Yiqiao Jin, Kartik Sharma, Vineeth Rakesh, Yingtong Dou, Menghai Pan, Mahashweta Das, Srijan Kumar. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Coding agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have gained traction for automating code generation through iterative problem-solving with minimal human involvement. Despite the emergence of various frameworks, e.g., LangChain, AutoML, and AIDE, ML scientists still struggle to effectively review and adjust the agents' coding process. The current approach of manually inspecting individual outputs is inefficient, making it difficult to track code evolution, compare coding iterations, and identify improvement opportunities. To address this challenge, we introduce a visual analytics system designed to enhance the examination of coding agent behaviors. Focusing on the AIDE framework, our system supports comparative analysis across three levels: (1) Code-Level Analysis, which reveals how the agent debugs and refines its code over iterations; (2) Process-Level Analysis, which contrasts different solution-seeking processes explored by the agent; and (3) LLM-Level Analysis, which highlights variations in coding behavior across different LLMs. By integrating these perspectives, our system enables ML scientists to gain a structured understanding of agent behaviors, facilitating more effective debugging and prompt engineering. Through case studies using coding agents to tackle popular Kaggle competitions, we demonstrate how our system provides valuable insights into the iterative coding process.

Chia-Yuan Chang, Zhimeng Jiang, Vineeth Rakesh, Menghai Pan, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Guanchu Wang, Mingzhi Hu, Zhichao Xu, Yan Zheng, Mahashweta Das, Na Zou. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Rationale discovery is defined as finding a subset of the input data that maximally supports the prediction of downstream tasks. In the context of graph machine learning, graph rationale is defined as identifying the critical subgraph in the given graph topology. In contrast to the rationale subgraph, the remaining subgraph is named the environment subgraph. Graph rationalization can enhance the model performance because the mapping between the graph rationale and the prediction label is viewed as invariant, by definition. To ensure the discriminative power of the extracted rationale subgraphs, a key technique named intervention is applied, whose core idea is that given changing environment subgraphs, the semantics from the rationale subgraph is invariant, which guarantees the correct prediction result. However, most, if not all, of the existing graph rationalization methods develop their intervention strategies on the graph level, which is coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose FIne-grained Graph rationalization (FIG). Our idea is driven by the self-attention mechanism, which provides rich interactions between input nodes. Based on that, FIG can achieve node-level and virtual node-level intervention. Our experiments involve 7 real-world datasets, and the proposed FIG shows significant performance advantages compared to 13 baseline methods.

The financial industry leverages machine learning in more ways than just finding the right alpha signal. It grapples with supply chains, business processes, marketing, churn, fraud, and money laundering, all while maintaining compliance with the various regulatory frameworks it is beholden to. Due to the sheer volume of wealth being handled by the financial industry and its critical role in everyday life, it has been a lucrative target for a wide spectrum of ever-evolving bad actors. With each successive iteration of this workshop, we have attempted to capture the breadth of these actors - fraudsters, money launderers, market manipulators, and potentially nation-state-level risks. The emerging advances in Generative AI make this a particularly exciting time to host this workshop. GenAI offers groundbreaking approaches to handling the various data types prevalent in the financial sector. From a security point of view, bad actors are actively using Generative AI creatively to thwart conventional defenses (e.g. voice cloning, better synthetic identities), and this workshop's audience would benefit from commonly applicable defenses & best practices against such threats. Last but not the least, there is now an increasing willingness from the financial industry towards deeper engagement and data sharing with academia.

State space models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to transformer-based models, offering linear complexity that scales better than transformers. One of the latest advances in SSMs, Mamba, introduces a selective scan mechanism that assigns trainable weights to input tokens, effectively mimicking the attention mechanism. Mamba has also been successfully extended to the vision domain by decomposing 2D images into smaller patches and arranging them as 1D sequences. However, it remains unclear how these patches interact with (or attend to) each other in relation to their original 2D spatial location. Additionally, the order used to arrange the patches into a sequence also significantly impacts their attention distribution. To better understand the attention between patches and explore the attention patterns, we introduce a visual analytics tool specifically designed for vision-based Mamba models. This tool enables a deeper understanding of how attention is distributed across patches in different Mamba blocks and how it evolves throughout a Mamba model. Using the tool, we also investigate the impact of different patch-ordering strategies on the learned attention, offering further insights into the model’s behavior.

