TopExNet: Entity-Centric Network Topic Exploration in News Streams

The recent introduction of entity-centric implicit network representations of unstructured text offers novel ways for exploring entity relations in document collections and streams efficiently and interactively. Here, we present TopExNet as a tool for exploring entity-centric network topics in streams of news articles. The application is available as a web service at https://topexnet.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/ .Comment: Published in Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2019, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, February 11-15, 201

Retrieving Multi-Entity Associations: An Evaluation of Combination Modes for Word Embeddings

Word embeddings have gained significant attention as learnable representations of semantic relations between words, and have been shown to improve upon the results of traditional word representations. However, little effort has been devoted to using embeddings for the retrieval of entity associations beyond pairwise relations. In this paper, we use popular embedding methods to train vector representations of an entity-annotated news corpus, and evaluate their performance for the task of predicting entity participation in news events versus a traditional word cooccurrence network as a baseline. To support queries for events with multiple participating entities, we test a number of combination modes for the embedding vectors. While we find that even the best combination modes for word embeddings do not quite reach the performance of the full cooccurrence network, especially for rare entities, we observe that different embedding methods model different types of relations, thereby indicating the potential for ensemble methods.Comment: 4 pages; Accepted at SIGIR'1

Implicit Entity Networks: A Versatile Document Model

The time in which we live is often referred to as the Information Age. However, it can also aptly be characterized as an age of constant information overload. Nowhere is this more present than on the Web, which serves as an endless source of news articles, blog posts, and social media messages. Of course, this overload is even greater in professions that handle the creation or extraction of information and knowledge, such as journalists, lawyers, researchers, clerks, or medical professionals. The volume of available documents and the interconnectedness of their contents are both a blessing and a curse for the contemporary information consumer. On the one hand, they provide near limitless information, but on the other hand, their consumption and comprehension requires an amount of time that many of us cannot spare. As a result, automated extraction, aggregation, and summarization techniques have risen in popularity, even though they are a long way from being comprehensive. When we, as humans, are faced with an overload of information, we tend to look for patterns that bring order into the chaos. In news, we might identify familiar political figures or celebrities, whereas we might look for expressive symptoms in medicine, or precedential cases in law. In other words, we look for known entities as reference points, and then explore the content along the lines of their relations to others entities. Unfortunately, this approach is not reflected in current document models, which do not provide a similar focus on entities. As a direct result, the retrieval of entity-centric knowledge and relations from a flood of textual information becomes more difficult than it has to be, and the inclusion of external knowledge sources is impeded. In this thesis, we introduce implicit entity networks as a comprehensive document model that addresses this shortcoming and provides a holistic representation of document collections and document streams. Based on the premise of modelling the cooccurrence relations between terms and entities as first-class citizens, we investigate how the resulting network structure facilitates efficient and effective entity-centric search, and demonstrate the extraction of complex entity relations, as well as their summarization. We show that the implicit network model is fully compatible with dynamic streams of documents. Furthermore, we introduce document aggregation methods that are sensitive to the context of entity mentions, and can be used to distinguish between different entity relations. Beyond the relations of individual entities, we introduce network topics as a novel and scalable method for the extraction of topics from collections and streams of documents. Finally, we combine the insights gained from these applications in a versatile hypergraph document model that bridges the gap between unstructured text and structured knowledge sources

Constellations of weathering: Following the meteorological mobilities of Bangla bricks

Using follow-the-thing methods and insights from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces the meteorological mobilities entwined within Bangladesh bricks. Following the extended lifecycle of the Bangla brick from sediment to clay, from clay to brick and from brick to sediment, and the role that monsoon weathering plays in these processes, reveals complex entanglements of mobilities and materialities. A more-than-human mobilities perspective highlights the myriad human and nonhuman circulations that constitute the brick, as well as the geological, atmospheric and hydrological dynamics that brickmaking sets in motion. Through the becoming and unbecoming of the brick, the paper explores how the mobile materiality of the monsoon is enmeshed within the building blocks of Bangladesh’s cities and the infrastructures on which they depend and how, in turn, the mobile materiality of the brick influences monsoonal environments. These intra-active entanglements trouble perceived dichotomies between society and meteorological forces and highlight the agentive role of weather systems in social worlds

Entanglement of Infrastructures and Action: Exploring the Material Foundations of Technicians’ Work in Smart Infrastructure Context

