Query Expansion of Zero-Hit Subject Searches: Using a Thesaurus in Conjunction with NLP Techniques

The focus of our study is zero-hit queries in keyword subject searches and the effort of increasing recall in these cases by reformulating and, then, expanding the initial queries using an external source of knowledge, namely a thesaurus. To this end, the objectives of this study are twofold. First, we perform the mapping of query terms to the thesaurus terms. Second, we use the matched terms to expand the user’s initial query by taking advantage of the thesaurus relations and implementing natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We report on the overall procedure and elaborate on key points and considerations of each step of the process

A framework for applying natural language processing in digital health interventions

BACKGROUND: Digital health interventions (DHIs) are poised to reduce target symptoms in a scalable, affordable, and empirically supported way. DHIs that involve coaching or clinical support often collect text data from 2 sources: (1) open correspondence between users and the trained practitioners supporting them through a messaging system and (2) text data recorded during the intervention by users, such as diary entries. Natural language processing (NLP) offers methods for analyzing text, augmenting the understanding of intervention effects, and informing therapeutic decision making. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to present a technical framework that supports the automated analysis of both types of text data often present in DHIs. This framework generates text features and helps to build statistical models to predict target variables, including user engagement, symptom change, and therapeutic outcomes. METHODS: We first discussed various NLP techniques and demonstrated how they are implemented in the presented framework. We then applied the framework in a case study of the Healthy Body Image Program, a Web-based intervention trial for eating disorders (EDs). A total of 372 participants who screened positive for an ED received a DHI aimed at reducing ED psychopathology (including binge eating and purging behaviors) and improving body image. These users generated 37,228 intervention text snippets and exchanged 4285 user-coach messages, which were analyzed using the proposed model. RESULTS: We applied the framework to predict binge eating behavior, resulting in an area under the curve between 0.57 (when applied to new users) and 0.72 (when applied to new symptom reports of known users). In addition, initial evidence indicated that specific text features predicted the therapeutic outcome of reducing ED symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: The case study demonstrates the usefulness of a structured approach to text data analytics. NLP techniques improve the prediction of symptom changes in DHIs. We present a technical framework that can be easily applied in other clinical trials and clinical presentations and encourage other groups to apply the framework in similar contexts

Ready, Willing and Able: Kansas City Parents Talk About How to Improve Schools and What They Can Do to Help

Are parents an untapped resource in improving and reimagining K -- 12 education in Kansas City? What do they think would enhance student learning and what are they willing to do to help their children get the education they deserve? These are among the questions explored in an in-depth survey of 1,566 parents with children now in public school in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This study finds the majority of parents in the Kansas City area ready, willing and able to be more engaged in their children's education at some level. For communities to reap the most benefit from additional parental involvement, it is important to understand that different parents can be involved and seek to be involved in different ways.The results of this research, detailed in the following pages, show that nearly a third of the region's parents may be ready to take on a greater role in shaping how local schools operate and advocating for reform in K -- 12 education. These parents say they would be very comfortable serving on committees focused on teacher selection and the use of school resources. Their sense of "parental engagement" extends beyond such traditional activities as attending PTA meetings, coaching sports, volunteering for bake sales, chaperoning school trips and seeing that their children are prepared for school each day. Yet, despite their broad interest in a deeper, more substantive involvement in shaping the region's school systems, relatively few of these "potential transformers" have actually participated in policy-oriented activities in the past year. Moreover, this survey finds that even though the majority of parents seem less inclined to jump into school policy debates, many say they could do more to support local schools in the more traditional school parent roles

Tools That Teach Too: Exploring the Role of Interaction in the Development of Useful Cognitive Residuals

Tools help us perform tasks. But they also change the way we think. In five studies, I explored the lasting effects — the cognitive residuals — of using two common forms of automated spelling assistance, spell-checking and autocorrect. These different spelling assistance systems aim to provide similar spelling outcomes, but users interact quite differently with each. By comparing differences in spelling skills after using these different types of spelling assistance, I assessed differences in the cognitive residuals that arise from direct interaction (spell-checking) and passive support (autocorrect). Results suggest that the passive support provided by autocorrect is just as good as for the development of spelling skill as the direct interaction offered by traditional forms of spell-checking. However, I also demonstrate a new type of direct-interaction spell-checking that outperforms traditional approaches in creating cognitive residuals for users that help improve their spelling skills

