Dan Su, Kezhi Kong, Ying Lin, Joseph Jennings, Brandon Norick, Markus Kliegl, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Active learning exploits inherent structures in the unlabeled data to minimize the number of labels required to train an accurate model. It enables effective machine learning in applications with high labeling cost, such as document classification and drug response prediction. We investigate active learning on heterogeneous information networks, with the objective of obtaining accurate node classifications while minimizing the number of labeled nodes. Our proposed algorithm harnesses a multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithm to determine network structures that identify the most important nodes to the classification task, accounting for node types and without assuming label assortativity. Evaluations on real-world network classification tasks demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms existing methods independent of the underlying classification model.

In real-world applications, objects of multiple types are interconnected, formingHeterogeneous Information Networks. In such heterogeneous information networks, we make the key observation that many interactions happen due to someeventand the objects in each event form a complete semantic unit. By taking advantage of such a property, we propose a generic framework calledHyperEdge-BasedEmbedding(Hebe) to learn object embeddings with events in heterogeneous information networks, where ahyperedgeencompasses the objects participating in one event. TheHebeframework models the proximity among objects in each event with two methods: (1) predicting a target object given other participating objects in the event, and (2) predicting if the event can be observed given all the participating objects. Since each hyperedge encapsulates more information of a given event,Hebeis robust to data sparseness and noise. In addition,Hebeis scalable when the data size spirals. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show the efficacy and robustness of the proposed framework.

Heterogeneous events, which are defined as events connecting strongly-typed objects, are ubiquitous in the real world. We propose a HyperEdge-Based Embedding (Hebe) framework for heterogeneous event data, where a hyperedge represents the interaction among a set of involving objects in an event. The Hebe framework models the proximity among objects in an event by predicting a target object given the other participating objects in the event (hyperedge). Since each hyperedge encapsulates more information on a given event, Hebe is robust to data sparseness. In addition, Hebe is scalable when the data size spirals. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of Hebe.

News data is one of the most abundant and familiar data sources. News data can be systematically utilized and ex- plored by database, data mining, NLP and information re- trieval researchers to demonstrate to the general public the power of advanced information technology. In our view, news data contains rich, inter-related and multi-typed data objects, forming one or a set of gigantic, interconnected, het- erogeneous information networks. Much knowledge can be derived and explored with such an information network if we systematically develop effective and scalable data-intensive information network analysis technologies. By further developing a set of information extraction, in- formation network construction, and information network mining methods, we extract types, topical hierarchies and other semantic structures from news data, construct a semi- structured news information network NewsNet. Further, we develop a set of news information network exploration and mining mechanisms that explore news in multi-dimensional space, which include (i) OLAP-based operations on the hierarchical dimensional and topical structures and rich-text, such as cell summary, single dimension analysis, and promo- tion analysis, (ii) a set of network-based operations, such as similarity search and ranking-based clustering, and (iii) a set of hybrid operations or network-OLAP operations, such as entity ranking at different granularity levels. These form the basis of our proposed NewsNetExplorer system. Although some of these functions have been studied in recent research, effective and scalable realization of such functions in large networks still poses multiple challenging research problems. Moreover, some functions are our on-going research tasks. By integrating these functions, NewsNetExplorer not only provides with us insightful recommendations in NewsNet exploration system but also helps us gain insight on how to perform effective information extraction, integration and mining in large unstructured datasets.

Among different hybrid recommendation techniques, network-based entity recommendation methods, which utilize user or item relationship information, are beginning to attract increasing attention recently. Most of the previous studies in this category only consider a single relationship type, such as friendships in a social network. In many scenarios, the entity recommendation problem exists in a heterogeneous information network environment. Different types of relationships can be potentially used to improve the recommendation quality. In this paper, we study the entity recommendation problem in heterogeneous information networks. Specifically, we propose to combine heterogeneous relationship information for each user differently and aim to provide high-quality personalized recommendation results using user implicit feedback data and personalized recommendation models.

Recent studies suggest that by using additional user or item relationship information when building hybrid recommender systems, the recommendation quality can be largely improved. However, most such studies only consider a single type of relationship, e.g., social network. Notice that in many applications, the recommendation problem exists in an attribute-rich heterogeneous information network environment. In this paper, we study the entity recommendation problem in heterogeneous information networks. We propose to combine various relationship information from the network with user feedback to provide high quality recommendation results.

With the emergence of web-based social and information applications, entity similarity search in information networks, aiming to find entities with high similarity to a given query entity, has gained wide attention. However, due to the diverse semantic meanings in heterogeneous information networks, which contain multi-typed entities and relationships, similarity measurement can be ambiguous without context. In this paper, we investigate entity similarity search and the resulting ambiguity problems in heterogeneous information networks. We propose to use a meta-path-based ranking model ensemble to represent semantic meanings for similarity queries, exploit the possibility of using using user-guidance to understand users query. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our framework significantly outperforms competitor methods.

Real-world, multiple-typed objects are often interconnected, forming heterogeneous information networks. A major challenge for link-based clustering in such networks is its potential to generate many different results, carrying rather diverse semantic meanings. In order to generate desired clustering, we propose to use meta-path, a path that connects object types via a sequence of relations, to control clustering with distinct semantics. Nevertheless, it is easier for a user to provide a few examples ("seeds") than a weighted combination of sophisticated meta-paths to specify her clustering preference. Thus, we propose to integrate meta-path selection with user-guided clustering to cluster objects in networks, where a user first provides a small set of object seeds for each cluster as guidance. Then the system learns the weights for each meta-path that are consistent with the clustering result implied by the guidance, and generates clusters under the learned weights of meta-paths. A probabilistic approach is proposed to solve the problem, and an effective and efficient iterative algorithm, PathSelClus, is proposed to learn the model, where the clustering quality and the meta-path weights are mutually enhancing each other. Our experiments with several clustering tasks in two real networks demonstrate the power of the algorithm in comparison with the baselines.

Eleven open source software projects were analyzed to determine if the number of committing developers impacts code quality. We use cyclomatic complexity, lines of code per function, comment density, and maximum nesting as surrogate measures of code quality. We find no significant evidence to suggest that the number of committing developers affects the quality of software.