Building professional discourse in emerging markets: Language, context and the challenge of sensemaking

Using ethnographic evidence from the former Soviet republics, this article examines a relatively new and mainly unobserved in the International Business (IB) literature phenomenon of communication disengagement that manifests itself in many emerging markets. We link it to the deficiencies of the local professional business discourse rooted in language limitations reflecting lack of experience with the market economy. This hampers cognitive coherence between foreign and local business entities, adding to the liability of foreignness as certain instances of professional experience fail to find adequate linguistic expression, and complicates cross-cultural adjustments causing multi-national companies (MNCs) financial losses. We contribute to the IB literature by examining cross-border semantic sensemaking through a retrospectively constructed observational study. We argue that a relative inadequacy of the national professional idiom is likely to remain a feature of business environment in post-communist economies for some time and therefore should be factored into business strategies of MNCs. Consequently, we recommend including discursive hazards in the risk evaluation of international projects

TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF

Ontologies and Information Extraction

This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which becomes a major application domain for IE

Designing a Controlled Medical Vocabulary Server: The VOSER Project

journal articleBiomedical Informatic

Combining Unsupervised, Supervised, and Rule-based Algorithms for Text Mining of Electronic Health Records - A Clinical Decision Support System for Identifying and Classifying Allergies of Concern for Anesthesia During Surgery

Undisclosed allergic reactions of patients are a major risk when undertaking surgeries in hospitals. We present our early experience and preliminary findings for a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) being developed in a Norwegian Hospital Trust. The system incorporates unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms in combination with rule-based algorithms to identify and classify allergies of concern for anesthesia during surgery. Our approach is novel in that it utilizes unsupervised machine learning to analyze large corpora of narratives to automatically build a clinical language model containing words and phrases of which meanings and relative meanings are also learnt. It further implements a semi-automatic annotation scheme for efficient and interactive machine-learning, which to a large extent eliminates the substantial manual annotation (of clinical narratives) effort necessary for the training of supervised algorithms. Validation of system performance was performed through comparing allergies identified by the CDSS with a manual reference standard

Present and Future Languages – How Innovation Has Changed Us

Given the growth in usage of online social networks, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, which rely on videos and images (such as photos) to relay information between connections, new intuitive languages, though not yet formally recognized, have emerged. We also herein give the example of a new language we have created – the Business Narrative Modelling Language (BNML) – which communicates business perspectives based on pictorial representations, supported by the narrative. Currently, the concept of language is linked to the use of words. We foresee that such a definition of language will have to change to include other structured forms of communication, resorting and relying on graphics, also. We give examples of BNML representations, with regards to two case studies we have performed, based on face-to-face interviews and company visits. At ExpressGlass technology plays an important role, while at Yazaki Saltano a remarkable team effort between Toyota suppliers is made evident, to create innovation

Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics: A Conceptual Framework

This paper furnishes a structuralist rhetorical semiotic conceptual framework for brand equity planning. The main source of brand equity that is employed for exemplification purposes is the advertising filmic text. The conceptual framework assumes as its general blueprint Greimas’s generativist model of the trajectory of signification. Structuralist operations and operations of rhetorical transformation are posited as the basis for the generation of superior brand associations. The conceptual model put forward challenges the Greimasian assumption that a depth semantic structure is reducible to a binarist rationale, while adopting a connectionist approach in the form of associative networks. At the same time, the proposed framework deviates from the application of conceptual graphs in textual semiotics, while portraying in the form of associative networks how the three strata of a brand’s trajectory of signification interact with view to generating brand associations