EnrichEvent: Enriching Social Data with Contextual Information for Emerging Event Extraction

Social platforms have emerged as crucial platforms for disseminating information and discussing real-life social events, which offers an excellent opportunity for researchers to design and implement novel event detection frameworks. However, most existing approaches merely exploit keyword burstiness or network structures to detect unspecified events. Thus, they often fail to identify unspecified events regarding the challenging nature of events and social data. Social data, e.g., tweets, is characterized by misspellings, incompleteness, word sense ambiguation, and irregular language, as well as variation in aspects of opinions. Moreover, extracting discriminative features and patterns for evolving events by exploiting the limited structural knowledge is almost infeasible. To address these challenges, in this thesis, we propose a novel framework, namely EnrichEvent, that leverages the lexical and contextual representations of streaming social data. In particular, we leverage contextual knowledge, as well as lexical knowledge, to detect semantically related tweets and enhance the effectiveness of the event detection approaches. Eventually, our proposed framework produces cluster chains for each event to show the evolving variation of the event through time. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our framework, validating its high performance and effectiveness in detecting and distinguishing unspecified social events

Interactive Visual Analysis of Translations

This thesis is the result of a collaboration with the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. The goal of this collaboration is to design novel visualization techniques to enable digital humanities scholars to explore and analyze parallel translations. To this end, chapter 2 introduces the first survey of surveys on text visualization which reviews all of the surveys and state-of-the-art reports on text visualization techniques, classifies them, provides recommendations, and discusses reported challenges.Following this, we present three visual interactive designs that support the typical digital humanities scholars workflow. In Chapter 4, we present VNLP, a visual, interactive design that enables users to explicitly observe the NLP pipeline processes and update the parameters at each processing stage. Chapter 5 presents AlignVis, a visual tool that provides a semi-automatic alignment framework to build a correspondence between multiple translations. It presents the results of using text similarity measurements and enables the user to create, verify, and edit alignments using a novel visual interface. Chapter 6 introduce TransVis, a novel visual design that supports comparison of multiple parallel translations. It incorporates customized mechanisms for rapid and interactive filtering and selection of a large number of German translations of Shakespeare’s Othello. All of the visual designs are evaluated using examples, detailed observations, case studies, and/or domain expert feedback from a specialist in modern and contemporary German literature and culture.Chapter 7 reports our collaborative experience and proposes a methodological workflow to guide such interdisciplinary research projects. This chapter also includes a summary of outcomes and lessons learned from our collaboration with the domain expert. Finally, Chapter 8 presents a summary of the thesis and future work directions

Let's track! strategies to establish active people tracking in workplaces

The action research component is conducted by developing a system that delivers insights into teamwork dynamics, as revealed by tracking the social network interactions that occur within collaborative work environments. I constructed a working prototype that utilised an indoor people tracking system that captures people's movements as they operate within their workspace. It is capable of simultaneously monitoring the progress of multiple cohabitating project teams. Focusing on providing context specific insights, I designed a flexible behaviour model that constructed customised social networks to extract interactions of interest from the tracked data. The visually rich analysis reporting that was layered with contextual cues enabled quick cognition by the intended viewer. The targeted user covers all levels of the organisation from project collaborators to the support personnel and upper management. With this setup, everyone can participate in a data-supported reflective learning process. The original contribution of my research is two-fold. Firstly, the people tracking system and analytics I developed demonstrated the technical capability to provide real time insights to workspace design, project management and human resource management applications. Secondly, through reference to my three case studies, I argue that a user-centric approach is critical for the successful integration and adaptation of people tracking systems and analytics into real world workplace practices

Design and Instantiation of an Interactive Multidimensional Ontology for Game Design Elements – a Design and Behavioral Approach

While games and play are commonly perceived as leisure tools, focus on the strategic implementation of isolated gameful elements outside of games has risen in recent years under the term gamification. Given their ease of implementation and impact in competitive games, a small set of game design elements, namely points, badges, and leaderboards, initially dominated research and practice. However, these elements reflect only a small group of components that game designers use to achieve positive outcomes in their systems. Current research has shifted towards focusing on the game design process instead of the isolated implementation of single elements under the term gameful design. But the problem of a tendency toward a monocultural selection of prominent design elements persists in-game and gameful design, preventing the method from reaching its full potential. This dissertation addresses this problem by designing and developing a digital, interactive game design element ontology that scholars and practitioners can use to make more informed and inspired decisions in creating gameful solutions to their problems. The first part of this work is concerned with the collation and development of the digital ontology. First, two datasets were collated from game design and gamification literature (game design elements and playing motivations). Next, four explorative studies were conducted to add user-relevant metadata and connect their items into an ontological structure. The first two studies use card sorting to assess game theory frameworks regarding their suitability as foundational categories for the game design element dataset and to gain an overview of different viewpoints from which categorizations can be derived. The second set of studies builds on an explorative method of matching dataset entries via their descriptive keywords to arrive at a connected graph. The first of these studies connects items of the playing motivations dataset with themselves, while the second connects them with an additional dataset of human needs. The first part closes with the documentation of the design and development of the tool Kubun, reporting on the outcome of its evaluation via iterative expert interviews and a field study. The results suggest that the tool serves its preset goals of affording intuitive browsing for dedicated searches and serendipitous findings. While the first part of this work reports on the top-down development process of the ontology and related navigation tool, the second part presents an in-depth research of specific learning-oriented game design elements to complement the overall research goal through a complementary bottom-up approach. Therein, two studies on learning-oriented game design elements are reported regarding their effect on performance, long-term learning outcome, and knowledge transfer. The studies are conducted with a game dedicated to teaching correct waste sorting. The first study focuses on a reward-based game design element in terms of its motivatory effect on perfect play. The second study evaluates two learning-enhancing game design elements, repeat, and look-up, in terms of their contribution to a long-term learning outcome. The comprehensive insights gained through the in-depth research manifest in the design of a module dedicated to reporting research outcomes in the ontology. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the studies’ varying limitations and an outlook on pathways for future research

