Identifying collaboration dynamics of bipartite author-topic networks with the influences of interest changes

Knowing driving factors and understanding researcher behaviors from the dynamics of collaborations over time offer some insights, i.e. help funding agencies in designing research grant policies. We present longitudinal network analysis on the observed collaborations through co-authorship over 15 years. Since co-authors possibly influence researchers to have interest changes, by focusing on researchers who could become the influencer, we propose a stochastic actor-oriented model of bipartite (two-mode) author-topic networks from article metadata. Information of scientific fields or topics of article contents, which could represent the interests of researchers, are often unavailable in the metadata. Topic absence issue differentiates this work with other studies on collaboration dynamics from article metadata of title-abstract and author properties. Therefore, our works also include procedures to extract and map clustered keywords as topic substitution of research interests. Then, the next step is to generate panel-waves of co-author networks and bipartite author-topic networks for the longitudinal analysis. The proposed model is used to find the driving factors of co-authoring collaboration with the focus on researcher behaviors in interest changes. This paper investigates the dynamics in an academic social network setting using selected metadata of publicly-available crawled articles in interrelated domains of "natural language processing" and "information extraction". Based on the evidence of network evolution, researchers have a conformed tendency to co-author behaviors in publishing articles and exploring topics. Our results indicate the processes of selection and influence in forming co-author ties contribute some levels of social pressure to researchers. Our findings also discussed on how the co-author pressure accelerates the changes of interests and behaviors of the researchers

Significance of Individualized Choice of Vocal Role-Model for Vocal Training of Young Singers

The article addresses one of vocal coaching problems – individualized approach for young singers when choosing vocal role-model. Author states that this topic is not sufficiently explored in Latvia. The interest has been stimulated by a performance heard by the author. This performance left the author deeply impacted and even created a desire to copy it. These first impressions were the basis on which a singer can build up his or her personal aesthetics or develop his vocal role-model. Article contains autobiographical artist experiences, interview with opera singer K. Zarinu and academic reports on intuition, empathy, idiomotorics. During the course of the research author has employed methodical materials, personal experience and observations from pedagogical practice

Identifying Hidden Communities of Interest with Topic-based Networks: A Case Study of the Community of Philosophers of Science (1930-2017)

Scientific networks are often investigated by means of citation analyses. Yet, interpretation of such networks in terms of semantic (and often disciplinary) content heavily depends on supplementary knowledge, notably about author research specialties. Similar situations arise more generally in many types of social networks whose semantic interpretation relies on supplementary information. Here, author community net-works are inferred from a topic model which provides direct insights into the semantic specificity of the identified “hidden communities of interest” (HCoI). Using a philosophy of science corpus of full-text articles (N=16,917), we investigate its underlying communities by measuring topic profile correlations be-tween authors. A diachronic perspective is built by modeling the research networks over different time-periods and mapping genealogical relationships be-tween communities. The results show a marked in-crease in philosophy of science communities over time and trace the progressive appearance of the specialization areas that structure the field today

Financial development and financing constraints - international evidence from the structural investment model

The relationship between the financial, and real sides of the economy has long been a topic of intense interest, and debate. The author provides microeconomic evidence that financial development aids growth, by reducing financing constraints that would otherwise restrict efficient firm investment. The author estimates a structural model, based on the Euler equation for investment, using firm-level data from forty countries. The results show a strong negative relationship between the extent of financial market development, and the sensitivity of investment, to the availability of internal funds (a proxy for financing constraints). Considering size effects, business cycles, and the legal environment as plausible alternative explanations, the author finds the results to be robust in all cases.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation,Banks&Banking Reform,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

The family business in the luxury and fashion market: an Italian - French market driver

