Analyzing the Evolution of Graphs and Texts

TL;DR

This paper explores the dynamic evolution of graphs and texts, proposing methods to model changes efficiently and analyze their underlying causes, with applications in social networks, news titles, and personal biographies.

Contribution

It introduces dynamic network embedding techniques using Personalized PageRank and analyzes textual changes and occupational identity disclosures over time.

Findings

Improved detection of network anomalies and entity meaning shifts.

Insights into news title edits and their impact on information integrity.

Quantitative analysis of job disclosure patterns over five years.

Abstract

With the recent advance of representation learning algorithms on graphs (e.g., DeepWalk/GraphSage) and natural languages (e.g., Word2Vec/BERT) , the state-of-the art models can even achieve human-level performance over many downstream tasks, particularly for the task of node and sentence classification. However, most algorithms focus on large-scale models for static graphs and text corpus without considering the inherent dynamic characteristics or discovering the reasons behind the changes. This dissertation aims to efficiently model the dynamics in graphs (such as social networks and citation graphs) and understand the changes in texts (specifically news titles and personal biographies). To achieve this goal, we utilize the renowned Personalized PageRank algorithm to create effective dynamic network embeddings for evolving graphs. Our proposed approaches significantly improve the running time and accuracy for both detecting network abnormal intruders and discovering entity meaning shifts over large-scale dynamic graphs. For text changes, we analyze the post-publication changes in news titles to understand the intents behind the edits and discuss the potential impact of titles changes from information integrity perspective. Moreover, we investigate self-presented occupational identities in Twitter users' biographies over five years, investigating job prestige and demographics effects in how people disclose jobs, quantifying over-represented jobs and their transitions over time.