Nihil Obstat

Datasets, databases and resources: MSH WSD, BioNOT, Gazetiki, DBpedia Spotlight, Google BigQuery, Common Crawl

2011-11-23T10:13:00.000+01:00

Some datasets and resources I have recently found (although they may be old):

MSH WSD: a data set for Word Sense Disambiguation WSD based on a method that can be used to automatically develop a WSD test collection using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus and the manual MeSH indexing of MEDLINE.
BioNOT: a searchable database of negated biomedical sentences. The database consists of more than 32 million negated sentences at PubMed.
Gazetiki: a geographical database that contains 8323702 geographical names coming from Geonames and from different Web sources, with the latter representing over 1 million items, with the addition of a popularity score which was calculated based on the usage of a place name in a geotagged dataset.
DBpedia Spotlight: a tool for automatically annotating mentions of DBpedia resources in text, providing a solution for linking unstructured information sources to the Linked Open Data cloud through DBpedia. DBpedia Spotlight performs named entity extraction, including entity detection and Name Resolution.
Google BigQuery Service: a SQL-like tool for analyzing massive datasets, as a web service that enables you to do interactive analysis of massively large datasets-up to billions of rows.
Common Crawl: a freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation.

Seminario MAVIR: Búsqueda de personas en la Web

2011-11-21T09:02:00.000+01:00

TÍTULO: Búsqueda de personas en la Web
PONENTE: Julio Gonzalo (NLP&IR-UNED)
FECHA Y HORA: miércoles 23 de noviembre de 2011, a las 12h00

ABSTRACT

Buscar información sobre personas es una actividad frecuente en la Red, que va desde encontrar un número de teléfono hasta analizar la reputación online de una persona a partir de miles de fuentes. Pero utilizar un nombre de persona como consulta tiene un problema crucial: la ambigüedad. Los buscadores convencionales devuelven una lista de resultados en la que, muy a menudo, se mezcla información sobre muchas personas que se llaman igual. Un buscador ideal agruparía los resultados que se refieren a cada persona, y extraería dinámicamente un perfil de cada persona a partir del contenido de las páginas encontradas.

Web People Search es el término acuñado para este reto, y una parte sustancial de la investigación en el tema se ha vertebrado en torno a las campañas de evaluación competitiva WePS. En esta charla resumiremos los progresos alcanzados hasta ahora, y utilizaremos WePS como un ejemplo del uso de campañas de evaluación como motor de la investigación en Tecnologías de la Lengua. Por el camino, nuestras reflexiones ayudarán a explicar porqué los espías se niegan a usar la medida F de Van Rijsbergen, y qué podrían usar a cambio.

BIO

Julio Gonzalo es coordinador del grupo de investigación NLP&IR de la UNED. Sus intereses de investigación se sitúan en la intersección entre el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural y la Recuperación de
Información e incluyen, en particular, la búsqueda de información multilingüe e interactiva, la organización de resultados de búsqueda, la búsqueda semántica, y las métricas y metodologías de evaluación en
estas áreas. Ha sido recientemente general co-chair del CLEF 2011, area chair de EACL 2012 y EMNLP 2010, y co-organizador de las campañas de evaluación WePS (2007, 2009 y 2010).

LUGAR DE CELEBRACIÓN

Sala de Grados
Escuela Politécnica Superior, UAM
c/ Francisco Tomás y Valiente, 11
Campus de Cantoblanco
28049 Madrid

+ INFO: http://www.mavir.net/talks/100-jgonzalo-nov2011

CFP: WWW 2012, Internet Monetization and Incentives Track

2011-10-27T10:45:00.001+02:00

Call for Papers: WWW 2012, Internet Monetization and Incentives Track

The Web has become as a major economic phenomenon, acting both as a conduit for traditional endeavourstransactions such as business-to-business and business-to-consumer commerce, and as an arena for a specific variety of other economic activities such as Web advertising, digital payment systems, and bandwidths provisioning. The WWW track on Internet Monetization is a forum for theoretical and applied research related to web-specific economic activities.

The track will be interdisciplinary in nature. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to) :

Computational advertising: sponsored search, content match, graphical ads delivery, targeting
Machine learning and data mining applied to auction theory and user modeling in the context of Internet monetization
Internet auctions, markets, and exchanges
Economics aspects of online reviews, reputations, and ratings
Monetizing digital media, user generated content, and the social web
User-experience design aspects of Web monetization mechanisms
Web analytics for e-commerce
Economics of information/digital goods
Advertising infrastructure: tools, platforms, networks, exchanges, automation, audience intelligence
Economic approaches to spam/fraud control
Social and crowdsourcing commerce
E-commerce issues in cloud computing and and Web apps
Mobile web advertising and locating-based e-commerce

Important dates

All submission deadlines are at 9:00pm PST.

November 1st, 2011 Abstracts for papers due
November 7th, 2011 Papers due
January 30th, 2012 Paper notifications out
February 28th, 2012 Camera ready papers due
April 16th, 2012 Conference begins

All submissions must be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Template.

Submission can be made at: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=www2012

Via SIGIRList.

ACM Author-Izer: it is for you, it is for the ACM

2011-10-19T22:44:00.001+02:00

A win-win, absoultely. The ACM has developed a new service, now live, named "Author-Izer". A relatively long explanation of the service is there, but I strongly recommend to take a look at the presentation; it will give you an idea of what you get, and how to get it. However, and in few words, you make the final version of your papers at ACM publications available for free to your readers, and in turn, you allow the ACM to get a more precise account of cites and downloads. A win-win, because you benefit from knowing (and posting) your (registered) cites and downloads, as well.

It would be redundant to explain the process here, but although it seems easy, it takes a while. And that is important, because you may want to get your papers made public for free instantly. But well, it does not work so quickly. Some hints of the process:

All right, you are told to create an ACM Digital Library Web user account. That is easy, just sign up. But the user name is automatically generated, so do not forget it or you will have to answer your secret question as you filled in the registration and read your email (delay!), or to re-create the account.
Then you are requested to make at least a change to your "author profile". But where is it? You can not find it in the ACM DL page, nor even being logged. That is because there is no link between you as a Web user and you as an author. So the quickest way to find the profile is to search for your name in the DL, and click on your author name at one of your papers. Then you edit it (suggestion, fill the form completely), and your changes stay pending until somebody at the DL authorizes them. Wait. It took a day on my case, but it can be hours if you ar in the same time frame as the ACM - it means, the US.
Once your changes are admitted, you can access your author profile page. This should be mine: ACM DL author profile for Jose Maria Gomez Hidalgo. If you are logged as a user, you will see a new export link at your pubs in the ACM journals/conferences: "ACM Author-Izer Service". You can export all of them with the same link at the begining of the page, but unless you have dozens and dozens, I do not recommend it. It is more easy going one by one.
When you click one of the Author-Izer links, you get a popup for filling some details, and you get the code to insert in your papers page. Beware, you cave to write the URL of the page that will be hosting your paper page, or it will not be working. In my case, I tried several times until I got it: http://www.esp.uem.es/jmgomez/papers/. Copy the code in your page, and that is it. It is done instantly.

So that is all. Now you can have a link to your camera-ready version, and the citation stats, in your page. Simple but with some delays. As a note, every time you make a change at your author profile, it is manually reviewed, so it may take time to get it live.

JRC-Names - A freely available, highly multilingual named entity resource

2011-10-13T10:24:00.001+02:00

JRC-Names is a highly multilingual named entity resource for person and organisation names ('entities'). It consists of large lists of names and their many spelling variants (up to hundreds for a single person), including across scripts (Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.). The named entity resource file with the list of spelling variants is accompanied by Java-implemented demonstrator software that (a) allows to produce - for any input name - a list of known spelling variants, and that (b) analyses UTF8-encoded text files to find known entity mentions, returning the name variant found, the preferred display name for that entity, the unique name identifier for that name, the position of the entity name in the text, and its length in characters.

To see examples, go to any of the over one million entity pages on EMM-NewsExplorer (e.g. that for Muammar Gaddafi at http://emm.newsexplorer.eu/NewsExplorer/entities/en/262.html) to see the list of spelling variants automatically collected for that entity.

JRC-Names is a /technical/ resource that can be used to find names even if they are spelled differently and to normalise name spellings in databases or other repositories. It is also a useful ingredient for IT systems that process text, e.g. for text mining, machine translation, social network generation, and other text mining applications involving named entities.

JRC-Names is a by-product of the analysis of about 100,000 news reports per day by the *Europe Media Monitor* (EMM) family of applications (freely accessible at http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html). It was mostly compiled automatically, by analysing hundreds of millions of news articles since the year 2004 in up to twenty languages, identifying names of entities (mostly persons, but also organisations, event names, and more), and detecting which of these newly found names are variant spellings of each other. Most name variants in JRC-Names are thus spellings that were found in real-life text (including frequent spelling mistakes). Additionally, for a subset of the collection of entities, software automatically extracted spelling variants in many further languages (e.g. Chinese, Thai, Japanese, ...) from the cross-lingual links in Wikipedia. For highly frequent or otherwise important names, the named entity resource was additionally manually verified. As JRC-Names was mostly produced automatically, it will contain some errors.

At http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/, you find more information on the JRC's multilingual language technology activity, a download link for JRC-Names and a reference paper explaining the named entity resource, as well as a page pointing to other multilingual resources.