Bipartite graphs are ubiquitous in real-world applications, where butterflies (2x2-bicliques) serve as fundamental building blocks for analyzing graph motifs. While existing wedge aggregation based butterfly computation methods are effective for small-scale graphs, they face significant scalability challenges when processing large-scale bipartite graphs with billions of vertices and edges. In this paper, we present MONARCH, a distributed framework for efficient butterfly computation. Unlike traditional approaches that require expensive two-hop neighbor traversal, MONARCH operates exclusively on first-hop neighbor information, reducing both computation time and communication overhead. This pioneering framework expands the boundary of butterfly computation methods, making it feasible to process bipartite graphs that are orders of magnitude larger. To demonstrate its scalability, we show experimental results on bipartite graph with billions of vertices and edges.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to find network elements (e.g., nodes, edges) with significantly atypical patterns and has a profound impact in a variety of application domains, including social network analysis, security, Web, finance, and many more. Most of the existing methods have been developed in an unsupervised manner or with extremely limited supervision, due to the high cost of acquiring ground-truth information. Consequently, the identified anomalies may turn out to be noises or uneventful instances because of the lack of prior knowledge on graph anomalies. To address the data scarcity issue in GAD, in this paper, we propose, gADAM, a novel graph neural network-based GAD framework, which consolidates (1) an innovative mixup approach to augment the original training data by adaptively interpolating data instances in the embedding space, and (2) an efficacious sampling method to obtain high-quality negative samples for model training. Additionally, to advance the representation learning for GAD, we further equip the proposed framework with a generic prototype-based learning module. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we corroborate the superiority of the proposed gADAM framework on graph anomaly detection w.r.t. various metrics.

We consider the problem of test-time adaptation of predictive models trained on tabular data. Effective solution of this problem requires adaptation of predictive models trained on the source domain to a target domain, using only unlabeled target domain data, without access to source domain data. Existing test-time adaptation methods for tabular data have difficulty coping with the heterogeneous features and their complex dependencies inherent in tabular data. To overcome these limitations, we consider test-time adaptation in the setting wherein the logical structure of the rules is assumed to remain invariant despite distribution shift between source and target domains whereas the numerical parameters associated with the rules and the weights assigned to them can vary to accommodate distribution shift. TabLog discretizes numerical features, models dependencies between heterogeneous features, introduces a novel contrastive loss for coping with distribution shift, and presents an end-to-end framework for efficient training and test-time adaptation by taking advantage of a logical neural network representation of a rule ensemble. We present results of experiments using several benchmark data sets that demonstrate TabLog is competitive with or improves upon the state-of-the-art methods for test-time adaptation of predictive models trained on tabular data. Our code is available at https://github.com/WeijieyingRen/TabLog.

This workshop aims to explore the intersection of Generative AI with the rich tapestry of financial data types, seeking to uncover new methodologies and techniques that can enhance predictive analytics, fraud detection, and customer insights across the sector. By harnessing these advancements in AI, we can pave the way to not only understand customer behavior but also anticipate their needs more effectively, leading to superior customer outcomes and more personalized services. Our objective is to shed light on the challenges and opportunities presented by the diverse data formats in finance. We aim to bridge the gap between the dominance of traditional models for tabular data analysis and the emerging potential of Generative AI to revolutionize the treatment of time series, click streams, and other unstructured data forms.

