Weiqing Wang

CL
h-index26
25papers
973citations
Novelty45%
AI Score47

25 Papers

8.7LGSep 3, 2022Code
Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction

Yufeng Zhang, Weiqing Wang, Hongzhi Yin et al.

Inductive link prediction (ILP) is to predict links for unseen entities in emerging knowledge graphs (KGs), considering the evolving nature of KGs. A more challenging scenario is that emerging KGs consist of only unseen entities, called as disconnected emerging KGs (DEKGs). Existing studies for DEKGs only focus on predicting enclosing links, i.e., predicting links inside the emerging KG. The bridging links, which carry the evolutionary information from the original KG to DEKG, have not been investigated by previous work so far. To fill in the gap, we propose a novel model entitled DEKG-ILP (Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction) that consists of the following two components. (1) The module CLRM (Contrastive Learning-based Relation-specific Feature Modeling) is developed to extract global relation-based semantic features that are shared between original KGs and DEKGs with a novel sampling strategy. (2) The module GSM (GNN-based Subgraph Modeling) is proposed to extract the local subgraph topological information around each link in KGs. The extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that DEKG-ILP has obvious performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods for both enclosing and bridging link prediction. The source code is available online.

1.1CLJun 10, 2022Code
Unsupervised Sentence Simplification via Dependency Parsing

Vy Vo, Weiqing Wang, Wray Buntine

Text simplification is the task of rewriting a text so that it is readable and easily understood. In this paper, we propose a simple yet novel unsupervised sentence simplification system that harnesses parsing structures together with sentence embeddings to produce linguistically effective simplifications. This means our model is capable of introducing substantial modifications to simplify a sentence while maintaining its original semantics and adequate fluency. We establish the unsupervised state-of-the-art at 39.13 SARI on TurkCorpus set and perform competitively against supervised baselines on various quality metrics. Furthermore, we demonstrate our framework's extensibility to other languages via a proof-of-concept on Vietnamese data. Code for reproduction is published at \url{https://github.com/isVy08/USDP}.

11.2AIDec 23, 2022Code
HiTSKT: A Hierarchical Transformer Model for Session-Aware Knowledge Tracing

Fucai Ke, Weiqing Wang, Weicong Tan et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to leverage students' learning histories to estimate their mastery levels on a set of pre-defined skills, based on which the corresponding future performance can be accurately predicted. As an important way of providing personalized experience for online education, KT has gained increased attention in recent years. In practice, a student's learning history comprises answers to sets of massed questions, each known as a session, rather than merely being a sequence of independent answers. Theoretically, within and across these sessions, students' learning dynamics can be very different. Therefore, how to effectively model the dynamics of students' knowledge states within and across the sessions is crucial for handling the KT problem. Most existing KT models treat student's learning records as a single continuing sequence, without capturing the sessional shift of students' knowledge state. To address the above issue, we propose a novel hierarchical transformer model, named HiTSKT, comprises an interaction(-level) encoder to capture the knowledge a student acquires within a session, and a session(-level) encoder to summarise acquired knowledge across the past sessions. To predict an interaction in the current session, a knowledge retriever integrates the summarised past-session knowledge with the previous interactions' information into proper knowledge representations. These representations are then used to compute the student's current knowledge state. Additionally, to model the student's long-term forgetting behaviour across the sessions, a power-law-decay attention mechanism is designed and deployed in the session encoder, allowing it to emphasize more on the recent sessions. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that HiTSKT achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets compared with six state-of-the-art KT models.

17.9AISep 3, 2022
MMKGR: Multi-hop Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Shangfei Zheng, Weiqing Wang, Jianfeng Qu et al.

Multi-modal knowledge graphs (MKGs) include not only the relation triplets, but also related multi-modal auxiliary data (i.e., texts and images), which enhance the diversity of knowledge. However, the natural incompleteness has significantly hindered the applications of MKGs. To tackle the problem, existing studies employ the embedding-based reasoning models to infer the missing knowledge after fusing the multi-modal features. However, the reasoning performance of these methods is limited due to the following problems: (1) ineffective fusion of multi-modal auxiliary features; (2) lack of complex reasoning ability as well as inability to conduct the multi-hop reasoning which is able to infer more missing knowledge. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel model entitled MMKGR (Multi-hop Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Reasoning). Specifically, the model contains the following two components: (1) a unified gate-attention network which is designed to generate effective multi-modal complementary features through sufficient attention interaction and noise reduction; (2) a complementary feature-aware reinforcement learning method which is proposed to predict missing elements by performing the multi-hop reasoning process, based on the features obtained in component (1). The experimental results demonstrate that MMKGR outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in the MKG reasoning task.

4.6LGAug 8, 2024Code
Scalable Transformer for High Dimensional Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Xin Zhou, Weiqing Wang, Wray Buntine et al.

Deep models for Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting have recently demonstrated significant success. Channel-dependent models capture complex dependencies that channel-independent models cannot capture. However, the number of channels in real-world applications outpaces the capabilities of existing channel-dependent models, and contrary to common expectations, some models underperform the channel-independent models in handling high-dimensional data, which raises questions about the performance of channel-dependent models. To address this, our study first investigates the reasons behind the suboptimal performance of these channel-dependent models on high-dimensional MTS data. Our analysis reveals that two primary issues lie in the introduced noise from unrelated series that increases the difficulty of capturing the crucial inter-channel dependencies, and challenges in training strategies due to high-dimensional data. To address these issues, we propose STHD, the Scalable Transformer for High-Dimensional Multivariate Time Series Forecasting. STHD has three components: a) Relation Matrix Sparsity that limits the noise introduced and alleviates the memory issue; b) ReIndex applied as a training strategy to enable a more flexible batch size setting and increase the diversity of training data; and c) Transformer that handles 2-D inputs and captures channel dependencies. These components jointly enable STHD to manage the high-dimensional MTS while maintaining computational feasibility. Furthermore, experimental results show STHD's considerable improvement on three high-dimensional datasets: Crime-Chicago, Wiki-People, and Traffic. The source code and dataset are publicly available https://github.com/xinzzzhou/ScalableTransformer4HighDimensionMTSF.git.

29.7CLJan 30, 2023
On Robustness of Prompt-based Semantic Parsing with Large Pre-trained Language Model: An Empirical Study on Codex

Terry Yue Zhuo, Zhuang Li, Yujin Huang et al.

Semantic parsing is a technique aimed at constructing a structured representation of the meaning of a natural-language question. Recent advancements in few-shot language models trained on code have demonstrated superior performance in generating these representations compared to traditional unimodal language models, which are trained on downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, existing fine-tuned neural semantic parsers are susceptible to adversarial attacks on natural-language inputs. While it has been established that the robustness of smaller semantic parsers can be enhanced through adversarial training, this approach is not feasible for large language models in real-world scenarios, as it requires both substantial computational resources and expensive human annotation on in-domain semantic parsing data. This paper presents the first empirical study on the adversarial robustness of a large prompt-based language model of code, \codex. Our results demonstrate that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) code-language models are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. To address this challenge, we propose methods for improving robustness without the need for significant amounts of labeled data or heavy computational resources.

2.3CLMar 21, 2022
Paraphrasing Techniques for Maritime QA system

Fatemeh Shiri, Terry Yue Zhuo, Zhuang Li et al.

There has been an increasing interest in incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Defence and military systems to complement and augment human intelligence and capabilities. However, much work still needs to be done toward achieving an effective human-machine partnership. This work is aimed at enhancing human-machine communications by developing a capability for automatically translating human natural language into a machine-understandable language (e.g., SQL queries). Techniques toward achieving this goal typically involve building a semantic parser trained on a very large amount of high-quality manually-annotated data. However, in many real-world Defence scenarios, it is not feasible to obtain such a large amount of training data. To the best of our knowledge, there are few works trying to explore the possibility of training a semantic parser with limited manually-paraphrased data, in other words, zero-shot. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit paraphrasing methods for the automated generation of large-scale training datasets (in the form of paraphrased utterances and their corresponding logical forms in SQL format) and present our experimental results using real-world data in the maritime domain.

