Alessandro Provetti

Crawling Facebook for social network analysis purposes

We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree distribution, centrality measures, scaling laws and distribution of friendship.

Representing actions: Laws, observations and hypotheses

Abstract We propose a modificationL 1 of the action description languageA. The languageL 1 allows representation of hypothetical situations and hypothetical occurrence of actions (as inA) as well as representation of actual occurrences of actions and observations of the truth values of fluents in actual situations. The corresponding entailment relation formalizes various types of common-sense reasoning about actions and their effects not modeled by previous approaches. As an application of L1 we also present an architecture for intelligent agents capable of observing, planning and acting in a changing environment based on the entailment relation of L1 and use logic programming approximation of this entailment to implement a planning module for this architecture. We prove the soundness of our implementation and give a sufficient condition for its completeness.

Generalized Louvain method for community detection in large networks

In this paper we present a novel strategy to discover the community structure of (possibly, large) networks. This approach is based on the well-know concept of network modularity optimization. To do so, our algorithm exploits a novel measure of edge centrality, based on the κ-paths. This technique allows to efficiently compute a edge ranking in large networks in near linear time. Once the centrality ranking is calculated, the algorithm computes the pairwise proximity between nodes of the network. Finally, it discovers the community structure adopting a strategy inspired by the well-known state-of-the-art Louvain method (henceforth, LM), efficiently maximizing the network modularity. The experiments we carried out show that our algorithm outperforms other techniques and slightly improves results of the original LM, providing reliable results. Another advantage is that its adoption is naturally extended even to unweighted networks, differently with respect to the LM.

On Facebook, most ties are weak

Strong ties connect individuals in the same community; weak ties connect individuals in different communities.

Enhancing community detection using a network weighting strategy

A community within a network is a group of vertices densely connected to each other but less connected to the vertices outside. The problem of detecting communities in large networks plays a key role in a wide range of research areas, e.g. Computer Science, Biology and Sociology. Most of the existing algorithms to find communities count on the topological features of the network and often do not scale well on large, real-life instances. In this article we propose a strategy to enhance existing community detection algorithms by adding a pre-processing step in which edges are weighted according to their centrality, w.r.t. the network topology. In our approach, the centrality of an edge reflects its contribute to making arbitrary graph transversals, i.e., spreading messages over the network, as short as possible. Our strategy is able to effectively complements information about network topology and it can be used as an additional tool to enhance community detection. The computation of edge centralities is carried out by performing multiple random walks of bounded length on the network. Our method makes the computation of edge centralities feasible also on large-scale networks. It has been tested in conjunction with three state-of-the-art community detection algorithms, namely the Louvain method, COPRA and OSLOM. Experimental results show that our method raises the accuracy of existing algorithms both on synthetic and real-life datasets.

Mixing local and global information for community detection in large networks

Clustering networks play a key role in many scientific fields, from Biology to Sociology and Computer Science. Some clustering approaches are called global because they exploit knowledge about the whole network topology. Vice versa, so-called local methods require only a partial knowledge of the network topology. Global approaches yield accurate results but do not scale well on large networks; local approaches, vice versa, are less accurate but computationally fast. We propose CONCLUDE (COmplex Network CLUster DEtection), a new clustering method that couples the accuracy of global approaches with the scalability of local methods. CONCLUDE generates random, non-backtracking walks of finite length to compute the importance of each edge in keeping the network connected, i.e., its edge centrality. Edge centralities allow for mapping vertices onto points of a Euclidean space and compute all-pairs distances between vertices; those distances are then used to partition the network into clusters.

Extraction and Analysis of Facebook Friendship Relations

Online social networks (OSNs) are a unique web and social phenomenon, affecting tastes and behaviors of their users and helping them to maintain/create friendships. It is interesting to analyze the growth and evolution of online social networks both from the point of view of marketing and offer of new services and from a scientific viewpoint, since their structure and evolution may share similarities with real-life social networks. In social sciences, several techniques for analyzing (off-line) social networks have been developed, to evaluate quantitative properties (e.g., defining metrics and measures of structural characteristics of the networks) or qualitative aspects (e.g., studying the attachment model for the network evolution, the binary trust relationships, and the link prediction problem). However, OSN analysis poses novel challenges both to computer and Social scientists. We present our long-term research effort in analyzing Facebook, the largest and arguably most successful OSN today: it gathers more than 500 million users. Access to data about Facebook users and their friendship relations is restricted; thus, we acquired the necessary information directly from the front end of the website, in order to reconstruct a subgraph representing anonymous interconnections among a significant subset of users. We describe our ad hoc, privacy-compliant crawler for Facebook data extraction. To minimize bias, we adopt two different graph mining techniques: breadth-first-search (BFS) and rejection sampling. To analyze the structural properties of samples consisting of millions of nodes, we developed a specific tool for analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of social networks, adopting and improving existing Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques and algorithms.

Formalizing narratives using nested circumscription

The representation of narratives of actions and observations is a current issue in Knowledge Representation, where traditional plan-oriented treatments of action seem to fall short. To address narratives, Pinto and Reiter have extended Situation Calculus axioms, Kowalski and Sergot have introduced the Event Calculus in Logic Programming, and Baral et al. have defined the specification language L which allows to express actual and hypothetical situations in a uniform setting. The L entailment relation can formalize several forms of reasoning about actions and change. In this paper we illustrate a translation of L theories into Nested Abnormality Theories, a novel form of circumscription. The proof of soundness and completeness of the translation is the main technical result of the paper, but attention is also devoted to the features of Nested Abnormality Theories to capture commonsense reasoning in general and to clarify which assumptions a logical formalization forces upon a domain. These results also help clarifying the relationship between L and other recent circumscriptive formalizations for narratives, such as Miller and Shanahans.

Improving recommendation quality by merging collaborative filtering and social relationships

Matrix Factorization techniques have been successfully applied to raise the quality of suggestions generated by Collaborative Filtering Systems (CFSs). Traditional CFSs based on Matrix Factorization operate on the ratings provided by users and have been recently extended to incorporate demographic aspects such as age and gender. In this paper we propose to merge CFS based on Matrix Factorization and information regarding social friendships in order to provide users with more accurate suggestions and rankings on items of their interest. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a real-life online social network; the experimental results show an improvement against existing CFSs. A detailed comparison with related literature is also present.

On the equivalence and range of applicability of graph-based representations of logic programs

Logic programs under Answer Sets semantics can be studied, and actual computation can be carried out, by means of representing them by directed graphs. Several reductions of logic programs to directed graphs are now available. We compare our proposed representation, called Extended Dependency Graph, to the Block Graph representation recently defined by Linke [Proc. IJCAI-2001, 2001, pp. 641-648]. On the relevant fragment of well-founded irreducible programs, extended dependency and block graph turns out to be isomorphic. So, we argue that graph representation of general logic programs should be abandoned in favor of graph representation of well-founded irreducible programs, which are more concise, more uniform in structure while being equally expressive.