Exploring the State of the Art in Legal QA Systems

Answering questions related to the legal domain is a complex task, primarily due to the intricate nature and diverse range of legal document systems. Providing an accurate answer to a legal query typically necessitates specialized knowledge in the relevant domain, which makes this task all the more challenging, even for human experts. QA (Question answering systems) are designed to generate answers to questions asked in human languages. They use natural language processing to understand questions and search through information to find relevant answers. QA has various practical applications, including customer service, education, research, and cross-lingual communication. However, they face challenges such as improving natural language understanding and handling complex and ambiguous questions. Answering questions related to the legal domain is a complex task, primarily due to the intricate nature and diverse range of legal document systems. Providing an accurate answer to a legal query typically necessitates specialized knowledge in the relevant domain, which makes this task all the more challenging, even for human experts. At this time, there is a lack of surveys that discuss legal question answering. To address this problem, we provide a comprehensive survey that reviews 14 benchmark datasets for question-answering in the legal field as well as presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art Legal Question Answering deep learning models. We cover the different architectures and techniques used in these studies and the performance and limitations of these models. Moreover, we have established a public GitHub repository where we regularly upload the most recent articles, open data, and source code. The repository is available at: \url{https://github.com/abdoelsayed2016/Legal-Question-Answering-Review}

Framework for opinion as a service on review data of customer using semantics based analytics

At Opinion mining plays a significant role in representing the original and unbiased perception of the products/services. However, there are various challenges associated with performing an effective opinion mining in the present era of distributed computing system with dynamic behaviour of users. Existing approaches is more laborious towards extracting knowledge from the reviews of user which is further subjected to various rounds of operation with complex procedures. The proposed system addresses the problem by introducing a novel framework called as Opinion-as-a-Service which is meant for direct utilization of the extracted knowledge in most user friendly manner. The proposed system introduces a set of three sequential algorithm that performs aggregated of incoming stream of opinion data, performing indexing, followed by applying semantics for extracting knowledge. The study outcome shows that proposed system is better than existing system in mining performance

Securing Unity and Reverence: Chinese ontological security across its maritime and frontier disputes

This thesis draws on the Constructivist school of International Relations, applying the theory of ontological security to explain diverging patterns of behaviour by China across its maritime and frontier territorial disputes. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, these patterns have seen China consistently interact with states adjacent to its frontiers to settle disputes peacefully, with occasional instances of conflict. Conversely, in its maritime disputes, though varying in its levels of aggression and cooperation, China has resolutely refused to settle with disputant states. In examining these varying behaviours, it is argued that differences derive from the differing ability of China to secure its national identity between the two types of dispute. Analysing the examples of the Sino-Indian dispute and border war, the Burmese border agreement, and the ongoing South China Sea disputes, periods of conflict and settlement in these disputes are compared to changing manifestations of Chinese national identity. What results is an illustration of frontier border settlement contributing to the security of China’s identity as a unified, pluralistic nation state. The absence of national minority populations in relation to maritime disputes alternatively sees continued interaction in these disputes as securing China’s identity as the superior ‘Central Kingdom’ relative to peripheral South East Asian states, while offering little incentive for settlement. Both types of dispute can be viewed as contributing to the biographical narrative of China’s ‘Century of Humiliation’. This thesis presents a significant departure from existing studies of China’s disputes, predominantly undertaken from a Realist perspective. Additionally, it expands on existing Constructivist literature by demonstrating how national identity can result in a range of behaviours across a range of differing disputes, further validating the emerging ontological security approach within International Relations scholarship

The dynamic predictive power of company comparative networks for stock sector performance

As economic integration and business connections increase, companies actively interact with each other in the market in cooperative or competitive relationships. To understand the market network structure with company relationships and to investigate the impacts of market network structure on stock sector performance, we propose the construct of a company comparative network based on public media data and sector interaction metrics based on the company network. All the market network structure metrics are integrated into a vector autoregression model with stock sector return and risk. Several findings demonstrate the dynamic relationships that exist between sector interactions and sector performance. First, sector interaction metrics constructed based on company networks are significant leading indicators of sector performance. Interestingly, the interactions between sectors have greater predictive power than those within sectors. Second, compared with the company closeness network, the company comparative network, which labels the cooperative or competitive relationships between companies, is a better construct to understand and predict sector interactions and performance. Third, competitive company interactions between sectors impact sector performance in a slower manner than cooperative company interactions. The findings enrich financial studies regarding asset pricing by providing additional explanations of company/sector interactions and insights into company management using industry-level strategies

