A large portion of real world data is either text or structured (e.g., relational) data. Moreover, such data objects are often linked together (e.g., structured specification of products linking with the corresponding product descriptions and customer comments). Even for text data such as news data, typed entities can be extracted with entity extraction tools. The EventCube project constructs TextCube and TopicCube from interconnected structured and text data (or from text data via entity extraction and dimension building), and performs multidimensional search and analysis on such datasets, in an informative, powerful, and user-friendly manner. This proposed EventCube demo will show the power of the system not only on the originally designed ASRS (Aviation Safety Report System) data sets, but also on news datasets collected from multiple news agencies, and academic datasets constructed from the DBLP and web data. The system has high potential to be extended in many powerful ways and serve as a general platform for search, OLAP (online analytical processing) and data mining on integrated text and structured data. After the system demo in the conference, the system will be put on the web for public access and evaluation.

Many applications generate a large volume of parallel document collections. A parallel document collection consists of two sets of documents where the documents in each set correspond to each other and form semantic pairs (e.g., pairs of problem and solution descriptions in a help-desk setting). Although much work has been done on text mining, little previous work has attempted to mine such a novel kind of text data. In this paper, we propose a new probabilistic topic model, called Probabilistic Topic Mapping (PTM) model, to mine parallel document collections to simultaneously discover latent topics in both sets of documents as well as the mapping of topics in one set to those in the other. We evaluate the PTM model on one real parallel document collection in IT service domain. We show that PTM can effectively discover meaningful topics, as well as their mappings, and it's also useful for improving text matching and retrieval when there's a vocabulary gap.

Information network contains abundant knowledge about relationships among people or entities. Unfortunately, such kind of knowledge is often hidden in a network where different kinds of relationships are not explicitly categorized. For example, in a research publication network, the advisor-advisee relationships among researchers are hidden in the coauthor network. Discovery of those relationships can benefit many interesting applications such as expert finding and research community analysis. In this paper, we take a computer science bibliographic network as an example, to analyze the roles of authors and to discover the likely advisor-advisee relationships. In particular, we propose a time-constrained probabilistic factor graph model (TPFG), which takes a research publication network as input and models the advisor-advisee relationship mining problem using a jointly likelihood objective function. We further design an efficient learning algorithm to optimize the objective function. Based on that our model suggests and ranks probable advisors for every author. Experimental results show that the proposed approach infer advisor-advisee relationships efficiently and achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy (80-90%). We also apply the discovered advisor-advisee relationships to bole search, a specific expert finding task and empirical study shows that the search performance can be effectively improved (+4.09% by [email protected]).

In this article, we study the problem of Web user profiling, which is aimed at finding, extracting, and fusing the “semantic”-based user profile from the Web. Previously, Web user profiling was often undertaken by creating a list of keywords for the user, which is (sometimes even highly) insufficient for main applications. This article formalizes the profiling problem as several subtasks: profile extraction, profile integration, and user interest discovery. We propose a combination approach to deal with the profiling tasks. Specifically, we employ a classification model to identify relevant documents for a user from the Web and propose a Tree-Structured Conditional Random Fields (TCRF) to extract the profile information from the identified documents; we propose a unified probabilistic model to deal with the name ambiguity problem (several users with the same name) when integrating the profile information extracted from different sources; finally, we use a probabilistic topic model to model the extracted user profiles, and construct the user interest model. Experimental results on an online system show that the combination approach to different profiling tasks clearly outperforms several baseline methods. The extracted profiles have been applied to expert finding, an important application on the Web. Experiments show that the accuracy of expert finding can be improved (ranging from +6% to +26% in terms of MAP) by taking advantage of the profiles.

As the amount of textual information grows explosively in various kinds of business systems, it becomes more and more desirable to analyze both structured data records and unstructured text data simultaneously. While online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques have been proven very useful for analyzing and mining structured data, they face challenges in handling text data. On the other hand, probabilistic topic models are among the most effective approaches to latent topic analysis and mining on text data. In this paper, we propose a new data model called topic cube to combine OLAP with probabilistic topic modeling and enable OLAP on the dimension of text data in a multidimensional text database. Topic cube extends the traditional data cube to cope with a topic hierarchy and store probabilistic content measures of text documents learned through a probabilistic topic model. To materialize topic cubes efficiently, we propose a heuristic method to speed up the iterative EM algorithm for estimating topic models by leveraging the models learned on component data cells to choose a good starting point for iteration. Experiment results show that this heuristic method is much faster than the baseline method of computing each topic cube from scratch. We also discuss potential uses of topic cube and show sample experimental results.

