Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Representation Learning On Multi-Layered Heterogeneous Network, Delvin Ce Zhang, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network data can often be represented in a multi-layered structure with rich semantics. One example is e-commerce data, containing user-user social network layer and item-item context layer, with cross-layer user-item interactions. Given the dual characters of homogeneity within each layer and heterogeneity across layers, we seek to learn node representations from such a multi-layered heterogeneous network while jointly preserving structural information and network semantics. In contrast, previous works on network embedding mainly focus on single-layered or homogeneous networks with one type of nodes and links. In this paper we propose intra- and cross-layer proximity concepts. Intra-layer proximity simulates propagation along …

Investigating The Effects Of Dimension-Specific Sentiments On Product Sales: The Perspective Of Sentiment Preferences, Cuiqing Jiang, Jianfei Wang, Qian Tang, Xiaozhong Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While literature has reached a consensus on the awareness effect of online word-of-mouth (eWOM), this paper studies its persuasive effect, specifically, the dimension-specific sentiment effects on product sales. We allow the sentiment information in eWOM along different product dimensions to have different persuasive effects on consumers’ purchase decisions. This occurs because of consumers’ sentiment preference, which is defined as the relative importance consumers place on various dimension-specific sentiments. We use an aspect-level sentiment analysis to derive the dimension-specific sentiments and PVAR (panel vector auto-regression) models to estimate their effects on product sales using a movie panel dataset. The findings show …

Exploiting Reasoning Chains For Multi-Hop Science Question Answering, Weiwen Xu, Yang Deng, Huihui Zhang, Deng Cai, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a novel Chain Guided Retriever reader (CGR) framework to model the reasoning chain for multi-hop Science Question Answering. Our framework is capable of performing explainable reasoning without the need of any corpus-specific annotations, such as the ground-truth reasoning chain, or human annotated entity mentions. Specifically, we first generate reasoning chains from a semantic graph constructed by Abstract Meaning Representation of retrieved evidence facts. A Chain-aware loss, concerning both local and global chain information, is also designed to enable the generated chains to serve as distant supervision signals for training the retriever, where reinforcement learning is also adopted to …

A Bert-Based Two-Stage Model For Chinese Chengyu Recommendation, Minghuan Tan, Jing Jiang, Bingtian Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Chinese, Chengyu are fixed phrases consisting of four characters. As a type of idioms, their meanings usually cannot be derived from their component characters. In this paper, we study the task of recommending a Chengyu given a textual context. Observing some of the limitations with existing work, we propose a two-stage model, where during the first stage we re-train a Chinese BERT model by masking out Chengyu from a large Chinese corpus with a wide coverage of Chengyu. During the second stage, we fine-tune the retrained, Chengyu-oriented BERT on a specific Chengyu recommendation dataset. We evaluate this method on …

Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability, Xin Lv, Yixin Cao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Yichi Zhang, Zelin Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to obtain more interpretable link prediction. However, we find in experiments that many paths given by these models are actually unreasonable, while little work has been done on interpretability evaluation for them. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to quantitatively evaluate the interpretability of multi-hop reasoning models so as to advance their development. In specific, we define three metrics, including path recall, local interpretability, and global interpretability for evaluation, and design an approximate strategy to calculate these metrics using the interpretability scores of rules. We manually annotate all possible …

Binary Classifiers For Noisy Datasets: A Comparative Study Of Existing Quantum Machine Learning Frameworks And Some New Approaches, Nikolaos Schetakis, Davit Aghamalyan, Paul Robert Griffin, Michael Boguslavsky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This technology offer is a quantum machine learning algorithm applied to binary classification models for noisy datasets which are prevalent in financial and other datasets. By combining hybrid-neural networks, quantum parametric circuits, and data re-uploading we have improved the classification of non-convex 2-dimensional figures by understanding learning stability as noise increases in the dataset. The metric we use for assessing the performance of our quantum classifiers is the area under the receiver operator curve (ROC AUC). We are interested to collaborate with partners with use cases for binary classification of noisy data. Also, as quantum technology is still insufficient for …