24.9CLAug 12, 2023
Generating Faithful Text From a Knowledge Graph with Noisy Reference Text

Tahsina Hashem, Weiqing Wang, Derry Tanti Wijaya et al.

Knowledge Graph (KG)-to-Text generation aims at generating fluent natural-language text that accurately represents the information of a given knowledge graph. While significant progress has been made in this task by exploiting the power of pre-trained language models (PLMs) with appropriate graph structure-aware modules, existing models still fall short of generating faithful text, especially when the ground-truth natural-language text contains additional information that is not present in the graph. In this paper, we develop a KG-to-text generation model that can generate faithful natural-language text from a given graph, in the presence of noisy reference text. Our framework incorporates two core ideas: Firstly, we utilize contrastive learning to enhance the model's ability to differentiate between faithful and hallucinated information in the text, thereby encouraging the decoder to generate text that aligns with the input graph. Secondly, we empower the decoder to control the level of hallucination in the generated text by employing a controllable text generation technique. We evaluate our model's performance through the standard quantitative metrics as well as a ChatGPT-based quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our evaluation demonstrates the superior performance of our model over state-of-the-art KG-to-text models on faithfulness.

10.8ASSep 10, 2024Code
Sortformer: A Novel Approach for Permutation-Resolved Speaker Supervision in Speech-to-Text Systems

Taejin Park, Ivan Medennikov, Kunal Dhawan et al.

Sortformer is an encoder-based speaker diarization model designed for supervising speaker tagging in speech-to-text models. Instead of relying solely on permutation invariant loss (PIL), Sortformer introduces Sort Loss to resolve the permutation problem, either independently or in tandem with PIL. In addition, we propose a streamlined multi-speaker speech-to-text architecture that leverages Sortformer for speaker supervision, embedding speaker labels into the encoder using sinusoidal kernel functions. This design addresses the speaker permutation problem through sorted objectives, effectively bridging timestamps and tokens to supervise speaker labels in the output transcriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Sort Loss can boost speaker diarization performance, and incorporating the speaker supervision from Sortformer improves multi-speaker transcription accuracy. We anticipate that the proposed Sortformer and multi-speaker architecture will enable the seamless integration of speaker tagging capabilities into foundational speech-to-text systems and multimodal large language models (LLMs), offering an easily adoptable and user-friendly mechanism to enhance their versatility and performance in speaker-aware tasks. The code and trained models are made publicly available through the NVIDIA NeMo Framework.

5.2CLMay 7
How Does A Text Preprocessing Pipeline Affect Ontology Matching?

Zhangcheng Qiang, Kerry Taylor, Weiqing Wang

The classical text preprocessing pipeline, comprising Tokenisation, Normalisation, Stop Words Removal, and Stemming/Lemmatisation, has been implemented in many systems for ontology matching (OM). However, the lack of standardisation in text preprocessing creates diversity in the mapping results. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the text preprocessing pipeline on 8 Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tracks with 49 distinct alignments. We find that Tokenisation and Normalisation (categorised as Phase 1 text preprocessing) are more effective than Stop Words Removal and Stemming/Lemmatisation (categorised as Phase 2 text preprocessing). We propose two novel approaches to repair unwanted false mappings that occur in Phase 2 text preprocessing. One is a pre hoc logic-based repair approach used before text preprocessing, employing an ontology-specific check to find common words that cause false mappings. The other repair approach is the post hoc large language model (LLM)-based approach, used after text preprocessing, which utilises the strong background knowledge provided by LLMs to repair non-existent and counter-intuitive false mappings. The experimental results indicate that these two approaches can significantly improve the matching correctness and the overall matching performance.

