Personalizing the analysis for web search potentially improves the search experience. A good analytical model for web search should leverage not only collective wisdom but also individual characteristics. Most of the existing analytical models, however, focus on how to utilize the collective wisdom, from a crowd, for instance. In this paper, we address the problem of user-specific web search analysis by considering the so-called burstiness in web search, which captures the behavior of rare words appearing many times in a single document. We go beyond click graph and propose two probabilistic topic models, Topic Independence Model and Topic Dependence Model. The former adopts the assumption that the generation of query terms and URLs are topically independent, and the latter captures the coupling between search queries and URLs. We also capture the temporal burstiness of topics by utilizing continuous Beta distribution. Through a large-scale analysis of a real-life search query log, we observe that each user's web search trail enjoys multiple kinds of user-based unique characteristics. On a massive search query log, the new models achieve a better held-out likelihood than existing baselines, and they can also effectively reveal the latent evolution of topics on the corpus level and user-based level.

Since inaccuracies commonly exist in many applications, data uncertainty has become an important problem in database systems. To deal with data uncertainty, probabilistic databases can be used to store uncertain data, and querying facilities are provided to yield answers with confidence. However, the results from a query or mining process may not be reliable when the uncertainty propagates in the systems. In this paper, we leverage the power of crowdsourcing by designing a set of Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs in short, to ask a crowd to improve the quality of uncertain data. In particular, we consider crowds consists of workers with diverse accuracy rates when answering the HITs. We design solutions to maximize the data quality with minimal number of HITs. There are two obstacles for this non-trivial optimization, which lead to very high computational cost for selecting the optimal set of HITs. First, members of a crowd may return incorrect answers with different probabilities. Second, the HITs decomposed from uncertain data are often correlated. We have addressed these challenges in this paper by designing an effective approximation algorithm and an efficient heuristic solution, especially for crowds with diverse individual accuracy rates. To further improve the efficiency, we derive tight lower and upper bounds for effective filtering and estimation. Extensive experiments on both a simulated crowd and a real crowdsourcing platform are conducted to evaluate our solutions.

Image aesthetics assessment aims to endow computers with the ability to judge the aesthetic values of images, and its potential has been recognized in a variety of applications. Most previous studies perform aesthetics assessment purely based on image content. However, given the fact that aesthetic perceiving is a human cognitive activity, it is necessary to consider users’ perception of an image when judging its aesthetic quality. In this article, we regard users’ social behavior as the reflection of their perception of images and harness these additional clues to improve image aesthetics assessment. Specifically, we first merge the raw social interactions between users and images into clusters as the social labels of images, so the collective social behavioral information associated with an image can be well represented over a structured and compact space. Then, we develop a novel deep multi-task network to jointly learn social labels in different modalities from social images and apply it to common web images. In this manner, our approach is readily generalized to web images without social behavioral information. Finally, we introduce a high-level fusion sub-network to the aesthetics model, in which the social and visual representations of images are well balanced for aesthetics assessment. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets well verify the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the benefits of different types of social behavioral information for image aesthetics assessment.

Web search analysis plays a critical role in improving the performance of cutting-edge search engines. Most of the existing models, such as the click graph and its variants, focus on utilizing the wisdom of the crowd. However, how to design a model supporting both the collective wisdom as well as the unique characteristic of individuals is rarely studied. In this paper, our goal is to solve the new problem of user-specific web search analysis. We go beyond click graph and propose two probabilistic topic models, Topic Independence Model(TIM) and Topic Dependence Model (TDM). TIM adopts an assumption that the generation of query terms and URLs are topically independent; TDM captures the coupling between search queries and URLs. We also capture the temporal burstiness of topics by utilizing the continuous Beta distribution. Through a large-scale analysis of a real-life search query log, we observe that each user's web search trail enjoys multiple kinds of user-based unique characteristics. On a massive search query log, the new models achieve a better held-out likelihood than standard LDA, DCMLDA and TOT, and they can also effectively reveal the latent evolutions of topics on the corpus level and user-based level.