This paper firstly proposes a simple yet efficient generalized approach to apply differential privacy to text representation (i.e., word embedding). Based on it, we propose a user-level approach to learn personalized differentially private word embedding model on user generated contents (UGC). To our best knowledge, this is the first work of learning user-level differentially private word embedding model from text for sharing. The proposed approaches protect the privacy of the individual from re-identification, especially provide better trade-off of privacy and data utility on UGC data for sharing. The experimental results show that the trained embedding models are applicable for the classic text analysis tasks (e.g., regression). Moreover, the proposed approaches of learning differentially private embedding models are both framework- and dataindependent, which facilitates the deployment and sharing. The source code is available at https://github.com/sonvx/dpText.

Multi-feature data analysis (e.g., on Facebook, LinkedIn) is challenging especially if one wants to do it efficiently and retain the flexibility by choosing features of interest for analysis. Features (e.g., age, gender, relationship, political view etc.) can be explicitly given from datasets, but also can be derived from content (e.g., political view based on Facebook posts). Analysis from multiple perspectives is needed to understand the datasets (or subsets of it) and to infer meaningful knowledge. For example, the influence of age, location, and marital status on political views may need to be inferred separately (or in combination). In this paper, we adapt multilayer network (MLN) analysis, a nontraditional approach, to model the Facebook datasets, integrate content analysis, and conduct analysis, which is driven by a list of desired application based queries. Our experimental analysis shows the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed approach when modeling and analyzing datasets with multiple features.

Given the increasing number of heterogeneous data stored in relational databases, file systems or cloud environment, it needs to be easily accessed and semantically connected for further data analytic. The potential of data federation is largely untapped, this paper presents an interactive data federation system (https://vimeo.com/ 319473546) by applying large-scale techniques including heterogeneous data federation, natural language processing, association rules and semantic web to perform data retrieval and analytics on social network data. The system first creates a Virtual Database (VDB) to virtually integrate data from multiple data sources. Next, a RDF generator is built to unify data, together with SPARQL queries, to support semantic data search over the processed text data by natural language processing (NLP). Association rule analysis is used to discover the patterns and recognize the most important co-occurrences of variables from multiple data sources. The system demonstrates how it facilitates interactive data analytic towards different application scenarios (e.g., sentiment analysis, privacyconcern analysis, community detection).

Increasing attention to the research on activity monitoring in smart homes has motivated the employment of ambient intelligence to reduce the deployment cost and solve the privacy issue. Several approaches have been proposed for multi-resident activity recognition, however, there still lacks a comprehensive benchmark for future research and practical selection of models. In this paper, we study different methods for multi-resident activity recognition and evaluate them on the same sets of data. In particular, we explore the effectiveness and efficiency of temporal learning algorithms using sequential data and non-temporal learning algorithms using temporally-manipulated features. In the experiments we compare and analyse the results of the studied methods using datasets from three smart homes.

Social Network Sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter, have been playing a great role in our lives. On the one hand, they help connect people who would not otherwise be connected before. Many recent breakthroughs in AI such as facial recognition [49] were achieved thanks to the amount of available data on the Internet via SNS (hereafter Big Data). On the other hand, due to privacy concerns, many people have tried to avoid SNS to protect their privacy. Similar to the security issue of the Internet protocol, Machine Learning (ML), as the core of AI, was not designed with privacy in mind. For instance, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) try to solve a quadratic optimization problem by deciding which instances of training dataset are support vectors. This means that the data of people involved in the training process will also be published within the SVM models. Thus, privacy guarantees must be applied to the worst-case outliers, and meanwhile data utilities have to be guaranteed.

For the above reasons, this thesis studies on: (1) how to construct data federation infrastructure with privacy guarantee in the big data era; (2) how to protect privacy while learning ML models with a good trade-off between data utilities and privacy. To the first point, we proposed different frameworks em- powered by privacy-aware algorithms that satisfied the definition of differential privacy, which is the state-of-the-art privacy-guarantee algorithm by definition. Regarding (2), we proposed different neural network architectures to capture the sensitivities of user data, from which, the algorithm itself decides how much it should learn from user data to protect their privacy while achieves good performance for a downstream task. The current outcomes of the thesis are: (1) privacy-guarantee data federation infrastructure for data analysis on sensitive data; (2) privacy-guarantee algorithms for data sharing; (3) privacy-concern data analysis on social network data. The research methods used in this thesis include experiments on real-life social network dataset to evaluate aspects of proposed approaches.

Insights and outcomes from this thesis can be used by both academic and industry to guarantee privacy for data analysis and data sharing in personal data. They also have the potential to facilitate relevant research in privacy-aware representation learning and related evaluation methods.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is a useful tool for sequence labelling tasks in natural language processing. Although in practice RNNs suffer a problem of vanishing/exploding gradient, their compactness still offers efficiency and make them less prone to overfitting. In this paper we show that by propagating the prediction of previous labels we can improve the performance of RNNs while keeping the number of parameters in RNNs unchanged and adding only one more step for inference. As a result, the models are still more compact and efficient than other models with complex memory gates. In the experiment, we evaluate the idea on optical character recognition and Chunking which achieve promising results.

In this paper, we aim to reveal the impact of lexical-semantic resources, used in particular for word sense disambiguation and sense-level semantic categorization, on automatic personality classification task. While stylistic features (e.g., part-of-speech counts) have been shown their power in this task, the impact of semantics beyond targeted word lists is relatively unexplored. We propose and extract three types of lexical-semantic features, which capture high-level concepts and emotions, overcoming the lexical gap of word n-grams. Our experimental results are comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while no personality-specific resources are required.

This paper describes our NIHRIO system for SemEval-2018 Task 3 "Irony detection in English tweets". We propose to use a simple neural network architecture of Multilayer Perceptron with various types of input features including: lexical, syntactic, semantic and polarity features.  Our system achieves very high performance in both subtasks of binary and multi-class irony detection in tweets. In particular, we rank at fifth in terms of the accuracy metric and the F1 metric. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NIHRIO/IronyDetectionInTwitter

To protect user privacy in data analysis, a state-of-the-art strategy is differential privacy in which scientific noise is injected into the real analysis output. The noise masks individual’s sensitive information contained in the dataset. However, determining the amount of noise is a key challenge, since too much noise will destroy data utility while too little noise will increase privacy risk. Though previous research works have designed some mechanisms to protect data privacy in different scenarios, most of the existing studies assume uniform privacy concerns for all individuals. Consequently, putting an equal amount of noise to all individuals leads to insufficient privacy protection for some users, while over-protecting others. To address this issue, we propose a self-adaptive approach for privacy concern detection based on user personality. Our experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness to address a suitable personalized privacy protection for cold-start users (i.e., without their privacy-concern information in training data).

In this paper, we present a differential privacy preserving approach, which extracts personality-based knowledge to serve privacy guarantee data analysis on personal sensitive data. Based on the approach, we further implement an end-to-end privacy guarantee system, KaPPA, to provide researchers iterative data analysis on sensitive data. The key challenge for differential privacy is determining a reasonable amount of privacy budget to balance privacy preserving and data utility. Most of the previous work applies unified privacy budget to all individual data, which leads to insufficient privacy protection for some individuals while over-protecting others. In KaPPA, the proposed personality-based privacy preserving approach automatically calculates privacy budget for each individual. Our experimental evaluations show a significant trade-off of sufficient privacy protection and data utility.