19.4CVSep 6, 2024Code
Generating Faithful and Salient Text from Multimodal Data

Tahsina Hashem, Weiqing Wang, Derry Tanti Wijaya et al.

While large multimodal models (LMMs) have obtained strong performance on many multimodal tasks, they may still hallucinate while generating text. Their performance on detecting salient features from visual data is also unclear. In this paper, we develop a framework to generate faithful and salient text from mixed-modal data, which includes images and structured data ( represented in knowledge graphs or tables). Specifically, we train a small vision critic model to identify hallucinated and non-salient features from the image modality. The critic model also generates a list of salient image features. This information is used in the post editing step to improve the generation quality. Experiments on two datasets show that our framework improves LMMs' generation quality on both faithfulness and saliency, outperforming recent techniques aimed at reducing hallucination.

7.3AISep 21, 2024
OAEI-LLM: A Benchmark Dataset for Understanding Large Language Model Hallucinations in Ontology Matching

Zhangcheng Qiang, Kerry Taylor, Weiqing Wang et al.

Hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) commonly occur in domain-specific downstream tasks, with no exception in ontology matching (OM). The prevalence of using LLMs for OM raises the need for benchmarks to better understand LLM hallucinations. The OAEI-LLM dataset is an extended version of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) datasets that evaluate LLM-specific hallucinations in OM tasks. We outline the methodology used in dataset construction and schema extension, and provide examples of potential use cases.

2.1AIFeb 22, 2023Code
DNG: Taxonomy Expansion by Exploring the Intrinsic Directed Structure on Non-gaussian Space

Songlin Zhai, Weiqing Wang, Yuanfang Li et al.

Taxonomy expansion is the process of incorporating a large number of additional nodes (i.e., "queries") into an existing taxonomy (i.e., "seed"), with the most important step being the selection of appropriate positions for each query. Enormous efforts have been made by exploring the seed's structure. However, existing approaches are deficient in their mining of structural information in two ways: poor modeling of the hierarchical semantics and failure to capture directionality of is-a relation. This paper seeks to address these issues by explicitly denoting each node as the combination of inherited feature (i.e., structural part) and incremental feature (i.e., supplementary part). Specifically, the inherited feature originates from "parent" nodes and is weighted by an inheritance factor. With this node representation, the hierarchy of semantics in taxonomies (i.e., the inheritance and accumulation of features from "parent" to "child") could be embodied. Additionally, based on this representation, the directionality of is-a relation could be easily translated into the irreversible inheritance of features. Inspired by the Darmois-Skitovich Theorem, we implement this irreversibility by a non-Gaussian constraint on the supplementary feature. A log-likelihood learning objective is further utilized to optimize the proposed model (dubbed DNG), whereby the required non-Gaussianity is also theoretically ensured. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets verify the superiority of DNG relative to several strong baselines.

2.7CLMar 25, 2025
OAEI-LLM-T: A TBox Benchmark Dataset for Understanding Large Language Model Hallucinations in Ontology Matching

Zhangcheng Qiang, Kerry Taylor, Weiqing Wang et al.

Hallucinations are often inevitable in downstream tasks using large language models (LLMs). To tackle the substantial challenge of addressing hallucinations for LLM-based ontology matching (OM) systems, we introduce a new benchmark dataset OAEI-LLM-T. The dataset evolves from seven TBox datasets in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), capturing hallucinations of ten different LLMs performing OM tasks. These OM-specific hallucinations are organised into two primary categories and six sub-categories. We showcase the usefulness of the dataset in constructing an LLM leaderboard for OM tasks and for fine-tuning LLMs used in OM tasks.

1.9CLNov 6, 2024Code
How Does A Text Preprocessing Pipeline Affect Ontology Matching?

