We present in this paper a novel approach for as-you-type top- @math keyword search over social media. We adopt a natural "network-aware" interpretation for information relevance, by which information produced by users who are closer to the seeker is considered more relevant. In practice, this query model poses new challenges for effectiveness and efficiency in online search, even when a complete query is given as input in one keystroke. This is mainly because it requires a joint exploration of the social space and classic IR indexes such as inverted lists. We describe a memory-efficient and incremental prefix-based retrieval algorithm, which also exhibits an anytime behavior, allowing to output the most likely answer within any chosen running-time limit. We evaluate it through extensive experiments for several applications and search scenarios, including searching for posts in micro-blogging (Twitter and Tumblr), as well as searching for businesses based on reviews in Yelp. They show that our solution is effective in answering real-time as-you-type searches over social media.
Person (or people) search represents another facet of social search'', related to this paper, as the task of finding highly relevant persons for a given seeker and keywords. Usually, the approach used in this type of application is to identify the most relevant users, and then to filter them by the query keywords @cite_8 @cite_1 . In this area, @cite_17 describes the main aspects of the Unicorn system for search over the Facebook graph, including a typeahead feature for user search. A similar search problem, finding a sub-graph of the social network that connects two or more persons, is considered under the instant search paradigm in @cite_27 .
@cite_27 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_8
6946022 2663075978 1987700483 139119103 1566861348 2171570327 2169612737 2127203709 2048653843 2085161844 2963449390 2043849363 2090659861 2026312584 2100500227 2022322548 1994838421 2130831177 92788038 2137084491
In this paper, we study a new problem of instant social graph search, which aims to find a sub graph that closely connects two and more persons in a social network. This is a natural requirement in our real daily life, such as "Who can be my referrals for applying for a job position?". In this paper, we formally define the problem and present a series of approximate algorithms to solve this problem: Path, Influence, and Diversity. To evaluate the social graph search results, we have developed two prototype systems, which are online available and have attracted thousands of users. In terms of both user's viewing time and the number of user clicks, we demonstrate that the three algorithms can significantly outperform (+34.56 -+131.37 ) the baseline algorithm. In this paper, we present the results of a user study on exploratory search activities in a social science digital library. We conducted a user study with 32 participants with a social sciences background—16 postdoctoral researchers and 16 students—who were asked to solve a task on searching related work to a given topic. The exploratory search task was performed in a 10-min time slot. The use of certain search activities is measured and compared to gaze data recorded with an eye tracking device. We use a novel tree graph representation to visualise the users’ search patterns and introduce a way to combine multiple search session trees. The tree graph representation is capable of creating one single tree for multiple users and identifying common search patterns. In addition, the information behaviour of students and postdoctoral researchers is being compared. The results show that search activities on the stratagem level are frequently utilised by both user groups. The most heavily used search activities were keyword search, followed by browsing through references and citations, and author searching. The eye tracking results showed an intense examination of documents metadata, especially on the level of citations and references. When comparing the group of students and postdoctoral researchers, we found significant differences regarding gaze data on the area of the journal name of the seed document. In general, we found a tendency of the postdoctoral researchers to examine the metadata records more intensively with regard to dwell time and the number of fixations. By creating combined session trees and deriving subtrees from those, we were able to identify common patterns like economic (explorative) and exhaustive (navigational) behaviour. Our results show that participants utilised multiple search strategies starting from the seed document, which means that they examined different paths to find related publications. Unicorn is an online, in-memory social graph-aware indexing system designed to search trillions of edges between tens of billions of users and entities on thousands of commodity servers. Unicorn is based on standard concepts in information retrieval, but it includes features to promote results with good social proximity. It also supports queries that require multiple round-trips to leaves in order to retrieve objects that are more than one edge away from source nodes. Unicorn is designed to answer billions of queries per day at latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds, and it serves as an infrastructural building block for Facebook's Graph Search product. In this paper, we describe the data model and query language supported by Unicorn. We also describe its evolution as it became the primary backend for Facebook's search offerings. This paper addresses the issue of expert finding in a social network. The task of expert finding, as one of the most important research issues in social networks, is aimed at identifying persons with relevant expertise or experience for a given topic. In this paper, we propose a propagation-based approach that takes into consideration of both person local information and network information (e.g. relationships between persons). Experimental results show that our approach can outperform the baseline approach. The automatic search for knowledgeable people in the scope of an organization is a key function which makes modern Enterprise search systems commercially successful and socially demanded. A number of effective approaches to expert finding were recently proposed in academic publications. Although, most of them use reasonably defined measures of personal expertise, they often limit themselves to rather unrealistic and sometimes oversimplified principles. In this thesis, we explore several ways to go beyond state-of-the-art assumptions used in research on expert finding and propose several novel solutions for this and related tasks. First, we describe measures of expertise that do not assume independent occurrence of terms and persons in a document what makes them perform better than the measures based on independence of all entities in a document. One of these measures makes persons central to the process of terms generation in a document. Another one assumes that the position of the person’s mention in a document with respect to the positions of query terms indicates the relation of the person to the document’s relevant content. Second, we find the ways to use not only direct expertise evidence for a person concentrated within the document space of the person’s current employer and only within those organizational documents that mention the person. We successfully utilize the predicting potential of additional indirect expertise evidence publicly available on the Web and in the organizational documents implicitly related to a person. Finally, besides the expert finding methods we proposed, we also demonstrate solutions for the tasks from related domains. In one case, we use several algorithms of multi-step relevance propagation to search for typed entities in Wikipedia. In another case, we suggest generic methods for placing photos uploaded to Flickr on the World map using language models of locations built entirely on the annotations provided by users with a few task specific extensions. To answer search queries on a social network rich with user-generated content, it is desirable to give a higher ranking to content that is closer to the individual issuing the query. Queries occur at nodes in the network, documents are also created by nodes in the same network, and the goal is to find the document that matches the query and is closest in network distance to the node issuing the query. In this paper, we present the "Partitioned Multi-Indexing" scheme, which provides an approximate solution to this problem. With m links in the network, after an offline O(m) pre-processing time, our scheme allows for social index operations (i.e., social search queries, as well as insertion and deletion of words into and from a document at any node), all in time O(1). Further, our scheme can be implemented on open source distributed streaming systems such as Yahoo! S4 or Twitter's Storm so that every social index operation takes O(1) processing time and network queries in the worst case, and just two network queries in the common case where the reverse index corresponding to the query keyword is much smaller than the memory available at any distributed compute node. Building on Das 's approximate distance oracle, the worst-case approximation ratio of our scheme is O(1) for undirected networks. Our simulations on the social network Twitter as well as synthetic networks show that in practice, the approximation ratio is actually close to 1 for both directed and undirected networks. We believe that this work is the first demonstration of the feasibility of social search with real-time text updates at large scales. Effective extraction of query relevant information present within documents on the web is a nontrivial task. In this paper we present our system called QueSTS, which does the above task by filtering and aggregating important query relevant sentences distributed across a set of documents. Our approach captures the contextual relationships among sentences of all input documents and represents them as an “integrated graph”. These relationships are exploited and several subgraphs of integrated graph which consist of sentences that are highly relevant to the query and that are highly related to each other are constructed. These subgraphs are ranked by our scoring model. The highest ranked subgraph which is rich in query relevant information and also has sentences that are highly coherent is returned as a query specific summary. With the exponentially growing amount of information available on the Internet, the task of retrieving documents of interest has become increasingly difficult. Search engines usually return more than 1,500 results per query, yet out of the top twenty results, only one half turn out to be relevant to the user. One reason for this is that Web queries are in general very short and give an incomplete specification of individual users' information needs. This paper explores ways of incorporating users' interests into the search process to improve the results. The user profiles are structured as a concept hierarchy of 4,400 nodes. These are populated by 'watching over a user's shoulder' while he is surfing. No explicit feedback is necessary. The profiles are shown to converge and to reflect the actual interests quite well. One possible deployment of the profiles is investigated: re-ranking and filtering search results. Increases in performance are moderate but noticeable and show that fully automatic creation of large hierarchical user profiles is possible. We focus on large graphs where nodes have attributes, such as a social network where the nodes are labelled with each person's job title. In such a setting, we want to find subgraphs that match a user query pattern. For example, a "star" query would be, "find a CEO who has strong interactions with a Manager, a Lawyer,and an Accountant, or another structure as close to that as possible". Similarly, a "loop" query could help spot a money laundering ring. Traditional SQL-based methods, as well as more recent graph indexing methods, will return no answer when an exact match does not exist. This is the first main feature of our method. It can find exact-, as well as near-matches, and it will present them to the user in our proposed "goodness" order. For example, our method tolerates indirect paths between, say, the "CEO" and the "Accountant" of the above sample query, when direct paths don't exist. Its second feature is scalability. In general, if the query has nq nodes and the data graph has n nodes, the problem needs polynomial time complexity O(n n q), which is prohibitive. Our G-Ray ("Graph X-Ray") method finds high-quality subgraphs in time linear on the size of the data graph. Experimental results on the DLBP author-publication graph (with 356K nodes and 1.9M edges) illustrate both the effectiveness and scalability of our approach. The results agree with our intuition, and the speed is excellent. It takes 4 seconds on average fora 4-node query on the DBLP graph. This paper presents a novel framework for a multimedia search task: searching a person in a scene using human body appearance. Existing works mostly focus on two independent problems related to this task, i.e., people detection and person re-identification. However, a sequential combination of these two components does not solve the person search problem seamlessly for two reasons: 1) the errors in people detection are carried into person re-identification unavoidably; 2) the setting of person re-identification is different from that of person search which is essentially a verification problem. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework which jointly models the commonness of people (for detection) and the uniqueness of a person (for identification). We demonstrate superior performance of our approach on public benchmarks compared with the sequential combination of the state-of-the-art detection and identification algorithms. Searching persons in large-scale image databases with the query of natural language description has important applications in video surveillance. Existing methods mainly focused on searching persons with image-based or attribute-based queries, which have major limitations for a practical usage. In this paper, we study the problem of person search with natural language description. Given the textual description of a person, the algorithm of the person search is required to rank all the samples in the person database then retrieve the most relevant sample corresponding to the queried description. Since there is no person dataset or benchmark with textual description available, we collect a large-scale person description dataset with detailed natural language annotations and person samples from various sources, termed as CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES). A wide range of possible models and baselines have been evaluated and compared on the person search benchmark. An Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Neural Attention mechanism (GNA-RNN) is proposed to establish the state-of-the art performance on person search. In this paper, we present a system called QueSTS, which generates a query specific extractive summary of a selected set of documents. We have proposed an integrated graph approach to represent the contextual relationships among sentences of all the input documents. These relationships are exploited and several sub-graphs of the integrated graph are constructed. These sub-graphs consist of sentences that are highly relevant to the query and that are highly related to each other. These sub-graphs are ranked by a scoring model. The highest ranked sub-graph which is rich in query relevant information is selected as a query specific summary. A sentence ordering strategy has also been proposed by us to improve the coherence of the summary. Sentences in the selected summary are sequenced as per the above strategy. Experimental results show that the summaries generated by the QueSTS system are significantly better than other systems in terms of user satisfaction. This paper introduces the problem of matching people names to their corresponding social network identities such as their Twitter accounts. Existing tools for this purpose build upon naive textual matching and inevitably suffer low precision, due to false positives (e.g., fake impersonator accounts) and false negatives (e.g., accounts using nicknames). To overcome these limitations, we leverage "relational" evidences extracted from the Web corpus. In particular, as such an example, weadopt Web document co-occurrences, which can be interpreted as an "implicit" counterpart of Twitter follower relationships. Using both textual and relational features, we learn a ranking function aggregating these features for the accurate ordering of candidate matches. Another key contribution of this paper is to formulate confidence scoring as a separate problem from relevance ranking. A baseline approach is to use the relevance of the top match itself as the confidence score. In contrast, we train a separate classifier, using not only the top relevance score but also various statistical features extracted from the relevance scores of all candidates, and empirically validate to outperform the baseline approach. We evaluate our proposed system using real-life internetscale entity-relationship and social network graphs. Emerging social network applications for sharing and collaboration need a way to publish and search a big amount of social objects. Currently, social applications allow the association of a set of user defined keywords, named tags, when publishing these objects, in order to allow searching for them later using a subset of these tags. Commercial systems and recent research community proposals preclude a wide Internet deployment due to the emergence of scalability and hot spot problems in the nodes. We propose T-DHT, an innovative hybrid unstructured-structured DHT based approach, to cope with these high demanding requirements, in a fully scalable, distributed and balanced way. The storage process allows attaching a set of user tags to the stored object and takes at most O(Log(N)) node hops. The tag information attached to the object is stored in a compact way into the node links using a bloom filter, in order to be used later in the search process. The search process allows searching for previously stored objects by means of a tag conjunction and also takes at most O(Log(N)) node hops. The search process is based on DHT typical search combined with an unstructured search algorithm using the tag information previously stored into bloom filters of node links. The simulation results show T-DHT performs in a fully balanced and scalable way, without generating typical hot spot problems even if unbalanced distributions of popular tags are used. Although T-DHT has been devised to build a scalable infrastructure for social applications, it can be applied to solve the more general Peer-to-Peer keyword search problems. We consider two scenarios of naming people in databases of news photos with captions: (i) finding faces of a single person, and (ii) assigning names to all faces. We combine an initial text-based step, that restricts the name assigned to a face to the set of names appearing in the caption, with a second step that analyzes visual features of faces. By searching for groups of highly similar faces that can be associated with a name, the results of purely text-based search can be greatly ameliorated. We improve a recent graph-based approach, in which nodes correspond to faces and edges connect highly similar faces. We introduce constraints when optimizing the objective function, and propose