Pre-conference talk for NIU Yudong and WANG Sha

Talk #1: Discovering Personalized Characteristic Communities in Attributed Graphs
by NIU Yudong, PhD Candidate

What is the widest community in which a person exercises a strong impact? Although extensive attention has been devoted to searching communities containing given individuals, the problem of finding their unique communities of influence has barely been examined. In this paper, we study the novel problem of Characteristic cOmmunity Discovery (COD) in attributed graphs. Our goal is to identify the largest community, taking into account the query attribute, in which the query node has a significant impact. The key challenge of the COD problem is that it requires evaluating the influence of the query node over a large number of hierarchically structured communities. We first propose a novel compressed COD evaluation approach to accelerate the influence estimation by eliminating redundant computations for overlapping communities. Then, we further devise a local hierarchical reclustering method to alleviate the skewness of hierarchical communities generated by global clustering for a specific query attribute. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our solutions to COD: they find characteristic communities better than existing community search methods by several quality measures and achieve up to 25x speedups against well-crafted baselines.

Talk #2: Enabling Roll-up and Drill-down Operations in News Exploration with Knowledge Graphs for Due Diligence and Risk Management
by Wang Sha, PhD Candidate

Efficient news exploration is crucial in real-world applications, particularly within the financial sector, where numerous control and risk assessment tasks rely on the analysis of public news reports. The current processes in this domain predominantly rely on manual efforts, often involving keywordbased searches and the compilation of extensive keyword lists. In this paper, we introduce NCEXPLORER, a framework designed with OLAP-like operations to enhance the news exploration experience. NCEXPLORER empowers users to use roll-up operations for a broader content overview and drill-down operations for detailed insights. These operations are achieved through integration with external knowledge graphs (KGs), encompassing both fact-based and ontology-based structures. This integration significantly augments exploration capabilities, offering a more comprehensive and efficient approach to unveiling the underlying structures and nuances embedded in news content. Extensive empirical studies through master-qualified evaluators on Amazon Mechanical Turk demonstrate NCEXPLORER’s superiority over existing state-of-the-art news search methodologies across an array of topic domains, using real-world news datasets.

NIU Yudong is a Ph.D. candidate at SCIS, under the supervision of Prof. Li Yuchen. His research focuses on community search over attributed graphs and sketch-based algorithms.

Wang Sha is a Ph.D. candidate at SCIS, under the supervision of Prof Li Yuchen. Her research focuses on text data analysis with Knowledge  graph and pre-trained language models.