Recommending a point-of-interest (POI) a user will visit next based on temporal and spatial context information is an important task in mobile-based applications. Recently, several POI recommendation models based on conventional sequential-data modeling approaches have been proposed. However, such models focus on only a user's check-in sequence information and the physical distance between POIs. Furthermore, they do not utilize the characteristics of POIs or the relationships between POIs. To address this problem, we propose CAPE, the first content-aware POI embedding model which utilizes text content that provides information about the characteristics of a POI. CAPE consists of a check-in context layer and a text content layer. The check-in context layer captures the geographical influence of POIs from the check-in sequence of a user, while the text content layer captures the characteristics of POIs from the text content. To validate the efficacy of CAPE, we constructed a large-scale POI dataset. In the experimental evaluation, we show that the performance of the existing POI recommendation models can be significantly improved by simply applying CAPE to the models.

BACKGROUND: Molecular biomarkers that can predict drug efficacy in cancer patients are crucial components for the advancement of precision medicine. However, identifying these molecular biomarkers remains a laborious and challenging task. Next-generation sequencing of patients and preclinical models have increasingly led to the identification of novel gene-mutation-drug relations, and these results have been reported and published in the scientific literature. RESULTS: Here, we present two new computational methods that utilize all the PubMed articles as domain specific background knowledge to assist in the extraction and curation of gene-mutation-drug relations from the literature. The first method uses the Biomedical Entity Search Tool (BEST) scoring results as some of the features to train the machine learning classifiers. The second method uses not only the BEST scoring results, but also word vectors in a deep convolutional neural network model that are constructed from and trained on numerous documents such as PubMed abstracts and Google News articles. Using the features obtained from both the BEST search engine scores and word vectors, we extract mutation-gene and mutation-drug relations from the literature using machine learning classifiers such as random forest and deep convolutional neural networks. Our methods achieved better results compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We used our proposed features in a simple machine learning model, and obtained F1-scores of 0.96 and 0.82 for mutation-gene and mutation-drug relation classification, respectively. We also developed a deep learning classification model using convolutional neural networks, BEST scores, and the word embeddings that are pre-trained on PubMed or Google News data. Using deep learning, the classification accuracy improved, and F1-scores of 0.96 and 0.86 were obtained for the mutation-gene and mutation-drug relations, respectively. CONCLUSION: We believe that our computational methods described in this research could be used as an important tool in identifying molecular biomarkers that predict drug responses in cancer patients. We also built a database of these mutation-gene-drug relations that were extracted from all the PubMed abstracts. We believe that our database can prove to be a valuable resource for precision medicine researchers.

Opinion spam, intentionally written by spammers who do not have actual experience with services or products, has recently become a factor that undermines the credibility of information online. In recent years, studies have attempted to detect opinion spam using machine learning algorithms. However, limitations of gold-standard spam datasets still prove to be a major obstacle in opinion spam research. In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset called Paraphrased OPinion Spam (POPS), which contains a new type of review spam that imitates real human opinions using crowdsourcing. To create such a seemingly truthful review spam dataset, we asked task participants to paraphrase truthful reviews, and include factual information and domain knowledge in their reviews. The classification experiments and semantic analysis results show that our POPS dataset most linguistically and semantically resembles truthful reviews. We believe that our new deceptive opinion spam dataset will help advance opinion spam research.

User-generated content is becoming increasingly valuable to both individuals and businesses due to its usefulness and influence in e-commerce markets. As consumers rely more on such information, posting deceptive opinions, which can be deliberately used for potential profit, is becoming more of an issue. Existing work on opinion spam detection focuses mainly on linguistic features such as n-grams, syntactic patterns, or LIWC. However, deep semantic analysis remains largely unstudied. In this paper, we propose a frame-based deep semantic analysis method for understanding rich characteristics of deceptive and truthful opinions written by various types of individuals including crowdsourcing workers, employees who have expert-level domain knowledge about local businesses, and online users who post on Yelp and TripAdvisor. Using our proposed semantic frame feature, we developed a classification model that outperforms the baseline model and achieves an accuracy of nearly 91%. Also, we performed qualitative analysis of deceptive and truthful review datasets and considered their semantic differences. Finally, we successfully found some interesting features that existing methods were unable to identify.

Search engines have become an important decision making tool today. Decision making queries are often subjective, such as "a good birthday present for my girlfriend", "best action movies in 2010", to name a few. Unfortunately, such queries may not be answered properly by conventional search systems. In order to address this problem, we introduce Consento, a consensus search engine designed to answer subjective queries. Consento performs segment indexing, as opposed to document indexing, to capture semantics from user opinions more precisely. In particular, we define a new indexing unit, Maximal Coherent Semantic Unit (MCSU).