Section: Research Program

Introduction

The main objective of Magnet is to develop original machine learning methods for networked data in order to build applications like browsing, monitoring and recommender systems, and more broadly information extraction in information networks. We consider information networks in which the data consist of both feature vectors and texts. We model such networks as (multiple) (hyper)graphs wherein nodes correspond to entities (documents, spans of text, users, ...) and edges correspond to relations between entities (similarity, answer, co-authoring, friendship, ...). Our main research goal is to propose new online and batch learning algorithms for various problems (node classification / clustering, link classification / prediction) which exploit the relationships between data entities and, overall, the graph topology. We are also interested in searching for the best hidden graph structure to be generated for solving a given learning task. Our research will be based on generative models for graphs, on machine learning for graphs and on machine learning for texts. The challenges are the dimensionality of the input space, possibly the dimensionality of the output space, the high level of dependencies between the data, the inherent ambiguity of textual data and the limited amount of human labeling. An additional challenge will be to design scalable methods for large information networks. Hence, we will explore how sampling, randomization and active learning can be leveraged to improve the scalability of the proposed algorithms.

Our research program is organized according to the following questions:

1. How to go beyond vectorial classification models in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks?

2. How to adaptively build graphs with respect to the given tasks? How to create networks from observations of information diffusion processes?

3. How to design methods able to achieve a good trade-off between predictive accuracy and computational complexity?

4. How to go beyond strict node homophilic/similarity assumptions in graph-based learning methods?