Via MAVIR and Elsnet lists.

VI Jornadas MAVIR: Tecnologías de Acceso a la Información: Estado actual y reto

2011-10-13T09:00:00.001+02:00

VI Jornadas MAVIR
Tecnologías de Acceso a la Información: Estado actual y retos
15 y 16 de noviembre de 2011
ETSI Informática, URJC

Registro gratuito: http://6jmavir.appspot.com
Información completa: http://www.mavir.net/events/96-jornadas-mavir-2011

PROGRAMA

martes 15/11/2011. Jornada Científica y Empresarial
Salón de Grados, Edificio Interdepartamental II, URJC

9h00: Recepción y entrega de documentación

9h30: Graph Distance Distribution for Social Network Mining
Paolo Boldi (Università degli Studi di Milano)

11h00: pausa café

11h30: Ceremonia de Apertura de las Jornadas y Entrega del Premio MAVIR
Raquel Martínez, Coordinadora Adjunta del Consorcio MAVIR
Abraham Duarte, Investigador Principal del grupo GAVAB-URJC

12h30: Exposición del Premio MAVIR 2011

13h00: pausa almuerzo

15h00: Understanding Text with Knowledge Bases and Random Walks
Eneko Agirre (Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)

16h30: Mesa Redonda Empresas

17h30: fin del primer día

miércoles 15/11/2011. Jornada Académica
Salón de Grados, Edificio Interdepartamental II, URJC

9h30: Recepción y entrega de documentación

10h00: Presentación de las líneas de investigación actuales del Consorcio MAVIR
Ronda de presentaciones a cargo de investigadores de los grupos
CybermetricsLab-CSIC, HTL&IR-UAM, LABDA-UC3M, GSI-UEM, NLP&IR-UNED,
THALES-UPM y GAVAB-URJC.

13h30: clausura de las jornadas

PRESENTACIÓN

La Universidad Rey Juan Carlos acoge los próximos 15 y 16 de noviembre de 2011 la sexta edición de las Jornadas MAVIR. Este año, bajo el título "Tecnologías de Acceso a la Información: Estado actual y retos", reunimos charlas científicas a cargo de ponentes de prestigio internacional y presentaciones de empresas de base tecnológica que trabajan en las líneas de investigación prioritarias del consorcio. Entre los temas que se tratarán destacan el análisis de grafos para el análisis de las redes sociales, las técnicas de semántica computacional aplicadas a la comprensión de información textual y el estado actual de las tecnologías de acceso inteligente a la información.

Como en años anteriores, aprovechamos la celebración de las jornadas para entregar la quinta edición del Premio MAVIR al mejor Trabajo de Fin de Carrera o Tesis de Máster en las áreas de investigación del consorcio. El premio está patrocinado por las empresas Bitext, Corex, Daedalus e iSOCO y cuenta con una dotación en metálico de 1.600 €.

El Consorcio MAVIR es una red de investigación co-financiada por la Comunidad de Madrid y el Fondo Social Europeo bajo los programas de I+D en TIC MA2VICMR (2010-2013) y MAVIR (2006-2009). El núcleo del consorcio está formado por un equipo multidisciplinar de más de 50 ingenieros, científicos, lingüistas y documentalistas provenientes de grupos consolidados, 15 PYMEs de base tecnológica y empresas integradoras. Las actividades de I+D del consorcio se centran en el campo de las tecnologías lingüísticas aplicadas a los sistemas inteligentes de acceso y tratamiento de la información multimedia y multilingüe.

DESTINATARIOS

Empresas de base tecnológica relacionadas con las Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano, los Sistemas Inteligentes de Acceso a la Información, los sistemas de Reconocimiento Automático del Habla, los buscadores y la Web, especialmente aquellas con interés en el acceso y gestión de contenidos multimedia y multilingües.
Empresas integradoras con intereses en Sistemas Inteligentes de Acceso a la Información.
Grupos de investigación y spin-offs con intereses en Transferencia de Tecnología en TIC.
Organismos públicos y privados para los cuales la presencia en la Web es un factor estratégico.
Investigadores y estudiantes interesados en áreas como el acceso a la información multimedia y multilingüe, el procesamiento del lenguaje natural, la creación de recursos lingüísticos, la extracción de información, los sistemas de búsqueda de respuestas, el reconocimiento del habla y la Web semántica.