Digital user's decision journey

The landscape of the Internet is continually evolving. This creates huge opportunities for different industries to optimize vital channels online, resulting in various-forms of new Internet services. As a result, digital users are interacting with many digital systems and they are exhibiting dynamic behaviors. Their shopping behaviors are drastically different today than it used to be, with offline and online shopping interacting with each other. They have many channels to access online media but their consumption patterns on different channels are quite different. They do philanthropy online to help others but their heterogeneous motivations and different fundraising campaigns leads to distinct path-to-contribution. Understanding the digital user’s decision making process behind their dynamic behaviors is critical as they interact with various digital systems for the firms to improve user experience and improve their bottom line. In this thesis, I study digital users’ decision journeys and the corresponding digital technology firms’ strategies using inter-disciplinary approaches that combine econometrics, economic structural modeling and machine learning. The uncovered decision journey not only offer empirical managerial insights but also provide guideline for introducing intervention to better serve digital users

Methods and applications in social networks analysis

The Social Network Analysis perspective has proven the ability to develop a significant breadth of theoretical and methodological issues witnessed by the contribution of an increasing number of scholars and the multiplication of empirical applications in a wide range of scientific fields. One of the disciplinary areas in which this development has occurred, among others, is certainly that of computational social science, by virtue of the developing field of online social networks and the leading role of information technologies in the production of scientific knowledge. The complex nature of social phenomena enforced the usefulness of the network perspective as a wealth of theoretical and methodological tools capable of penetrating within the dimensions of that complexity. The book hosts eleven contributions that within a sound theoretical ground, present different examples of speculative and applicative areas where the Social Network Analysis can contribute to explore, interpret and predict social interaction between actors. Some of the contributions were presented at the ARS’19 Conference held in Vietri sul Mare (Salerno, Italy) in October, 29-31 2019; it was the seventh of a biennial meetings series started in 2007 with the aim to promote relevant results and the most recent methodological developments in Social Network Analysis

A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis on Social Network Anonymization: Current Approaches and Future Directions

In recent decades, social network anonymization has become a crucial research field due to its pivotal role in preserving users' privacy. However, the high diversity of approaches introduced in relevant studies poses a challenge to gaining a profound understanding of the field. In response to this, the current study presents an exhaustive and well-structured bibliometric analysis of the social network anonymization field. To begin our research, related studies from the period of 2007-2022 were collected from the Scopus Database then pre-processed. Following this, the VOSviewer was used to visualize the network of authors' keywords. Subsequently, extensive statistical and network analyses were performed to identify the most prominent keywords and trending topics. Additionally, the application of co-word analysis through SciMAT and the Alluvial diagram allowed us to explore the themes of social network anonymization and scrutinize their evolution over time. These analyses culminated in an innovative taxonomy of the existing approaches and anticipation of potential trends in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first bibliometric analysis in the social network anonymization field, which offers a deeper understanding of the current state and an insightful roadmap for future research in this domain.Comment: 73 pages, 28 figure

Distances in the field : mapping similarity and familiarity in the production, curation and consumption of Australian art music

This thesis provides a timely intervention in the investigation of cultural fields by employing traditional and new data analytics to expand our understanding of fields as multi-dimensional sites of production, curation and consumption. Through a case study of contemporary Australian art music, the research explores the multiple ways in which the concept of ‘distance’ contributes to how we conceive of and engage with fields of artistic practice. While the concept of distance has often been an implicit or axiomatic concern for cultural sociology, this thesis foregrounds how it can be used to analyse fields from multiple perspectives, at multiple scales of enquiry and using diverse methodologies. In doing so, it distinguishes between notions of distance in the related concepts of similarity and familiarity. In the former, the relative proximities of cultural producers can be mapped to discern and contrast the organising principles which underlie different perspectives of a field. In the latter, the degree of an individual’s familiarity with an item or genre can be included in theorisations of cultural preferences and their social dimensions. This is disrupted in a field such as Australian art music, however, as its emphasis on experimentation and innovation presents barriers to developing familiarity. Distance can be considered a defining characteristic of this field, and motivates its selection as a critical case study from which to investigate how audiences form attachments to distant musical sounds. The investigation of distance from multiple perspectives, using different scales of analysis and across a series of focal points in the lifecycle of artist practice, provides an analysis of Australian art music in terms of the tensions which emerge from these intersecting representations of the field. The singular spatial representation of ‘objective relations’ in a field, and a concern with power and domination – as found in the approach of Bourdieu – is replaced by a multiplicity of sets of relations and a concern with their organising principles and juxtapositions. The thesis argues that the actor constellations which distances produce are intimately linked to our capacity to engage with fields as discrete and knowable domains of cultural practice. Beyond our capacity to know a cultural field, it also argues for the importance of reconsidering how we form attachments to distant musical tastes. As an avant-garde genre which embraces foreign and confounding sounds, audiences require the capacity to draw on a range of consumption strategies and techniques to successfully engage with and value the unfamiliar