Hubert Naacke

Hamed Rahimi, Hubert Naacke, Camelia Constantin et al.

This paper presents an algorithmic family of dynamic topic models called Aligned Neural Topic Models (ANTM), which combine novel data mining algorithms to provide a modular framework for discovering evolving topics. ANTM maintains the temporal continuity of evolving topics by extracting time-aware features from documents using advanced pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) and employing an overlapping sliding window algorithm for sequential document clustering. This overlapping sliding window algorithm identifies a different number of topics within each time frame and aligns semantically similar document clusters across time periods. This process captures emerging and fading trends across different periods and allows for a more interpretable representation of evolving topics. Experiments on four distinct datasets show that ANTM outperforms probabilistic dynamic topic models in terms of topic coherence and diversity metrics. Moreover, it improves the scalability and flexibility of dynamic topic models by being accessible and adaptable to different types of algorithms. Additionally, a Python package is developed for researchers and scientists who wish to study the trends and evolving patterns of topics in large-scale textual data.

Hamed Rahimi, Hubert Naacke, Camelia Constantin et al.

This paper presents ATEM, a novel framework for studying topic evolution in scientific archives. ATEM is based on dynamic topic modeling and dynamic graph embedding techniques that explore the dynamics of content and citations of documents within a scientific corpus. ATEM explores a new notion of contextual emergence for the discovery of emerging interdisciplinary research topics based on the dynamics of citation links in topic clusters. Our experiments show that ATEM can efficiently detect emerging cross-disciplinary topics within the DBLP archive of over five million computer science articles.

Yuhe Bai, Camelia Constantin, Hubert Naacke

In the area of large-scale training of graph embeddings, effective training frameworks and partitioning methods are critical for handling large networks. However, they face two major challenges: 1) existing synchronized distributed frameworks require continuous communication to access information from other machines, and 2) the inability of current partitioning methods to ensure that subgraphs remain connected components without isolated nodes, which is essential for effective training of GNNs since training relies on information aggregation from neighboring nodes. To address these issues, we introduce a novel partitioning method, named Leiden-Fusion, designed for large-scale training of graphs with minimal communication. Our method extends the Leiden community detection algorithm with a greedy algorithm that merges the smallest communities with highly connected neighboring communities. Our method guarantees that, for an initially connected graph, each partition is a densely connected subgraph with no isolated nodes. After obtaining the partitions, we train a GNN for each partition independently, and finally integrate all embeddings for node classification tasks, which significantly reduces the need for network communication and enhances the efficiency of distributed graph training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive evaluations on several benchmark datasets, achieving high efficiency while preserving the quality of the graph embeddings for node classification tasks.

Allaa Boutaleb, Bernd Amann, Hubert Naacke et al.

Recent table representation learning and data discovery methods tackle table union search (TUS) within data lakes, which involves identifying tables that can be unioned with a given query table to enrich its content. These methods are commonly evaluated using benchmarks that aim to assess semantic understanding in real-world TUS tasks. However, our analysis of prominent TUS benchmarks reveals several limitations that allow simple baselines to perform surprisingly well, often outperforming more sophisticated approaches. This suggests that current benchmark scores are heavily influenced by dataset-specific characteristics and fail to effectively isolate the gains from semantic understanding. To address this, we propose essential criteria for future benchmarks to enable a more realistic and reliable evaluation of progress in semantic table union search.

Allaa Boutaleb, Bernd Amann, Rafael Angarita et al.

Open-domain question answering over datalakes requires retrieving and composing information from multiple tables, a challenging subtask that demands semantic relevance and structural coherence (e.g., joinability). While exact optimization methods like Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) can ensure coherence, their computational complexity is often prohibitive. Conversely, simpler greedy heuristics that optimize for query coverage alone often fail to find these coherent, joinable sets. This paper frames multi-table retrieval as an iterative search process, arguing this approach offers advantages in scalability, interpretability, and flexibility. We propose a general framework and a concrete instantiation: a fast, effective Greedy Join-Aware Retrieval algorithm that holistically balances relevance, coverage, and joinability. Experiments across 5 NL2SQL benchmarks demonstrate that our iterative method achieves competitive retrieval performance compared to the MIP-based approach while being 4-400x faster depending on the benchmark and search space settings. This work highlights the potential of iterative heuristics for practical, scalable, and composition-aware retrieval.

Hamed Rahimi, Jacob Louis Hoover, David Mimno et al.

The recent explosion in work on neural topic modeling has been criticized for optimizing automated topic evaluation metrics at the expense of actual meaningful topic identification. But human annotation remains expensive and time-consuming. We propose LLM-based methods inspired by standard human topic evaluations, in a family of metrics called Contextualized Topic Coherence (CTC). We evaluate both a fully automated version as well as a semi-automated CTC that allows human-centered evaluation of coherence while maintaining the efficiency of automated methods. We evaluate CTC relative to five other metrics on six topic models and find that it outperforms automated topic coherence methods, works well on short documents, and is not susceptible to meaningless but high-scoring topics.

Xiangnan Ren, Olivier Curé, Hubert Naacke et al.

The trade-off between language expressiveness and system scalability (E&S) is a well-known problem in RDF stream reasoning. Higher expressiveness supports more complex reasoning logic, however, it may also hinder system scalability. Current research mainly focuses on logical frameworks suitable for stream reasoning as well as the implementation and the evaluation of prototype systems. These systems are normally developed in a centralized setting which suffer from inherent limited scalability, while an in-depth study of applying distributed solutions to cover E&S is still missing. In this paper, we aim to explore the feasibility of applying modern distributed computing frameworks to meet E&S all together. To do so, we first propose BigSR, a technical demonstrator that supports a positive fragment of the LARS framework. For the sake of generality and to cover a wide variety of use cases, BigSR relies on the two main execution models adopted by major distributed execution frameworks: Bulk Synchronous Processing (BSP) and Record-at-A-Time (RAT). Accordingly, we implement BigSR on top of Apache Spark Streaming (BSP model) and Apache Flink (RAT model). In order to conclude on the impacts of BSP and RAT on E&S, we analyze the ability of the two models to support distributed stream reasoning and identify several types of use cases characterized by their levels of support. This classification allows for quantifying the E&S trade-off by assessing the scalability of each type of use case \wrt its level of expressiveness. Then, we conduct a series of experiments with 15 queries from 4 different datasets. Our experiments show that BigSR over both BSP and RAT generally scales up to high throughput beyond million-triples per second (with or without recursion), and RAT attains sub-millisecond delay for stateless query operators.

Modou Gueye, Talel Abdessalem, Hubert Naacke

Tag recommendation is a major aspect of collaborative tagging systems. It aims to recommend tags to a user for tagging an item. In this paper we present a part of our work in progress which is a novel improvement of recommendations by re-ranking the output of a tag recommender. We mine association rules between candidates tags in order to determine a more consistent list of tags to recommend. Our method is an add-on one which leads to better recommendations as we show in this paper. It is easily parallelizable and morever it may be applied to a lot of tag recommenders. The experiments we did on five datasets with two kinds of tag recommender demonstrated the efficiency of our method.