The betweenness centrality index is essential in the analysis of social networks, but costly to compute. Currently, the fastest known algorithms require #(n ) time and #(n ) space, where n is the number of actors in the network.

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Centrality indices are an essential concept in network analysis. For those based on shortest-path distances the computation is at least quadratic in the number of nodes, since it usually involves solving the single-source shortest-paths (SSSP) problem from every node. Therefore, exact computation is infeasible for many large networks of interest today. Centrality scores can be estimated, however, from a limited number of SSSP computations. We present results from an experimental study of the quality of such estimates under various selection strategies for the source vertices.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) has been a long-standing research objective for natural language processing. In this paper we are concerned with developing graph-based unsupervised algorithms for alleviating the data requirements for large scale WSD. Under this framework, finding the right sense for a given word amounts to identifying the most “important ” node among the set of graph nodes representing its senses. We propose a variety of measures that analyze the connectivity of graph structures, thereby identifying the most relevant word senses. We assess their performance on standard datasets, and show that the best measures perform comparably to state-of-the-art. 1

Word sense disambiguation (WSD), the task of identifying the intended meanings (senses) of words in context, has been a long-standing research objective for natural language processing. In this paper we are concerned with graph-based algorithms for large-scale WSD. Under this framework, finding the right sense for a given word amounts to identifying the most “important ” node among the set of graph nodes representing its senses. We introduce a graph-based WSD algorithm which has few parameters and does not require sense annotated data for training. Using this algorithm, we investigate several measures of graph connectivity with the aim of identifying those best suited for WSD. We also examine how the chosen lexicon and its connectivity influences WSD performance. We report results on standard data sets, and show that our graph-based approach performs comparably to the state of the art.

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Background: The elucidation of whole-cell regulatory, metabolic, interaction and other biological networks generates the need for a meaningful ranking of network elements. Centrality analysis ranks network elements according to their importance within the network structure and different centrality measures focus on different importance concepts. Central elements of biological networks have been found to be, for example, essential for viability. Results: CentiBiN (Centralities in Biological Networks) is a tool for the computation and exploration of centralities in biological networks such as protein-protein interaction networks. It computes 17 different centralities for directed or undirected networks, ranging from local measures, that is, measures that only consider the direct neighbourhood of a network element, to global measures. CentiBiN supports the exploration of the centrality distribution by visualising central elements within the network and provides several layout mechanisms for the automatic generation of graphical representations of a network. It supports different input formats, especially for biological networks, and the export of the computed centralities to other tools. Conclusions: CentiBiN helps systems biology researchers to identify crucial elements of biological networks. CentiBiN including a user guide and example data sets is available free of charge at

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Centrality indices are an important tool in network analysis, and many of them are derived from the set of all shortest paths of the underlying graph. The so-called betweenness centrality index is essential for the analysis of social networks, but most costly to compute. Currently, the fastest known algorithms require Theta(n³) time and Theta(n²) space, where n is the number of vertices. Motivated by the fast-growing need to compute centrality indices on large, yet very sparse, networks, new algorithms for betweenness are introduced in this paper. They require O(n + m) space and run in O(n(m + n)) or O(n(m + n log n)) time on unweighted or weighted graphs, respectively, where m is the number of edges. Since these algorithms simply augment single-source shortest-paths computations, all standard centrality indices based on shortest paths can now be computed uniformly in one framework. Experimental evidence is provided that this substantially increases the range of network...

The random walk is fundamental to modeling dynamic processes on networks. Metrics based on the random walk have been used in many applications from image processing to Web page ranking. However, how appropriate are random walks to modeling and analyzing social networks? We argue that unlike a random walk, which conserves the quantity diffusing on a network, many interesting social phenomena, such as the spread of information or disease on a social network, are fundamentally non-conservative. When an individual infects her neighbor with a virus, the total amount of infection increases. We classify diffusion processes as conservative and non-conservative and show how these differences impact the choice of metrics used for network analysis, as well as our understanding of network structure and behavior. We show that Alpha-Centrality, which mathematically describes non-conservative diffusion, leads to new insights into the behavior of spreading processes on networks. We give a scalable approximate algorithm for computing the Alpha-Centrality in a massive graph. We validate our approach on real-world online social networks of Digg. We show that a non-conservative metric, such as Alpha-Centrality, produces better agreement with empirical measure of influence than conservative metrics, such as PageRank. We hope that our investigation will inspire further exploration into the realms of conservative and non-conservative metrics in social network analysis. 1.