Owing to the expense of healthcare and aging demographics, health inequity has emerged as a critical challenge in the United States, leading to significant disparities in health outcomes and unequal access to care in different communities. Understanding the complex associations between the distribution of healthcare providers, clinician characteristics, and socioeconomic conditions in communities of practice is essential to developing policies to close health inequity gaps. However, research in this domain is challenging due to the fragmentation of relevant datasets (including by the government), and the difficulty of using these datasets in a semantically unified manner. To address this challenge, we introduce HealthEQKG, an open-source knowledge graph (KG) specifically designed to support both qualitative and quantitative health equity research. Supported by a compact underlying ontology, HealthEQKG integrates two national-level (but independent) government agency datasets containing physician data and socioeconomic data, followed by data augmentation through the use of established Semantic Web resources. The complete KG contains 72,658 physicians and 28,346 Area Deprivation Indices for zip codes across the US. Through a series of fifteen competency questions, and two use-cases, we demonstrate its utility as a queryable resource for public health policymakers and researchers.

Identifying scholars and their relevant publications in interdisciplinary collaborations within an academic social network (ASN) can help drive new scientific knowledge discovery. This involves a challenging and time-consuming process, which requires scholar's influence role recognition in a scholar team for a given research task. In this paper, we propose a novel “ScholarInfluencer” recommendation system that: (a) uses a classification model combined with network analysis on a heterogeneous knowledge graph to recognize the scholar influencers within interdisciplinary teams of collaborators, and (b) features a large language model (LLM) to use influence role recognition results to support user queries to produce pertinent scholar and their publication recommendations. Our novel approach involves building a heterogeneous knowledge graph using diverse ASN datasets involving entities such as scholars, publications, research grants, and the relationship among these entities. We perform an evaluation of ScholarInfluencer using four widely-used ASN datasets (i.e., NSF, DBLP, Cora and CA-HepTh). Our experiment results show that our influence role recognition model outperforms the state-of-the-art models across the different datasets; especially in the case of the NSF dataset, our model outperforms by up to 13.6%. Further, we show how our recommendation model with role recognition outperforms the model without role recognition across the different datasets; especially in the case of the NSF dataset, our model outperforms by 7%.

Visualizing complex networks with many thousands of nodes and interesting community structure remains a challenging problem. This paper introduces DeepGraph, an off-the-shelf package that takes a network (encoded as an edge-list) as input, and uses open-source packages to interactively visualize nodes in the network in a learned representation space on a web browser. At its core, DeepGraph is powered by established unsupervised node embedding and clustering algorithms, allowing it to operate in an end-to-end fashion without requiring technical expertise or algorithmic parameters. More advanced users can 'swap' out the algorithms in a plug-and-play fashion. DeepGraph is especially designed for nontechnical sociologists and subject matter experts looking to explore the data and its community structure before formulating research questions and follow-up studies. We demonstrate the utility and generality of DeepGraph on real-world network datasets spanning domains from digital communication to social media.

Complex systems research and network science have recently been used to provide novel insights into economic phenomena such as patenting behavior and innovation in firms. Several studies have found that increased mobility of inventors, manifested through firm switching or transitioning, is associated with increased overall productivity. This paper proposes a novel structural study of such transitioning inventors, and the role they play in patent co-authorship networks, in a cohort of highly innovative and economically influential companies such as the five Big Tech firms (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta) in the post-recession period (2010--2022). We formulate and empirically investigate three research questions using Big Tech patent data. Our results show that transitioning inventors tend to have higher degree centrality than the average Big Tech inventor, and that their removal can lead to greater network fragmentation than would be expected by chance. The rate of transition over the 12-year period of study was found to be highest between 2015--2017, suggesting that the Big Tech innovation ecosystem underwent non-trivial shifts during this time. Finally, transition was associated with higher estimated impact of co-authored patents post-transition.