Nowadays, most business, administration, and/or scientific databases contain both structured attributes and text attributes. We call a database that consists of both multidimensional structured data and narrative text data as multidimensional text database . Searching, OLAP, and mining such databases pose many research challenges. To enhance the power of data analysis, interesting entities and relationships can be extracted from such databases to derive heterogeneous information networks, which in turn will substantially increase the power and flexibility of data exploration in such databases. Based on our previous studies on TextCube [1], TopicCube [2], and information network analysis, such as RankClus [3] and NetClus [4], we construct iNextCube , an i nformation- N etwork- e nhanced te xt Cube . In this demo, we show the power of iNextCube in the search and analysis of two multidimensional text databases: (i) a DBLP-based CS bibliographic database, and (ii) an online news database.

Recent work on language models for information retrieval has shown that smoothing language models is crucial for achieving good retrieval performance. Many different effective smoothing methods have been proposed, which mostly implement various heuristics to exploit corpus structures. In this paper, we propose a general and unified optimization framework for smoothing language models on graph structures. This framework not only provides a unified formulation of the existing smoothing heuristics, but also serves as a road map for systematically exploring smoothing methods for language models. We follow this road map and derive several different instantiations of the framework. Some of the instantiations lead to novel smoothing methods. Empirical results show that all such instantiations are effective with some outperforming the state of the art smoothing methods.

In this paper, we formally define the problem of topic modeling with network structure (TMN). We propose a novel solution to this problem, which regularizes a statistical topic model with a harmonic regularizer based on a graph structure in the data. The proposed method bridges topic modeling and social network analysis, which leverages the power of both statistical topic models and discrete regularization. The output of this model well summarizes topics in text, maps a topic on the network, and discovers topical communities. With concrete selection of a topic model and a graph-based regularizer, our model can be applied to text mining problems such as author-topic analysis, community discovery, and spatial text mining. Empirical experiments on two different genres of data show that our approach is effective, which improves text-oriented methods as well as network-oriented methods. The proposed model is general; it can be applied to any text collections with a mixture of topics and an associated network structure.

Name ambiguity problem has been a challenging issue for a long history. In this paper, we intend to make a thorough investigation of the whole problem. Specifically, we formalize the name disambiguation problem in a unified framework. The framework can incorporate both attribute and relationship into a probabilistic model. We explore a dynamic approach for automatically estimating the person number K and employ an adaptive distance measure to estimate the distance between objects. Experimental results show that our proposed framework can significantly outperform the baseline method.

This paper is concerned with the problem of name disambiguation. By name disambiguation, we mean distinguishing persons with the same name. It is a critical problem in many knowledge management applications. Despite much research work has been conducted, the problem is still not resolved and becomes even more serious, in particular with the popularity of Web 2.0. Previously, name disambiguation was often undertaken in either a supervised or unsupervised fashion. This paper first gives a constraint-based probabilistic model for semi-supervised name disambiguation. Specifically, we focus on investigating the problem in an academic researcher social network (http://arnetminer.org). The framework combines constraints and Euclidean distance learning, and allows the user to refine the disambiguation results. Experimental results on the researcher social network show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the baseline method using unsupervised hierarchical clustering algorithm.

This paper addresses the issue of extraction of an academic researcher social network. By researcher social network extraction, we are aimed at finding, extracting, and fusing the 'semantic '-based profiling information of a researcher from the Web. Previously, social network extraction was often undertaken separately in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper first gives a formalization of the entire problem. Specifically, it identifies the 'relevant documents' from the Web by a classifier. It then proposes a unified approach to perform the researcher profiling using conditional random fields (CRF). It integrates publications from the existing bibliography datasets. In the integration, it proposes a constraints-based probabilistic model to name disambiguation. Experimental results on an online system show that the unified approach to researcher profiling significantly outperforms the baseline methods of using rule learning or classification. Experimental results also indicate that our method to name disambiguation performs better than the baseline method using unsupervised learning. The methods have been applied to expert finding. Experiments show that the accuracy of expert finding can be significantly improved by using the proposed methods.