Graph is a prevalent discrete data structure, whose generation has wide applications such as drug discovery and circuit design. Diffusion generative models, as an emerging research focus, have been applied to graph generation tasks. Overall, according to the space of states and time steps, diffusion generative models can be categorized into discrete-/continuous-state discrete-/continuous-time fashions. In this paper, we formulate the graph diffusion generation in a discrete-state continuous-time setting, which has never been studied in previous graph diffusion models. The rationale of such a formulation is to preserve the discrete nature of graph-structured data and meanwhile provide flexible sampling trade-offs between sample quality and efficiency. Analysis shows that our training objective is closely related to the generation quality and our proposed generation framework enjoys ideal invariant/equivariant properties concerning the permutation of node ordering. Our proposed model shows competitive empirical performance against other state-of-the-art graph generation solutions on various benchmarks while at the same time can flexibly trade off the generation quality and efficiency in the sampling phase.

Contrastive Learning (CL) has shown promising performance in collaborative filtering. The key idea is to use contrastive loss to generate augmentation-invariant embeddings by maximizing the Mutual Information between different augmented views of the same instance. However, we empirically observe that existing CL models suffer from the dimensional collapse issue, where user/item embeddings only span a low-dimension subspace of the entire feature space. This suppresses other dimensional information and weakens the distinguishability of embeddings. Here we propose a non-contrastive learning objective, named nCL, which explicitly mitigates dimensional collapse of representations in collaborative filtering. Our nCL aims to achieve geometric properties of Alignment and Compactness on the embedding space. In particular, the alignment tries to push together representations of positive-related user-item pairs, while compactness tends to find the optimal coding length of user/item embeddings, subject to a given distortion. More importantly, our nCL does not require data augmentation nor negative sampling during training, making it scalable to large datasets compared to contrastive learning methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our nCL.

Network embedding plays an important role in a variety of social network applications. Existing network embedding methods, explicitly or implicitly, can be categorized into positional embedding (PE) methods or structural embedding (SE) methods. Specifically, PE methods encode the positional information and obtain similar embeddings for adjacent/close nodes, while SE methods aim to learn identical representations for nodes with the same local structural patterns, even if the two nodes are far away from each other. The disparate designs of the two types of methods lead to an apparent dilemma in that no embedding could perfectly capture both positional and structural information. In this paper, we seek to demystify the underlying relationship between positional embedding and structural embedding. We first point out that the positional embedding can produce the structural embedding with simple transformations, while the opposite direction cannot hold. Based on this finding, a novel network embedding model PACER is proposed, which optimizes the positional embedding with the help of random walk with restart (RWR) proximity distribution, and such positional embedding is then used to seamlessly obtain the structural embedding with simple transformations. Furthermore, two variants of PACER are proposed to handle node classification task on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Extensive experiments on 17 datasets show that PACER achieves comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-arts.

Imbalanced datasets are commonly observed in various real-world applications, presenting significant challenges in training classifiers. When working with large datasets, the imbalanced issue can be further exacerbated, making it exceptionally difficult to train classifiers effectively. To address the problem, over-sampling techniques have been developed to linearly interpolating data instances between minorities and their neighbors. However, in many real-world scenarios such as anomaly detection, minority instances are often dispersed diversely in the feature space rather than clustered together. Inspired by domain-agnostic data mix-up, we propose generating synthetic samples iteratively by mixing data samples from both minority and majority classes. It is non-trivial to develop such a framework, the challenges include source sample selection, mix-up strategy selection, and the coordination between the underlying model and mix-up strategies. To tackle these challenges, we formulate the problem of iterative data mix-up as a Markov decision process (MDP) that maps data attributes onto an augmentation strategy. To solve the MDP, we employ an actor-critic framework to adapt the discrete-continuous decision space. This framework is utilized to train a data augmentation policy and design a reward signal that explores classifier uncertainty and encourages performance improvement, irrespective of the classifier's convergence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework through extensive experiments conducted on seven publicly available benchmark datasets using three different types of classifiers. The results of these experiments showcase the potential and promise of our framework in addressing imbalanced datasets with diverse minorities.

