VMEXT: A Visualization Tool for Mathematical Expression Trees

Mathematical expressions can be represented as a tree consisting of terminal symbols, such as identifiers or numbers (leaf nodes), and functions or operators (non-leaf nodes). Expression trees are an important mechanism for storing and processing mathematical expressions as well as the most frequently used visualization of the structure of mathematical expressions. Typically, researchers and practitioners manually visualize expression trees using general-purpose tools. This approach is laborious, redundant, and error-prone. Manual visualizations represent a user's notion of what the markup of an expression should be, but not necessarily what the actual markup is. This paper presents VMEXT - a free and open source tool to directly visualize expression trees from parallel MathML. VMEXT simultaneously visualizes the presentation elements and the semantic structure of mathematical expressions to enable users to quickly spot deficiencies in the Content MathML markup that does not affect the presentation of the expression. Identifying such discrepancies previously required reading the verbose and complex MathML markup. VMEXT also allows one to visualize similar and identical elements of two expressions. Visualizing expression similarity can support support developers in designing retrieval approaches and enable improved interaction concepts for users of mathematical information retrieval systems. We demonstrate VMEXT's visualizations in two web-based applications. The first application presents the visualizations alone. The second application shows a possible integration of the visualizations in systems for mathematical knowledge management and mathematical information retrieval. The application converts LaTeX input to parallel MathML, computes basic similarity measures for mathematical expressions, and visualizes the results using VMEXT.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, Intelligent Computer Mathematics - 10th International Conference CICM 2017, Edinburgh, UK, July 17-21, 2017, Proceeding

Improving Word Association Measures in Repetitive Corpora with Context Similarity Weighting

Peer reviewe

The paradox of collaboration

Collaboration is a modern mantra of the neoliberal university and part of a discourse allied to research performativity quantitatively measured via co-authorship. Yet, beyond the metrics and the positive rhetoric collaboration is a complex and paradoxical concept. Academic staff are exhorted to collaborate, particularly in respect to research activities, but their career and promotion prospects depend on evaluations of their individual achievements in developing an independent body of work and in obtaining research funding. This central paradox, among others, is explored through analysing collaboration as a moral continuum. At one end of this continuum are other-regarding interpretations of collaboration involving the free sharing of ideas for the common good of scientific advance (collaboration-as-intellectual generosity), nurturing the development of less experienced colleagues (collaboration-as-mentoring) and disseminating knowledge claims via a range of scholarly platforms (collaboration-as-communication). However, other forms of collaboration are essentially self-regarding illustrating the pressures of performativity via increased research output (collaboration-as-performativity), through practices that reinforce the power of established networks (collaboration-as-cronyism) and the exploitation of junior researchers by those in positions of power and seniority (collaboration-as-parasitism). Whilst collaboration has always been at the heart of academic labour its paradoxes illustrate how individual and collective goals can come into conflict through the measurement of academic performance and the way in which such audits have perverted the meaning of collaboration

Improving Academic Plagiarism Detection for STEM Documents by Analyzing Mathematical Content and Citations

Identifying academic plagiarism is a pressing task for educational and research institutions, publishers, and funding agencies. Current plagiarism detection systems reliably find instances of copied and moderately reworded text. However, reliably detecting concealed plagiarism, such as strong paraphrases, translations, and the reuse of nontextual content and ideas is an open research problem. In this paper, we extend our prior research on analyzing mathematical content and academic citations. Both are promising approaches for improving the detection of concealed academic plagiarism primarily in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). We make the following contributions: i) We present a two-stage detection process that combines similarity assessments of mathematical content, academic citations, and text. ii) We introduce new similarity measures that consider the order of mathematical features and outperform the measures in our prior research. iii) We compare the effectiveness of the math-based, citation-based, and text-based detection approaches using confirmed cases of academic plagiarism. iv) We demonstrate that the combined analysis of math-based and citation-based content features allows identifying potentially suspicious cases in a collection of 102K STEM documents. Overall, we show that analyzing the similarity of mathematical content and academic citations is a striking supplement for conventional text-based detection approaches for academic literature in the STEM disciplines.Comment: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2019. The data and code of our study are openly available at https://purl.org/hybridP

