Harmony and dissonance: organizing the people's voices on political controversies

The wikileaks documents about the death of Osama Bin Laden and the debates about the economic crisis in Greece and other European countries are some of the controversial topics being played on the news everyday. Each of these topics has many different aspects, and there is no absolute, simple truth in answering questions such as: should the EU guarantee the financial stability of each member country, or should the countries themselves be solely responsible? To understand the landscape of opinions, it would be helpful to know which politician or other stakeholder takes which position-support or opposition-on these aspects of controversial topics

Applying Wikipedia to Interactive Information Retrieval

There are many opportunities to improve the interactivity of information retrieval systems beyond the ubiquitous search box. One idea is to use knowledge bases—e.g. controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, thesauri and ontologies—to organize, describe and navigate the information space. These resources are popular in libraries and specialist collections, but have proven too expensive and narrow to be applied to everyday webscale search. Wikipedia has the potential to bring structured knowledge into more widespread use. This online, collaboratively generated encyclopaedia is one of the largest and most consulted reference works in existence. It is broader, deeper and more agile than the knowledge bases put forward to assist retrieval in the past. Rendering this resource machine-readable is a challenging task that has captured the interest of many researchers. Many see it as a key step required to break the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that crippled previous efforts. This thesis claims that the roadblock can be sidestepped: Wikipedia can be applied effectively to open-domain information retrieval with minimal natural language processing or information extraction. The key is to focus on gathering and applying human-readable rather than machine-readable knowledge. To demonstrate this claim, the thesis tackles three separate problems: extracting knowledge from Wikipedia; connecting it to textual documents; and applying it to the retrieval process. First, we demonstrate that a large thesaurus-like structure can be obtained directly from Wikipedia, and that accurate measures of semantic relatedness can be efficiently mined from it. Second, we show that Wikipedia provides the necessary features and training data for existing data mining techniques to accurately detect and disambiguate topics when they are mentioned in plain text. Third, we provide two systems and user studies that demonstrate the utility of the Wikipedia-derived knowledge base for interactive information retrieval

Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Emergence as a Business Web Strategy Enabler

The Web is becoming in many respects a powerful tool for supporting business strategy as companies are quickly becoming more and more reliant on new Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities. However, this introduces additional managerial problems and risks that have to be taken into consideration, if they are not to be left behind. In this chapter we explore the Web’s present and future potential in relation to information sharing, knowledge management, innovation management, and the automation of cross-organizational business transactions. The suggested approach will provide entrepreneurs, managers, and IT leaders with guidance on how to adopt the latest Web 2.0-based technologies in their everyday work with a view to setting up a business Web strategy. Specifically, Enterprise 2.0 is presented as a key enabler for businesses to expand their ecosystems and partnerships. Enterprise 2.0 also acts as a catalyst for improving innovation processes and knowledge work

A twin data-driven approach for user-experience based design innovation

Data-driven innovation has received increasing attention, which explores big data technologies to gain more insights and advantages for product design. In user experience (UX) based design innovation, user-generated data and archived design documents are two valuable resources for various design activities such as identifying opportunities and generating design ideas. However, these two resources are usually isolated in different systems. Additionally, design information typically represented based on functional aspects is limited for UX-oriented design. To facilitate experience-oriented design activities, we propose a twin data-driven approach to integrate UX data and archived design documents. In particular, we aim to extract UX concepts from product reviews and design concepts from patents respectively and to discover associations between the extracted concepts. First, a UX-integrated design information representation model is proposed to associate capabilities with key elements of UX at the concept, category, and aspect levels of information. Based on this model, a twin data-driven approach is developed to bridge experience information and design information. It contains three steps: experience aspect identification using an attention-based LSTM (Long short-term memory) network, design information categorization based on topic clustering using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and LAD (Latent Dirichlet allocation) model, and experience needs and design information integration by leveraging word embedding techniques to measure concept similarity. A case study using healthcare-related experience and design information has demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach

Semantic Social Network Analysis: A Concrete Case

In this chapter we present our approach to analyzing such semantic social networks and capturing collective intelligence from collaborative interactions to challenge requirements of Enterprise 2.0. Our tools and models have been tested on an anonymized dataset from Ipernity.com, one of the biggest French social web sites centered on multimedia sharing. This dataset contains over 60,000 users, around half a million declared relationships of three types, and millions of interactions (messages, comments on resources, etc.). We show that the enriched semantic web framework is particularly well-suited for representing online social networks, for identifying their key features and for predicting their evolution. Organizing huge quantity of socially produced information is necessary for a future acceptance of social applications in corporate contexts

User data discovery and aggregation: the CS-UDD algorithm

In the social web, people use social systems for sharing content and opinions, for communicating with friends, for tagging, etc. People usually have different accounts and different profiles on all of these systems. Several tools for user data aggregation and people search have been developed and protocols and standards for data portability have been defined. This paper presents an approach and an algorithm, named Cross-System User Data Discovery (CS-UDD), to retrieve and aggregate user data distributed on social websites. It is designed to crawl websites, retrieve profiles that may belong to the searched user, correlate them, aggregate the discovered data and return them to the searcher which may, for example, be an adaptive system. The user attributes retrieved, namely attribute-value pairs, are associated with a certainty factor that expresses the confidence that they are true for the searched user. To test the algorithm, we ran it on two popular social networks, MySpace and Flickr. The evaluation has demonstrated the ability of the CS-UDD algorithm to discover unknown user attributes and has revealed high precision of the discovered attributes

Aspect and Entity Extraction for Opinion Mining

Abstract: Opinion mining or sentiment analysis is the computational study of people's opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions toward entities such as products, services, organizations, individuals, events, and their different aspects. It has been an active research area in natural language processing and Web mining in recent years. Researchers have studied opinion mining at the document, sentence and aspect levels. Aspect-level (called aspect-based opinion mining) is often desired in practical applications as it provides the detailed opinions or sentiments about different aspects of entities and entities themselves, which are usually required for action. Aspect extraction and entity extraction are thus two core tasks of aspect-based opinion mining. In this chapter, we provide a broad overview of the tasks and the current state-of-the-art extraction techniques

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Hierarchical organization of consumer reviews for products and its applications

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH