods to detect communities in a peer friends Twitter network, and then for each community we compute the degree of homophily on the basis of a measure of pairwise semantic similarity. We show that the Twixonomy provides a means for describing users' interests in a compact and readable way and allows for a fine-grained homophily analysis. Furthermore, we show that midlow level categories in the Twixonomy represent the best balance between informativeness and compactness of the representation

A large multilingual and multi-domain dataset for recommender systems

This paper presents a multi-domain interests dataset to train and test Recommender Systems, and the methodology to create the dataset from Twitter messages in English and Italian. The English dataset includes an average of 90 preferences per user on music, books, movies, celebrities, sport, politics and much more, for about half million users. Preferences are either extracted from messages of users who use Spotify, Goodreads and other similar content sharing platforms, or induced from their ”topical” friends, i.e., followees representing an interest rather than a social relation between peers. In addition, preferred items are matched with Wikipedia articles describing them. This unique feature of our dataset provides a mean to derive a semantic categorization of the preferred items, exploiting available semantic resources linked to Wikipedia such as the Wikipedia Category Graph, DBpedia, BabelNet and others

Efficient pruning of large knowledge graphs

In this paper we present an efficient and highly accurate algorithm to prune noisy or over-ambiguous knowledge graphs given as input an extensional definition of a domain of interest, namely as a set of instances or concepts. Our method climbs the graph in a bottom-up fashion, iteratively layering the graph and pruning nodes and edges in each layer while not compromising the connectivity of the set of input nodes. Iterative layering and protection of pre-defined nodes allow to extract semantically coherent DAG structures from noisy or over-ambiguous cyclic graphs, without loss of information and without incurring in computational bottlenecks, which are the main problem of stateof- the-art methods for cleaning large, i.e., Webscale, knowledge graphs. We apply our algorithm to the tasks of pruning automatically acquired taxonomies using benchmarking data from a SemEval evaluation exercise, as well as the extraction of a domain-adapted taxonomy from theWikipedia category hierarchy. The results show the superiority of our approach over state-of-art algorithms in terms of both output quality and computational efficiency

Medically assisted procreation: emerging problems in Italy

En Italia la procreación médicamente asistida se rige por la Ley 40 de 2004. Esta ley ha sido sujeto de múltiples cambios en los últimos diez años, que han rediseñado su apariencia hasta convertirla en una especie de referente de cómo se reescribe un texto legal. Incluso, hoy en día, muchos problemas deben ser vistos como un replanteamiento del modelo familiar, la paternidad y la existencia de un derecho a la libertad procreativa. Diferentes corrientes del feminismo han acogido el advenimiento de nuevas tecnologías reproductivas de manera diversa, ya que, si bien supuestamente fueron creadas para ampliar los derechos de las mujeres, también han dado lugar a nuevas formas de explo¬tación y sometimiento.In Italy, medically assisted procreation is governed by Law 40/2004. The said law has been subject to several changes over the past ten years, which have redesigned the face of it so as to make it an example of re-writing a legal text. Even today, many problems still need to be seen to that require a rethinking of the family model, parenthood, and the existence of a right to procreative freedom. The various currents of feminism have welcomed the advent of new reproductive technologies differently. Intended to broaden women’s rights, these new technologies have also opened up new forms of subjection and exploitation