The goal of graph summarization is to represent large graphs in a structured and compact way. A graph summary based on equivalence classes preserves pre-defined features of a graph's vertex within a $k$-hop neighborhood such as the vertex labels and edge labels. Based on these neighborhood characteristics, the vertex is assigned to an equivalence class. The calculation of the assigned equivalence class must be a permutation invariant operation on the pre-defined features. This is achieved by sorting on the feature values, e. g., the edge labels, which is computationally expensive, and subsequently hashing the result. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) fulfill the permutation invariance requirement. We formulate the problem of graph summarization as a subgraph classification task on the root vertex of the $k$-hop neighborhood. We adapt different GNN architectures, both based on the popular message-passing protocol and alternative approaches, to perform the structural graph summarization task. We compare different GNNs with a standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Bloom filter as non-neural method. For our experiments, we consider four popular graph summary models on a large web graph. This resembles challenging multi-class vertex classification tasks with the numbers of classes ranging from $576$ to multiple hundreds of thousands. Our results show that the performance of GNNs are close to each other. In three out of four experiments, the non-message-passing GraphMLP model outperforms the other GNNs. The performance of the standard MLP is extraordinary good, especially in the presence of many classes. Finally, the Bloom filter outperforms all neural architectures by a large margin, except for the dataset with the fewest number of $576$ classes.

Traditional approaches for data anonymization consider relational data and textual data independently. We propose rx-anon, an anonymization approach for heterogeneous semi-structured documents composed of relational and textual attributes. We map sensitive terms extracted from the text to the structured data. This allows us to use concepts like k-anonymity to generate a joined, privacy-preserved version of the heterogeneous data input. We introduce the concept of redundant sensitive information to consistently anonymize the heterogeneous data. To control the influence of anonymization over unstructured textual data versus structured data attributes, we introduce a modified, parameterized Mondrian algorithm. The parameter $\lambda$ allows to give different weight on the relational and textual attributes during the anonymization process. We evaluate our approach with two real-world datasets using a Normalized Certainty Penalty score, adapted to the problem of jointly anonymizing relational and textual data. The results show that our approach is capable of reducing information loss by using the tuning parameter to control the Mondrian partitioning while guaranteeing k-anonymity for relational attributes as well as for sensitive terms. As rx-anon is a framework approach, it can be reused and extended by other anonymization algorithms, privacy models, and textual similarity metrics.

Modern multi-document summarization (MDS) methods are based on transformer architectures. They generate state of the art summaries, but lack explainability. We focus on graph-based transformer models for MDS as they gained recent popularity. We aim to improve the explainability of the graph-based MDS by analyzing their attention weights. In a graph-based MDS such as GraphSum, vertices represent the textual units, while the edges form some similarity graph over the units. We compare GraphSum's performance utilizing different textual units, i. e., sentences versus paragraphs, on two news benchmark datasets, namely WikiSum and MultiNews. Our experiments show that paragraph-level representations provide the best summarization performance. Thus, we subsequently focus oAnalysisn analyzing the paragraph-level attention weights of GraphSum's multi-heads and decoding layers in order to improve the explainability of a transformer-based MDS model. As a reference metric, we calculate the ROUGE scores between the input paragraphs and each sentence in the generated summary, which indicate source origin information via text similarity. We observe a high correlation between the attention weights and this reference metric, especially on the the later decoding layers of the transformer architecture. Finally, we investigate if the generated summaries follow a pattern of positional bias by extracting which paragraph provided the most information for each generated summary. Our results show that there is a high correlation between the position in the summary and the source origin.

Current graph neural networks (GNNs) are promising, especially when the entire graph is known for training. However, it is not yet clear how to efficiently train GNNs on temporal graphs, where new vertices, edges, and even classes appear over time. We face two challenges: First, shifts in the label distribution (including the appearance of new labels), which require adapting the model. Second, the growth of the graph, which makes it, at some point, infeasible to train over all vertices and edges. We address these issues by applying a sliding window technique, i.e., we incrementally train GNNs on limited window sizes and analyze their performance. For our experiments, we have compiled three new temporal graph datasets based on scientific publications and evaluate isotropic and anisotropic GNN architectures. Our results show that both GNN types provide good results even for a window size of just 1 time step. With window sizes of 3 to 4 time steps, GNNs achieve at least 95% accuracy compared to using the entire timeline of the graph. With window sizes of 6 or 8, at least 99% accuracy could be retained. These discoveries have direct consequences for training GNNs over temporal graphs. We provide the code (https://github.com/Incremental-GNNs) and the newly compiled datasets (https://zenodo.org/record/3764770) for reproducibility and reuse.

We present multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendation and evaluate them on two different tasks: citation recommendation and subject label recommendation. We analyze the effects of adversarial regularization, sparsity, and different input modalities. By conducting 408 experiments, we show that adversarial regularization consistently improves the performance of autoencoders for recommendation. We demonstrate, however, that the two tasks differ in the semantics of item co-occurrence in the sense that item co-occurrence resembles relatedness in case of citations, yet implies diversity in case of subject labels. Our results reveal that supplying the partial item set as input is only helpful, when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness. When facing a new recommendation task it is therefore crucial to consider the semantics of item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate model.

Large-scale graph data in real-world applications is often not static but dynamic, i. e., new nodes and edges appear over time. Current graph convolution approaches are promising, especially, when all the graph's nodes and edges are available during training. When unseen nodes and edges are inserted after training, it is not yet evaluated whether up-training or re-training from scratch is preferable. We construct an experimental setup, in which we insert previously unseen nodes and edges after training and conduct a limited amount of inference epochs. In this setup, we compare adapting pretrained graph neural networks against retraining from scratch. Our results show that pretrained models yield high accuracy scores on the unseen nodes and that pretraining is preferable over retraining from scratch. Our experiments represent a first step to evaluate and develop truly online variants of graph neural networks.