LUGAR DE CELEBRACIÓN

Salón de Grados, Edificio Interdepartamental II
ETSI Informática, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
c/ Tulipán, s/n
28933 Móstoles, Madrid

REGISTRO

La asistencia es abierta y gratuita. Dado lo limitado del aforo, es necesario registrarse y reservar plaza en el formulario de registro: http://registro.mavir.net

Comment in New Scientist feature on Crowsourced SMS Spam filter

2011-06-17T09:29:00.001+02:00

Jakob Aron from New Scientist interviewed me some time a go regarding the following paper:

Kuldeep Yadav, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Atul Goyal, Ashish Gupta, Vinayak Naik. SMSAssassin: Crowdsourcing Driven Mobile-based System for SMS Spam Filtering.
12th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile 2011).

You can find my opinion at the feature: Crowdsourced software could stop SMS spam.

Buscando una herramienta para hacer mockups Web

2011-06-15T10:06:00.000+02:00

Estoy buscando una herramienta para prototipar productos con GUI basada en Web. Estos son mis requisitos:

Necesario:

Standalone, no web-based
Version para Windows
Gratuito pero completamente funcional, no soporte a un solo proyecto
Desarrollo de mockups Web
Eventos activos (e.g. pulsar boton lleva a otra pantalla/pagina)

Deseable:

Generación de código (aunque sea vacio para el backend)
Visualización Web (se generan htmls que se pueden colgar)
Soporte para cambio de CSSs

Prescindible

Soporte para wireframes
Aplicaciones sobre Win/GTK/etc.
Soporte para desarrollo de graficos (que se puede cubrir con otras herramientas)

Algunas posibilidades que ya he revisado:

Pencil - carece de eventos activos
Lumzy - web-based
Balsamiq - de pago
Edhita - de pago
Serena - limitado a un proyecto
Cacoo - Web based, limitado
Inkscape - de proposito general, muy bueno para gráficos en general - para eso lo usare
KRita - Linux/KDE
Open Office Draw - de proposito general, ya lo tengo
El listado disponible en: http://techtastico.com/post/mockups-online/ - todas online

Me gustaría escuchar vuestra experiencia, sugerencias, etc. Por favor, comentad.

New dataset released: SMS Spam Collection v.1

2011-06-09T11:56:00.001+02:00

New dataset released: SMS Spam Collection v.1

The SMS Spam Collection v.1 is a public set of SMS labeled messages that have been collected for mobile phone spam research. It has one dataset composed by 5,574 English, real and non-enconded messages, tagged according being legitimate (ham) or spam.

The collection is free for all purposes, and it is public available at: http://www.dt.fee.unicamp.br/~tiago/smsspamcollection/

This corpus has been collected from free or free for research sources at the Internet including the Grumbletext Web site, the NUS SMS Corpus, Caroline Tag's PhD Thesis, and a smaller previous collection (SMS Spam Corpus v.0.1: http://www.esp.uem.es/jmgomez/smsspamcorpus/, available for historic comparison).

A comprehensive study of this corpus can be found in the following paper, which offers a number of statistics, studies and baseline results for several machine learning methods.

Almeida, T.A., Gómez Hidalgo, J.M., Yamakami, A. Contributions to the study of SMS Spam Filtering: New Collection and Results. Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (ACM DOCENG'11), Mountain View, CA, USA, 2011. (Accepted)

Invitation to participate in a text visual analytics user study

2011-06-02T19:19:00.001+02:00

Let me disseminate this user study participation request.

Daniela Oelke, David Spretke, Andreas Stoffel, and Daniel A. Keim need to evaluate their research in the domain of visual analytics for improving the readability of a text. They would like to invite you to participate in a small survey that can be found here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H6KCJ52

Your task will be to read twice through 5 sentences and rank them. Afterwards you are asked to state your reasons for ranking them the way you did. Completing the study should take no longer than 10-15 minutes. Your effort is really appreciated as it helps us to further improve their algorithms.

To know more about their algorithms, check e.g.: "Visual Analytics: Combining Automated Discovery with Interactive Visualizations".

Via the SIGIR list.

Test the Google Wonder wheel

2011-05-19T23:52:00.001+02:00

I have came across this (beautiful) tool during a paper review. It is pretty funny, and a good example on how to visually help a user to express their information need in an Information Retrieval (search engine) system. It is quite like Google Suggest but with an actionable graph showing related queries to a particular one.

In order to play with it, your browser must be up to date. My test is with Firefox 3.5.2.

You enter the query "box", but ensuring Google Wonder Wheel (GWW) will be called. Use the following query:

http://www.google.com/search?q=box&tbs=ww:1

Note that the code "tbs=ww:1" is the call to the GWW, and the query is "q=box". Then you get a full screen with the graph on the left and the results on the right, I split it:

The graph:

The results:

Then you can click on e.g. "xbox" to expand the graph and get new results on you right. The graph, I omit the results, no wonder there apart from usual good quality results from Google :-)

You can continue on expanding, and as you can see in the pic below, you can go back to previous nodes.

