Web 2.0 users generate and spread huge amounts of messages in online social media. Such user-generated contents are mixture of temporal topics (e.g., breaking events) and stable topics (e.g., user interests). Due to their different natures, it is important and useful to distinguish temporal topics from stable topics in social media. However, such a discrimination is very challenging because the user-generated texts in social media are very short in length and thus lack useful linguistic features for precise analysis using traditional approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to detect both stable and temporal topics simultaneously from social media data. Specifically, a unified user-temporal mixture model is proposed to distinguish temporal topics from stable topics. To improve this model's performance, we design a regularization framework that exploits prior spatial information in a social network, as well as a burst-weighted smoothing scheme that exploits temporal prior information in the time dimension. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our proposal on two real data sets obtained from Del.icio.us and Twitter. The experimental results verify that our mixture model is able to distinguish temporal topics from stable topics in a single detection process. Our mixture model enhanced with the spatial regularization and the burst-weighted smoothing scheme significantly outperforms competitor approaches, in terms of topic detection accuracy and discrimination in stable and temporal topics.

Textual web pages dominate web search engines nowadays. However, there is also a striking increase of structured data on the web. Efficient keyword query processing on structured data has attracted enough attention, but effective query understanding has yet to be investigated. In this paper, we focus on the problem of keyword query reformulation in the structured data scenario. These reformulated queries provide alternative descriptions of original input. They could better capture users' information need and guide users to explore related items in the target structured data. We propose an automatic keyword query reformulation approach by exploiting structural semantics in the underlying structured data sources. The reformulation solution is decomposed into two stages, i.e., offline term relation extraction and online query generation. We first utilize a heterogenous graph to model the words and items in structured data, and design an enhanced Random Walk approach to extract relevant terms from the graph context. In the online query reformulation stage, we introduce an efficient probabilistic generation module to suggest substitutable reformulated queries. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-life data set, and our approach yields promising results.

Burst detection is an important topic in temporal stream analysis. Usually, only the textual features are used in burst detection. In the theme extraction from current prevailing social media content, it is necessary to consider not only textual features but also the pervasive collaborative context, e.g., resource lifetime and user activity. This paper explores novel approaches to combine multiple sources of such indication for better burst extraction. We systematically investigate the characters of collaborative context, i.e., metadata frequency, topic coverage and user attractiveness. First, a robust state based model is utilized to detect bursts from individual streams. We then propose a learning method to combine these burst pulses. Experiments on a large real dataset demonstrate the remarkable improvements over the traditional methods.

Collaborative tagging systems have emerged as an ubiquitous way to annotate and organize online resources. The users' tagging actions over time reflect the changing of their interests. In this paper, we propose to detect bursty tagging event, which captures the relations among a group of correlated tags where the tags are either bursty or associated with bursty tag co-occurrence. We exploit the sliding time intervals to extract bursty features from large tag corpora as the first step, and then adopt graph clustering techniques to group bursty features into meaningful bursty events. An experimental study demonstrates the superiority of our approach.

Collaborative tagging systems allow users to label online resources. The tags are generally correlated and evolving according to the change of web contents, and the popularity of tags represent evolution of social interests. Tag taxonomy is a promising solution to organize the data in tagging systems. In this demonstration, we propose to construct the evolutionary taxonomy which incorporates the correlation and evolution of tags, as user generated tags grow and change temporally. We demonstrate that our approach is intuitive and efficient in tag organization which exploits the evolving characteristic of collaborative tagging systems.