This study explores the mutual constitution of materiality and action in smart infrastructure context by focusing on technicians’ IT-enabled work with complex, distributed, and inherently unreliable smart power grid. Past research suggests infrastructures form a context and a topic unlike the dyadic interaction of humans and computers, and have provided accounts of the ways in which the smart infrastructures shape technicians’ work. This study develops a view of agency in smart infrastructure context in order to increase understanding on materiality of action. A concept of infra-acting is brought forth that situates action as part of (the material constitution of) infrastructure. Infra-acting posits that performing actions as part of infrastructures are (1) conditioned by material history; (2) dependent on mobilizing actors; (3) shaped by invisible and dynamic actors; and (4) riddled by vagaries. An ethnographic research provides an empirical illustration to foreground technicians’ actions corollary to the materiality of infrastructure

News devices : how digital objects participate in news work and research

News work is increasingly taking place in and through a variety of intersecting digital devices, from websites, to search engines, online platforms, apps, bots, web analytics, data analysis and visualisation tools. These devices are also increasingly used as resources in digital research, and their implications are yet to be fully understood. This thesis examines how digital objects participate in news work and research. To this end, I propose an orientation towards the news device as a research topic and approach. The news device approach calls attention to the ways in which practices and relations are co-produced with digital objects involved in news work. It also attends to how such digital devices may afford modes of studying these practices. To make the case for this approach, I examine the participation of three types of devices in three aspects of news work: (1) the role of the network graph in journalistic storytelling, (2) the role of the online platform in journalism coding, and (3) the role of the web tracker in news audience commodification. In all, the thesis contributes to understanding the digital transformations of news in two ways. First, it develops a rich, nuanced, multidisciplinary, collaborative and reflexive approach to news research with digital methods. Secondly, it provides novel insights into how digital devices shape both news processes and relations with the online advertising and marketing industries, commercial online platforms, digital visual culture, and other digital content producers

Going dark : care-full castings and delight-full deviations for a networked fiction in an everyday world

Going dark is a technical term within the world of theatre. It has the double meaning of lights out during rehearsal and a temporary venue closure for maintenance and resetting. In this way it speaks to matters of care in the form of attending to one’s environs while resisting the excess of twenty-four hour productivity. This thesis appropriates going dark as a practice and methodology. In both instances it considers how deviation from the familiar; steady observation; and a kind of slow liveliness might reveal delight-full throughways for a less human-centric worlding. This project emerges from a confluence of driving commitments-digital media, the dark, and speculative fiction - embedded in the habitual and affective processes of everyday activities. Each concern additionally has the capacity to disturb the mundane in ordinary and extraordinary ways. How then might such an everyday landscape be harnessed to explore speculative projects embedded in the digital fabric of social media as a type of textual creative resistance? To assist me in this enquiry I travel along the submerged pathways of stinkhorn fungi, lively soil, and social media networks in conversation with the experimental online project Going DARK. Engaging a fictocritical framework I draw sustenance from the disruptive practices of feminist science fiction writers and look to the messy earth-bound provocations of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Threaded below the carefully composed registers are the influential figurations of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject and the processes of becoming and assemblage engaged in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Consequently my thesis travels multiple lines of curious deviation to inform, borrow, expand or temporarily submerge a story. Viewed through a posthuman lens it seeks to find delight and direction in the inbetween dark and dirty spaces. Equally it is an endeavor to interrupt the off-world utopian dream embedded in idealistic paternal views of escape to another planet in order to make us accountable for our actions on the world we are in now

An approach to managing the complexity of knowledge intensive business processes

Organisations face ever growing complexity in the business environment and use processes to deliver value in a stable, sustainable and controllable way. However complexity in the business environment is threatening the stability of processes and forcing their continuing evolution in ever shorter time cycles, which then creates significant management challenges. Addressing complexity requires a change in management thinking about processes.The research explores the nature of complexity, how businesses respond to it, and the consequent impact on process complexity. The research reviews the notion of complexity and its relevance to organisations, business processes and knowledge contexts. The research focuses on knowledge intensive firms, as these exhibit several of the features and allow early application of the approach suggested by this thesis. The research draws upon concepts from several fields including complexity and complex systems, business process management, and knowledge management.This thesis addresses the question: “How can organisations address the complexity of knowledge intensive business processes?” In answering the question the thesis argues the need to integrate multiple perspectives involved in managing such processes, proposes an approach to complex knowledge intensive business processes that reduces the management challenge, and argues the need to develop an agile shared knowledge context in support of the approach.This thesis develops a theoretical framework consisting of a set of hypotheses rooted in the literature, and then proposes an approach to addressing complex knowledge intensive business processes based upon these hypotheses. Then,through a series of QDS investigations and action research cycles, this thesis tests the hypotheses, further develops the approach and examines its application in different problem domains in multiple organisations. This thesis then discusses the process and the outcomes of applying the approach, identifies its limitations, assesses its contribution to knowledge and suggests directions for further research

