Accurate prediction of house price, a vital aspect of the residential real estate sector, is of substantial interest for a wide range of stakeholders. However, predicting house prices is a complex task due to the significant variability influenced by factors such as house features, location, neighborhood, and many others. Despite numerous attempts utilizing a wide array of algorithms, including recent deep learning techniques, to predict house prices accurately, existing approaches have fallen short of considering a wide range of factors such as textual and visual features. This paper addresses this gap by comprehensively incorporating attributes, such as features, textual descriptions, geo-spatial neighborhood, and house images, typically showcased in real estate listings in a house price prediction system. Specifically, we propose a multi-modal deep learning approach that leverages different types of data to learn more accurate representation of the house. In particular, we learn a joint embedding of raw house attributes, geo-spatial neighborhood, and most importantly from textual description and images representing the house; and finally use a downstream regression model to predict the house price from this jointly learned embedding vector. Our experimental results with a real-world dataset show that the text embedding of the house advertisement description and image embedding of the house pictures in addition to raw attributes and geo-spatial embedding, can significantly improve the house price prediction accuracy. The relevant source code and dataset are publicly accessible at the following URL: https://github.com/4P0N/mhpp

Integrity 2024 is the fifth edition of the Workshop on Integrity in Social Networks and Media, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) since the 2020 edition [1-4]. The goal of the workshop is to bring together academic and industry researchers working on integrity, fairness, trust and safety in social networks to discuss the most pressing risks and cutting-edge technologies to reliably measure and mitigate them. The event consists of invited talks from academic experts and industry leaders as well as peer-reviewed papers and posters through an open call-for-papers.

Complex social event summarization is a problem which has been shown having great utility for real-world applications, including crisis management, rumor control and government policy tracking. In recent years there has been significant research effort spent on effectively extracting meaningful textual descriptions of an event. However, in many critical situations, social events are complex and context-sensitive, which demands the online summarization of social events in an integrated manner. In this paper, we propose the first online complex social event summarization approach, namely SOMA, which summarizes the complex social events over multiple attributes including media content and contexts simultaneously. Specifically, we first propose a deep learning model that comprehensively summarizes events in regards to the text description and locations that they appear in, by utilizing their hidden connections in posts. We then propose a summary generator over time, text and location to achieve a maximal coverage of the summary over the original social event and minimal redundancy of the summary. Furthermore, we propose a location estimation method to address the location sparsity issue of complex events by mining the correlation between text and location. The evaluation over four real-event datasets and three benchmark datasets shows that our proposed approach outperforms the existing solutions for event summarizaiton in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven approach for a trip planner, that finds the most popular multi-modal trip using public transport from historical trips, given a source, a destination, and userdefined constraints such as time, minimum switches, or preferred modes of transport. To solve the most popular trip and its variants, we propose a multi-stage deep learning architecture, PathOracle, that consists of two major components: KSNet to generate key stops, and MPTNet to generate popular path trips from a source to a destination passing through the key stops. We also introduce a unique representation of stops using Stop2Vec that considers both the neighborhood and trip popularity between stops to facilitate accurate path planning. We present an extensive experimental study with a large real-world public transport based commuting Myki dataset of Melbourne city, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches.

Integrity 2023 is the fourth edition of the successful Workshop on Integrity in Social Networks and Media, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) in the past three years. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss content and interaction integrity challenges in social networks and social media platforms. The event consists of a combination of invited talks by reputed members of the Integrity community from both academia and industry and peer-reviewed contributed talks and posters solicited via an open call-for-papers.

Histograms are a compact and effective way to summarize large datasets, representing data distribution by partitioning it into blocks or buckets for visualization and analysis. They find widespread use in diverse fields, from image processing to statistical analysis and database optimization. This paper focuses on merging and maintaining a centralized histogram for distributed summaries in multidimensional spaces. The proposed framework employs a dynamic index data structure to efficiently approximate data distribution from continuous distributed data streams. It offers a simple and implementable solution, gener-ating an up-to-date histogram for aggregated multidimensional data summaries while supporting both centralized and local histograms. Experimental results demonstrate its performance in parallel and distributed settings, considering communication cost, error rate, and practicality.

