Deep Text Mining of Instagram Data Without Strong Supervision

With the advent of social media, our online feeds increasingly consist of short, informal, and unstructured text. This textual data can be analyzed for the purpose of improving user recommendations and detecting trends. Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms, containing both text and images. However, most of the prior research on text processing in social media is focused on analyzing Twitter data, and little attention has been paid to text mining of Instagram data. Moreover, many text mining methods rely on annotated training data, which in practice is both difficult and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we present methods for unsupervised mining of fashion attributes from Instagram text, which can enable a new kind of user recommendation in the fashion domain. In this context, we analyze a corpora of Instagram posts from the fashion domain, introduce a system for extracting fashion attributes from Instagram, and train a deep clothing classifier with weak supervision to classify Instagram posts based on the associated text. With our experiments, we confirm that word embeddings are a useful asset for information extraction. Experimental results show that information extraction using word embeddings outperforms a baseline that uses Levenshtein distance. The results also show the benefit of combining weak supervision signals using generative models instead of majority voting. Using weak supervision and generative modeling, an F1 score of 0.61 is achieved on the task of classifying the image contents of Instagram posts based solely on the associated text, which is on level with human performance. Finally, our empirical study provides one of the few available studies on Instagram text and shows that the text is noisy, that the text distribution exhibits the long-tail phenomenon, and that comment sections on Instagram are multi-lingual.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Pre-print for paper to appear in conference proceedings for the Web Intelligence Conferenc

ContrastNER: Contrastive-based Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER

Prompt-based language models have produced encouraging results in numerous applications, including Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. NER aims to identify entities in a sentence and provide their types. However, the strong performance of most available NER approaches is heavily dependent on the design of discrete prompts and a verbalizer to map the model-predicted outputs to entity categories, which are complicated undertakings. To address these challenges, we present ContrastNER, a prompt-based NER framework that employs both discrete and continuous tokens in prompts and uses a contrastive learning approach to learn the continuous prompts and forecast entity types. The experimental results demonstrate that ContrastNER obtains competitive performance to the state-of-the-art NER methods in high-resource settings and outperforms the state-of-the-art models in low-resource circumstances without requiring extensive manual prompt engineering and verbalizer design.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, COMPSAC202

TranSQL: A Transformer-based Model for Classifying SQL Queries

Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) are becoming popular in various fields as they enable domain experts to focus on domain-specific concepts rather than software-specific ones. Many domain experts usually reuse their previously-written scripts for writing new ones; however, to make this process straightforward, there is a need for techniques that can enable domain experts to find existing relevant scripts easily. One fundamental component of such a technique is a model for identifying similar DSL scripts. Nevertheless, the inherent nature of DSLs and lack of data makes building such a model challenging. Hence, in this work, we propose TRANSQL, a transformer-based model for classifying DSL scripts based on their similarities, considering their few-shot context. We build TRANSQL using BERT and GPT-3, two performant language models. Our experiments focus on SQL as one of the most commonly-used DSLs. The experiment results reveal that the BERT-based TRANSQL cannot perform well for DSLs since they need extensive data for the fine-tuning phase. However, the GPT-based TRANSQL gives markedly better and more promising results.acceptedVersio

Conceptualization and scalable execution of big data workflows using domain-specific languages and software containers

Big Data processing, especially with the increasing proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and convergence of IoT, edge and cloud computing technologies, involves handling massive and complex data sets on heterogeneous resources and incorporating different tools, frameworks, and processes to help organizations make sense of their data collected from various sources. This set of operations, referred to as Big Data workflows, requires taking advantage of Cloud infrastructures’ elasticity for scalability. In this article, we present the design and prototype implementation of a Big Data workflow approach based on the use of software container technologies, message-oriented middleware (MOM), and a domain-specific language (DSL) to enable highly scalable workflow execution and abstract workflow definition. We demonstrate our system in a use case and a set of experiments that show the practical applicability of the proposed approach for the specification and scalable execution of Big Data workflows. Furthermore, we compare our proposed approach’s scalability with that of Argo Workflows – one of the most prominent tools in the area of Big Data workflows – and provide a qualitative evaluation of the proposed DSL and overall approach with respect to the existing literature.publishedVersio