Performing Continuity of/in Smart Infrastructure : Exploring Entanglements of Infrastructure and Actions

Nearly everything we do in contemporary organizations and societies builds on some form of infrastructure. Our reliance on infrastructures underscores the importance of the continuity of these infrastructures. However, the infrastructures are inherently unreliable and unpredictable and achieve veneers of permanence and stability only through constant and ongoing efforts. In their functioning, they become established through complex and uncertain processes that involve a number of actors and factors. Consequently, understanding those processes is a key concern for organizations that are responsible for these infrastructures. Traditionally, the literature on the business continuity of organizational functions has emphasized the importance of planning and management approaches. Practitioners and academics have brought forth frameworks to aid organizations in planning and managing their continuity-related issues. The frameworks offer universally applicable processes and procedures that organizations should follow to improve their continuity. However, these frameworks tell little about continuity itself. Organizations rarely function as they document or as management describes organizational work. As such, the complex and uncertain processes of continuity cannot be directly inferred from the documents or from the managerial descriptions of work. If we wish to enact meaningful changes to those complex and uncertain processes through which infrastructure continuity becomes established, we need to understand how those processes unfold in practice. This dissertation focuses on infrastructure continuity in a smart infrastructure context. Smart infrastructures are traditional infrastructures that have been extended with digital technologies. In this research, infrastructure continuity is approached from the perspective of technicians working in the smart infrastructure context. The technicians’ work in these contexts is constitutively entangled with information systems and the technologies that form the infrastructures. As such, the smart infrastructures form an intriguing and fruitful yet rather unexplored context for information systems research. Theoretically, this research builds on sociomaterial theorizing and especially on Karen Barad’s agential realism. The purpose of this dissertation is to increase understanding on how the continuity of smart infrastructure becomes performed. This purpose is explored through six research articles that form the foundations of this dissertation. Methodologically, this research builds on conceptual and empirical research approaches. The conceptual research focuses on developing and clarifying business continuity- and sociomateriality-related concepts and approaches through argumentation and a literature review. The empirical research builds on a qualitative research approach and, more specifically, on ethnographic research. As is typical for ethnographic research, the empirical material was collected from a single organization that was studied extensively over a several-month participant observation. Reflecting the purpose of the study, the ethnography was conducted in a centralized operations center of a smart infrastructure (smart power grid) where technicians work with information systems and technologies. This dissertation contributes to the literature on infrastructure continuity and on sociomateriality. The primary contribution to the infrastructure continuity literature is a performative conceptualization of the infrastructure continuity. This conceptualization suggests that business continuity is not an attribute of any single measure but is an outcome of a joint accomplishment of sociomaterial networks of agencies that becomes established through recurrent actions. As such, the findings of this research challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the literature but also extend the earlier literature. In addition, this dissertation extends discussions on sociomaterial agency. In the light of the findings, when agency is situated in the context of a smart infrastructure, agency