On The Current State of Scholarly Retrieval Systems

The enormous growth in the size of scholarly literature makes its retrieval challenging. To address this challenge, researchers and practitioners developed several solutions. These include indexing solutions e.g. ResearchGate, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP) etc., research paper repositories e.g. arXiv.org, Zenodo, etc., digital libraries, scholarly retrieval systems, e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar etc., digital libraries, and publisher websites. Among these, the scholarly retrieval systems, the main focus of this article, employ efficient information retrieval techniques and other search tactics. However, they are still limited in meeting the user information needs to the fullest. This brief review paper is an attempt to identify the main reasons behind this failure by reporting the current state of scholarly retrieval systems. The findings of this study suggest that the existing scholarly retrieval systems should differentiate scholarly users from ordinary users and identify their needs. Citation network analysis should be made an essential part of the retrieval system to improve the search precision and accuracy. The paper also identifies several research challenges and opportunities that may lead to better scholarly retrieval systems

The use of confidentiality and anonymity protections as a cover for fraudulent fieldwork data

Qualitative fieldwork research on sensitive topics sometimes requires that interviewees be granted confidentiality and anonymity. When qualitative researchers later publish their findings, they must ensure that any statements obtained during fieldwork interviews cannot be traced back to the interviewees. Given these protections to interviewees, the integrity of the published findings cannot usually be verified or replicated by third parties, and the scholarly community must trust the word of qualitative researchers when they publish their results. This trust is fundamentally abused, however, when researchers publish articles reporting qualitative fieldwork data that they never collected. Using only publicly available information, I argue that a 2017 article in an Elsevier foreign policy and international relations journal presents anonymised fieldwork interviews that could not have occurred as described. As an exercise in post-publication peer review (PPPR), this paper examines the evidence that calls into question the reliability of the putative fieldwork quotations. I show further that the 2017 article is not a unique case. The anonymity and confidentiality protections common in some areas of research create an ethical problem: the protections necessary for obtaining research data can be used as a cover to hide substandard research practices as well as research misconduct

Plagiarism as an axiom of legal similarity: a critical and interdisciplinary study of the Italian author's right and the UK copyright systems on the moral right of attribution

Plagiarism may have accompanied acts of creation, either endorsing or contradicting them. Esteemed as a general rule of literature or censured as literary larceny, it embodies the disavowal of authorship in the intellectual works of others and thus breaches their right to be acknowledged as authors, while also feasibly deceiving the public and, in any case, contradicting the universal rule of creative imitation. Historically entangled with the concepts of counterfeiting and piracy, it only later reached an autonomous collocation as a violation of the moral right of attribution. Placed in the broadest context of copyright law, it yet struggles against its confinement to a strict legal characterisation, given its colourful appearance and inherent inconsistency according to the type of works or field of knowledge to which it relates, thus refuting any unyielding interpretation. In such a mutable context, the purpose of this research, which revolves around the systems of Italy and the United Kingdom, is to explore a view of plagiarism that appreciates the different instances in which a genuine borrowing or a deceitful practice appear, considering the dimension of copyright infringement, but also looking at other possible legal and non-legal means of construal. Given these premises, an accurate exploration of the phenomenon requires a preliminary consideration of the manifold literature on the subject, which increasingly progresses together with the development of technology and social practices. Furthermore, its literal absence in statutory law does not impede finding a collocation in the context of the judiciary, which is analysed with reference to the legal systems of both Italy and the United Kingdom. This does not infer that courts deliver a flawless and unfailing interpretation of plagiarism. On the contrary, a careful reading of the ruling confirms that the narrow realm of copyright law is shrinking. However, the unpredictability of the statutory and judicial approach towards plagiarism may also be welcomed as an attempt by the law to acknowledge the difficulty to appraise its complexity. Therefore, the present study openly adopts an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis that may help to describe its controversial legal breadth while also possibly unravelling any other principled range

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today