Besat Kassaie

Besat Kassaie, Renée J. Miller

Avoiding redundancy in query results has been extensively studied in relational databases and information retrieval, yet its implications for data lakes remain largely unexplored. We bridge this gap by investigating how to discover unionable tables that contribute new information for a given query table in large-scale data lakes. We formally define Novel Table Search (NTS) as the problem of finding tables that are novel with respect to a given query table and identify two desirable properties that any scoring function for NTS should satisfy. We introduce a concrete scoring mechanism designed to maximize syntactic novelty, prove that it satisfies the proposed properties, and show that the associated optimization problem is NP-hard. To address this challenge, we develop an efficient approximation technique based on penalization, i.e., Attribute-Based Novel Table Search (ANTs). We propose three additional NTS variants to achieve syntactic novelty and introduce two evaluation metrics for syntactic novelty. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ANTs outperforms other methods in capturing syntactic novelty across evaluation metrics and various benchmarks, while also achieving the lowest execution time.

Besat Kassaie

We report our effort to identify the sensitive information, subset of data items listed by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability), from medical text using the recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning techniques. We represent the words with high dimensional continuous vectors learned by a variant of Word2Vec called Continous Bag Of Words (CBOW). We feed the word vectors into a simple neural network with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture. Without any attempts to extract manually crafted features and considering that our medical dataset is too small to be fed into neural network, we obtained promising results. The results thrilled us to think about the larger scale of the project with precise parameter tuning and other possible improvements.

Besat Kassaie

In this report, we propose a new application for twitter data called \textit{job detection}. We identify people's job category based on their tweets. As a preliminary work, we limited our task to identify only IT workers from other job holders. We have used and compared both simple bag of words model and a document representation based on Skip-gram model. Our results show that the model based on Skip-gram, achieves a 76\% precision and 82\% recall.