Automatic Construction of Multi-faceted User Profiles using Text Clustering and its Application to Expert Recommendation and Filtering Problems

In the information age we are living in today, not only are we interested in accessing multimedia objects such as documents, videos, etc. but also in searching for professional experts, people or celebrities, possibly for professional needs or just for fun. Information access systems need to be able to extract and exploit various sources of information (usually in text format) about such individuals, and to represent them in a suitable way usually in the form of a profile. In this article, we tackle the problems of profile-based expert recommendation and document filtering from a machine learning perspective by clustering expert textual sources to build profiles and capture the different hidden topics in which the experts are interested. The experts will then be represented by means of multi-faceted profiles. Our experiments show that this is a valid technique to improve the performance of expert finding and document filtering

A European research agenda for lifelong learning

It is a generally accepted truth that without a proper educational system no country will prosper, nor will its inhabitants. With the arrival of the post-industrial society, in Europe and elsewhere, it has become increasingly clear that people should continue learning over their entire life-spans lest they or their society suffer the dire consequences. But what does this future lifelong learning society exactly look like? And how then should education prepare for it? What should people learn and how should they do so? How can we afford to pay for all this, what are the socio-economic constraints of the move towards a lifelong-learning society? And, of course, what role can and should the educational establishment of schools and universities play? This are questions that demand serious research efforts, which is what this paper argues for

Committee-Based Profiles for Politician Finding

One step towards breaking down barriers between citizens and politicians is to help people identify those politicians who share their concerns. This paper is set in the field of expert finding and is based on the automatic construction of politicians’ profiles from their speeches on parliamentary committees. These committee-based profiles are treated as documents and are indexed by an information retrieval system. Given a query representing a citizen’s concern, a profile ranking is then obtained. In the final step, the different results for each candidate are combined in order to obtain the final politician ranking. We explore the use of classic combination strategies for this purpose and present a new approach that improves state-of-the-art performance and which is more stable under different conditions. We also introduce a two-stage model where the identification of a broader concept (such as the committee) is used to improve the final politician ranking.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economı́a y Competitividad under projects TIN2013-42741-P and TIN2016-77902-C3-2-P, and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF-FEDER)

LDA-based Term Profiles for Expert Finding in a Political Setting

A common task in many political institutions (i.e. Parliament) is to find politicians who are experts in a particular field. In order to tackle this problem, the first step is to obtain politician profiles which include their interests, and these can be automatically learned from their speeches. As a politician may have various areas of expertise, one alternative is to use a set of subprofiles, each of which covers a different subject. In this study, we propose a novel approach for this task by using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to determine the main underlying topics of each political speech, and to distribute the related terms among the different topic-based subprofiles. With this objective, we propose the use of fifteen distance and similarity measures to automatically determine the optimal number of topics discussed in a document, and to demonstrate that every measure converges into five strategies: Euclidean, Dice, Sorensen, Cosine and Overlap. Our experimental results showed that the scores of the different accuracy metrics of the proposed strategies tended to be higher than those of the baselines for expert recommendation tasks, and that the use of an appropriate number of topics has proved relevant

Surveillance, big data and democracy: lessons for Australia from the US and UK

This article argues that current laws are ill-equipped to deal with the multifaceted threats to individual privacy by governments, corporations and our own need to participate in the information society. Introduction In the era of big data, where people find themselves surveilled in ever more finely granulated aspects of their lives, and where the data profiles built from an accumulation of data gathered about themselves and others are used to predict as well as shape their behaviours, the question of privacy protection arises constantly. In this article we interrogate whether the discourse of privacy is sufficient to address this new paradigm of information flow and control. What we confront in this area is a set of practices concerning the collection, aggregation, sharing, interrogation and uses of data on a scale that crosses private and public boundaries, jurisdictional boundaries, and importantly, the boundaries between reality and simulation. The consequences of these practices are emerging as sometimes useful and sometimes damaging to governments, citizens and commercial organisations. Understanding how to regulate this sphere of activity to address the harms, to create an infrastructure of accountability, and to bring more transparency to the practices mentioned, is a challenge of some complexity. Using privacy frameworks may not provide the solutions or protections that ultimately are being sought. This article is concerned with data gathering and surveillance practices, by business and government, and the implications for individual privacy in the face of widespread collection and use of big data. We will firstly outline the practices around data and the issues that arise from such practices. We then consider how courts in the United Kingdom (‘UK’) and the United States (‘US’) are attempting to frame these issues using current legal frameworks, and finish by considering the Australian context. Notably the discourse around privacy protection differs significantly across these jurisdictions, encompassing elements of constitutional rights and freedoms, specific legislative schemes, data protection, anti-terrorist and criminal laws, tort and equity. This lack of a common understanding of what is or what should be encompassed within privacy makes it a very fragile creature indeed. On the basis of the exploration of these issues, we conclude that current laws are ill-equipped to deal with the multifaceted threats to individual privacy by governments, corporations and our own need to participate in the information society

INNOVATION FOR SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: DIGITAL LITERACY AND THE NATIONAL READING CAMPAIGN

This study attempts to describe the history of how the Norwegian language policy in the Nordic Council and The European Global Language Policy at the European Commission are implemented in The National Library Strategy 2020-2023 in Norway and its relevance across Intercultural Communication. Innovation for a democratic Language Technology infrastructure aims to participate in quality education for Literacy, prioritizing Universal Design Development on children's inclusion for social development and a sustainable future. The Research field based on Hermeneutics, Epistemology, Ethics and methodology, are a main foundation for Universal design . (Areskoug Josefsson, Haarr, K. H., Eriksen, S. S., & Brossard Børhaug, F. 2022) Norway holds the chairmanship of the Nordic Council of Ministers in 20221 and also the chairmanship of the Network for Nordic Language Committees.2 In this connection, the focus on challenges concerning minority children inclusion in schools, libraries, and intercultural language centers3 , and how the development and use of language technology can contribute to supporting the Nordic countries' language policies and digital plans is a priority. (Regjeringen; sprakteknologi og de nordiske sprakene, 2022) The National Library, through the Council of language in Norway, has initiated a discussion based on the debate between digital transition and languages policies: “In today's language technology landscape, school children and teachers experience that software and writing support offered by the major international technology giants in the school does not reflect the official spelling of the local languages. Today, it is impossible to include adopted spelling standards in internationally advanced writing tools. The language norms conveyed by the big technology giants thus appear as competitors to the official spelling. The companies also do not allow locally developed language technology for small languages (e.g., Greenlandic, Sami, Norwegian, Nynorsk) to be offered as a local adaptation to the children and young people who receive their education in these languages". (Wetås. Å, Språkrådet 4.04.2022)