In recent years, research tasks have increasingly involved using multi-disciplinary knowledge through collaborations of scholars from multiple fields. However, identifying a team of suitable collaborators from diverse fields for a given research task is a challenging and time-consuming process. In this paper, we propose a novel “ScholarTeamFinder” model that uses knowledge graph based link prediction to identify collaborators within an academic social network (ASN) to form a research team to address a multi-disciplinary research problem. Our approach involves building a heterogeneous knowledge graph within an ASN using entities such as scholars, publications, research grants, and the relationship among these entities. Following this, we use graph-based deep learning to learn the node embedding from the knowledge graph that can be used for scholar team recommendation. More specifically, we used the classical meth-path2vec as our base graph learning algorithm and improved its performance by considering semantic meaning of entities and encoding edge embeddings in the graph. Finally, we propose a beam-search algorithm for scholar team prediction based on our model embeddings. Our evaluation of ScholarTeamFinder is performed using large ASN datasets including a unique dataset (i.e., NSF award dataset) of federal grant awards collected over the last ten years and the scholars’ publication data, as well as three other widely used datasets (i.e., APS, SCHOLAT and Gowalla). Experiment results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models across the different datasets.

Given a domain-specific set of concept labels, taxonomy induction is the problem of inducing a taxonomy over the concept labels. Despite its importance in problems such as e-commerce, and some algorithmic research as a consequence, practical tools for taxonomy induction and interactive visualization do not currently exist. To be truly useful, such a tool must permit a reasonable solution in a relatively unsupervised setting, and be applicable to general subsets of concept labels. In this paper, we present an unsupervised, end-to-end taxonomy induction system for arbitrary concept-labels from the e-commerce domain. Our system only takes a simple text file as input and yields a tree-like taxonomy that can be rendered on a browser, and that a non-technical user can interact with. Important components of the system can also be customized by a technically experienced user.

Given a domain-specific set of concepts, local taxonomy construction (LTC) is the problem of `locally' inducing the neighborhood of a concept (from the set of target concepts) without being given any example links. The problem, despite having practical importance, has received little research attention due to its difficulty (in contrast with link prediction, a problem that resembles it and has undergone broad study). In this paper, we present a formalism and deep empirical study on the LTC problem. In particular, we show that an innovative application of representation learning approaches from the natural language community could be adapted to tackle the problem, often quite effectively. We also present a detailed information retrieval (IR)-based methodology for evaluating these solutions on three real- world product datasets of varying sizes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to introduce the LTC problem, especially for e-commerce applications, and offer effective, nearly unsupervised, solutions, for addressing it on real-world data.

Humanitarian disasters have been on the rise in recent years due to the effects of climate change and socio-political situations such as the refugee crisis. Technology can be used to best mobilize resources such as food and water in the event of a natural disaster, by semi-automatically flagging tweets and short messages as indicating an urgent need. The problem is challenging not just because of the sparseness of data in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, but because of the varying characteristics of disasters in developing countries (making it difficult to train just one system) and the noise and quirks in social media. In this paper, we present a robust, low-supervision social media urgency system that adapts to arbitrary crises by leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data in an ensemble setting. The system is also able to adapt to new crises where an unlabeled background corpus may not be available yet by utilizing a simple and effective transfer learning methodology. Experimentally, our transfer learning and low-supervision approaches are found to outperform viable baselines with high significance on myriad disaster datasets. In this short paper, we provide details on the low-supervision approach for urgency detection on Twitter feeds.

Due to climate change and the effects of geopolitical and social challenges like the refugee crisis in Europe, the world is facing an unprecedented set of humanitarian problems. According to the United Nations, there is a projected funding shortfall of more than 20 billion dollars in addressing these needs. Technology can play a vital role in mitigating this burden, especially with the advent of real-time social media and advances in areas like Natural Language Processing and machine learning. An important problem addressed by machine learning in current crisis informatics platforms is situation labeling, which can be intuitively defined as semi-automatically assigning one or more actionable labels (such as food, medicine or water) to tweets or documents from a controlled vocabulary. Despite multiple advances, current situation labeling systems are noisy and do not generalize very well to arbitrary crisis data. Consequentially, consumers of these outputs (which include humanitarian responders) are unwilling to trust these outputs without due diligence or provenance. In this paper, we demonstrate an interactive visualization platform called SAVIZ that provides non-technical first responders with such capabilities. SAVIZ is completely built using open-source technologies, can be rendered on a web browser and is backward-compatible with several pre-existing crisis intelligence platforms. We use two real-world scenarios (the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the unfolding Ebola crisis in Africa) to illustrate the potential of SAVIZ.