The purpose of this thesis arises from a strong interest in companies operating in the luxury and fashion market and from the prospect that the author will continue his career in this market. Firstly, he analyses and attempts to define the broad topic of Family Businesses (FBs). Furthermore, the main topic is the family business phenomenon in the luxury and fashion context. The luxury-fashion business is very relevant in the global economic context and the FB model appears frequently in luxury-fashion companies; using the 4 Cs Miller and Le Breton-Miller model, he examines the reasons of this relationship. In the following, he describes the luxury and fashion market and the mutation that took place in the last 20 years with the several FBs acquisitions made by French conglomerates, analysing the causes and advantages of those mergers. Finally, he takes a closer look at the evolution of the Italian market, clarifying the difficult question: Why is not there an Italian LVMH/conglomerate despite the large presence of traditional luxury-fashion companies in Italy? One tricky question, two different issues as causes; at the end an additional recent topic that could be further researched in the future: will Italy be a potential main manufacturer for luxury and fashion market

Copula stochastic volatility in oil returns: approximate Bayesian computation with volatility prediction

Modeling the volatility of energy commodity returns has become a topic of increased interest in recent years, because of the important role it plays in today's economy. In this paper we propose a novel copula-based stochas- tic volatility model for energy commodity returns that allows for asymmetric volatility persistence. We employ Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), a powerful tool to make inferences and predictions for such highly-nonlinear model. We carry out two simulation studies to illustrate that ABC is an appropriate alternative to standard MCMC-based methods when the state transition process is challenging to implement. Finally, we model the volatility of WTI and Brent oil futures' returns with the proposed copula-based stochastic volatility model and show that such model outperforms symmetric alternatives in terms of in- and out-of-sample volatility prediction accuracThe first author acknowledges financial support from Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, grant number ECO2017–83255-C3–2-P. The second and third authors acknowledge financial support from Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PID2019–108311GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

Topic-Guided Sampling For Data-Efficient Multi-Domain Stance Detection

Stance Detection is concerned with identifying the attitudes expressed by an author towards a target of interest. This task spans a variety of domains ranging from social media opinion identification to detecting the stance for a legal claim. However, the framing of the task varies within these domains, in terms of the data collection protocol, the label dictionary and the number of available annotations. Furthermore, these stance annotations are significantly imbalanced on a per-topic and inter-topic basis. These make multi-domain stance detection a challenging task, requiring standardization and domain adaptation. To overcome this challenge, we propose $\textbf{T}$opic $\textbf{E}$fficient $\textbf{St}$anc$\textbf{E}$ $\textbf{D}$etection (TESTED), consisting of a topic-guided diversity sampling technique and a contrastive objective that is used for fine-tuning a stance classifier. We evaluate the method on an existing benchmark of $16$ datasets with in-domain, i.e. all topics seen and out-of-domain, i.e. unseen topics, experiments. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art with an average of $3.5$ F1 points increase in-domain, and is more generalizable with an averaged increase of $10.2$ F1 on out-of-domain evaluation while using $\leq10\%$ of the training data. We show that our sampling technique mitigates both inter- and per-topic class imbalances. Finally, our analysis demonstrates that the contrastive learning objective allows the model a more pronounced segmentation of samples with varying labels.Comment: ACL 2023 (Oral

Multidisciplinary Practices: Must a Change to Model Rule 5.4 Apply to All Law Firms Uniformly?

At the American Bar Association 2000 annual meeting, delegates voted to reinforce Model Rule 5.4, prohibiting fee sharing and partnership between lawyers and non-lawyers in arrangements known as multidisciplinary practices. Nevertheless, the topic continues to be controversial, primarily because the Big Five accounting firms are hiring an increasing number of lawyers and expanding into services that many argue constitute the practice of law. This Note asserts that applying Rule 5.4 uniformly to law firms of all sizes is not in the best interest of the small firms and solo practitioners that comprise the majority of the legal profession; such firms and their clients would benefit if small firms were allowed to participate in MDPs. The author suggests, however, that such firms not be permitted to partner with public auditing firms, whose duty to disclose client activity to the public conflicts with the lawyer\u27s duty to protect client confidence