Public Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, such as Thingspeak, significantly increased the availability of open IoT data and enabled faster and cheaper development of novel IoT applications by reducing or even eliminating the need for deploying their own IoT sensors and platforms. However, open IoT data is often heterogeneous, sparse, fuzzy, and lacks accurate description (which we refer to as IoT metadata). These limitations make open IoT data challenging to integrate and use, and prevent the efficient development of IoT applications. In fact, while several sensor data description models have been proposed and standardized, open IoT data currently lack or include only partial metadata description. Therefore, novel techniques for automatically annotating open IoT data are needed to fully unleash the power of open IoT. This article proposes a novel metadata-assisted cascading ensemble classification framework (MACE) for the automatic annotation of IoT data. MACE is capable of sequentially combining standalone classifiers, enabling it to cope with heterogeneous IoT data and different domains of information (e.g., numerical and textual), which have not been considered previously. MACE incorporates a novel ensemble approach for automatically selecting, sorting, filtering, and assembling classifiers in a way that improves annotation performance. This article presents extensive experimental evaluations of MACE using public IoT data sets. Results demonstrate that the MACE framework significantly outperforms existing solutions for open IoT data by as much as 10% in classification accuracy.

Topic trajectory information provides crucial insight into the dynamics of topics and their evolutionary relationships over a given time. Also, this information can help to improve our understanding on how new topics have emerged or formed through a sequential or interrelated events of emergence, modification and integration of prior topics. Nevertheless, the implementation of the existing methods for topic trajectory identification is rarely available as usable software. In this paper, we present TopicTracker, a platform for topic trajectory identification and visualisation. The key of Topic Tracker is that it can represent the three facets of information together, given two kinds of input: a time-stamped topic profile consisting of the set of the underlying topics over time, and the evolution strength matrix among them: evolutionary pathways of dynamic topics, evolution states of the topics, and topic importance. TopicTracker is a publicly available software implemented using the R software.

With the advent of location-based social networks, users can tag their daily activities in different locations through check-ins. These check-in locations signify user preferences for various socio-spatial activities and can be used to improve the quality of services in some applications such as recommendation systems, advertising, and group formation. To support such applications, in this paper, we formulate a new problem of identifying top-k S ocio- S patial co-engaged L ocation Selection ( SSLS ) for users in a social graph, that selects the best set of $k$ locations from a large number of location candidates relating to the user and her friends. The selected locations should be (i) spatially and socially relevant to the user and her friends, and (ii) diversified both spatially and socially to maximize the coverage of friends in the socio-spatial space. This problem has been proved as NP-hard. To address such a challenging problem, we first develop an Exact solution by designing some pruning strategies based on derived bounds on diversity. To make the solution scalable for large datasets, we also develop an approximate solution by deriving relaxed bounds and advanced termination rules to filter out insignificant intermediate results. To further accelerate the efficiency, we present one fast exact approach and a meta-heuristic approximate approach by avoiding the repeated computation of diversity at the running time. Finally, we have performed extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms against three adapted existing methods using four large real-world datasets.

Finding an expert plays a crucial role in driving successful collaborations and speeding up high-quality research development and innovations. However, the rapid growth of scientific publications and digital data makes identifying the right experts a challenging problem. Existing approaches for finding experts given a topic can be categorised into information retrieval techniques such as vector space models, document language models, and graph-based models. In this paper, we propose ExpFinder , a new hybrid model for expert finding, that integrates a novel N-gram vector space model, denoted as nVSM, and a graph-based model, denoted as μCO-HITS, that is a proposed variation of the CO-HITS algorithm. The key of nVSM is to exploit recent inverse document frequency weighting method for N-gram words, and ExpFinder incorporates nVSM into μCO-HITS to achieve expert finding. We comprehensively evaluate ExpFinder on four different datasets from the academic domains in comparison with six different expert finding models. The evaluation results show that ExpFinder is an highly effective model for expert finding, substantially outperforming all the compared models in 19% to 160.2%.

