The persistent challenges of data sparsity and class imbalance have long limited the development of recommender systems. Fortunately, line graph theory offers a novel perspective to overcome these issues. By transforming the user-item interaction bipartite graph into a line graph, the problems of data sparsity and class imbalance are elegantly reformulated as those of insufficient labeled nodes and imbalanced label distribution in the line graph domain. This reformulation allows us to directly apply mature techniques from node classification and imbalanced graph learning to address these core challenges. Inspired by this insight, we propose a Line Graph Data Augmentation (LGDA) strategy, which features two distinct characteristics. Firstly, it is a plug-and-play module that resolves data sparsity and imbalance without modifying the underlying recommendation framework. Secondly, it employs a targeted augmentation and confidence filtering mechanism to generate high-quality, balanced augmented data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets validate that LGDA effectively alleviates data sparsity and class imbalance, leading to significant improvements in both recommendation performance and system robustness.

Methods based on variational bayes theorytare widely used to detect community structures in networks. In recent years, many related methods have emerged that provide valuable insights into variational bayes theory. Remarkably, a fundamental assumption remains incomprehensible. Variational bayes-based methods typically employ a posterior distribution that follows a gaussian distribution to approximate the unknown prior distribution. However, the complexity and irregularity of node distributions in real-world networks prompt us to consider what characteristics of network information are suitable for the posterior distribution. Mathematically, inappropriate low- and high-frequency signals in expectation inference and variance inference can intensify the adverse effects of community distortion and ambiguity. To analysis these two phenomena and propose reasonable countermeasures, we conduct an empirical study. It is found that appropriately compressing low-frequency signals during expectation inference and amplifying high-frequency signals during variance inference are effective strategies. Based on these two strategies, this paper proposes a novel variational bayes plug-in, namely VBPG, to boost the performance of existing variational bayes-based community detection methods. Specifically, we modulate the frequency signals during expectation and variance inference to generate a new gaussian distribution. This strategy improves the fitting accuracy between the posterior distribution and the unknown true distribution without altering the modules of existing methods. The comprehensive experimental results validate that methods using VBPG achieve competitive performance improvements in most cases.

Existing community detection methods for attributed multiplex networks focus on exploiting the complementary information from different topologies, while they are paying little attention to the role of attributes. However, we observe that real attributed multiplex networks exhibit two unique features, namely, consistency and homogeneity of node attributes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel method, called ACDM, which is based on these two characteristics of attributes, to detect communities on attributed multiplex networks. Specifically, we extract commonality representation of nodes through the consistency of attributes. The collaboration between the homogeneity of attributes and topology information reveals the particularity representation of nodes. The comprehensive experimental results on real attributed multiplex networks well validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in most networks.

Since existing methods are often not effective to detect communities with multiple topics in attributed networks, we propose a method named SSAGCN via Autoencoder-style self-supervised learning. SSAGCN firstly designs an adaptive graph convolutional network (AGCN), which is treated as the encoder for fusing topology information and attribute information automatically, and then utilizes a dual decoder to simultaneously reconstruct network topology and attributes. By further introducing the modularity maximization and the joint optimization strategies, SSAGCN can detect communities with multiple topics in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that SSAGCN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, and also can be used to conduct topic analysis well.

Abstract With the rapid development of social networks, academic social networks have attracted increasing attention. In particular, providing personalized recommendations for learners considering data sparseness and cold-start scenarios is a challenging task. An important research topic is to accurately discover potential friends of learners to build implicit learning groups and obtain personalized collaborative recommendations of similar learners according to the learning content. This paper proposes a personalized explainable learner implicit friend recommendation method (PELIRM). Methodologically, PELIRM utilizes the learner's multidimensional interaction behavior in social networks to calculate the degrees of trust between learners and applies the three-degree influence theory to mine the implicit friends of learners. The similarity of research interests between learners is calculated by cosine and term frequency–inverse document frequency. To solve the recommendation problem for cold-start learners, the learner's common check-in IP is used to obtain the learner's location information. Finally, the degree of trust, similarity of research interests, and geographic distance between learners are combined as ranking indicators to recommend potential friends for learners and give multiple interpretations of the recommendation results. By verifying and evaluating the proposed method on real data from Scholar.com, the experimental results show that the proposed method is reliable and effective in terms of personalized recommendation and explainability.

A$k$-core is the special cohesive subgraph where each vertex has at least$k$degree. It is widely used in graph mining applications such as community detection, visualization, and clique discovery. Because dynamic graphs frequently evolve, obtaining their$k$-cores via decomposition is inefficient. Instead, previous studies proposed various methods for updating$k$-cores based on inserted (removed) edges. Unfortunately, the parallelism of existing approaches is limited due to their theoretical constraints. To further improve the parallelism of maintenance algorithms, we refine the$k$-core maintenance theorem and propose two effective parallel methods to update$k$-cores for insertion and removal cases. Experimental results show that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms on real-world graphs by one order of magnitude.

