Ben Fei

Towards effective browsing of large scale social annotations

This paper is concerned with the problem of browsing social annotations. Today, a lot of services (e.g., Del.icio.us, Filckr) have been provided for helping users to manage and share their favorite URLs and photos based on social annotations. Due to the exponential increasing of the social annotations, more and more users, however, are facing the problem how to effectively find desired resources from large annotation data. Existing methods such as tag cloud and annotation matching work well only on small annotation sets. Thus, an effective approach for browsing large scale annotation sets and the associated resources is in great demand by both ordinary users and service providers. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, namely Effective Large Scale Annotation Browser (ELSABer), to browse large-scale social annotation data. ELSABer helps the users browse huge number of annotations in a semantic, hierarchical and efficient way. More specifically, ELSABer has the following features: 1) the semantic relations between annotations are explored for browsing of similar resources; 2) the hierarchical relations between annotations are constructed for browsing in a top-down fashion; 3) the distribution of social annotations is studied for efficient browsing. By incorporating the personal and time information, ELSABer can be further extended for personalized and time-related browsing. A prototype system is implemented and shows promising results.

Social Propagation: Boosting Social Annotations for Web Mining

This paper is concerned with the problem of boosting social annotations using propagation, which is also called social propagation. In particular, we focus on propagating social annotations of web pages (e.g., annotations in Del.icio.us). Social annotations are novel resources and valuable in many web applications, including web search and browsing. Although they are developing fast, social annotations of web pages cover only a small proportion (<0.1%) of the World Wide Web. To alleviate the low coverage of annotations, a general propagation model based on Random Surfer is proposed. Specifically, four steps are included, namely basic propagation, multiple-annotation propagation, multiple-link-type propagation, and constraint-guided propagation. The model is evaluated on a dataset of 40,422 web pages randomly sampled from 100 most popular English sites and ten famous academic sites. Each page’s annotations are obtained by querying the history interface of Del.icio.us. Experimental results show that the proposed model is very effective in increasing the coverage of annotations while still preserving novel properties of social annotations. Applications of propagated annotations on web search and classification further verify the effectiveness of the model.

EagleEye: entity-centric business intelligence for smarter decisions

This paper describes EagleEye, which is an intelligent system that provides business intelligence through advanced data mining and text analytics. Unlike traditional search engines, EagleEye is entity oriented, and an entity can be an organization, a person, or a place. Given an entity name, the basic function of EagleEye is to generate a consolidated view of the entity information it gathers from many disparate data sources and to organize and categorize it, and automatically detect entity relationships. EagleEye can also analyze the opinions of entities, evaluate whether they are positive or negative, and provide insight into many aspects of consumer sentiment toward product brands. This type of information can enable enterprises to manage the reputation of their brands and to respond more quickly to changes in the marketplace. We present the key technologies--such as entity-name grouping, entity-relation extraction, and entity-oriented opinion mining--that were developed to support these functions. EagleEye has been successfully deployed to a number of clients across a variety of industries in China. Several case studies are presented to demonstrate in practice the capability and business value of EagleEye.

Boosting social annotations using propagation

This paper is concerned with the problem of boosting social annotations using propagation, which is also called social propagation. In particular, we focus on propagating social annotations of web pages (e.g., annotations in Del.icio.us). Although social annotations are developing fast, they cover only a small proportion of Web pages on the World Wide Web. To alleviate the low coverage problem, a general propagation model based on Random Surfer is proposed. Specifically, four steps are included: basic propagation, multiple-annotation propagation, multiple-link-type propagation, and constraint-guided propagation. Experimental results show that the proposed model is very effective in increasing coverage of annotations as well as preserving property of social annotations.