Due to easy dissemination of news in social media and the Web, there has been an increasing rise of disinformation on important political issues like elections in recent years. Computational solutions for automatic bias and sensationalism detection for news articles can have tremendous impact if used in the right way. Because news is an ever-shifting domain, concept drift is an issue that must be dealt with in any real-world computational news classification system that relies on features and trained machine learning models. Yet, an empirical study of concept drift in such systems, especially popular systems released recently as open-source and used within organizations, has been lacking thus far. This short paper reports results on an empirical study specifically designed to assess concept drift, using an open-source, popular computational news classification system, on real news data crawled from the Web. We find that even a gap of two years (2017 vs. 2019) can lead to significant concept drift, a far narrower gap than observed in traditional machine learning domains, making deployment of pre-trained or openly available computational news classification models an ethically suspect issue.

Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) is an important problem that has many domain-specific applications, including semantic search and predictive analytics. As sophisticated KGC algorithms continue to be proposed, an important, neglected use case is to empower domain experts who do not have much technical background to construct high-fidelity, interpretable knowledge graphs. Such domain experts are a valuable source of input because of their (both formal and learned) knowledge of the domain. In this demonstration paper, we present a system that allows domain experts to construct knowledge graphs by writing sophisticated rule-based entity extractors with minimal training, using a GUI-based editor that offers a range of complex facilities.

Extracting useful entities and attribute values from illicit domains such as human trafficking is a challenging problem with the potential for widespread social impact. Such domains employ atypical language models, have 'long tails' and suffer from the problem of concept drift. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, feature-agnostic Information Extraction (IE) paradigm specifically designed for such domains. Our approach uses raw, unlabeled text from an initial corpus, and a few (12-120) seed annotations per domain-specific attribute, to learn robust IE models for unobserved pages and websites. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach can outperform feature-centric Conditional Random Field baselines by over 18% F-Measure on five annotated sets of real-world human trafficking datasets in both low-supervision and high-supervision settings. We also show that our approach is demonstrably robust to concept drift, and can be efficiently bootstrapped even in a serial computing environment.

Building a knowledge base (KB) describing domain-specific entities is an important problem in industry, examples including KBs built over companies (e.g. Dun & Bradstreet), skills (LinkedIn, CareerBuilder) and people (inome). The task involves several engineering challenges, including devising effective procedures for data extraction, aggregation and deduplication. Data extraction involves processing multiple information sources in order to extract domain-specific data instances. The extracted instances must be aggregated and deduplicated; that is, instances referring to the same underlying entity must be identified and merged. This paper describes a pipeline developed at CareerBuilder LLC for building a KB describing employers, by first extracting entities from both global, publicly available data sources (Wikipedia and Freebase) and a proprietary source (Infogroup), and then deduplicating the instances to yield an employer-specific KB. We conduct a range of pilot experiments over three independently labeled datasets sampled from the extracted KB, and comment on some lessons learned.

Automatic schema matching algorithms are typically only concerned with finding attribute correspondences. However, real world data integration problems often require matchings whose arguments span all three types of elements in relational databases: relation, attribute and data value. This paper introduces the definitions and semantics of three additional correspondence types concerning both schema and data values. These correspondences cover the higher-order mappings identified in a seminal paper by Krishnamurthy, Litwin, and Kent. It is shown that these correspondences can be automatically translated to tuple generating dependencies (tgds), and thus this research is compatible with data integration applications that leverage tgds.

A pair wise comparison of data objects is a requisite step in many data mining applications, but has quadratic complexity. In applications such as record linkage, blocking methods may be applied to reduce the cost. That is, the data is first partitioned into a set of blocks, and pair wise comparisons computed for pairs within each block. To date, blocking methods have required the blocking scheme be given, or the provision of training data enabling supervised learning algorithms to determine a blocking scheme. In either case, a domain expert is required. This paper develops an unsupervised method for learning a blocking scheme for tabular data sets. The method is divided into two phases. First, a weakly labeled training set is generated automatically in time linear in the number of records of the entire dataset. The second phase casts blocking key discovery as a Fisher feature selection problem. The approach is compared to a state-of-the-art supervised blocking key discovery algorithm on three real-world databases and achieves favorable results.