In recent years, new digital technologies are being used to support the navigation and the analysis of scientific publications, justified by the increasing number of articles published every year. For this reason, experts make use of on-line systems to browse thousands of articles in search of relevant information. In this paper, we present a new method that automatically assigns meanings to references on the basis of the citation text through a Natural Language Processing pipeline and a slightly-supervised clustering process. The resulting network of semantically-linked articles allows an informed exploration of the research panorama through semantic paths. The proposed approach has been validated using the ACL Anthology Dataset containing several thousands of papers related to the Computational Linguistics field. A manual evaluation on the extracted citation meanings carried to very high levels of accuracy. Finally, a freely-available web-based application has been developed and published on-line.

E-recruitment uses a range of web-based technologies to find, evaluate, and hire new personnel for organizations. A crucial challenge in this arena lies in the categorization of job offers: candidates and operators often explore and analyze large numbers of offers and profiles through a set of job categories. To date, recruitment organizations define job categories top-down, relying on standardized vocabularies that often fail to capture new skills and requirements that emerge from dynamic labor markets. In order to support e-recruitment, this paper presents a dynamic, bottom-up method to automatically enrich and revise job categories. The method detects novel, highly characterizing terms in a corpus of job offers, leading to a more effective categorization, and is evaluated on real-world data by Multiposting (http://www.multiposting.fr/en), a large French e-recruitment firm.

Nowadays, many tools and systems are available to allow the analysis and the comparison of researchers' scientific production. The reason underlying such interest is evident: promotions, funding allocations, and employments are currently based on the evaluation (and direct comparisons) of publication lists. Existing measures, like H-index, aim at supporting this process by automatic calculations of quality and/or quantity indices. In this work, we propose a demonstration of a web environment, available at http://d-index.di.unito.it, that faces the problem of studying the impact of collaborations in research communities. The presented system allows the estimation of the impact of each scientific collaboration on the production of each researchers indexed by the DBLP bibliographic database by means of a novel time-based modeling of collaborative environments. The proposed application provides several interactions and visualization schemes to deeply discover clear and latent insights, over time, around the work of each researcher. Furthermore, it allows cross-community rankings of the authors depending on similar collaboration patterns and dependences.

Nowadays, in the Web 2.0 reality, one of the most challenging task for companies that aim to manage and recommend job offers is to convey this enormous amount of information in a succinct and intelligent manner such to increase the performances of matching operations against users profiles/curricula and optimize the time/space complexity of these processes. With this goal, this paper presents a novel method to formalize the textual content of job offers that aims at identifying the most relevant information and fields expressed by them and leverage this compact formalization for job recommendation and profile matching in social network environments. This method has been then developed and tested in the industrial environment represented by Multiposting and Work4, world leaders in digital solutions of e-recruitment problems. In this study three classes of documents are considered: job offers, job categories and social network user profiles (as potential job candidates); each class contains several fields with textual information. The proposed representation method permits to dynamically identify those text fields, for each class, that could help a cross-matching strategy in order to preserve, from one hand, the matching/recommendation performances and, on the other hand, reduce the cost of these operations (due to a straightforward dimensionality reduction mechanism). We then evaluated and compared the presented approach showing significant improvements on both categorization and recommendation tasks by also drastically reducing their computational costs.

Twitter is a popular microblogging service that acts as a ground-level information news flashes portal where people with different background, age, and social condition provide information about what is happening in front of their eyes. This characteristic makes Twitter probably the fastest information service in the world. In this article, we recognize this role of Twitter and propose a novel, user-aware topic detection technique that permits to retrieve, in real time, the most emerging topics of discussion expressed by the community within the interests of specific users. First, we analyze the topology of Twitter looking at how the information spreads over the network, taking into account the authority/influence of each active user. Then, we make use of a novel term aging model to compute the burstiness of each term, and provide a graph-based method to retrieve the minimal set of terms that can represent the corresponding topic. Finally, since any user can have topic preferences inferable from the shared content, we leverage such knowledge to highlight the most emerging topics within her foci of interest. As evaluation we then provide several experiments together with a user study proving the validity and reliability of the proposed approach.

In this work, we demonstrate a web application, available at http://d-index.di.unito.it, that permits to analyze the scientific profiles of all the researchers indexed by DBLP by focusing on the collaborations that contributed to define their curricula. The presented application allows the user to analyze the profile of a researcher, her dependence degrees on all the co-authors (along her entire scientific publication history) and to make comparisons among them in terms of dependence patterns. In particular, it is possible to estimate and visualize how much a researcher has benefited from collaboration with another researcher as well as the communities in which she has been involved. Moreover, the application permits to compare, in a single chart, each researcher with all the scientists indexed in DBLP by focusing on their dependences with respect to many other parameters like the total number of papers, the number of collaborations and the length of the scientific careers.

Taxonomies embody formalized knowledge and define aggregations between concepts/categories in a given domain, facilitating the organization of the data and making the contents easily accessible to the users. Since taxonomies have significant roles in the data annotation, search and navigation, they are often carefully engineered. However, especially in very dynamic content, they do not necessarily reflect the content knowledge. Thus, in this paper, we propose A Narrative Interpretation of Taxonomies for their Adaptation (ANITA) for re-structuring existing taxonomies to varying application contexts and we evaluate the proposed scheme by user studies that show that the proposed algorithm is able to adapt the taxonomy in a new compact and understandable structure from a human point of view.

Since the visualization real estate puts stringent constraints on how much data can be presented to the users at once, table summarization is an essential tool in helping users quickly explore large data sets. An effective summary needs to minimize the information loss due to the reduction in details. Summarization algorithms leverage the redundancy in the data to identify value and tuple clustering strategies that represent the (almost) same amount of information with a smaller number of data representatives. It has been shown that, when available, metadata, such as value hierarchies associated to the attributes of the tables, can help greatly reduce the resulting information loss. However, table summarization, whether carried out through data analysis performed on the table from scratch or supported through already available metadata, is an expensive operation. We note that the table summarization process can be significantly sped up when the metadata used for supporting the summarization itself is pre-processed to reduce the unnecessary details. The pre-processing of the metadata, however, needs to be performed carefully to ensure that it does not add significant amounts of additional loss to the table summarization process. In this paper, we propose a tRedux algorithm for value hierarchy pre-processing and reduction. Experimental evaluations show that, depending on the table and taxonomy complexity, metadata summarization can provide gains in table summarization time that can range (in absolute values) from seconds to 10s-of-1000s of seconds. Consequently, while resulting in only an extra ~ 20% reduction in table quality, tRedux can provide ~ 2x speedups in table summarization time. Experiments also show that tRedux has a better performance than alternative metadata reduction strategies in supporting table summarization; and, as the taxonomy complexity increases, the absolute gains of tRedux also increase.

Most of the existing document and web search engines rely on keyword-based queries. To find matches, these queries are processed using retrieval algorithms that rely on word frequencies, topic recentness, document authority, and (in some cases) available ontologies. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to exploring text collections using a novel keywords-by-concepts (KbC) graph, which supports navigation using domain-specific concepts as well as keywords that are characterizing the text corpus. The KbC graph is a weighted graph, created by tightly integrating keywords extracted from documents and concepts obtained from domain taxonomies. Documents in the corpus are associated to the nodes of the graph based on evidence supporting contextual relevance; thus, the KbC graph supports contextually informed access to these documents. In this paper, we also present CoSeNa (Context-based Search and Navigation) system that leverages the KbC model as the basis for document exploration and retrieval as well as contextually-informed media integration.