SEEC: Semantic Vector Federation across Edge Computing Environments

Semantic vector embedding techniques have proven useful in learning semantic representations of data across multiple domains. A key application enabled by such techniques is the ability to measure semantic similarity between given data samples and find data most similar to a given sample. State-of-the-art embedding approaches assume all data is available on a single site. However, in many business settings, data is distributed across multiple edge locations and cannot be aggregated due to a variety of constraints. Hence, the applicability of state-of-the-art embedding approaches is limited to freely shared datasets, leaving out applications with sensitive or mission-critical data. This paper addresses this gap by proposing novel unsupervised algorithms called \emph{SEEC} for learning and applying semantic vector embedding in a variety of distributed settings. Specifically, for scenarios where multiple edge locations can engage in joint learning, we adapt the recently proposed federated learning techniques for semantic vector embedding. Where joint learning is not possible, we propose novel semantic vector translation algorithms to enable semantic query across multiple edge locations, each with its own semantic vector-space. Experimental results on natural language as well as graph datasets show that this may be a promising new direction.

SENSE: Semantically Enhanced Node Sequence Embedding

Effectively capturing graph node sequences in the form of vector embeddings is critical to many applications. We achieve this by (i) first learning vector embeddings of single graph nodes and (ii) then composing them to compactly represent node sequences. Specifically, we propose SENSE-S (Semantically Enhanced Node Sequence Embedding - for Single nodes), a skip-gram based novel embedding mechanism, for single graph nodes that co-learns graph structure as well as their textual descriptions. We demonstrate that SENSE-S vectors increase the accuracy of multi-label classification tasks by up to 50% and link-prediction tasks by up to 78% under a variety of scenarios using real datasets. Based on SENSE-S, we next propose generic SENSE to compute composite vectors that represent a sequence of nodes, where preserving the node order is important. We prove that this approach is efficient in embedding node sequences, and our experiments on real data confirm its high accuracy in node order decoding.