Anomaly detection on attributed networks has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Despite the success, most of the existing methods only focus on detecting the abnormal nodes while fail to detect the abnormal subgraphs. In this paper, we define a new problem of hybrid-order anomaly detection on attributed networks, which aims to detect both of the abnormal nodes and subgraphs. To this end, a new deep learning model called Hybrid-Order Graph Attention Network (HO-GAT) is developed, which is able to simultaneously detect the abnormal nodes and motif instances in an attributed network. In order to model the mutual influence between nodes and motif instances, the learning procedures of the node representation and the motif instance representation are integrated into a unified graph attention network with a novel hybrid-order self-attention mechanism. After learning the node representation and the motif instance representation, two decoders are respectively designed to reconstruct the attribute information of the nodes and motif instances, and the hybrid-order topological structure among nodes and motif instances. And finally, the reconstruction errors are utilized as the abnormal score of nodes and motif instances respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets have confirmed the effectiveness of the HO-GAT method.

Nowadays, the learning management system (LMS) has been widely used in different educational stages from primary to tertiary education for student administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. Towards effective learning outcome assessment, the exam script generation problem has attracted many attentions recently. But the research in this field is still in its early stage. Two essential issues have been ignored largely by existing solutions. First, given a course, it is unknown yet how to generate an quality exam script which concurrently has (i) the proper difficulty level, (ii) the coverage of essential knowledge points, (iii) the capability to distinguish academic performances between students, and (iv) the student scores in normal distribution. Second, while frequently encountered in practice, it is unknown so far how to generate a pair of high quality exam scripts which are equivalent in assessment (i.e., the student scores are comparable by taking either of them) but have significantly different sets of questions. To fill the gap, this paper proposes ExamGAN (Exam Script Generative Adversarial Network) to generate high quality exam scripts, and then extends ExamGAN to T-ExamGAN (Twin-ExamGAN) to generate a pair of high quality exam scripts. Based on extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, it has verified the superiority of proposed solutions in various aspects against the state-of-the-art. Moreover, we have conducted a case study which demonstrated the effectiveness of proposed solution in the real teaching scenarios.

Graph convolutional network (GCN)-based recommendation has recently attracted significant attention in the recommender system community. Although current studies propose various GCNs to improve recommendation performance, existing methods suffer from two main limitations. First, user–item interaction data is generally sparse in practice, highlighting these methods' ineffectiveness in learning user and item feature representations. Second, they usually perform a dot-product operation to model and calculate user preferences on items, leading to inaccurate user preference learning. To address these limitations, this study adopts a design idea that sharply differs from existing works. Specifically, we introduce the knowledge distillation concept into GCN-based recommendation and propose a two-phase knowledge distillation model (TKDM) improving recommendation performance. In Phase I, a self-distillation method on a graph auto-encoder learns the user and item feature representations. This auto-encoder employs a simple two-layer GCN as an encoder and a fully connected layer as a decoder. On this basis, in Phase II, a mutual-distillation method on a fully connected layer is introduced to learn user preferences on items with triple-based Bayesian personalized ranking. Extensive experiments on three real-world data sets demonstrate that TKDM outperforms classic and state-of-the-art methods related to GCN-based recommendation problems.

Recently, hybrid-order community detection has been proposed for addressing the hypergraph fragmentation issue suffered by the motif-based higher-order community detection. However, the existing attempts of hybrid-order community detection inadvertently damage the lower-order connectivity pattern and the higher-order connectivity pattern when constructing the fusion model. Additionally, like the higher-order community detection approaches, they also adopt a two-phase strategy that separately applies the existing graph node clustering methods to the proximity matrix derived from the lower-order connectivity pattern and the higher-order connectivity pattern. Therefore, the higher-order connectivity pattern is only utilized for constructing proximity matrix and hence has no direct effect on the final community results. In this paper, to address the above issues, we propose a Generative model for Hybrid-Order Community detection (GHOC). The main idea lies in defining a likelihood function of a generative model that finds the optimal community membership strength vectors of nodes, based on which the original lower-order connectivity pattern and the higher-order connectivity pattern can be directly reconstructed simultaneously. From the community membership strength vectors, the final community structure can be derived. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several data sets, and the results have confirmed the superiority of the proposed GHOC method.

