Crowdsourcing services make it possible to collect huge amount of annotations from less trained crowd workers in an inexpensive and efficient manner. However, unlike making binary or pairwise judgements, labeling complex structures such as ranked lists by crowd workers is subject to large variance and low efficiency, mainly due to the huge labeling space and the annotators' non-expert nature. Yet ranked lists offer the most informative knowledge for training and testing in various data mining and information retrieval tasks such as learning to rank. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model called "Thurstonian Pairwise Preference" (TPP) to infer the true ranked list out of a collection of crowdsourced pairwise annotations. The key challenges that TPP addresses are to resolve the inevitable incompleteness and inconsistency of judgements, as well as to model variable query difficulty and different labeling quality resulting from workers' domain expertise and truthfulness. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that TPP can effectively bind pairwise preferences of the crowd into rankings and substantially outperforms previously published methods.

We propose a single unified minimax entropy approach for user preference modeling with multidimensional knowledge. Our approach provides a discriminative learning protocol which is able to simultaneously a) leverage explicit human knowledge, which are encoded as explicit features, and b) model the more ambiguous hidden intent, which are encoded as latent features. A latent feature can be carved by any parametric form, which allows it to accommodate arbitrary underlying assumptions. We present our approach in the scenario of check-in preference learning and demonstrate it is capable of modeling user preference in an optimized manner.

Traditional citation analysis has been widely applied to detect patterns of scientific collaboration, map the landscapes of scholarly disciplines, assess the impact of research outputs, and observe knowledge transfer across domains. It is, however, limited, as it assumes all citations are of similar value and weights each equally. Content‐based citation analysis ( CCA ) addresses a citation's value by interpreting each one based on its context at both the syntactic and semantic levels. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of CAA research in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodical approaches, and example applications. In addition, we highlight how increased computational capabilities and publicly available full‐text resources have opened this area of research to vast possibilities, which enable deeper citation analysis, more accurate citation prediction, and increased knowledge discovery.

Understanding how research themes evolve over time in a research community is useful in many ways (e.g., revealing important milestones and discovering emerging major research trends). In this paper, we propose a novel way of analyzing literature citation to explore the research topics and the theme evolution by modeling article citation relations with a probabilistic generative model. The key idea is to represent a research paper by a ``bag of citations'' and model such a ``citation document'' with a probabilistic topic model. We explore the extension of a particular topic model, i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation~(LDA), for citation analysis, and show that such a Citation-LDA can facilitate discovering of individual research topics as well as the theme evolution from multiple related topics, both of which in turn lead to the construction of evolution graphs for characterizing research themes. We test the proposed citation-LDA on two datasets: the ACL Anthology Network(AAN) of natural language research literatures and PubMed Central(PMC) archive of biomedical and life sciences literatures, and demonstrate that Citation-LDA can effectively discover the evolution of research themes, with better formed topics than (conventional) Content-LDA.