A question: would this really help users? I suppose I have to dig into SIGCHI or SIGIR to know...

Slides on Opinion Mining by Bing Liu, Web

2011-05-18T00:38:00.001+02:00

On 2006, Bing Liu (a prominent researcher in Text Mining in general, and in Opinion Mining in particular), published a very interesting book whose reference is:

Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents and Usage Data
Bing Liu, Springer, December, 2006

The book, recently re-edited, is a comprenhensive review of algorithms, techniques and datasets available for different types on Web Mining, including Web structure, Web content and Web usage mining. It covers a wide number of topics (chapters) like: Association Rules, Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Information Retrieval and Web Search, Link Analysis, Web Crawling, Opinion Mining, or Web Usage Mining.

Since the book is conceived as handbook for advanced students and above, it is supported by several slidesets by Bing Liu himself, which includes one on Opinion Mining (chapter 11) in particular. I have found these slides specially interesting because:

The presentation is quite practical and application oriented, avoiding other traditional discussions on how emotions are represented in text, and so on.
Is is quite affordable as well, with clear details on the basic techniques, and frequent references to more advanced developments.
It separates long text (e.g. movie reviews) from short text (e.g. Twitter comments) techniques, with a clear motivation.
And last, but not least, it is written by one of the "gurus" of the field, it is authoritative.

It has brought to me new ideas on how to approach Opinion Mining on short texts, specially a clever one that is to bootstrap on the features (words and phrases) instead of on texts; I mean, in each iteration, enrich the vocabulary at the same time the collection gets tagged. This is somehow borrowed from a work by Riloff and Wiebe at EMNLP'03, discussed in the slide 29.

IEEE VAST Challenge 2011 - epidemics, cybersecurity and text mining for counter-terrorism

2011-04-18T20:05:00.002+02:00

IEEE VAST Challenge 2011

The VAST Challenge is a participation category of the IEEE VAST 2011 Symposium (part of VisWeek 2011). The VAST 2011 Challenge continues in the footsteps of previous contests with the purpose of pushing the forefront of visual analytics tools using benchmark data sets and establishing a forum to advance visual analytics evaluation methods. It is hopped that it will speed the transfer of VA technology from research labs to commercial products, and increase the availability of evaluation techniques.

Teams may enter one or more mini Challenges independently of the entering the Grand Challenge. ALL teams submitting an entry to a VAST Challenge will be invited to discuss their work during a challenge workshop.

Entries will be judged on both the correctness of the analysis (based on the availability of ground truth) and the utility of the tools in conducting the analysis. Participants have several months to prepare their submissions.

The story & challenges

Vastopolis is a major metropolitan area with a population of approximately two million residents. During the last few days, health professionals at local hospitals have noticed a dramatic increase in reported illnesses. (...)

MINI CHALLENGE 1: Geospatial and Microblogging - Characterization of an Epidemic Spread. Identify approximately where the outbreak started on the map (ground zero location). If possible, outline the affected area. Explain how you arrived at your conclusion.
MINI CHALLENGE 2 : Cybersecurity - Situational Awareness in Computer Networks. Using the new situation awareness display(s), what noteworthy events took place for the time period covered in the firewall, IDS and syslog logs? Which events are of concern from a security standpoint?
MINI CHALLENGE 3: Text Analytics - Investigation into Criminal Activity. Identify any imminent terrorist threats in the Vastopolis metropolitan area. Provide detailed information on the threat or threats (e.g. who, what, where, when, and how) so that officials can conduct counterintelligence activities. Also, provide a list of the evidential documents supporting your answer.
GRAND CHALLENGE: Combines all data sets.

Via KDNuggets.

MASC corpus by ANC, a resource for linguistic analysis and opinion mining

2011-04-14T10:16:00.001+02:00

The American National Corpus project has released a subset of annotated texts of several genres and with a number of annotations, the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus, free for research and commercial purposes. It includes comprises roughly 25K words:

Genres: Court transcript, Debate transcript, Email, Essay, Newspaper/newswire, Technical, Twitter, Blog, spam etc.
Annotations: Token, Part of speech, Sentence boundary, Shallow parse (noun chunk, verb chunk), Named entities (person, location, organization, date), Penn Treebank syntax, and Opinion annotation. All of these annotations are distributed in GrAF format.

Via Nancy Ide and the SentimentAI list.

Twitter view with Trendsmap

2011-04-04T23:10:00.001+02:00

Trendsmap: This excellent website allows to check what is a Twitter trend in the map area you want. In Spain today:

Madrid, my hometown, today:

No doubt, a site to bookmark!

