Abstract: The construction of the ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) process is one of the biggest tasks of building a warehouse. ETL processes area has little research, because of its difficulty and lack of formal model for representing ETL activities that map the incoming data from different sources to be in a suitable format for loading into the warehouse. A main problem in data warehousing of multidimensional text databases is to deal with the content in its text cells. In this paper, we propose a model for textual data warehouse ETL processes called ETL-Text. It combines classical data warehousing tasks, information retrieval (IR) techniques, and information processing in particular the language modeling. Our approach is based on Wikipedia as external knowledge source to extract the semantics of the textual documents. To validate our approach, we develop a prototype composed of several processing modules that illustrate the different ETL-Text processes. Also, we use the 20 Newsgroups corpus to perform our experimentation.

Abstract: The objective of the thesis is to explore how complex data can be treated using unsupervised machine learning techniques, in which additional information is injected to guide the exploratory process. Starting from specific problems, our contributions take into account the different dimensions of the complex data: their nature (image, text), the additional information attached to the data (labels, structure, concept ontologies) and the temporal dimension. A special attention is given to data representation and how additional information can be leveraged to improve this representation.

---------

Abstract: Online social networks play a major role in the spread of information at very large scale and it becomes essential to provide means to analyze this phenomenon. Analyzing information diffusion proves to be a challenging task since the raw data produced by users of these networks are a flood of ideas, recommendations, opinions, etc. The aim of this PhD work is to help in the understanding of this phenomenon. So far, our contributions are the following: (i) a survey of developments in the field; (ii) T-BaSIC, a graph-based model for information diffusion prediction; (iii) SONDY, an open source platform that helps understanding social network users' interests and activity by providing emerging topics and events detection as well as network analysis functionalities.

---------