Topic Modeling For Multi-Aspect Listwise Comparison, Delvin Ce Zhang, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a well-established probabilistic method, topic models seek to uncover latent semantics from plain text. In addition to having textual content, we observe that documents are usually compared in listwise rankings based on their content. For instance, world-wide countries are compared in an international ranking in terms of electricity production based on their national reports. Such document comparisons constitute additional information that reveal documents' relative similarities. Incorporating them into topic modeling could yield comparative topics that help to differentiate and rank documents. Furthermore, based on different comparison criteria, the observed document comparisons usually cover multiple aspects, each expressing a distinct …

An Economic Analysis Of Rebates Conditional On Positive Reviews, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo, Jian Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Strategic sellers on some online selling platforms have recently been using a conditional-rebate strategy to manipulate product reviews under which only purchasing consumers who post positive reviews online are eligible to redeem the rebate. A key concern for the conditional rebate is that it can easily induce fake reviews, which might be harmful to consumers and society. We develop a microbehavioral model capturing consumers’ review-sharing benefit, review-posting cost, and moral cost of lying to examine the seller’s optimal pricing and rebate decisions. We derive three equilibria: the no-rebate, organic-review equilibrium; the low-rebate, boosted-authentic-review equilibrium; and the high-rebate, partially-fake-review equilibrium. We …

On Aggregating Salaries Of Occupations From Job Post And Review Data, Chih-Chieh Hung, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The popularity of job websites has significantly changed the way people learn about different occupations. Among the insights offered by these websites are the statistics of occupation salaries which are useful information for job seekers, career coaches, graduating students, and labor related government agencies. Such statistics include the distribution of job salaries of each occupation, such as average or quantiles. However, significant variability in salary (and review salary) can be found among jobs of the same occupation as we gather job post and review data from job websites. Such variability shows the existence of biases, including salary competitiveness in job …

Flip & Slack – Active Flipped Classroom Learning With Collaborative Slack Interactions, Kyong Jin Shim, Gottipati Swapna, Yi Meng Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Active flipped classroom learning is stipulated with faculty structuring the activities involving constructive interactions, either formal or informal. Sharing ideas and responding to ideas improve the cognitive skills of the students. Encouraging peers to contribute to class activities and respecting peers contribute to the development of affective skills. We present an integrated platform for cognitive and affective skills development. A flipped classroom arrangement allows the faculty to focus more on in-class activities such as programming and lab exercises to support active learning in computing courses. We share the design of an innovative flipped classroom model integrated with Slack and present …

Topic-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network For Link Prediction, Siyong Xu, Cheng Yang, Yuan Fang, Yuan Fang, Yang Tianchi, Luhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Heterogeneous graphs (HGs), consisting of multiple types of nodes and links, can characterize a variety of real-world complex systems. Recently, heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs), as a powerful graph embedding method to aggregate heterogeneous structure and attribute information, has earned a lot of attention. Despite the ability of HGNNs in capturing rich semantics which reveal different aspects of nodes, they still stay at a coarse-grained level which simply exploits structural characteristics. In fact, rich unstructured text content of nodes also carries latent but more fine-grained semantics arising from multi-facet topic-aware factors, which fundamentally manifest why nodes of different types would …

Automating User Notice Generation For Smart Contract Functions, Xing Hu, Zhipeng Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts have obtained much attention and are crucial for automatic financial and business transactions. For end-users who have never seen the source code, they can read the user notice shown in end-user client to understand what a transaction does of a smart contract function. However, due to time constraints or lack of motivation, user notice is often missing during the development of smart contracts. For endusers who lack the information of the user notices, there is no easy way for them to check the code semantics of the smart contracts. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new approach …

Stock Market Trend Forecasting Based On Multiple Textual Features: A Deep Learning Method, Zhenda Hu, Zhaoxia Wang, Seng-Beng Ho, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stock market trend forecasting is a valuable and challenging research task for both industry and academia. In order to explore the influence of stock news information on the stock market trend, a textual embedding construction method is proposed to encode multiple textual features, including topic features, sentiment features, and semantic features extracted from stock news textual content. In addition, a deep learning method is designed by using financial data and multiple textual features obtained from multiple news textual embeddings for short-term stock market trend prediction. For evaluation, extensive experiments on real stock market data are conducted. The experimental results illustrate …