The finance industry is constantly faced with an ever evolving set of challenges including credit card fraud, identity theft, network intrusion, money laundering, human trafficking, and illegal sales of firearms. There is also the newly emerging threat of fake news in financial media that can lead to distortions in trading strategies and investment decisions. In addition, traditional problems such as customer analytics, forecasting, and recommendations take on a unique flavor when applied to financial data. A number of new ideas are emerging to tackle all these problems including self-supervised learning methods, deep learning algorithms, network/graph based solutions as well as linguistic approaches. These methods must often be able to work in real-time and be able handle large volumes of data. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss both the problems faced by the financial industry and potential solutions. We plan to invite regular papers, positional papers and extended abstracts of work in progress. We will also encourage short papers from financial industry practitioners that introduce domain specific problems and challenges to academic researchers.

The huge volume of emerging graph datasets has become a double-bladed sword for graph machine learning. On the one hand, it empowers the success of a myriad of graph neural networks (GNNs) with strong empirical performance. On the other hand, training modern graph neural networks on huge graph data is computationally expensive. How to distill the given graph dataset while retaining most of the trained models' performance is a challenging problem. Existing efforts try to approach this problem by solving meta-learning-based bilevel optimization objectives. A major hurdle lies in that the exact solutions of these methods are computationally intensive and thus, most, if not all, of them are solved by approximate strategies which in turn hurt the distillation performance. In this paper, inspired by the recent advances in neural network kernel methods, we adopt a kernel ridge regression-based meta-learning objective which has a feasible exact solution. However, the computation of graph neural tangent kernel is very expensive, especially in the context of dataset distillation. As a response, we design a graph kernel, named LiteGNTK, tailored for the dataset distillation problem which is closely related to the classic random walk graph kernel. An effective model named Kernel rıdge regression-based graph Dataset Distillation (KIDD) and its variants are proposed. KIDD shows nice efficiency in both the forward and backward propagation processes. At the same time, KIDD shows strong empirical performance over 7 real-world datasets compared with the state-of-the-art distillation methods. Thanks to the ability to find the exact solution of the distillation objective, the learned training graphs by KIDD can sometimes even outperform the original whole training set with as few as 1.65% training graphs.

Finding the proper depth $d$ of a graph convolutional network (GCN) that provides strong representation ability has drawn significant attention, yet nonetheless largely remains an open problem for the graph learning community. Although noteworthy progress has been made, the depth or the number of layers of a corresponding GCN is realized by a series of graph convolution operations, which naturally makes $d$ a positive integer ($d \in \mathbb{N}+$). An interesting question is whether breaking the constraint of $\mathbb{N}+$ by making $d$ a real number ($d \in \mathbb{R}$) can bring new insights into graph learning mechanisms. In this work, by redefining GCN's depth $d$ as a trainable parameter continuously adjustable within $(-\infty,+\infty)$, we open a new door of controlling its signal processing capability to model graph homophily/heterophily (nodes with similar/dissimilar labels/attributes tend to be inter-connected). A simple and powerful GCN model TEDGCN, is proposed to retain the simplicity of GCN and meanwhile automatically search for the optimal $d$ without the prior knowledge regarding whether the input graph is homophilic or heterophilic. Negative-valued $d$ intrinsically enables high-pass frequency filtering functionality via augmented topology for graph heterophily. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of TEDGCN on node classification tasks for a variety of homophilic and heterophilic graphs.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been successfully used to help users discover the items of interest. Nevertheless, existing CF methods suffer from noisy data issue, which negatively impacts the quality of recommendation. To tackle this problem, many prior studies leverage adversarial learning to regularize the representations of users/items, which improves both generalizability and robustness. Those methods often learn adversarial perturbations and model parameters under min-max optimization framework. However, there still have two major drawbacks: 1) Existing methods lack theoretical guarantees of why adding perturbations improve the model generalizability and robustness; 2) Solving min-max optimization is time-consuming. In addition to updating the model parameters, each iteration requires additional computations to update the perturbations, making them not scalable for industry-scale datasets.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in collaborative filtering. However, recent studies show that GNNs tend to yield inferior performance when the distributions of training and test data are not aligned well. Moreover, training GNNs often requires optimizing non-convex neural networks with an abundance of local and global minima, which may differ widely in their performance at test time. Thus, it is essential to develop an optimization strategy that can choose the minima carefully, which can yield strong generalization performance on unseen data. Here we propose an effective training schema, called gSAM, under the principle that theflatter minima has a better generalization ability than thesharper ones. To achieve this goal, gSAM regularizes the flatness of the weight loss landscape by forming a bi-level optimization: the outer problem conducts the standard model training while the inner problem helps the model jump out of the sharp minima. Experimental results show the superiority of our gSAM.