CFP: First International CNCCS Workshop on Security Aspects for Online Social Networks (CNCCS - SAONS)

2011-03-14T16:23:00.001+01:00

First International CNCCS Workshop on Security Aspects for Online Social Networks (CNCCS - SAONS)
Vienna, Austria, end of August

To be held in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2011)

Online social networks are one of the most used Internet services and they consume most of the time users spend connected to the Internet. These sites allow sharing knowledge, help in finding and integrating communities and provide tools to develop activities together. However, they are prone to misuse such as identity theft, malware, spam and data leaking. The Spanish National Advisory Council on Cyber-Security (CNCCS) is the main sponsor of this workshop, which aims to bring together security research and industry with innovative and practical ideas in order to secure online social networks.

Recent community works

2011-03-11T18:52:00.000+01:00

A short list of recent community works:

Program Committee for Spanish Natural Language Processing Conference (SEPLN), September 2011.
Guest Editor for the International Journal of Electronic Commerce Special Issue on Mining Social Media, Spring 2011.
Program Committee for the First Spanish Information Retrieval Conference (Congreso Español de Recuperación de Información), June 2010.
Review for the Institution of Engineering and Technology Information Security Journal, December 2010.
Review for the Elsevier Information Sciences Journal, September 2010.
Co-Organizer of the Workshop NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioning the Next 10 Years (PLN-E), September, 2010.
Review for the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, July 2010.

Besides, the Proceedings of the Workshop NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioning the Next 10 Years have been published at CEUR with the following reference:

José Carlos Cortizo, José María Gómez, Francisco Manuel Rangel, Victor Peinado, Hugo Zaragoza, Francisco M. Carrero (eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioning the Next 10 Years, Valencia, Spain, September 7, 2010, CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073, online urn:nbn:de:0074-697-0

Also, the Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mining Social Media (2009), from which some authors have extended their work for the Special Issue on Mining Social Media above, are available at Bubok.

Tag: SSP XD

Why (a lot of) data helps

2011-03-09T06:59:00.001+01:00

On my years of addressing heterogenous text mining problems, I have many often faced a lack of data problem. Because the question I make myself is: where can I find the labelled data I need for my problem at hand? And sometimes I find the answer, but many other times I do not.

This is my fault, data is out there.

But it was not the data I was seeking. It can be better!

Think about the size of the Web. Think about the size of the Project Guttemberg corpus. Think about the trillions of public tweets. Let me stress that I am not saying "think about that TREC or Reuters corpus", than now can go over billions of documents, hundreds of billions of words. I am thinking about purely unstructured data available with no purpose, with no scientific goal, but plenty of examples of real language usage.

And here it comes the paper by Halevy, Norvig, and Pereira at IEEE Intelligent Systems:

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, Fernando Pereira, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data," IEEE Intelligent Systems, pp. 8-12, March/April, 2009.

If you face the same problem, you must read this paper.

And think about it.

Some perls you should think about:

(...) invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data.

For those with experience in smallscale machine learning who are worried about the curse of dimensionality and overfitting of models to data, note that all the experimental evidence from the last decade suggests that throwing away rare events is almost always a bad idea, (...)

An do not miss final recommendations:

Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data.
Represent all the data with a nonparametric model rather than trying to summarize it with a parametric model, because with very large data sources, the data holds a lot of detail.
For natural language applications, trust that human language has already evolved words for the important concepts.
See how far you can go by tying together the words that are already there, rather than by inventing new concepts with clusters of words.

Now search for the title and read also others' opinions.

CFP: The Third International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2011)

2011-01-25T19:46:00.001+01:00

The Third International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2011)
6-8 October 2011, Singapore

http://www.socinfo2011.org or
http://www.sis.smu.edu.sg/SocInfo2011
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) is an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from informatics and the social & management sciences to come together to share ideas and opinions, and present original research work. The goal is to create an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge between the two communities, as well as to enable mutual critical discussion of current research.

The conference solicits original research and experience based case study papers, as well as proposals for demonstrations. It welcomes interdisciplinary papers on methods from the social sciences in the study of information systems, applying information technology in the study of social phenomena, or applying social concepts in the design of information systems.

Detailed research topics of interest for this conference include, but are not limited to:

- Computational models of social phenomena and social simulation
- Social networks: discovery, evolution, analysis and applications
- Web mining and its social interpretations
- Security, privacy, trust, reputation and incentive issues
- Design and analysis of Web2.0 applications (social or collaborative Web applications)
- Algorithms and protocols inspired by human societies
- Mechanisms for providing fairness in information systems
- Social choice mechanisms in the e-society
- Recommendation systems and social applications of the semantic Web
- Virtual communities (e.g., open-source, multiplayer gaming, etc.)
- Impact of technology on socio-economic, security, defense aspects
- Visualization of dynamic social networks

Accepted papers (research, poster and demonstration) will appear in Springer's Lecture Note Series Proceedings. More details on the conference and submission guidelines can be found at the conference website.

