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The Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA) is a fastalgorithm for community detection. This algorithm has proved itsefficiency and scalability even in large social networks. It is basedonly on updating the label of each node by the most frequentlabel within its neighbors. However, in case of many maximallabels, a random choice is made. This reduces the performanceof the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new version ofLPA, called Link Strength-based LPA (LS-LPA), that addressesthis issue. In our approach, we rank labels according to the linkstrength of each neighbor. The strength of links is quantified viak-neighborhood which includes common neighbors and multi-stepneighbors. Experiments on different networks with different sizesshow that our solution improves LPA's performance significantly.

The need for IT skills assessment and certification is indisputable for both persons and institutions. Thus, the recourse to automatic assessment systems able to answer the strong demand of such assessment or certification is inevitable. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically assess IT skills in authentic context. This approach relies on the potential of XML format and its related efficient technologies which allow the extraction of information from XML documents. We divide our assessment approach into two steps. In the first, we transform both Students documents and answers model to an intermediate representation using XML format for which some preprocessing is done. In the second step, we extract from the teacher's correct document the required skills as paths of the tree representation of the XML document. In order to assign a mark we measure similarities between these paths and those of the student document. We have conducted an experimental study to validate our approach. Thus, we have developped a tool based on the proposed approach to automatically assess Word Processing skills using Microsoft Office Word program. The evaluation of our tool is performed on a real exam with one hundred students. The results show the accuracy and the suitability of this solution for assessing IT skills.