Byron Dom

Graph-based ranking algorithms for e-mail expertise analysis

In this paper we study graph--based ranking measures for the purpose of using them to rank email correspondents according to their degree of expertise on subjects of interest. While this complete expertise analysis consists of several steps, in this paper we focus on the analysis of digraphs whose nodes correspond to correspondents (people), whose edges correspond to the existence of email correspondence between the people corresponding to the nodes they connect and whose edge directions point from the member of the pair whose relative expertise has been estimated to be higher. We perform our analysis on both synthetic and real data and we introduce a new error measure for comparing ranked lists.

Linear prediction models with graph regularization for web-page categorization

We present a risk minimization formulation for learning from both text and graph structures which is motivated by the problem of collective inference for hypertext document categorization. The method is based on graph regularization formulated as a well-formed convex optimization problem. We present numerical algorithms for our formulation, and show that such combination of local text features and link information can lead to improved predictive accuracy.

A time-dependent topic model for multiple text streams

In recent years social media have become indispensable tools for information dissemination, operating in tandem with traditional media outlets such as newspapers, and it has become critical to understand the interaction between the new and old sources of news. Although social media as well as traditional media have attracted attention from several research communities, most of the prior work has been limited to a single medium. In addition temporal analysis of these sources can provide an understanding of how information spreads and evolves. Modeling temporal dynamics while considering multiple sources is a challenging research problem. In this paper we address the problem of modeling text streams from two news sources - Twitter and Yahoo! News. Our analysis addresses both their individual properties (including temporal dynamics) and their inter-relationships. This work extends standard topic models by allowing each text stream to have both local topics and shared topics. For temporal modeling we associate each topic with a time-dependent function that characterizes its popularity over time. By integrating the two models, we effectively model the temporal dynamics of multiple correlated text streams in a unified framework. We evaluate our model on a large-scale dataset, consisting of text streams from both Twitter and news feeds from Yahoo! News. Besides overcoming the limitations of existing models, we show that our work achieves better perplexity on unseen data and identifies more coherent topics. We also provide analysis of finding real-world events from the topics obtained by our model.

Document preprocessing for naive Bayes classification and clustering with mixture of multinomials

Naive Bayes classifier has long been used for text categorization tasks. Its sibling from the unsupervised world, the probabilistic mixture of multinomial models, has likewise been successfully applied to text clustering problems. Despite the strong independence assumptions that these models make, their attractiveness come from low computational cost, relatively low memory consumption, ability to handle heterogeneous features and multiple classes, and often competitiveness with the top of the line models. Recently, there has been several attempts to alleviate the problems of Naive Bayes by performing heuristic feature transformations, such as IDF, normalization by the length of the documents and taking the logarithms of the counts. We justify the use of these techniques and apply them to two problems: classification of products in Yahoo! Shopping and clustering the vectors of collocated terms in user queries to Yahoo! Search. The experimental evaluation allows us to draw conclusions about the promise that these transformations carry with regard to alleviating the strong assumptions of the multinomial model.

Scalable clustering of news search results

In this paper, we present a system for clustering the search results of a news search engine. The news search interface includes the relevant news articles to a given query organized in terms of related news stories. Here each cluster corresponds to a news story and the news articles are clustered into stories. We present a system that clusters the search results of a news search system in a fast and scalable manner. The clustering system is organized into three components including offline clustering, incremental clustering and realtime clustering. We propose novel techniques for clustering the search results in realtime. The experimental results with large collections of news documents reveal that our system is both scalable and also achieves good accuracy in clustering the news search results.

Threshold selection for web-page classification with highly skewed class distribution

We propose a novel cost-efficient approach to threshold selection for binary web-page classification problems with imbalanced class distributions. In many binary-classification tasks the distribution of classes is highly skewed. In such problems, using uniform random sampling in constructing sample sets for threshold setting requires large sample sizes in order to include a statistically sufficient number of examples of the minority class. On the other hand, manually labeling examples is expensive and budgetary considerations require that the size of sample sets be limited. These conflicting requirements make threshold selection a challenging problem. Our method of sample-set construction is a novel approach based on stratified sampling, in which manually labeled examples are expanded to reflect the true class distribution of the web-page population. Our experimental results show that using false positive rate as the criterion for threshold setting results in lower-variance threshold estimates than using other widely used accuracy measures such as F1 and precision.

A structure-sensitive framework for text categorization

This paper presents a framework called Structure Sensitive CATegorization(SSCAT), that exploits document structure for improved categorization. There are two parts to this framework, viz. (1) Documents often have layout structure, such that logically coherent text is grouped together into fields using some mark-up language. We use a log-linear model, which associates one or more features with each field. Weights associated with the field features are learnt from training data and these weights quantify the per-class importance of the field features in determining the category for the document. (2) We employ a technique that exploits the parse tree of fields that are phrasal constructs, such as title and associates weights with words in these constructs while boosting weights of important words called focus words. These weights are learnt from example instances of phrasal constructs, marked with the corresponding focus words. The learning is accomplished by training a classifier that uses linguistic features obtained from the texts parse structure. The weighted words, in fields with phrasal constructs, are used in obtaining features for the corresponding fields in the overall framework. SSCAT was tested on the supervised categorization task of over one million products from Yahoo!s on-line shopping data. With an accuracy of over 90%, our classifier outperforms Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines. This not only shows the effectiveness of SSCAT but also strengthens our belief that linguistic features based on natural language structure can improve tasks such as text categorization.