Keynotes (partial list):
------------------------
- Michael Macy, Cornell University
- Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona

Important dates:
----------------
Research papers:
- Abstract submission: April 7, 2011
- Full paper submission: April 15, 2011
- Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2011
- Submission of final version: July 15, 2011

Poster/Demonstration Papers:
- Poster/Demo submission: April 15, 2011
- Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2011
- Submission of final version: July 15, 2011

Organizing Committee:
---------------------
Honorary General Chairs:
- Rajendra K. Srivastava, Provost, Singapore Management University, Singapore
- Steven Miller, Dean, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

General Co-Chairs:
- Ee-Peng Lim, Singapore Management University, Singapore
- Noshir Contractor Northwestern University, USA
- Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Program Co-Chairs:
- Anwitaman Datta, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam, Netherland

Workshop Co-Chairs:
- Lin Qiu, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Angela Leung, Singapore Management University, Singapore

Tutorial Co-Chair:
- Do Quoc Anh, Singapore Management University, Singapore

Poster/Demo Co-Chairs:
- Baihua Zheng, Singapore Management University, Singapore
- Shoude Lin, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Sponsorship/Exhibition Co-Chairs:
- David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore
- Jin-Cheon Na, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Publications Co-Chairs:
- Aixin Sun, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Leonard Bolc, Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Poland

Registration Chair:
- Feida Zhu, Singapore Management University, Singapore

Local Arrangement Co-Chairs:
- Hady Wirawan Lauw, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
- Chei Sian Lee, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Publicity Co-Chairs:
- Jie Tang, Tsinghua University, China (CHINA)
- Paolo Boldi, University of Milano, Italy (EUROPE)
- Yan Wang, Macquarie University, Australia (AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND)
- Vineet Chaoji, Yahoo! Research, India (INDIA)
- Dimitri Williams, University of South California (USA)
- Eun Ju Lee, Seoul National University (KOREA)
- Giorgos Cheliotis, National University of Singapore (SINGAPORE)
- Tsuyoshi Murata, Tokyo Institute of Technology (JAPAN)

Divertido phishing

2011-01-17T10:09:00.000+01:00

Un mensaje de phishing que me ha llegado al correo personal:

Desde El Fondo Social Europeo en España, 2007-2013.
Oficina de Inglaterra.
Número de referencia: esf/2039484-2011

FELICIDADES! Los resultados para 2011 CATEGORÍA "A " Draw.

Por la presente le informamos del resultado del Fondo Europeo de este año social en España.
Su dirección de e-mail le ha ganado la cantidad de cinco euros de los Cien Mil (€ 500.000).
Sus fondos están listos para su procesamiento inmediato y la entregue a usted.
(...)

Creo que no voy a reclamar mi premio, por cinco euros... es que no me ha tocado ni lo puesto :-)

Estoy por contribuir el texto a Google Translate!

¡Pues sí que podría!

2011-01-14T17:05:00.001+01:00

En abril del 2009 planteé una pregunta: ¿Podría el PLN ayudar a José Manuel Lucía?

Pues parece que sí.

Porque al hilo de la espectacular serie de José Manuel en Pasapalabra, coemnté el esfuerzo de IBM, con Watson y el proyecto DeepQA, que se planteaban vencer a un humano en Jeopardy! Y parece ser que, aunque en una sesión de práctica, lo ha logrado con dos grandes jugadores de este juego:

IBM Watson supercomputer beats humans in practice round
By Larry Dignan

IBM's Watson supercomputer won a practice round against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and raised a lot of questions about the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Watson, a four-year effort by IBM, was quicker on the draw, didn't fall prey to emotion and had a voice that could be confused for wayward computer Hal 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. For IBM, Watson is about tackling verticals and bringing hardware and analytics to the fore.

(...)

En en enlace anterior están los vídeos. A mí, personalmente, lo que más me llama la atención es el comentario de uno de los jugadores:

I asked Rutter what it was like playing against Watson. "I'm impressed with Watson and its speed," he said. "But after 10 or 15 questions Watson is just another good player. I have every confidence that we'll do well."

Que al final es exactamente lo perseguido en la Inteligencia Artificial, comportamiento humano. Aunque de momento, esta victoria es insuficiente para afirmar que se ha pasado el test de Turing, como en su momento paso con Deep Blue.

