Erik Saule

Shrabani Ghosh, Erik Saule

In real-world scenarios, large graphs represent relationships among entities in complex systems. Mining these large graphs often containing millions of nodes and edges helps uncover structural patterns and meaningful insights. Dividing a large graph into smaller subgraphs facilitates complex system analysis by revealing local information. Community detection extracts clusters or communities of graphs based on statistical methods and machine learning models using various optimization techniques. Structure based community detection methods are more suitable for applying to graphs because they do not rely heavily on rich node or edge attribute information. The features derived from these communities can improve downstream graph mining tasks, such as link prediction and node classification. In real-world applications, we often lack ground truth community information. Additionally, there is neither a universally accepted gold standard for community detection nor a single method that is consistently optimal across diverse applications. In many cases, it is unclear how practitioners select community detection methods, and choices are often made without explicitly considering their potential impact on downstream tasks. In this study, we investigate whether the choice of community detection algorithm significantly influences the performance of downstream applications. We propose a framework capable of integrating various community detection methods to systematically evaluate their effects on downstream task outcomes. Our comparative analysis reveals that specific community detection algorithms yield superior results in certain applications, highlighting that method selection substantially affects performance.

Erik Saule, Kalpathi Subramanian, Razvan Bunescu

Professional societies often publish curriculum guidelines to help programs align their content to international standards. In Computer Science, the primary standard is published by ACM and IEEE and provide detailed guidelines for what should be and could be included in a Computer Science program. While very helpful, it remains difficult for program administrators to assess how much of the guidelines is being covered by a CS program. This is in particular due to the extensiveness of the guidelines, containing thousands of individual items. As such, it is time consuming and cognitively demanding to audit every course to confidently mark everything that is actually being covered. Our preliminary work indicated that it takes about a day of work per course. In this work, we propose using Natural Language Processing techniques to accelerate the process. We explore two kinds of techniques, the first relying on traditional tools for parsing, tagging, and embeddings, while the second leverages the power of Large Language Models. We evaluate the application of these techniques to classify a corpus of pedagogical materials and show that we can meaningfully classify documents automatically.

Haofeng Jia, Erik Saule

As science advances, the academic community has published millions of research papers. Researchers devote time and effort to search relevant manuscripts when writing a paper or simply to keep up with current research. In this paper, we consider the problem of citation recommendation by extending a set of known-to-be-relevant references. Our analysis shows the degrees of cited papers in the subgraph induced by the citations of a paper, called projection graph, follow a power law distribution. Existing popular methods are only good at finding the long tail papers, the ones that are highly connected to others. In other words, the majority of cited papers are loosely connected in the projection graph but they are not going to be found by existing methods. To address this problem, we propose to combine author, venue and keyword information to interpret the citation behavior behind those loosely connected papers. Results show that different methods are finding cited papers with widely different properties. We suggest multiple recommended lists by different algorithms could satisfy various users for a real citation recommendation system. Moreover, we also explore the fast local approximation for combined methods in order to improve the efficiency.

Haofeng Jia, Erik Saule

As science advances, the academic community has published millions of research papers. Researchers devote time and effort to search relevant manuscripts when writing a paper or simply to keep up with current research. In this paper, we consider the problem of citation recommendation on graph and propose a task-specific neighborhood construction strategy to learn the distributed representations of papers. In addition, given the learned representations, we investigate various schemes to rank the candidate papers for citation recommendation. The experimental results show our proposed neighborhood construction strategy outperforms the widely-used random walks based sampling strategy on all ranking schemes, and the model based ranking scheme outperforms embedding based rankings for both neighborhood construction strategies. We also demonstrated that graph embedding is a robust approach for citation recommendation when hidden ratio changes, while the performance of classic methods drop significantly when the set of seed papers is becoming small.

Onur Küçüktunç, Erik Saule, Kamer Kaya et al.

Literature search is arguably one of the most important phases of the academic and non-academic research. The increase in the number of published papers each year makes manual search inefficient and furthermore insufficient. Hence, automatized methods such as search engines have been of interest in the last thirty years. Unfortunately, these traditional engines use keyword-based approaches to solve the search problem, but these approaches are prone to ambiguity and synonymy. On the other hand, bibliographic search techniques based only on the citation information are not prone to these problems since they do not consider textual similarity. For many particular research areas and topics, the amount of knowledge to humankind is immense, and obtaining the desired information is as hard as looking for a needle in a haystack. Furthermore, sometimes, what we are looking for is a set of documents where each one is different than the others, but at the same time, as a whole we want them to cover all the important parts of the literature relevant to our search. This paper targets the problem of result diversification in citation-based bibliographic search. It surveys a set of techniques which aim to find a set of papers with satisfactory quality and diversity. We enhance these algorithms with a direction-awareness functionality to allow the users to reach either old, well-cited, well-known research papers or recent, less-known ones. We also propose a set of novel techniques for a better diversification of the results. All the techniques considered are compared by performing a rigorous experimentation. The results show that some of the proposed techniques are very successful in practice while performing a search in a bibliographic database.

Onur Küçüktunç, Erik Saule, Kamer Kaya et al.

The literature search has always been an important part of an academic research. It greatly helps to improve the quality of the research process and output, and increase the efficiency of the researchers in terms of their novel contribution to science. As the number of published papers increases every year, a manual search becomes more exhaustive even with the help of today's search engines since they are not specialized for this task. In academics, two relevant papers do not always have to share keywords, cite one another, or even be in the same field. Although a well-known paper is usually an easy pray in such a hunt, relevant papers using a different terminology, especially recent ones, are not obvious to the eye. In this work, we propose paper recommendation algorithms by using the citation information among papers. The proposed algorithms are direction aware in the sense that they can be tuned to find either recent or traditional papers. The algorithms require a set of papers as input and recommend a set of related ones. If the user wants to give negative or positive feedback on the suggested paper set, the recommendation is refined. The search process can be easily guided in that sense by relevance feedback. We show that this slight guidance helps the user to reach a desired paper in a more efficient way. We adapt our models and algorithms also for the venue and reviewer recommendation tasks. Accuracy of the models and algorithms is thoroughly evaluated by comparison with multiple baselines and algorithms from the literature in terms of several objectives specific to citation, venue, and reviewer recommendation tasks. All of these algorithms are implemented within a publicly available web-service framework (http://theadvisor.osu.edu/) which currently uses the data from DBLP and CiteSeer to construct the proposed citation graph.