Knowledge graph question answering aims to identify answers of the query according to the facts in the knowledge graph. In the vast majority of the existing works, the input queries are considered perfect and can precisely express the user’s query intention. However, in reality, input queries might be ambiguous and elusive which only contain a limited amount of information. Directly answering these ambiguous queries may yield unwanted answers and deteriorate user experience. In this paper, we propose PReFNet which focuses on answering ambiguous queries with pseudo relevance feedback on knowledge graphs. In order to leverage the hidden (pseudo) relevance information existed in the results that are initially returned from a given query, PReFNet treats the top-k returned candidate answers as a set of most relevant answers, and uses variational Bayesian inference to infer user’s query intention. To boost the quality of the inferred queries, a neighborhood embedding based VGAE model is used to prune inferior inferred queries. The inferred high quality queries will be returned to the users to help them search with ease. Moreover, all the high-quality candidate nodes will be re-ranked according to the inferred queries. The experiment results show that our proposed method can recommend high-quality query graphs to users and improve the question answering accuracy.

Node embeddings obtained from information networks have been widely adopted for representing knowledge and driving various information retrieval and machine learning tasks. However, training node embeddings is computationally intensive, making it difficult to scale to larger graphs. Most existing works have addressed the scalability challenge by simply adding more hardware resources. For example, a common approach to speed up the training process is to distribute model computation across multiple machines and GPUs. This paper takes an orthogonal approach towards scalability by addressing the problem of computation complexity in training embeddings. We present bigg2vec for scaling up the embedding training process. bigg2vec introduces a novel polar coordinate-based system for internal representation and computation. It provides the following benefits: (a) It significantly reduces compute and memory requirements while improving embedding quality and (b) uses a novel graph organization to generate high-quality negative samples (this reduces the number of negative samples needed for training, which is especially beneficial f or skewed graphs). We have deployed bigg2vec to generate embeddings for multiple AI models within Visa. Our Global Personalized Restaurant Recommender System (GPR) is one such project that uses bigg2vec to periodically generate embeddings for over 450 million nodes connected by more than 3 billion edges. bigg2vec generates higher quality embeddings while training them faster than state-of-the-art methods on a single CPU-based machine.

Real-world link prediction problems often deal with data from multiple domains, where data may be highly skewed and imbalanced. Computer vision research has studied similar issues under the Few-Shot Learning (FSL) umbrella. However, this problem has rarely been addressed and explored in the graph domain, specifically for link prediction. In this work, we propose an adversarial training-based framework that aims at improving link prediction for highly skewed and imbalanced graphs from different domains by generating domain agnostic embedding. We introduce a domain discriminator on pairs of graph-level embedding. We then use the discriminator to improve the model in an adversarial way, such that the graph embedding generated by the model are domain agnostic. We test our ideas on one large real-world user-business-review dataset and three benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that when domain differences exist, our method creates better graph embedding that are more evenly distributed across domains and generate better prediction outcomes. In the absence of domain differences, our method is on par with state-of-the-art.