Seminario MAVIR: Introduction to Text Mining. Processing Subjectivity in Texts (Roser Morante)

2011-01-14T10:11:00.001+01:00

TÍTULO: Introduction to Text Mining. Processing Subjectivity in Texts.
PONENTE: Roser Morante (CLiPS - University of Antwerp)
FECHA: 2-4 febrero de 2011

ABSTRACT
Text data mining has been described as techniques for examining document collections and discovering information not contained in any individual document. This seminar provides an introduction to the main text mining techniques and tasks. In addition, the seminar outlines concepts concerning negation and modality and their crucial role in a wide range of language applications. The treatment of modality and negation is very relevant for all Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications that involve deep text understanding. This includes applications that need to discriminate between factual and non-factual information (uncertain facts, opinions, attitudes, emotions, and beliefs), such as information extraction, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, text mining, and question answering, as well as other applications that process the meaning of texts, such as recognizing textual entailment, paraphrasing, and summarization. Hence, the adequate modeling of these phenomena is of crucial importance to the NLP community as a whole. While the area is still relatively new compared to areas like machine translation, parsing or semantic role labeling, it is now growing quickly.

LUGAR DE CELEBRACIÓN
Sala Adoración de Miguel (1.2.C16)
Escuela Politécnica Superior
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Avda. Universidad, 30
28911 Leganés, Madrid

HORARIOS
miércoles 2 de febrero: 15h00-19h00
jueves 3 y viernes 4 de febrero: 10h00-13h00

INFORMACIÓN: http://www.mavir.net/talks/76-rmorante-feb2011

Microsoft Research vs. Google Research - quick look to two systems

2010-12-30T18:09:00.001+01:00

Two different ways of thinking (& acting) regarding research, but the same interests most of the time. You can get a list of Microsoft Research projects, two of them very interesting because I am used to rely on their competition, Google's ones:

Microsoft Bing Translator (vs. Google Translate). Although Google Translate has scored top in competitions (with some criticism about quality metrics, however), I believe this is clearly to explore. In next weeks I will be testing both on my daily writings, let's see what happens.
Microsoft Academic Search (vs. Google Scholar). Here we have an interesting point, as the result list for a search is quite different, perhaps reflecting two ways of doing things and even thinking about the business.

Comparing Academic vs. Scholar, on, of course, searching myself, I get the following two results lists (screenshots):

MS Academic Search

Google Scholar

Comparing:

MS Academic Search

Google Scholar

Less results, probably better precision

Typed results (persons, journals, etc.)

Structured view

More results, probably better recall

Less typed results (cites - The can be excluded)

Papers and cites mixed

For the purpose of getting an outlook of somebody's publication record, I like MS Academic Search more. For getting the most about impact, probably it is Google Scholar. In fact, I have had to restrict the search in Scholar using phase search ("word1 word2") in order to get (many) less false positives.

How to generate spam in Facebook (and other Social Networks)

2010-12-30T09:56:00.001+01:00

This is not a bright discovery, moreover it is being done right now and it has been reported in several places. But I believe it is interesting... and I find funny to write about it.

The goal of spam is to get your potential reader receive and read the message. Well, the final goal is to get the fake product purchased, but you have to start getting the message read! Social Networks usually send you updates and other messages regarding what is happening with you and your contacts. For instance, somebody is now following you at Twitter, you have a message at LinkedIn, or you have been tagged in a picture at Facebook. The idea is using these messages to get your attention; you will read them, they are trusted by you and related to personal topics!

Just follow this procedure:

Get several accounts in the Social Network.
Collect a list of users to send the spam to.
If it is possible to personalize a "request contact" message, send messages to a hundred of other users. Not too many, this behavior will not pass unnoticed to the Social Network. E.g. this is possible in LinkedIn.
If it is possible to tag people in pictures, create several pictures with your favorite Rolex-Viagra-whatever message and the link, post several in each of your fake accounts, and tag each one with the target users (4-5 users per picture...). E.g. this is possible in Facebook.
(...) Check and use whatever other method to send an alert to a user in the Social Network, and exploit it in the same fashion.
Obviously, you will be getting your accounts blocked. Get more!

In order to make this effectively, you need to automate all steps in the process. Using the APIs, it is not difficult, but you have to automatically solve several CAPTCHAs in the way. Check how at "Strong CAPTCHA Guidelines".

What makes me smile about this is that spam has been getting more and more about social engineering, and what Social Networks enable is just that! OK, perhaps these attacks are not so feasible...

Forthcoming CFPs

2010-12-29T15:21:00.001+01:00

Here is a list of forthcoming CFPs:

Ninth International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, 13-15 June 2011, Madrid, Spain. Deadline: 14 January 2011
Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 28 June - 02 July, 2011. Deadline: 01 February 2011
Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 16-22 July, 2011, Barcelona, Spain. Deadline: 24 January, 2011
- Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 17-21 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain. Deadline: 31 January, 2011
- Check other co-located events that may be of interest.
Virus Bulletin 2011, 5-7 October 2011, Barcelona, Spain. Deadline: 11 March 2011