In this talk we will focus on how data management practices need to be re-configured in order to support Intelligent, Reliable and Responsible decision-making systems. The appetite for effective use of information assets has been steadily rising in both public and private sector organisations. However, whether the information is used for social good or commercial gain, there is a growing recognition of the complex socio-technical challenges associated with balancing the diverse demands of regulatory compliance and data privacy, social expectations and ethical use, business process agility and value creation, and scarcity of data science talent. In this talk, we highlight these interconnected challenges and introduce Information Resilience, as a scaffold within which the competing requirements of responsible and agile approaches to information use can be positioned. The aim is to develop and present a manifesto for Information Resilience that can serve as a reference for future research and development in relevant areas of Responsible Data Management.

Accurate house prediction is of great significance to various real estate stakeholders such as house owners, buyers, and investors. We propose a location-centered prediction framework that differs from existing work in terms of data profiling and prediction model. Regarding data profiling, we make an important observation as follows – besides the in-house features such as floor area, the location plays a critical role in house price prediction. Unfortunately, existing work either overlooked it or had a coarse grained measurement of locations. Thereby, we define and capture a fine-grained location profile powered by a diverse range of location data sources, including transportation profile, education profile, suburb profile based on census data, and facility profile. Regarding the choice of prediction model, we observe that a variety of approaches either consider the entire data for modeling, or split the entire house data and model each partition independently. However, such modeling ignores the relatedness among partitions, and for all prediction scenarios, there may not be sufficient training samples per partition for the latter approach. We address this problem by conducting a careful study of exploiting the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model. Specifically, we map the strategies for splitting the entire house data to the ways the tasks are defined in MTL, and select specific MTL-based methods with different regularization terms to capture and exploit the relatedness among tasks. Based on real-world house transaction data collected in Melbourne, Australia, we design extensive experimental evaluations, and the results indicate a significant superiority of MTL-based methods over state-of-the-art approaches. Meanwhile, we conduct an in-depth analysis on the impact of task definitions and method selections in MTL on the prediction performance, and demonstrate that the impact of task definitions on prediction performance far exceeds that of method selections.

Event popularity prediction over social media is crucial for estimating information propagation scope, decision making, and emergency prevention. However, existing approaches only focus on predicting the occurrences of single attribute such as a message, a hashtag or an image, which are not comprehensive enough for representing complex social event propagation. In this paper, we predict the event popularity, where an event is described as a set of messages containing multiple hashtags. We propose a novel hashtag-influence-based event popularity prediction by mining the impact of an influential hashtag set on the event propagation. Specifically, we first propose a hashtag-influence-based cascade model to select the influential hashtags over an event hashtag graph built by the pairwise hashtag similarity and the topic distribution of event-related hashtags. A novel measurement is proposed to identify the hashtag influence of an event over its content and social impacts. A hashtag correlation-based algorithm is proposed to optimize the seed selection in a greedy manner. Then, we propose an event-fitting boosting model to predict the event popularity by embedding the feature importance over events into the XGBOOST model. Moreover, we propose an event-structure-based method, which incrementally updates the prediction model over social streams. We have conducted extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Influence maximization has recently received significant attention for scheduling online campaigns or advertisements on social network platforms. However, most studies only focus on user influence via cyber interactions while ignoring their physical interactions which are also essential to gauge influence propagation. Additionally, targeted campaigns or advertisements have not received sufficient attention. To address these issues, we first devise a novel holistic influence diffusion model that takes into account both cyber and physical user interactions in an effective and practical way. Based on the new diffusion model, we formulate a new problem of holistic influence maximization, denoted as HIM query, for targeted advertisements in a spatial social network. The HIM query problem aims to find a minimum set of users whose holistic influence can cover all target users in the network, which belongs to a set covering problem. Since the HIM query problem is NP-hard, we develop a greedy baseline algorithm and then improve on this algorithm to reduce the computational cost. To deal with large networks, we also design a spatial-social index to maintain the social, spatial and textual information of users, as well as developing an index-based efficient solution. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using one synthetic and three real-world datasets to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed holistic influence diffusion model and our developed algorithms.

