Section: New Results

Some Ongoing Work

Metric Learning for Graph-based Label Propagation

The efficiency of graph-based semi-supervised algorithms depends on the graph of instances on which they are applied. The instances are often in a vectorial form before a graph linking them is built. The construction of the graph relies on a metric over the vectorial space that helps define the weight of the connection between entities. The typical choice for this metric is usually a distance or a similarity measure based on the Euclidean norm. We claim that in some cases the Euclidean norm on the initial vectorial space might not be the most appropriate to solve the task efficiently.

In a paper currently under review, we proposed an algorithm that aims at learning the most appropriate vectorial representation for building a graph on which label propagation is solved efficiently, with theoretical guarantees on the classification performance.

Link Classification in Signed Graphs

We worked on active link classification in signed graphs. Namely, the idea is to build a spanning tree of the graph and query all its edge signs. In the two clusters case, this allows to predict the sign of an edge between nodes $u$ and $v$ as the product of the signs of edge along the path in the spanning tree from $u$ to $v$. It turns out that ensuring low error rate amounts to minimizing the stretch, a long open standing problem known as Low Stretch Spanning Tree [11] . While we are still working on the theoretical analysis, experimental results showed that our construction is generally competitive with a simple yet efficient baseline and outperforms it for specific graph geometry like grid graphs.

Moreover, based on experimental observations, we will also analyze a heuristic which exhibits good performance at a very low computational cost and is therefore well suited for large-scale graphs. In a nutshell, it predicts the sign of an edge from $u$ to $v$ based on the fraction of $u$ negative outgoing edges and $v$ negative incoming edges, exploiting a behavioral consistency bias from signed social network users.

Going further in link classification, we believe that the notion of sign can be extended, going from one binary label per edge to a more holistic approach where the similarity between two nodes is measured across different contexts. These contexts are represented by vectors whose dimension matches the dimension of unknown feature vectors associated with each node. The goal is to answer queries of the form: how similar are nodes $u$ and $v$ along a specific context? We first plan to validate the relevance of this modeling on real-world problems, then test baseline methods on synthetic and real data before looking for a more effective, online prediction method.

Graph-based Learning for Dependency Parsing

We are investigating the use of different graph-based learning techniques such as $k$-nearest neighbors classification and label propagation for the problem of dependency parsing. While most of current approaches rely on learning a single scoring model (through SVM, MIRA, neural networks) from a large set of hand annotated training data (usually thousands of sentences), we are interested in using the sentence space geometry (approximated via a similarity graph over some labeled and unlabeled sentences) to tune the model to better fit a given sentence. This amounts to learning a slightly different model for each unlabeled sentence.

In order to successfully parse sentences in this setting, we need to propagate parsing information from labeled sentences to unlabeled ones through the graph. In order to build a similarity graph well suited to dependency parsing, we worked on learning a similarity function between pairs of sentences, based on the idea that two sentences are similar if they have similar parse trees. We will then investigate how to propagate the trees (which may be of varying sizes) through the graph and consider several propagation schemes.