引用自己論文的問題...

Nature 上點出來期刊論文裡自我引用的問題 (這邊的自我引用包括了合作過的人):「Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database」。

開頭舉了一個極端的例子,Vaidyanathan 的自我引用比率高達 94%,而學界的中位數是 12.7%,感覺是有某種制度造成的行為?

Vaidyanathan, a computer scientist at the Vel Tech R&D Institute of Technology, a privately run institute, is an extreme example: he has received 94% of his citations from himself or his co-authors up to 2017, according to a study in PLoS Biology this month. He is not alone. The data set, which lists around 100,000 researchers, shows that at least 250 scientists have amassed more than 50% of their citations from themselves or their co-authors, while the median self-citation rate is 12.7%.

會想要提是因為想到當年 Google 的經典演算法 PageRank,就是在處理這個問題... 把 paper 換成 webpage 而已。

把 npm 的 dependency 當作 PageRank 的資料來源,分析 npm 目前的生態...

在「An Analysis of the JavaScript Package Ecosystem npm」這篇看到作者把 npm 的 dependency 當作資料來源,計算出 npm 的 PageRank:

可以看到 Underscore.js 的 PageRank 一直都維持在第一位... 這個方法頗有趣的,不知道有沒有其他語言的 :o

Google PageRank 資料將不再公開

Google 將不再對外公開 PageRank 資訊:「Google has confirmed it is removing Toolbar PageRank」與「RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web」。

PageRank 資訊是透過 Google Toolbar 再反向被挖出來的,而 Toolbar 上的資訊將會拿掉,也預期對應的 API 應該也會關閉:

Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing Toolbar PageRank. That means that if you are using a tool or a browser that shows you PageRank data from Google, within the next couple weeks it will begin not to show any data at all.

Google 內部還是會用,只是不會公開了...

Google 發表計算網頁真實性的演算法 (Knowledge-Based Trust)

Slashdot 上看到 Google 發表了計算網頁真實性的演算法,Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT):「Google Wants To Rank Websites Based On Facts Not Links」,原始的論文 PDF 檔案可以在「Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources」這邊取得。

論文本身的原理不難懂 (其實方法相當有趣),主要是給出了三個貢獻。

首先是能夠區分是取出資訊的方法有問題 (extract 的演算法不夠好),或是網站本身就給出錯誤的資訊:

Our main contribution is a more sophisticated probabilistic model, which can distinguish between two main sources of error: incorrect facts on a page, and incorrect extractions made by an extraction system.

第二個則是在效能上的改善:

Our second contribution is a new method to adaptively decide the granularity of sources to work with: if a specific webpage yields too few triples, we may aggregate it with other webpages from the same website. Conversely, if a website has too many triples, we may split it into smaller ones, to avoid computational bottlenecks (Section 4).

第三個則是提出好的分散式演算法,可以螞蟻雄兵計算出來:

The third contribution of this paper is a detailed, large-scale evaluation of the performance of our model.

KBT 並不是要取代 PageRank,而是跟 PageRank 互相配合,可以有效打擊內容農場 (Content farm) 這類網站,畢竟 PageRank 的假設在一般的狀況下是有邏輯的。

在「High PageRank but low KBT (top-left corner)」這段講到了這件事情:

We consider the 15 gossip websites listed in [16]. Among them, 14 have a PageRank among top 15% of the websites, since such websites are often popular. However, for all of them the KBT are in the bottom 50%; in other words, they are considered less trustworthy than half of the websites. Another kind of websites that often get low KBT are forum websites.

再找時間細讀其他類似的演算法...