improvements in the low-level methods used to construct the graphs. Furthermore, we generalize the graph-based approach to face naming in the full data set. In this multi-person naming case the optimization quickly becomes computationally demanding, and we present an important speed-up using graph-flows to compute the optimal name assignments in documents. Generative models have previously been proposed to solve the multi-person naming task. We compare the generative and graph-based methods in both scenarios, and find significantly better performance using the graph-based methods in both cases. This paper addresses several key issues in the ArnetMiner system, which aims at extracting and mining academic social networks. Specifically, the system focuses on: 1) Extracting researcher profiles automatically from the Web; 2) Integrating the publication data into the network from existing digital libraries; 3) Modeling the entire academic network; and 4) Providing search services for the academic network. So far, 448,470 researcher profiles have been extracted using a unified tagging approach. We integrate publications from online Web databases and propose a probabilistic framework to deal with the name ambiguity problem. Furthermore, we propose a unified modeling approach to simultaneously model topical aspects of papers, authors, and publication venues. Search services such as expertise search and people association search have been provided based on the modeling results. In this paper, we describe the architecture and main features of the system. We also present the empirical evaluation of the proposed methods. Employees depend on other people in the enterprise for rapid access to important information. But current systems for finding experts do not adequately address the social implications of finding and engaging strangers in conversation. This paper provides a user study of SmallBlue, a social-context-aware expertise search system that can be used to identify experts, see dynamic profile information and get information about the social distance to the expert, before deciding whether and how to initiate contact. The system uses an innovative approach to privacy to infer content and dynamic social networks from email and chat logs. We describe usage of SmallBlue and discuss implications for the next generation of enterprise-wide systems for finding people. This paper addresses the issue of extraction of an academic researcher social network. By researcher social network extraction, we are aimed at finding, extracting, and fusing the 'semantic '-based profiling information of a researcher from the Web. Previously, social network extraction was often undertaken separately in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper first gives a formalization of the entire problem. Specifically, it identifies the 'relevant documents' from the Web by a classifier. It then proposes a unified approach to perform the researcher profiling using conditional random fields (CRF). It integrates publications from the existing bibliography datasets. In the integration, it proposes a constraints-based probabilistic model to name disambiguation. Experimental results on an online system show that the unified approach to researcher profiling significantly outperforms the baseline methods of using rule learning or classification. Experimental results also indicate that our method to name disambiguation performs better than the baseline method using unsupervised learning. The methods have been applied to expert finding. Experiments show that the accuracy of expert finding can be significantly improved by using the proposed methods. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive analysis of graph-theoretical properties of online social networks based on the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) ontology. Of particular interest for this work were properties related to the small-world phenomenon. More than 1.6 million of the FOAF documents collected on the Semantic Web met our requirements and were analyzed in depth. Most FOAF documents are created and published by social networking services, blog hosting services, or combinations of the two as a matter of routine; only a fractional amount are maintained by individuals. Although the FOAF ontology defines unique identifiers for persons in theory, retrieval and particularly fusion of personal information is difficult and error-prone in practice. Nevertheless, we identified the largest strongly connected components of various community networks based on FOAF documents and analyzed them in regard to the small-world phenomenon. Interestingly, all components examined exhibited a characteristic path length comparable to the smallest length achievable for a graph of the respective size, and the clustering coefficient was much greater than expected for an equivalent random graph; along with power law degree distributions, both are typical features of small-world graphs. The wide availability of large scale databases requires more efficient and scalable tools for data understanding and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we present a method to find important people who have appeared repeatedly in a certain time period from large news video databases. Specifically, we investigate two issues: how to group similar faces to find dominant groups and how to label these groups by the corresponding names for identification. These are challenging problems because firstly people can appear with large appearance variations such as hair styles, illumination conditions and poses that make comparing between similar faces more difficult: secondly, the number of people and their occurrence frequencies that are unknown make finding dominant and useful groups more complicated: and finally, the fact that in news video faces and names usually do not appear together can make troubles in aligning faces and names. To handle above problems, we propose using the relevant set correlation based clustering model which can efficiently handle dataset of millions of objects represented in thousands or even millions of dimensions to find groups of similar faces from the large and noisy face dataset. Then in order to identify faces in clusters, names extracted from the transcripts are filtered and used to find the best correspondences by using methods developed in the statistical machine translation literature. Experiments on large video datasets containing hundreds of hours showed that our system can efficiently find out important people by not only their appearance but also their identification.