Embeddings are one of the fundamental building blocks for data analysis tasks. Embeddings are already essential tools for large language models and image analysis, and their use is being extended to many other research domains. The generation of these distributed representations is often a data-and computation-expensive process; yet the holistic analysis and adjustment of them after they have been created is still a developing area. In this paper, we first propose a very general quantitatively measure for the presence of features in the embedding data based on if it can be learned. We then devise a method to remove or alleviate undesired features in the embedding while retaining the essential structure of the data. We use a Domain Adversarial Network (DAN) to generate a non-affine transformation, but we add constraints to ensure the essential structure of the embedding is preserved. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-art unsupervised algorithm on several data sets, including novel applications from the industry.

In this paper, we demonstrate our Global Personalized Recommender (GPR) system for restaurants. GPR does not use any explicit reviews, ratings, or domain-specific metadata but rather leverages over 3 billion anonymized payment transactions to learn user and restaurant behavior patterns. The design and development of GPR have been challenging, primarily due to the scale and skew of the data. Our system supports over 450M cardholders from over 200 countries and 2.5M restaurants in over 35K cities worldwide, respectively. Additionally, GPR being a global recommender system, needs to account for the regional variations in people's food choices and habits. We address the challenges by combining three different recommendation algorithms instead of using a single revolutionary model in the backend. The individual recommendation models are scalable and adapt to varying data skew challenges to ensure high-quality personalized recommendations for any user anywhere in the world.

The rapid proliferation of new users and items on the social web has aggravated the gray-sheep user/long-tail item challenge in recommender systems. Historically, cross-domain co-clustering methods have successfully leveraged shared users and items across dense and sparse domains to improve inference quality. However, they rely on shared rating data and cannot scale to multiple sparse target domains (i.e., the one-to-many transfer setting). This, combined with the increasing adoption of neural recommender architectures, motivates us to develop scalable neural layer-transfer approaches for cross-domain learning. Our key intuition is to guide neural collaborative filtering with domain-invariant components shared across the dense and sparse domains, improving the user and item representations learned in the sparse domains. We leverage contextual invariances across domains to develop these shared modules, and demonstrate that with user-item interaction context, we can learn-to-learn informative representation spaces even with sparse interaction data. We show the effectiveness and scalability of our approach on two public datasets and a massive transaction dataset from Visa, a global payments technology company (19% Item Recall, 3x faster vs. training separate models for each domain). Our approach is applicable to both implicit and explicit feedback settings.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in machine learning on graphs and networks with applications ranging from IoT traffic management to social network recommendations. Supervised machine learning tasks in networks such as node classification and link prediction require us to perform feature engineering that is known and agreed to be the key to success in applied machine learning. Research efforts dedicated to representation learning, especially representation learning using deep learning, has shown us ways to automatically learn relevant features from vast amounts of potentially noisy, raw data. However, most of the methods are inadequate to handle heterogeneous information networks which pretty much represents most real world data today. The methods cannot preserve the structure and semantic of multiple types of nodes and links well enough, capture higher-order heterogeneous connectivity patterns, and ensure coverage of nodes for which representations are generated. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient algorithm, motif2vec that learns node representations or embeddings for heterogeneous networks. Specifically, we leverage higher-order, recurring, and statistically significant network connectivity patterns in the form of motifs to transform the original graph to motif graph(s), conduct biased random walk to efficiently explore higher order neighborhoods, and then employ heterogeneous skip-gram model to generate the embeddings. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on multiple real-world networks from diverse domains and against existing state-of-the-art methods on multi-class node classification and link prediction tasks, and demonstrate its consistent superiority over prior work.

Over the past few decades as purchasing options moved online, the widespread use and popularity of online review sites has simultaneously increased. In spite of the fact that a huge extent of buying choices today are driven by numeric scores (e.g., rating a product), detailed reviews play an important role for activities like purchasing an expensive DSLR camera. Since writing a detailed review for an item is usually time-consuming, the number of reviews available in the Web is far from many. In this paper, we build a system AD-WIRE that given a user and an item, our system identifies the top- k meaningful tags to help her review the item easily. AD-WIRE allows a user to compose her review by quickly selecting from among the set of returned tags or writes her own review. AD-WIRE also visualizes the dependency of the tags to different aspects of an item so a user can make an informed decision quickly. The system can be used for different type of the products. The current demonstration is built to explore review writing process for the mobile phones.