Zhangcheng Qiang, Kerry Taylor, Weiqing Wang

The classical text preprocessing pipeline, comprising Tokenisation, Normalisation, Stop Words Removal, and Stemming/Lemmatisation, has been implemented in many systems for ontology matching (OM). However, the lack of standardisation in text preprocessing creates diversity in the mapping results. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the text preprocessing pipeline on 8 Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tracks with 49 distinct alignments. We find that Tokenisation and Normalisation (categorised as Phase 1 text preprocessing) are more effective than Stop Words Removal and Stemming/Lemmatisation (categorised as Phase 2 text preprocessing). We propose two novel approaches to repair unwanted false mappings that occur in Phase 2 text preprocessing. One is an ad hoc logic-based repair approach used before text preprocessing, employing an ontology-specific check to find common words that cause false mappings. The other repair approach is the post hoc large language model (LLM)-based approach, used after text preprocessing, which utilises the strong background knowledge provided by LLMs to repair non-existent and counter-intuitive false mappings. The experimental results indicate that these two approaches can significantly improve the matching correctness and the overall matching performance.

6.9IRJun 18, 2024
PromptDSI: Prompt-based Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Document Retrieval

Tuan-Luc Huynh, Thuy-Trang Vu, Weiqing Wang et al.

Differentiable Search Index (DSI) utilizes pre-trained language models to perform indexing and document retrieval via end-to-end learning without relying on external indexes. However, DSI requires full re-training to index new documents, causing significant computational inefficiencies. Continual learning (CL) offers a solution by enabling the model to incrementally update without full re-training. Existing CL solutions in document retrieval rely on memory buffers or generative models for rehearsal, which is infeasible when accessing previous training data is restricted due to privacy concerns. To this end, we introduce PromptDSI, a prompt-based, rehearsal-free continual learning approach for document retrieval. PromptDSI follows the Prompt-based Continual Learning (PCL) framework, using learnable prompts to efficiently index new documents without accessing previous documents or queries. To improve retrieval latency, we remove the initial forward pass of PCL, which otherwise greatly increases training and inference time, with a negligible trade-off in performance. Additionally, we introduce a novel topic-aware prompt pool that employs neural topic embeddings as fixed keys, eliminating the instability of prompt key optimization while maintaining competitive performance with existing PCL prompt pools. In a challenging rehearsal-free continual learning setup, we demonstrate that PromptDSI variants outperform rehearsal-based baselines, match the strong cache-based baseline in mitigating forgetting, and significantly improving retrieval performance on new corpora.

19.8CVMar 19, 2024Code
HYDRA: A Hyper Agent for Dynamic Compositional Visual Reasoning

Fucai Ke, Zhixi Cai, Simindokht Jahangard et al.

Recent advances in visual reasoning (VR), particularly with the aid of Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), show promise but require access to large-scale datasets and face challenges such as high computational costs and limited generalization capabilities. Compositional visual reasoning approaches have emerged as effective strategies; however, they heavily rely on the commonsense knowledge encoded in Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform planning, reasoning, or both, without considering the effect of their decisions on the visual reasoning process, which can lead to errors or failed procedures. To address these challenges, we introduce HYDRA, a multi-stage dynamic compositional visual reasoning framework designed for reliable and incrementally progressive general reasoning. HYDRA integrates three essential modules: a planner, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent serving as a cognitive controller, and a reasoner. The planner and reasoner modules utilize an LLM to generate instruction samples and executable code from the selected instruction, respectively, while the RL agent dynamically interacts with these modules, making high-level decisions on selection of the best instruction sample given information from the historical state stored through a feedback loop. This adaptable design enables HYDRA to adjust its actions based on previous feedback received during the reasoning process, leading to more reliable reasoning outputs and ultimately enhancing its overall effectiveness. Our framework demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in various VR tasks on four different widely-used datasets.

6.6LGMay 24, 2023Code
Newton-Cotes Graph Neural Networks: On the Time Evolution of Dynamic Systems

Lingbing Guo, Weiqing Wang, Zhuo Chen et al.

