Weak signal identification with semantic web mining

We investigate an automated identification of weak signals according to Ansoff to improve strategic planning and technological forecasting. Literature shows that weak signals can be found in the organization's environment and that they appear in different contexts. We use internet information to represent organization's environment and we select these websites that are related to a given hypothesis. In contrast to related research, a methodology is provided that uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) for the identification of weak signals. This improves existing knowledge based approaches because LSI considers the aspects of meaning and thus, it is able to identify similar textual patterns in different contexts. A new weak signal maximization approach is introduced that replaces the commonly used prediction modeling approach in LSI. It enables to calculate the largest number of relevant weak signals represented by singular value decomposition (SVD) dimensions. A case study identifies and analyses weak signals to predict trends in the field of on-site medical oxygen production. This supports the planning of research and development (R&D) for a medical oxygen supplier. As a result, it is shown that the proposed methodology enables organizations to identify weak signals from the internet for a given hypothesis. This helps strategic planners to react ahead of time

Semantic Retrieval and Automatic Annotation: Linear Transformations, Correlation and Semantic Spaces

This paper proposes a new technique for auto-annotation and semantic retrieval based upon the idea of linearly mapping an image feature space to a keyword space. The new technique is compared to several related techniques, and a number of salient points about each of the techniques are discussed and contrasted. The paper also discusses how these techniques might actually scale to a real-world retrieval problem, and demonstrates this though a case study of a semantic retrieval technique being used on a real-world data-set (with a mix of annotated and unannotated images) from a picture library

From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics

Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field

A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance Detection Task

The 2017 Fake News Challenge Stage 1 (FNC-1) shared task addressed a stance classification task as a crucial first step towards detecting fake news. To date, there is no in-depth analysis paper to critically discuss FNC-1's experimental setup, reproduce the results, and draw conclusions for next-generation stance classification methods. In this paper, we provide such an in-depth analysis for the three top-performing systems. We first find that FNC-1's proposed evaluation metric favors the majority class, which can be easily classified, and thus overestimates the true discriminative power of the methods. Therefore, we propose a new F1-based metric yielding a changed system ranking. Next, we compare the features and architectures used, which leads to a novel feature-rich stacked LSTM model that performs on par with the best systems, but is superior in predicting minority classes. To understand the methods' ability to generalize, we derive a new dataset and perform both in-domain and cross-domain experiments. Our qualitative and quantitative study helps interpreting the original FNC-1 scores and understand which features help improving performance and why. Our new dataset and all source code used during the reproduction study are publicly available for future research