Big data workflows: Locality-aware orchestration using software containers

The emergence of the Edge computing paradigm has shifted data processing from centralised infrastructures to heterogeneous and geographically distributed infrastructures. Therefore, data processing solutions must consider data locality to reduce the performance penalties from data transfers among remote data centres. Existing Big Data processing solutions provide limited support for handling data locality and are inefficient in processing small and frequent events specific to the Edge environments. This article proposes a novel architecture and a proof-of-concept implementation for software container-centric Big Data workflow orchestration that puts data locality at the forefront. The proposed solution considers the available data locality information, leverages long-lived containers to execute workflow steps, and handles the interaction with different data sources through containers. We compare the proposed solution with Argo Workflows and demonstrate a significant performance improvement in the execution speed for processing the same data units. Finally, we carry out experiments with the proposed solution under different configurations and analyze individual aspects affecting the performance of the overall solution.publishedVersio

Smart Data Placement for Big Data Pipelines: An Approach based on the Storage-as-a-Service Model

The development of big data pipelines is a challenging task, especially when data storage is considered as part of the data pipelines. Local storage is expensive, hard to maintain, comes with several challenges (e.g., data availability, data security, and backup). The use of cloud storage, i.e., Storageas-a-Service (StaaS), instead of local storage has the potential of providing more flexibility in terms of such as scalability, fault tolerance, and availability. In this paper, we propose a generic approach to integrate StaaS with data pipelines, i.e., computation on an on-premise server or on a specific cloud, but integration with StaaS, and develop a ranking method for available storage options based on five key parameters: cost, proximity, network performance, the impact of server-side encryption, and user weights. The evaluation carried out demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of data transfer performance and the feasibility of dynamic selection of a storage option based on four primary user scenarios.acceptedVersio

Locality-Aware Workflow Orchestration for Big Data

The development of the Edge computing paradigm shifts data processing from centralised infrastructures to heterogeneous and geographically distributed infrastructure. Such a paradigm requires data processing solutions that consider data locality in order to reduce the performance penalties from data transfers between remote (in network terms) data centres. However, existing Big Data processing solutions have limited support for handling data locality and are inefficient in processing small and frequent events specific to Edge environments. This paper proposes a novel architecture and a proof-of-concept implementation for software container-centric Big Data workflow orchestration that puts data locality at the forefront. Our solution considers any available data locality information by default, leverages long-lived containers to execute workflow steps, and handles the interaction with different data sources through containers. We compare our system with Argo workflow and show significant performance improvements in terms of speed of execution for processing units of data using our data locality aware Big Data workflow approach.acceptedVersio

Conceptualization and scalable execution of big data workflows using domain-specific languages and software containers

Big Data processing, especially with the increasing proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and convergence of IoT, edge and cloud computing technologies, involves handling massive and complex data sets on heterogeneous resources and incorporating different tools, frameworks, and processes to help organizations make sense of their data collected from various sources. This set of operations, referred to as Big Data workflows, requires taking advantage of Cloud infrastructures’ elasticity for scalability. In this article, we present the design and prototype implementation of a Big Data workflow approach based on the use of software container technologies, message-oriented middleware (MOM), and a domain-specific language (DSL) to enable highly scalable workflow execution and abstract workflow definition. We demonstrate our system in a use case and a set of experiments that show the practical applicability of the proposed approach for the specification and scalable execution of Big Data workflows. Furthermore, we compare our proposed approach’s scalability with that of Argo Workflows – one of the most prominent tools in the area of Big Data workflows – and provide a qualitative evaluation of the proposed DSL and overall approach with respect to the existing literature.publishedVersio

Big data workflows: Locality-aware orchestration using software containers

The emergence of the Edge computing paradigm has shifted data processing from centralised infrastructures to heterogeneous and geographically distributed infrastructures. Therefore, data processing solutions must consider data locality to reduce the performance penalties from data transfers among remote data centres. Existing Big Data processing solutions provide limited support for handling data locality and are inefficient in processing small and frequent events specific to the Edge environments. This article proposes a novel architecture and a proof-of-concept implementation for software container-centric Big Data workflow orchestration that puts data locality at the forefront. The proposed solution considers the available data locality information, leverages long-lived containers to execute workflow steps, and handles the interaction with different data sources through containers. We compare the proposed solution with Argo Workflows and demonstrate a significant performance improvement in the execution speed for processing the same data units. Finally, we carry out experiments with the proposed solution under different configurations and analyze individual aspects affecting the performance of the overall solution.publishedVersio

Big Data Pipelines on the Computing Continuum: Tapping the Dark Data

The computing continuum enables new opportunities for managing big data pipelines concerning efficient management of heterogeneous and untrustworthy resources. We discuss the big data pipelines lifecycle on the computing continuum and its associated challenges, and we outline a future research agenda in this area.acceptedVersio