Network embedding, aiming to project a network into a low-dimensional space, is increasingly becoming a focus of network research. Semi-supervised network embedding takes advantage of labeled data, and has shown promising performance. However, existing semi-supervised methods would get unappealing results in the completely-imbalanced label setting where some classes have no labeled nodes at all. To alleviate this, we propose two novel semi-supervised network embedding methods. The first one is a shallow method named RSDNE. Specifically, to benefit from the completely-imbalanced labels, RSDNE guarantees both intra-class similarity and inter-class dissimilarity in an approximate way. The other method is RECT which is a new class of graph neural networks. Different from RSDNE, to benefit from the completely-imbalanced labels, RECT explores the class-semantic knowledge. This enables RECT to handle networks with node features and multi-label setting. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated promising results on exploiting node representations for many downstream tasks through supervised end-to-end training. To deal with the widespread label scarcity issue in real-world applications, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) is leveraged to train GNNs with limited or even no labels by maximizing the mutual information between nodes in its augmented views generated from the original graph. However, the distribution of graphs remains unconsidered in view generation, resulting in the ignorance of unseen edges in most existing literature, which is empirically shown to be able to improve GCL's performance in our experiments. To this end, we propose to incorporate graph generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn the distribution of views for GCL, in order to i) automatically capture the characteristic of graphs for augmentations, and ii) jointly train the graph GAN model and the GCL model. Specifically, we present GACN, a novel Generative Adversarial Contrastive learning Network for graph representation learning. GACN develops a view generator and a view discriminator to generate augmented views automatically in an adversarial style. Then, GACN leverages these views to train a GNN encoder with two carefully designed self-supervised learning losses, including the graph contrastive loss and the Bayesian personalized ranking Loss. Furthermore, we design an optimization framework to train all GACN modules jointly. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets show that GACN is able to generate high-quality augmented views for GCL and is superior to twelve state-of-the-art baseline methods. Noticeably, our proposed GACN surprisingly discovers that the generated views in data augmentation finally conform to the well-known preferential attachment rule in online networks.

There exists a lot of research work on social ties, few of which is about the directionality of social ties. However, the directionality is actually a basic but important attribute of social ties. In this paper, we present a supervised learning problem, the tie direction learning (TDL) problem, which aims to learn the directionality function of directed social networks. Two ways are introduced to solve the TDL problem: one is based on handcrafted features and the other, named DeepDirect, learns the social tie representation through the topological information of the network. In DeepDirect, a novel network embedding approach, which directly maps the social ties to low-dimensional embedding vectors through deep learning techniques, is proposed. DeepDirect embeds the network considering three different aspects: preserving network topology, utilizing labeled data, and generating pseudo-labels based on observed directionality patterns. Two novel applications are proposed for the learned directionality function, i.e., direction discovery on undirected ties and direction quantification on bidirectional ties. Experiments are conducted on five different real-world data sets about these two tasks. The experimental results demonstrate our methods, especially DeepDirect, are effective and promising.

Besides the conventional schema-oriented tasks, data dependencies are recently revisited for data quality applications, such as violation detection. To address the variety and veracity issues of big data, data dependencies have been extended as data quality rules to adapt to various data types, ranging from (1)categorical data with equality relationships to (2)heterogeneous data with similarity relationships, and (3)numerical data with order relationships. In this survey, we briefly review the recent proposals on data dependencies categorized into the aforesaid types of data. In addition to (a)the concepts of these data dependency notations, we investigate (b)the extension relationships between data dependencies, e.g., conditional functional dependencies (CFDs) extend the conventional functional dependencies (FDs). It forms a family tree of extensions, mostly rooted in FDs, helping us understand the expressive power of various data dependencies. Moreover, we summarize (c)the discovery of dependencies from data, since data dependencies are often unlikely to be manually specified in a traditional way, given the huge volume and high variety of big data. We further outline (d)the applications of the extended data dependencies, in particular in data quality practice. It guides users to select proper data dependencies with sufficient expressive power and reasonable discovery cost. Finally, we conclude with several directions of future studies on the emerging data.

With the enrichment of the entity information in the real world, many networks with attributed nodes are proposed and studied widely. Community detection in these attributed networks is an essential task that aims to find groups where the intra-nodes are much more densely connected than the inter-nodes. However, many existing community detection methods in attributed networks do not distinguish overlapping communities from non-overlapping communities when designing algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel and accurate algorithm called Node-similarity-based Multi-Label Propagation Algorithm (NMLPA) for detecting overlapping communities in attributed networks. NMLPA first calculates the similarity between nodes and then propagates multiple labels based on the network structure and the node similarity. Moreover, NMLPA uses a pruning strategy to keep the number of labels per node within a suitable range. Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world networks show that our new method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.