This paper describes a novel method for generating and integrating knowledge graphs extracted from multiple natural language sources by FRED, a machine reading tool for generating abstract representations of text documents. This is a key problem in human-robot spoken dialogue interaction, issue which arises from a current research project related to active and healthy ageing using caring service robots where we are involved. The problem is also relevant in many application scenarios requiring the creation and dynamic evolution of a knowledge base, such as automatic news summarisation. Solving this problem requires solving sub-tasks that have only been studied individually, so far. We propose a holistic approach to handle FRED's graphs related to different input texts and output a knowledge graph representing the reconciled knowledge.

Processes within real world networks evolve according to the underlying graph structure. A number of examples exists in diverse network genres: botnet communication growth, moving traffic jams [1], information foraging [2] in document networks (WWW and Wikipedia), and spread of viral memes or opinions in social networks. The network structure in all the above examples remains relatively fixed, while the shape, size and position of the affected network regions change gradually with time. Traffic jams grow, move, shrink and eventually disappear. Public attention shifts among current hot topics inducing a similar shift of highly accessed Wikipedia articles. Discovery of such smoothly evolving network processes has the potential to expose the intrinsic mechanisms of complex network dynamics, enable new data-driven models and improve network design. We introduce the novel problem of Mining smoothly evolving processes (MINESMOOTH) in networks with dynamic real-valued node/edge weights. We show that ensuring smooth transitions in the solution is NP-hard even on restricted network structures such as trees. We propose an efficient filtering based framework, called LEGATO. It achieves 3-7 times higher scores (i.e. larger and more significant processes) compared to alternatives on real networks, and above 80% accuracy in discovering realistic "embedded" processes in synthetic networks. In transportation networks, LEGATO discovers processes that conform to existing traffic jams models. Its results in Wikipedia reveal the temporal evolution of information seeking of Internet users.

How to spot and summarize anomalies in dynamic networks such as road networks, communication networks and social networks? An anomalous event, such as a traffic accident, a denial of service attack or a chemical spill, can affect several near-by edges and make them behave abnormally, over several consecutive time-ticks. We focus on spotting and summarizing such significant anomalous regions, spanning space (i.e. nearby edges), as well as time. Our first contribution is the problem formulation, namely finding all such Significant Anomalous Regions (SAR). The next contribution is the design of novel algorithms: an expensive, exhaustive algorithm, as well as an efficient approximation, called NETSPOT. Compared to the exhaustive algorithm, NETSPOT is up to one order of magnitude faster in real data, while achieving less than 4% average relative error rate. In synthetic datasets, it is more than 30 times faster and solves large problem instances that are otherwise infeasible. The final contribution is the validation on real data: we demonstrate the utility of NETSPOT for inferring accidents on road networks and detecting patterns of anomalous access to subnetworks of Wikipedia. We also study NETSPOT'S scalability in large social, transportation and synthetic evolving networks, spanning in total up to 50 million edges.

Anomaly detection in dynamic networks has a rich gamut of application domains, such as road networks, communication networks and water distribution networks. An anomalous event, such as a traffic accident, denial of service attack or a chemical spill, can cause a local shift from normal behavior in the network state that persists over an interval of time. Detecting such anomalous regions of network and time extent in large real-world networks is a challenging task. Existing anomaly detection techniques focus on either the time series associated with individual network edges or on global anomalies that affect the entire network. In order to detect anomalous regions, one needs to consider both the time and the affected network substructure jointly, which brings forth computational challenges due to the combinatorial nature of possible solutions.

Networks from different genres are not static entities, but exhibit dynamic behavior. The congestion level of links in transportation networks varies in time depending on the traffic. Similarly, social and communication links are employed at varying rates as information cascades unfold. In recent years there has been an increase of interest in modeling and mining dynamic networks. However, limited attention has been placed in high-scoring sub graph discovery in time-evolving networks. We define the problem of finding the highest-scoring temporal sub graph in a dynamic network, termed Heaviest Dynamic Sub graph (HDS). We show that HDS is NP-hard even with edge weights in {-1,1} and devise an efficient approach for large graph instances that evolve over long time periods. While a naive approach would enumerate all O(t^2) sub-intervals, our solution performs an effective pruning of the sub-interval space by considering O(t*log(t)) groups of sub-intervals and computing an aggregate of each group in logarithmic time. We also define a fast heuristic and a tight upper bound for approximating the static version of HDS, and use them for further pruning the sub-interval space and quickly verifying candidate sub-intervals. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation of our algorithm on transportation, communication and social media networks for discovering sub graphs that correspond to traffic congestions, communication overflow and localized social discussions. Our method is two orders of magnitude faster than a naive approach and scales well with network size and time length.