becomes historic, polycentric, dynamic, and discontinuous.Lähes kaikki mitä me teemme nyky-yhteiskunnassa nojaa infrastruktuureihin. Voimmekin sanoa elävämme keskellä infrastruktuurien verkostoa. Riippuvaisuutemme infrastruktuureista korostaa niiden toiminnan jatkuvuuden tärkeyttä. Nämä infrastruktuurit ovat kuitenkin perustaltaan epäluotettavia ja arvaamattomia. Niiden toimivuus syntyy monimutkaisten ja epävarmojen prosessien kautta, jotka sisältävät moninaisia toimijoita ja tekijöitä. Näiden prosessien ymmärtäminen on keskeistä organisaatioille, jotka vastaavat näistä infrastruktuureista. Perinteisesti kirjallisuudessa, joka keskittyy toiminnan jatkuvuuteen (eng. business continuity), on korostettu suunnitelmien ja hallinnoinnin merkitystä. Suunnitteluun ja hallinnointiin on kehitetty useita johtamisen viitekehyksiä. Ne tarjoavat universaaleiksi tarkoitettuja määrämuotoisia prosesseja ja menettelytapoja, joita organisaatioiden tulisi noudattaa. Nämä viitekehykset kertovat kuitenkin hyvin vähän siitä mitä tai miten toiminnan jatkuvuus itsessään käytännössä ilmenee. Organisaatiot harvoin toimivat kuten dokumentoivat tai kuten organisaatioiden johto kuvailee toimintaa, joten näistä ei voida suoraan päätellä organisaation toimintaa. Kuitenkin jos haluamme toteuttaa merkityksellisiä muutoksia niihin monimutkaisiin ja epävarmoihin prosesseihin, joiden kautta toiminnan jatkuvuus syntyy, meidän tulee ymmärtää paremmin näitä prosesseja käytännössä. Tässä tietojärjestelmätieteisiin sijoittuvassa väitöskirjassa keskitytään toiminnan jatkuvuuteen älykkäiden infrastruktuurien (eng. smart infrastructure) kontekstissa. Älykkäillä infrastruktuureilla tarkoitetaan tässä tutkimuksessa perinteisiä infrastruktuureja, kuten sähköverkkoja, vedenjakelua, ja tieverkostoa, jotka ovat digitalisoitu. Aihetta lähestytään erityisesti infrastruktuurin parissa toimivien teknikoiden työn kautta. Teknikoiden työ näissä ympäristöissä on nivoutunut kiinteästi yhteen tietojärjestelmien ja teknologioiden kanssa, jotka muodostavat infrastruktuurin. Älykkäät infrastruktuurit muodostavatkin näin erityisesti tietojärjestelmätieteiden tutkimukselle kiinnostavan, mutta vähän tutkitun kontekstin. Tutkimus pohjautuu teoreettisesti sosiomateriaalisuuteen ja nojaa erityisesti Karen Baradin filosofiseen ja teoreettiseen viitekehykseen toimijarealismista (eng. agential realism). Tutkimuksen tavoite on tuottaa ymmärrystä siitä, miten infrastruktuurien jatkuvuus toteutuu käytännössä. Tätä tavoitetta on tässä väitöskirjassa tutkittu kuuden vertaisarvioidun artikkelin kautta. Menetelmällisesti tutkimuksessa on nojattu sekä konseptuaaliseen että empiiriseen tutkimukseen. Konseptuaalinen tutkimus keskittyy toiminnan jatkuvuuden ja sosiomateriaalisuuden käsitteiden ja lähestymistapojen kehittämiseen sekä selventämiseen argumentoinnin ja kirjallisuuskatsauksen avulla. Empiirinen tutkimuspohjautuu laadulliseen tutkimusotteeseen ja nojaa etnografiseen tutkimusmenetelmään. Kuten etnografiselle tutkimusmenetelmälle on luonnollista, aineisto pohjautuu pääosin osallistuvaan havainnointiin yhdessä organisaatiossa, jota on tutkittu intensiivisesti. Heijastaen tutkimuksen tavoitetta ja ongelmanasettelua, etnografinen tutkimus suoritettiin älykkään infrastruktuurin (sähköverkon) keskitetyssä valvomossa, jossa teknikoiden työtä tietojärjestelmien ja teknologioiden parissa seurattiin useiden kuukausien ajan. Tutkimuksen tulokset osallistuvat infrastruktuurien toiminnan jatkuvuuden ja sosiomaterialisuuden keskusteluihin. Tutkimuksen keskeisin tulos toiminnan jatkuvuuden tutkimukseen on toiminnan jatkuvuuden konseptualisointi suoritettuna toimintana. Tämän konseptualisoinnin mukaan toiminnan jatkuvuus ei ole jonkin menetelmän ominaisuus vaan jatkuvuus tuotetaan yhteisesti sosiomateriaalisessa toimijoiden verkossa toistuvien tekojen kautta. Tutkimuksen tulokset siis haastavat mutta myös edistävät aiempaa kirjallisuutta toiminnan jatkuvuudesta. Lisäksi, tutkimuksen tulokset edistävät keskusteluita toimijuuden sosiomateriaalisuudesta. Tulosten valossa, kun toimijuutta tarkastellaan infrastruktuurikontekstissa, on toimijuus historiallinen, polysentrinen, dynaaminen ja yllätyksellinen.Siirretty Doriast