Reasoning system dynamics is one of the most important analytical approaches for many scientific studies. With the initial state of a system as input, the recent graph neural networks (GNNs)-based methods are capable of predicting the future state distant in time with high accuracy. Although these methods have diverse designs in modeling the coordinates and interacting forces of the system, we show that they actually share a common paradigm that learns the integration of the velocity over the interval between the initial and terminal coordinates. However, their integrand is constant w.r.t. time. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach to predict the integration based on several velocity estimations with Newton-Cotes formulas and prove its effectiveness theoretically. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks empirically demonstrate consistent and significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

8.6ASSep 5, 2021
The DKU-DukeECE-Lenovo System for the Diarization Task of the 2021 VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge

Weiqing Wang, Danwei Cai, Qingjian Lin et al.

This report describes the submission of the DKU-DukeECE-Lenovo team to the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC) 2021 track 4. Our system including a voice activity detection (VAD) model, a speaker embedding model, two clustering-based speaker diarization systems with different similarity measurements, two different overlapped speech detection (OSD) models, and a target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD) model. Our final submission, consisting of 5 independent systems, achieves a DER of 5.07% on the challenge test set.

1.2ASFeb 6, 2021
The DKU-Duke-Lenovo System Description for the Third DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge

Weiqing Wang, Qingjian Lin, Danwei Cai et al.

In this paper, we present the submitted system for the third DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge from the DKU-Duke-Lenovo team. Our system consists of several modules: voice activity detection (VAD), segmentation, speaker embedding extraction, attentive similarity scoring, agglomerative hierarchical clustering. In addition, the target speaker VAD (TSVAD) is used for the phone call data to further improve the performance. Our final submitted system achieves a DER of 15.43% for the core evaluation set and 13.39% for the full evaluation set on task 1, and we also get a DER of 21.63% for core evaluation set and 18.90% for full evaluation set on task 2.

1.6LGFeb 4, 2021
Temporal Cascade and Structural Modelling of EHRs for Granular Readmission Prediction

Bhagya Hettige, Weiqing Wang, Yuan-Fang Li et al.

Predicting (1) when the next hospital admission occurs and (2) what will happen in the next admission about a patient by mining electronic health record (EHR) data can provide granular readmission predictions to assist clinical decision making. Recurrent neural network (RNN) and point process models are usually employed in modelling temporal sequential data. Simple RNN models assume that sequences of hospital visits follow strict causal dependencies between consecutive visits. However, in the real-world, a patient may have multiple co-existing chronic medical conditions, i.e., multimorbidity, which results in a cascade of visits where a non-immediate historical visit can be most influential to the next visit. Although a point process (e.g., Hawkes process) is able to model a cascade temporal relationship, it strongly relies on a prior generative process assumption. We propose a novel model, MEDCAS, to address these challenges. MEDCAS combines the strengths of RNN-based models and point processes by integrating point processes in modelling visit types and time gaps into an attention-based sequence-to-sequence learning model, which is able to capture the temporal cascade relationships. To supplement the patients with short visit sequences, a structural modelling technique with graph-based methods is used to construct the markers of the point process in MEDCAS. Extensive experiments on three real-world EHR datasets have been performed and the results demonstrate that \texttt{MEDCAS} outperforms state-of-the-art models in both tasks.

9.7ASOct 25, 2020
An iterative framework for self-supervised deep speaker representation learning

Danwei Cai, Weiqing Wang, Ming Li

In this paper, we propose an iterative framework for self-supervised speaker representation learning based on a deep neural network (DNN). The framework starts with training a self-supervision speaker embedding network by maximizing agreement between different segments within an utterance via a contrastive loss. Taking advantage of DNN's ability to learn from data with label noise, we propose to cluster the speaker embedding obtained from the previous speaker network and use the subsequent class assignments as pseudo labels to train a new DNN. Moreover, we iteratively train the speaker network with pseudo labels generated from the previous step to bootstrap the discriminative power of a DNN. Speaker verification experiments are conducted on the VoxCeleb dataset. The results show that our proposed iterative self-supervised learning framework outperformed previous works using self-supervision. The speaker network after 5 iterations obtains a 61% performance gain over the speaker embedding model trained with contrastive loss.

