126,850 research outputs found
Application of Natural Language Processing to Determine User Satisfaction in Public Services
Research on customer satisfaction has increased substantially in recent
years. However, the relative importance and relationships between different
determinants of satisfaction remains uncertain. Moreover, quantitative studies
to date tend to test for significance of pre-determined factors thought to have
an influence with no scalable means to identify other causes of user
satisfaction. The gaps in knowledge make it difficult to use available
knowledge on user preference for public service improvement. Meanwhile, digital
technology development has enabled new methods to collect user feedback, for
example through online forums where users can comment freely on their
experience. New tools are needed to analyze large volumes of such feedback. Use
of topic models is proposed as a feasible solution to aggregate open-ended user
opinions that can be easily deployed in the public sector. Generated insights
can contribute to a more inclusive decision-making process in public service
provision. This novel methodological approach is applied to a case of service
reviews of publicly-funded primary care practices in England. Findings from the
analysis of 145,000 reviews covering almost 7,700 primary care centers indicate
that the quality of interactions with staff and bureaucratic exigencies are the
key issues driving user satisfaction across England
kLog: A Language for Logical and Relational Learning with Kernels
We introduce kLog, a novel approach to statistical relational learning.
Unlike standard approaches, kLog does not represent a probability distribution
directly. It is rather a language to perform kernel-based learning on
expressive logical and relational representations. kLog allows users to specify
learning problems declaratively. It builds on simple but powerful concepts:
learning from interpretations, entity/relationship data modeling, logic
programming, and deductive databases. Access by the kernel to the rich
representation is mediated by a technique we call graphicalization: the
relational representation is first transformed into a graph --- in particular,
a grounded entity/relationship diagram. Subsequently, a choice of graph kernel
defines the feature space. kLog supports mixed numerical and symbolic data, as
well as background knowledge in the form of Prolog or Datalog programs as in
inductive logic programming systems. The kLog framework can be applied to
tackle the same range of tasks that has made statistical relational learning so
popular, including classification, regression, multitask learning, and
collective classification. We also report about empirical comparisons, showing
that kLog can be either more accurate, or much faster at the same level of
accuracy, than Tilde and Alchemy. kLog is GPLv3 licensed and is available at
http://klog.dinfo.unifi.it along with tutorials
Who Will Retweet This? Automatically Identifying and Engaging Strangers on Twitter to Spread Information
There has been much effort on studying how social media sites, such as
Twitter, help propagate information in different situations, including
spreading alerts and SOS messages in an emergency. However, existing work has
not addressed how to actively identify and engage the right strangers at the
right time on social media to help effectively propagate intended information
within a desired time frame. To address this problem, we have developed two
models: (i) a feature-based model that leverages peoples' exhibited social
behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interactions, to
characterize their willingness and readiness to propagate information on
Twitter via the act of retweeting; and (ii) a wait-time model based on a user's
previous retweeting wait times to predict her next retweeting time when asked.
Based on these two models, we build a recommender system that predicts the
likelihood of a stranger to retweet information when asked, within a specific
time window, and recommends the top-N qualified strangers to engage with. Our
experiments, including live studies in the real world, demonstrate the
effectiveness of our work
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