Influencer analysis on social networks

Along with the growth of social networks, social marketing, and influencer marketing, the analysis of influencers, especially the analysis of micro-influencers on social networks, becomes an interesting topic that attracts many researchers as well as industry organizations. An ideal micro-influencer is a user who is able to create positive content relevance to the business and get high engagement from his/her audience, continuously and consistently. Various approaches have been suggested for this problem but there is still a research gap that no effort meets these requirements yet. Resolving this gap is the main aim of this study. This study proposes a novel approach for identifying influencers on social networks using three metrics including the amplification factor to evaluate the information propagation, the passion point to measure the user's preference for a brand or its products and services, and the content creation score to estimate user's ability in creating contents on a social network. The main hypothesis is that the approach using these metrics will propose high-performing influencers. The study has been compared with some recent relevant methods as the baseline. It is also tested in the real world and the experiment shows that the proposed method's influencers deliver a react-to-purchase conversion rate's efficiency and a good return on investment in the influencer marketing campaign.Spolu s růstem sociálních sítí, sociálního marketingu a influencer marketingu se analýza influencerů, obzvlášť analýza mikroinfluencerů na sociálních sítích se stává zajímavým předmětem, který přitahuje mnoho výzkumníků i organizací různých oborů. Ideálním mikroinfluencerem je člověk, který dokáže vytvořit pozitivní obsah,relevantní pro danou organizaci a je schopen získat od svého publika neustálou a konstantní míru angažovanosti. Pro tento předmět byly navrženy různé metody mikroinfluencerů, ale studie ukazují, že stále existuje mezera ve výzkumu, která dosud nesplňovala tyto požadavky. Hlavním cílem této práce je vyřešení zmiňované mezery navrhující efektivní metody sociálního marketingu se zapojením influenecerů. Tato studie navrhuje nový přístup k identifikaci influencerů na sociálních sítích pomocí tří následujících metrik: amplifikační faktory pro ohodnocení propagovaného obsahu, oblast, o kterou je spotřebitelský zájem k určení zájmu daného uživatele u značky a jejich produktů a služeb, skóre tvorby obsahu pro odhad schopnosti uživatele vytvářet obsah na sociální síti. Hlavní hypotézou je, že metody využívající těchto metrik dokážou navrhnout kvalitní influencery, kteří podávají vysoký výkon. Tato studie byla porovnána se současnými metodami relevantní k této studii. Experimentální výsledky ukazují, že influenceři navržení tímto nástrojem, přinášejí efektivnější konverzní poměr a vyšší návratnost investice influencer marketingové kampaně.460 - Katedra informatikyvyhově

Ontology model for zakat hadith knowledge based on causal relationship, semantic relatedness and suggestion extraction

Hadith is the second most important source used by all Muslims. However, semantic ambiguity in the hadith raises issues such as misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and misjudgement of the hadith’s content. How to tackle the semantic ambiguity will be focused on this research (RQ). The Zakat hadith data should be expressed semantically by changing the surface-level semantics to a deeper sense of the intended meaning. This can be achieved using an ontology model covering three main aspects (i.e., semantic relationship extraction, causal relationship representation, and suggestion extraction). This study aims to resolve the semantic ambiguity in hadith, particularly in the Zakat topic by proposing a semantic approach to resolve semantic ambiguity, representing causal relationships in the Zakat ontology model, proposing methods to extract suggestion polarity in hadith, and building the ontology model for Zakat topic. The selection of the Zakat topic is based on the survey findings that respondents still lack knowledge and understanding of the Zakat process. Four hadith book types (i.e., Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, and Sunan Ibn Majah) that was covering 334 concept words and 247 hadiths were analysed. The Zakat ontology modelling cover three phases which are Preliminary study, source selection and data collection, data pre-processing and analysis, and development and evaluation of ontology models. Domain experts in language, Zakat hadith, and ontology have evaluated the Zakat ontology and identified that 85% of Zakat concept was defined correctly. The Ontology Usability Scale was used to evaluate the final ontology model. An expert in ontology development evaluated the ontology that was developed in Protégé OWL, while 80 respondents evaluated the ontology concepts developed in PHP systems. The evaluation results show that the Zakat ontology has resolved the issue of ambiguity and misunderstanding of the Zakat process in the Zakat hadith. The Zakat ontology model also allows practitioners in Natural language processing (NLP), hadith, and ontology to extract Zakat hadith based on the representation of a reusable formal model, as well as causal relationships and the suggestion polarity of the Zakat hadith

Affective Societies: Key Concepts

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts engender insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Each chapters provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook toward future research

Conceptualising the panic buying phenomenon during COVID-19 as an affective assemblage

Purpose-This study aims to conceptualise the panic buying behaviour of consumers in the UK during the novel COVID-19 crisis, using the assemblage approach as it is non-deterministic and relational and affords new ways of understanding the phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach-The study undertakes a digital ethnography approach and content analysis of Twitter data. A total of 6,803 valid tweets were collected over the perio

“A question of bank notes, cars, and houses!” Matchmaking and the Moral Economy of Love in Urban China

Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance