Priya Radhakrishnan

Extracting semantic knowledge from Wikipedia category names

Wikipedia being a large, freely available, frequently updated and community maintained knowledge base, has been central to much recent research. However, quite often we find that the information extracted from it has extraneous content. This paper proposes a method to extract useful information from Wikipedia, using Semantic Features derived from Wikipedia categories. The proposed method provides good performance as a Wikipedia category based method. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves a correlation coefficient of 0.66 with human judgments. The Semantic Features derived by this method gave good correlation with human rankings in a web search query completion application.

Exploiting Wikipedia inlinks for linking entities in queries

Given a knowledge base, annotating any text with entities in the knowledge base enhances automated understanding of the text. Entities provide extra contextual information for the automated system to understand and interpret the text better. In the special case when the text is in the form of short text queries, automated understanding can be critical in improving the quality of search results and recommendations. Annotation of queries helps semantic retrieval, ensuring diversity of search results including retrieval of relevant news stories. In this paper, we present SIEL@ERD, a system for automated stamping of entity information in short query text. Our system builds from the state-of-the-art TAGME system and is optimized for time and performance efficiency. Our system achieved an F1 measure of 0.53 and the latency of 0.31 seconds on a dataset of 500 queries and a Freebase snapshot provided for the short track in the Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge at SIGIR 2014.

Modeling the evolution of product entities

A large number of web queries are related to product entities. Studying evolution of product entities can help analysts understand the change in particular attribute values for these products. However, studying the evolution of a product requires us to be able to link various versions of a product together in a temporal order. While it is easy to temporally link recent versions of products in a few domains manually, solving the problem in general is challenging. The ability to temporally order and link various versions of a single product can also improve product search engines. In this paper, we tackle the problem of finding the previous version (predecessor) of a product entity. Given a repository of product entities, we first parse the product names using a CRF model. After identifying entities corresponding to a single product, we solve the problem of finding the previous version of any given particular version of the product. For the second task, we leverage innovative features with a Naïve Bayes classifier. Our methods achieve a precision of 88% in identifying the product version from product entity names, and a precision of 53% in identifying the predecessor.

Social Media Summarization

Social media is an important venue for information sharing, discussions or conversations on a variety of topics and events generated or happening across the globe. Application of automated text summarization techniques on the large volume of information piled up in social media can produce textual summaries in a variety of flavors depending on the difficulty of the use case. This chapter talks about the available set of techniques to generate summaries from different genres of social media text with an extensive introduction to extractive summarization techniques.

Survey of Social Commerce Research

Social commerce is a field that is growing rapidly with the rise of Web 2.0 technologies. This paper presents a review of existing research on this topic to ensure a comprehensive understanding of social commerce. First, we explore the evolution of social commerce from its marketing origins. Next, we examine various definitions of social commerce and the motivations behind it. We also investigate its advantages and disadvantages for both businesses and customers. Then, we explore two major tools for important for social commerce: Sentiment Analysis, and Social Network Analysis. By delving into well-known research papers in Information Retrieval and Complex Networks, we seek to present a survey of current research in multifarious aspects of social commerce to the scientific research community.