Mining Frequent Neighborhood Patterns in Large Labeled Graphs

Over the years, frequent subgraphs have been an important sort of targeted patterns in the pattern mining literatures, where most works deal with databases holding a number of graph transactions, e.g., chemical structures of compounds. These methods rely heavily on the downward-closure property (DCP) of the support measure to ensure an efficient pruning of the candidate patterns. When switching to the emerging scenario of single-graph databases such as Google Knowledge Graph and Facebook social graph, the traditional support measure turns out to be trivial (either 0 or 1). However, to the best of our knowledge, all attempts to redefine a single-graph support resulted in measures that either lose DCP, or are no longer semantically intuitive. This paper targets mining patterns in the single-graph setting. We resolve the "DCP-intuitiveness" dilemma by shifting the mining target from frequent subgraphs to frequent neighborhoods. A neighborhood is a specific topological pattern where a vertex is embedded, and the pattern is frequent if it is shared by a large portion (above a given threshold) of vertices. We show that the new patterns not only maintain DCP, but also have equally significant semantics as subgraph patterns. Experiments on real-life datasets display the feasibility of our algorithms on relatively large graphs, as well as the capability of mining interesting knowledge that is not discovered in prior works.Comment: 9 page

A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

Pair-Linking for Collective Entity Disambiguation: Two Could Be Better Than All

Collective entity disambiguation aims to jointly resolve multiple mentions by linking them to their associated entities in a knowledge base. Previous works are primarily based on the underlying assumption that entities within the same document are highly related. However, the extend to which these mentioned entities are actually connected in reality is rarely studied and therefore raises interesting research questions. For the first time, we show that the semantic relationships between the mentioned entities are in fact less dense than expected. This could be attributed to several reasons such as noise, data sparsity and knowledge base incompleteness. As a remedy, we introduce MINTREE, a new tree-based objective for the entity disambiguation problem. The key intuition behind MINTREE is the concept of coherence relaxation which utilizes the weight of a minimum spanning tree to measure the coherence between entities. Based on this new objective, we design a novel entity disambiguation algorithms which we call Pair-Linking. Instead of considering all the given mentions, Pair-Linking iteratively selects a pair with the highest confidence at each step for decision making. Via extensive experiments, we show that our approach is not only more accurate but also surprisingly faster than many state-of-the-art collective linking algorithms