The increasing popularity and widespread use of online review sites over the past decade has motivated businesses of all types to possess an expansive arsenal of user feedback (preferably positive) in order to mark their reputation and presence in the Web. Though a significant proportion of purchasing decisions today are driven by average numeric scores (e.g., movie rating in IMDB), detailed reviews are critical for activities such as buying an expensive digital SLR camera, reserving a vacation package, etc. Since writing a detailed review for a product (or, a service) is usually time-consuming and may not offer any incentive, the number of useful reviews available in the Web is far from many. The corpus of reviews available at our disposal for making informed decisions also suffers from spam and misleading content, typographical and grammatical errors, etc. In this paper, we address the problem of how to engage the lurkers (i.e., people who read reviews but never take time and effort to write one) to participate and write online reviews by systematically simplifying the reviewing task. Given a user and an item that she wants to review, the task is to identify the top-$k$ meaningful phrases (i.e., tags) from the set of all tags (i.e., available user feedback for items) that, when advised, would help her review an item easily. We refer to it as the TagAdvisor problem, and formulate it as a general-constrained optimization goal. Our framework is centered around three measures - relevance (i.e., how well the result set of tags describes an item to a user), coverage (i.e., how well the result set of tags covers the different aspects of an item), and polarity (i.e., how well sentiment is attached to the result set of tags) in order to help a user review an item satisfactorily. By adopting different definitions of coverage, we identify two concrete problem instances that enable a wide range of real-world scenarios. We show that these problems are NP-hard and develop practical algorithms with theoretical bounds to solve them efficiently. We conduct detailed experiments on synthetic and real data crawled from the web to validate the utility of our problem and effectiveness of our solutions.

The rise of social media has turned the Web into an online community where people connect, communicate, and collaborate with each other. Structured analytics in social media is the process of discovering the structure of the relationships emerging from this social media use. It focuses on identifying the users involved, the activities they undertake, the actions they perform, and the items (e.g., movies, restaurants, blogs, etc.) they create and interact with. There are two key challenges facing these tasks: how to organize and model social media content, which is often unstructured in its raw form, in order to employ structured analytics on it; and how to employ analytics algorithms to capture both explicit link-based relationships and implicit behavior-based relationships. In this tutorial, we systemize and summarize the research so far in analyzing social interactions between users and items in the Web from data mining and database perspectives. We start with a general overview of the topic, including discourse to various exciting and practical applications. Then, we discuss the state-of-art for modeling the data, formalizing the mining task, developing the algorithmic solutions, and evaluating on real datasets. We also emphasize open problems and challenges for future research in the area of structured analytics and social media.

The widespread use and growing popularity of online collaborative content sites has created rich resources for users to consult in order to make purchasing decisions on various items such as e-commerce products, restaurants, etc. Ideally, a user wants to quickly decide whether an item is desirable, from the list of items returned as a result of her search query. This has created new challenges for producers/manufacturers (e.g., Dell) or retailers (e.g., Amazon, eBay) of such items to compose succinct summarizations of web item descriptions, henceforth referred to as snippets, that are likely to maximize the items' visibility among users. We exploit the availability of user feedback in collaborative content sites in the form of tags to identify the most important item attributes that must be highlighted in an item snippet. We investigate the problem of finding the top-k best snippets for an item that are likely to maximize the probability that the user preference (available in the form of search query) is satisfied. Since a search query returns multiple relevant items, we also study the problem of finding the best diverse set of snippets for the items in order to maximize the probability of a user liking at least one of the top items. We develop an exact top-k algorithm for each of the problem and perform detailed experiments on synthetic and real data crawled from the web to to demonstrate the utility of our problems and effectiveness of our solutions.