Evaluating automatic detection of misspellings in German

his study investigates the performance of a spell checker designed for native writers on misspellings made by second language (L2) learners. It addresses two research questions: 1) What is the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2 misspellings? 2) What factors influence the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2 misspellings? To explore these questions, the study considers a corpus of 1,027 unique misspellings from 48 Anglophone learners of German and classifies these along three error taxonomies: linguistic competence (competence versus performance misspellings), linguistic subsystem (lexical, morphological or phonological misspellings), and target modification (single-edit misspellings (edit distance = one) versus multiple-edit misspellings (edit distance > 1)). The study then evaluates the performance of the Microsoft Word® spell checker on these misspellings. Results indicate that only 62% of the L2 misspellings are corrected and that the spell checker, independent of other factors, generally cannot correct multiple-edit misspellings although it is quite successful in correcting single-edit errors. In contrast to most misspellings by native writers, many L2 misspellings are multiple-edit errors and are thus not corrected by a spell checker designed for native writers. The study concludes with computational and pedagogical suggestions to enhance spell checking in CALL

Issues in conducting expert validation and review and user evaluation of the technology enhanced interaction framework and method

A Technology Enhanced Interaction Framework has been developed to support designers and developers design and develop technology enhanced interactions for complex scenarios involving disabled people. Issues of motivation, time, and understanding when validating and evaluating the Technology Enhanced Interaction Framework were identified through a literature review and questionnaires and interviews with experts. Changes to content, system, and approach were made in order to address the identified issues. Future work will involve detailed analysis of the expert review and validation findings and the implementation of a motivating approach to user evaluation

Exploration of Augmented Reality as an Assistive Device for Students with Dyslexia

Gemstone Team ARTAugmented Reality (AR) is a rapidly emerging technology, and its potential has not yet been fully explored. As members of Team ART, we aim to explore the use of AR as an assistive device platform for people with dyslexia, with the hopes that we could take advantage of the seamless integration of reality and computer-generated images and the attractive novelty of this up and coming platform. We began our project by surveying experts and members of the dyslexia community to determine the most helpful features and user interface for an assistive device to provide real-time feedback to users with dyslexia. Then, we developed an application on the Microsoft HoloLens to analyze users' handwritten spelling of words to provide immediate feedback. We tested the application on 19 participants in grades two through six and found that all of them improved their spelling as a result of using our device. 64.2 percent of users perceived the device to as motivating, significantly greater than the percentage of users who disliked the device. There was no significant correlation between improvement in spelling accuracy and increased motivation in regards to our device. Our novel study demonstrates that with further improvement and implementation, our application can provide assistance not only to people with dyslexia, but also to children in general

Efficient and Effective Query Auto-Completion

Query Auto-Completion (QAC) is an ubiquitous feature of modern textual search systems, suggesting possible ways of completing the query being typed by the user. Efficiency is crucial to make the system have a real-time responsiveness when operating in the million-scale search space. Prior work has extensively advocated the use of a trie data structure for fast prefix-search operations in compact space. However, searching by prefix has little discovery power in that only completions that are prefixed by the query are returned. This may impact negatively the effectiveness of the QAC system, with a consequent monetary loss for real applications like Web Search Engines and eCommerce. In this work we describe the implementation that empowers a new QAC system at eBay, and discuss its efficiency/effectiveness in relation to other approaches at the state-of-the-art. The solution is based on the combination of an inverted index with succinct data structures, a much less explored direction in the literature. This system is replacing the previous implementation based on Apache SOLR that was not always able to meet the required service-level-agreement.Comment: Published in SIGIR 202

Twitter analysis for depression on social networks based on sentiment and stress

Detecting words that express negativity in a social media message is one step towards detecting depressive moods. To understand if a Twitter user could exhibit depression over a period of time, we applied techniques in stages to discover words that are negative in expression. Existing methods either use a single step or a data subset, whereas we applied a multi-step approach which allowed us to identify potential users and then discover the words that expressed negativity by these users. We address some Twitter specific characteristics in our research. One of which is that Twitter data can be very large, hence our desire to be able to process the data efficiently. The other is that due to its enforced character limitation, the style of writing makes interpreting and obtaining the semantic meaning of the words more challenging. Results show that the sentiment of these words can be obtained and scored efficiently as the computation on these dataset were narrowed to only these selected users. We also obtained the stress scores which correlated well with negative sentiment expressed in the content. This work shows that by first identifying users and then using methods to discover words can be a very effective technique