7.1LGDec 8, 2019Code
$\mathtt{MedGraph:}$ Structural and Temporal Representation Learning of Electronic Medical Records

Bhagya Hettige, Yuan-Fang Li, Weiqing Wang et al.

Electronic medical record (EMR) data contains historical sequences of visits of patients, and each visit contains rich information, such as patient demographics, hospital utilisation and medical codes, including diagnosis, procedure and medication codes. Most existing EMR embedding methods capture visit-code associations by constructing input visit representations as binary vectors with a static vocabulary of medical codes. With this limited representation, they fail in encapsulating rich attribute information of visits (demographics and utilisation information) and/or codes (e.g., medical code descriptions). Furthermore, current work considers visits of the same patient as discrete-time events and ignores time gaps between them. However, the time gaps between visits depict dynamics of the patient's medical history inducing varying influences on future visits. To address these limitations, we present $\mathtt{MedGraph}$, a supervised EMR embedding method that captures two types of information: (1) the visit-code associations in an attributed bipartite graph, and (2) the temporal sequencing of visits through a point process. $\mathtt{MedGraph}$ produces Gaussian embeddings for visits and codes to model the uncertainty. We evaluate the performance of $\mathtt{MedGraph}$ through an extensive experimental study and show that $\mathtt{MedGraph}$ outperforms state-of-the-art EMR embedding methods in several medical risk prediction tasks.

4.8LGDec 2, 2019Code
Gaussian Embedding of Large-scale Attributed Graphs

Bhagya Hettige, Yuan-Fang Li, Weiqing Wang et al.

Graph embedding methods transform high-dimensional and complex graph contents into low-dimensional representations. They are useful for a wide range of graph analysis tasks including link prediction, node classification, recommendation and visualization. Most existing approaches represent graph nodes as point vectors in a low-dimensional embedding space, ignoring the uncertainty present in the real-world graphs. Furthermore, many real-world graphs are large-scale and rich in content (e.g. node attributes). In this work, we propose GLACE, a novel, scalable graph embedding method that preserves both graph structure and node attributes effectively and efficiently in an end-to-end manner. GLACE effectively models uncertainty through Gaussian embeddings, and supports inductive inference of new nodes based on their attributes. In our comprehensive experiments, we evaluate GLACE on real-world graphs, and the results demonstrate that GLACE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art embedding methods on multiple graph analysis tasks.

18.6IRMar 12, 2015
Geo-SAGE: A Geographical Sparse Additive Generative Model for Spatial Item Recommendation

Weiqing Wang, Hongzhi Yin, Ling Chen et al.

With the rapid development of location-based social networks (LBSNs), spatial item recommendation has become an important means to help people discover attractive and interesting venues and events, especially when users travel out of town. However, this recommendation is very challenging compared to the traditional recommender systems. A user can visit only a limited number of spatial items, leading to a very sparse user-item matrix. Most of the items visited by a user are located within a short distance from where he/she lives, which makes it hard to recommend items when the user travels to a far away place. Moreover, user interests and behavior patterns may vary dramatically across different geographical regions. In light of this, we propose Geo-SAGE, a geographical sparse additive generative model for spatial item recommendation in this paper. Geo-SAGE considers both user personal interests and the preference of the crowd in the target region, by exploiting both the co-occurrence pattern of spatial items and the content of spatial items. To further alleviate the data sparsity issue, Geo-SAGE exploits the geographical correlation by smoothing the crowd's preferences over a well-designed spatial index structure called spatial pyramid. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our Geo-SAGE model on two real large-scale datasets. The experimental results clearly demonstrate our Geo-SAGE model outperforms the state-of-the-art in the two tasks of both out-of-town and home-town recommendations.