We present ShoppingAdvisor, a novel recommender system that helps users in shopping for technical products. ShoppingAdvisor leverages both user preferences and technical product attributes in order to generate its suggestions. The system elicits user preferences via a tree-shaped flowchart, where each node is a question to the user. At each node, ShoppingAdvisor suggests a ranking of products matching the preferences of the user, and that gets progressively refined along the path from the tree's root to one of its leafs.

The rise of Web 2.0 is signaled by sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube, and social tagging is essential to their success. A typical tagging action involves three components, user, item (e.g., photos in Flickr), and tags (i.e., words or phrases). Analyzing how tags are assigned by certain users to certain items has important implications in helping users search for desired information. In this paper, we explore common analysis tasks and propose a dual mining framework for social tagging behavior mining. This framework is centered around two opposing measures, similarity and diversity , being applied to one or more tagging components, and therefore enables a wide range of analysis scenarios such as characterizing similar users tagging diverse items with similar tags, or diverse users tagging similar items with diverse tags, etc. By adopting different concrete measures for similarity and diversity in the framework, we show that a wide range of concrete analysis problems can be defined and they are NP-Complete in general. We design efficient algorithms for solving many of those problems and demonstrate, through comprehensive experiments over real data, that our algorithms significantly out-perform the exact brute-force approach without compromising analysis result quality.

Collaborative rating sites such as IMDB and Yelp have become rich resources that users consult to form judgments about and choose from among competing items. Most of these sites either provide a plethora of information for users to interpret all by themselves or a simple overall aggregate information. Such aggregates (e.g., average rating over all users who have rated an item, aggregates along pre-defined dimensions, etc.) can not help a user quickly decide the desirability of an item. In this paper, we build a system MapRat that allows a user to explore multiple carefully chosen aggregate analytic details over a set of user demographics that meaningfully explain the ratings associated with item(s) of interest. MapRat allows a user to systematically explore, visualize and understand user rating patterns of input item(s) so as to make an informed decision quickly. In the demo, participants are invited to explore collaborative movie ratings for popular movies.

The popularity of collaborative tagging sites has created new challenges and opportunities for designers of web items, such as electronics products, travel itineraries, popular blogs, etc. An increasing number of people are turning to online reviews and user-specified tags to choose from among competing items. This creates an opportunity for designers to build items that are likely to attract desirable tags when published. In this paper, we consider a novel optimization problem: given a training dataset of existing items with their user-submitted tags, and a query set of desirable tags, design the k best new items expected to attract the maximum number of desirable tags. We show that this problem is NP-Complete, even if simple Naive Bayes Classifiers are used for tag prediction. We present two principled algorithms for solving this problem: (a) an exact "two-tier" algorithm (based on top-k querying techniques), which performs much better than the naive brute-force algorithm and works well for moderate problem instances, and (b) a novel polynomial-time approximation algorithm with provable error bound for larger problem instances. We conduct detailed experiments on synthetic and real data crawled from the web to evaluate the efficiency and quality of our proposed algorithms.

Association rule mining is an indispensable tool for discovering insights from large databases and data warehouses.The data in a warehouse being multi-dimensional, it is often useful to mine rules over subsets of data defined by selections over the dimensions.Such interactive rule mining over multi-dimensional query windows is difficult since rule mining is computationally expensive.Current methods using pre-computation of frequent itemsets require counting of some itemsets by revisiting the transaction database at query time, which is very expensive.We develop a method (RMW) that identifies the minimal set of itemsets to compute and store for each cell, so that rule mining over any query window may be performed without going back to the transaction database.We give formal proofs that the set of itemsets chosen by RMW is sufficient to answer any query and also prove that it is the optimal set to be computed for 1 dimensional queries.We demonstrate through an extensive empirical evaluation that RMW achieves extremely fast query response time compared to existing methods, with only moderate overhead in pre-computation and storage.