Community detection can exhibit the aggregation behavior of complex networks. Network motifs are the fundamental building blocks which can reveal the higher-order structure of complex networks. Label propagation algorithm has the advantage of approximately linear time complexity, unfortunately, the randomness of label update is a major but unsolved issue. For these reasons, this paper proposes a novel community detection method, named motif-based embedding label propagation algorithm (MELPA). First, complex network topology is reconstructed by merging higher-order topology with lower-order connectivity features, where higher-order topology is captured by mining network motifs. Second, We design a label propagation characteristic model according to nodes influence, then a new label update rule is formulated based on reconstructed weighted network, the rule integrates frequency among neighbor labels, influence of nodes, propagation characteristics and closeness of nodes to update the node label, the purpose is to overcome the randomness of label selection and identify a better and more stable community structure. Finally, extensive experiments on synthetic networks and real-world complex networks are conducted to verify the effectiveness of MELPA, especially for the complex networks with unobvious community structure, MELPA will get unexpected results.

In a big data environment, traditional recommendation methods have limitations such as data sparseness and cold start, etc. In view of the rich semantics, excellent quality, and good structure of knowledge graphs, many researchers have introduced knowledge graphs into the research about recommendation systems, and studied interpretable recommendations based on knowledge graphs. Along this line, this paper proposes a scholar recommendation method based on the high-order propagation of knowledge graph (HoPKG), which analyzes the high-order semantic information in the knowledge graph, and generates richer entity representations to obtain users’ potential interest by distinguishing the importance of different entities. On this basis, a dual aggregation method of high-order propagation is proposed to enable entity information to be propagated more effectively. Through experimental analysis, compared with some baselines, such as Ripplenet, RKGE and CKE, our method has certain advantages in the evaluation indicators AUC and F1.

Sentence representation approaches have been widely used and proven to be effective in many text modeling tasks and downstream applications. Many recent proposals are available on learning sentence representations based on deep neural frameworks. However, these methods are pre-trained in open domains and depend on the availability of large-scale data for model fitting. As a result, they may fail in some special scenarios, where data are sparse and embedding interpretations are required, such as legal, medical, or technical fields. In this paper, we present an unsupervised learning method to exploit representations of sentences for some closed domains via topic modeling. We reformulate the inference process of the sentences with the corresponding contextual sentences and the associated words, and propose an effective context-enhanced process called the bi-Directional Context-enhanced Sentence Representation Learning (bi-DCSR). This method takes advantage of the semantic distributions of the nearby contextual sentences and the associated words to form a context-enhanced sentence representation. To support the bi-DCSR, we develop a novel Bayesian topic model to embed sentences and words into the same latent interpretable topic space called the Hybrid Priors Topic Model (HPTM). Based on the defined topic space by the HPTM, the bi-DCSR method learns the embedding of a sentence by the two-directional contextual sentences and the words in it, which allows us to efficiently learn high-quality sentence representations in such closed domains. In addition to an open-domain dataset from Wikipedia, our method is validated using three closed-domain datasets from legal cases, electronic medical records, and technical reports. Our experiments indicate that the HPTM significantly outperforms on language modeling and topic coherence, compared with the existing topic models. Meanwhile, the bi-DCSR method does not only outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods on closed domain sentence classification tasks, but also yields competitive performance compared to these established approaches on the open domain. Additionally, the visualizations of the semantics of sentences and words demonstrate the interpretable capacity of our model.

News recommendation recently has attracted wide spread research attention because of the fast propagation of information on the Internet. Due to the large volume of information, a recommendation system which can provide the most important and useful information is required. Most of existing researches focus on providing recommendation based on news contents and predict the category of news only, which is inefficient if the news pool is very large or contains a lot of noisy data. In this study, we propose a novel news recommendation system called UBS, which recommends personalized news based on User Behavior Sequence (UBS) with high efficiency. We formulate the mining problem of user behavior sequence for Internet news reading, which can significantly enhance the performance of recommendation. Experimental validation was conducted using real datasets that obtained from news website. The results show that UBS can provide reasonable news recommendation compared to content-based recommendation as well as collaborative filtering.

Destination prediction is an essential task for a number of emerging location based applications such as recommending sightseeing places and sending targeted advertisements. A common approach to destination prediction is to derive the probability of a location being the destination based on historical trajectories. However, existing techniques suffer from the "data sparsity problem", i.e., the number of available historical trajectories is far from sufficient to cover all possible trajectories. This problem considerably limits the amount of query trajectories whose predicted destinations can be inferred. In this demonstration, we showcase a system named "DesTeller" that is interactive, user-friendly, publicly accessible, and capable of answering real-time queries. The underlying algorithm Sub-Trajectory Synthesis (SubSyn) successfully addressed the data sparsity problem and is able to predict destinations for almost every query submitted by travellers. We also consider the privacy protection issue in case an adversary uses SubSyn algorithm to derive sensitive location information of users.

Question Classification plays an important role in most Question Answering systems. In this paper, we exploit semantic features in Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for Question Classification. We propose a semantic tree kernel to incorporate semantic similarity information. A diverse set of semantic features is evaluated. Experimental results show that SVMs with semantic features, especially semantic classes, can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art systems.