Contrastive Pre-Training Of Gnns On Heterogeneous Graphs, Xunqiang Jiang, Yuanfu Lu, Yuan Fang, Chuan Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While graph neural networks (GNNs) emerge as the state-of-the-art representation learning methods on graphs, they often require a large amount of labeled data to achieve satisfactory performance, which is often expensive or unavailable. To relieve the label scarcity issue, some pre-training strategies have been devised for GNNs, to learn transferable knowledge from the universal structural properties of the graph. However, existing pre-training strategies are only designed for homogeneous graphs, in which each node and edge belongs to the same type. In contrast, a heterogeneous graph embodies rich semantics, as multiple types of nodes interact with each other via different kinds …

Finding A Needle In A Haystack: Automatic Mining Of Silent Vulnerability Fixes, Jiayuan Zhou, Michael Pacheco, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Yuan Wang, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Following the coordinated vulnerability disclosure model, a vulnerability in open source software (OSS) is suggested to be fixed “silently”, without disclosing the fix until the vulnerability is disclosed. Yet, it is crucial for OSS users to be aware of vulnerability fixes as early as possible, as once a vulnerability fix is pushed to the source code repository, a malicious party could probe for the corresponding vulnerability to exploit it. In practice, OSS users often rely on the vulnerability disclosure information from security advisories (e.g., National Vulnerability Database) to sense vulnerability fixes. However, the time between the availability of a vulnerability …

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis In Question Answering Forums, Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) typically focuses on extracting aspects and predicting their sentiments on individual sentences such as customer reviews. Recently, another kind of opinion sharing platform, namely question answering (QA) forum, has received increasing popularity, which accumulates a large number of user opinions towards various aspects. This motivates us to investigate the task of ABSA on QA forums (ABSA-QA), aiming to jointly detect the discussed aspects and their sentiment polarities for a given QA pair. Unlike review sentences, a QA pair is composed of two parallel sentences, which requires interaction modeling to align the aspect mentioned in the question …

Building Legal Datasets, Jerrold Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Data-centric AI calls for better, not just bigger, datasets. As data protection laws with extra-territorial reach proliferate worldwide, ensuring datasets are legal is an increasingly crucial yet overlooked component of “better”. To help dataset builders become more willing and able to navigate this complex legal space, this paper reviews key legal obligations surrounding ML datasets, examines the practical impact of data laws on ML pipelines, and offers a framework for building legal datasets.

Informing Complexity: The Business Case For Managing Digital Twins Of Complex Process Facilities As A Valuable Asset, William Randell Mcnair

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Digital Twins of complex facilities, specifically 3D models created during their design, is a potentially valuable information asset. This three- article dissertation explores the business case for firms in the petrochemical process industry to manage throughout the facility lifecycle. A maturity model is provided to illustrate the stages of digital twin evolution and serves as a tool to help communicate each of the five levels of digital twin maturity achievable in various use cases. An industry analysis reviews existing literature and proposes a model to assess informing or insight value of digital twins from three perspectives. Next, an empirical …

Residential Curbside Recycle Context Analysis, Ntchanang Mpafe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Curbside recycling as a preferred mode of residential and municipal sustainability goals seems to have an overwhelming acceptance and adoption in the US. About 69.8 million out of 97.3 million (72%) single-family households in the United States have access to curbside recycling services (State of Curbside Recycling Report, 2020). Collectively, the programs divert about nine million tons of recyclables from landfill disposal each year (Cottom, 2019).

For a design that started in the 1980s in the US, its rapid universal adoption seems to have precluded a concerted effort in examining the coproduced nature (Households: service receptors and Municipalities: service providers) …

Detection Of Dental Apical Lesions Using Cnns On Periapical Radiograph, Chun-Wei Li, Szu-Yin Lin, He-Sheng Chou, Tsung-Yi Chen, Yu-An Chen, Sheng-Yu Liu, Yu-Lin Liu, Chiung-An Chen, Yen-Cheng Huang, Shih-Lun Chen, Yi-Cheng Mao, Patricia Angela R. Abu, Wei-Yuan Chiang, Wen-Shen Lo

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Apical lesions, the general term for chronic infectious diseases, are very common dental diseases in modern life, and are caused by various factors. The current prevailing endodontic treatment makes use of X-ray photography taken from patients where the lesion area is marked manually, which is therefore time consuming. Additionally, for some images the significant details might not be recognizable due to the different shooting angles or doses. To make the diagnosis process shorter and efficient, repetitive tasks should be performed automatically to allow the dentists to focus more on the technical and medical diagnosis, such as treatment, tooth cleaning, or …