The appetite for effective use of information assets has been steadily rising in both public and private sector organisations. However, whether the information is used for social good or commercial gain, there is a growing recognition of the complex socio-technical challenges associated with balancing the diverse demands of regulatory compliance and data privacy, social expectations and ethical use, business process agility and value creation, and scarcity of data science talent. In this vision paper, we present a series of case studies that highlight these interconnected challenges, across a range of application areas. We use the insights from the case studies to introduce Information Resilience, as a scaffold within which the competing requirements of responsible and agile approaches to information use can be positioned. The aim of this paper is to develop and present a manifesto for Information Resilience that can serve as a reference for future research and development in relevant areas of responsible data management.

We introduce a novel keyword-aware influential community query KICQ that finds the most influential communities from an attributed graph, where an influential community is defined as a closely connected group of vertices having some dominance over other groups of vertices with the expertise (a set of keywords) matching with the query terms (words or phrases). We first design the KICQ that facilitates users to issue an influential CS query intuitively by using a set of query terms, and predicates (AND or OR). In this context, we propose a novel word-embedding based similarity model that enables semantic community search, which substantially alleviates the limitations of exact keyword based community search. Next, we propose a new influence measure for a community that considers both the cohesiveness and influence of the community and eliminates the need for specifying values of internal parameters of a network. Finally, we propose two efficient algorithms for searching influential communities in large attributed graphs. We present detailed experiments and a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.

This is the proposal for the third edition of the Workshop on Integrity in Social Networks and Media, Integrity 2022, following the success of the first two Workshops held in conjunction with the 13th & 14th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) in 2020 and 2021. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss content and interaction integrity challenges in social networks and social media platforms. The event consists of (1) a series of invited talks by reputed members of the Integrity community from both academia and industry, (2) a call-for-papers for contributed talks and posters, and (3) a panel with the speakers.

RDF data has been extensively deployed describing various types of resources in a structured way. Links between data elements described by RDF models stand for the core of SemanticWeb. The rising amount of structured data published in public RDF repositories, also known as Linked Open Data, elucidates the success of the global and unified dataset proposed by the vision of the Semantic Web. Nowadays, semi-automatic algorithms build connections among these datasets by exploring a variety of methods. Interconnected open data demands automatic methods and tools to maintain their consistency over time. The update of linked data is considered as key process due to the evolutionary characteristic of such structured datasets. However, data changing operations might influence well-formed links, which turns difficult to maintain the consistencies of connections over time. In this article, we propose a thorough survey that provides a systematic review of the state of the art in link maintenance in linked open data evolution scenario. We conduct a detailed analysis of the literature for characterising and understanding methods and algorithms responsible for detecting, fixing and updating links between RDF data. Our investigation provides a categorisation of existing approaches as well as describes and discusses existing studies. The results reveal an absence of comprehensive solutions suited to fully detect, warn and automatically maintain the consistency of linked data over time.

In digital repositories, it is crucial to refine existing subject terms and exploit a taxonomy with subject terms, in order to promote information retrieval tasks such as indexing, cataloging and searching of digital documents. In this paper, we address how to refine an existing set of subject terms, often containing irrelevant ones or creating noise, that are used to index digital documents. Further, we present how to automatically induce a subject term taxonomy to capture and utilise the semantic relations among subject terms. Most related works have little studied these problems, focusing mostly on creating subject terms or building a taxonomy of key terms from text documents. We propose a methodology2 for refining an existing set of subject terms in a digital repository by identifying their semantics, as well as inducing a taxonomy with subject terms by analysing their mutual usages, maximising their semantic relatedness. Then, we present a case study using the (Analysis & Policy Observatory) APO digital repository to analyse the proposed methodology and demonstrate its applicability. Further, to validate the generalisability of the proposed taxonomy inducing method, we evaluate it using a gold-standard taxonomy in life sciences, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), in comparison with the state-of-the-art taxonomy inducing method, TaxoFinder. Our evaluation shows that our methodology has a high potential for refining an existing set of subject terms and capturing their semantic relationships by inducing a subject term taxonomy.