24,227 research outputs found
Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs
The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often
domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have
happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary
source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from
Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This
is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate
quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based
representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close
and a Distant Reading of the collection.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
Bringing Structure into Summaries: Crowdsourcing a Benchmark Corpus of Concept Maps
Concept maps can be used to concisely represent important information and
bring structure into large document collections. Therefore, we study a variant
of multi-document summarization that produces summaries in the form of concept
maps. However, suitable evaluation datasets for this task are currently
missing. To close this gap, we present a newly created corpus of concept maps
that summarize heterogeneous collections of web documents on educational
topics. It was created using a novel crowdsourcing approach that allows us to
efficiently determine important elements in large document collections. We
release the corpus along with a baseline system and proposed evaluation
protocol to enable further research on this variant of summarization.Comment: Published at EMNLP 201
Exploring scholarly data with Rexplore.
Despite the large number and variety of tools and services available today for exploring scholarly data, current support is still very limited in the context of sensemaking tasks, which go beyond standard search and ranking of authors and publications, and focus instead on i) understanding the dynamics of research areas, ii) relating authors âsemanticallyâ (e.g., in terms of common interests or shared academic trajectories), or iii) performing fine-grained academic expert search along multiple dimensions. To address this gap we have developed a novel tool, Rexplore, which integrates statistical analysis, semantic technologies, and visual analytics to provide effective support for exploring and making sense of scholarly data. Here, we describe the main innovative elements of the tool and we present the results from a task-centric empirical evaluation, which shows that Rexplore is highly effective at providing support for the aforementioned sensemaking tasks. In addition, these results are robust both with respect to the background of the users (i.e., expert analysts vs. âordinaryâ users) and also with respect to whether the tasks are selected by the evaluators or proposed by the users themselves
From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web
A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results
Users' trust in information resources in the Web environment: a status report
This study has three aims; to provide an overview of the ways in which trust is either assessed or asserted in relation to the use and provision of resources in the Web environment for research and learning; to assess what solutions might be worth further investigation and whether establishing ways to assert trust in academic information resources could assist the development of information literacy; to help increase understanding of how perceptions of trust influence the behaviour of information users
AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics
Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. We address this issue by introducing Augur, a novel approach to the early detection of research topics. Augur analyses the diachronic relationships between research areas and is able to detect clusters of topics that exhibit dynamics correlated with the emergence of new research topics. Here we also present the Advanced Clique Percolation Method (ACPM), a new community detection algorithm developed specifically for supporting this task. Augur was evaluated on a gold standard of 1,408 debutant topics in the 2000-2011 interval and outperformed four alternative approaches in terms of both precision and recall
Preview Cues: Enhancing Access to Multimedia Content
We describe preview cues, a lightweight mechanism to assist exploration of multimedia content. A preview cue provides a preview of the kind of content/information associated with an area (as opposed to an instance) of a domain. Preview cues associate media files and their meta data with the label of a topic in a domain. A lightweight gesture such as brushing a cursor over a label initiates playback of the preview cue file associated with that label. With these cues, users can preview the type of content associated with an area of a domain in order to decide whether or not that area is of interest for further exploration before having to select it. In this paper we describe the preview cues mechanism. We look at one case study of an implementation of preview cues in the audio domain, and we present the results of a user study of preview cue deployment. We conclude with a discussion of issues for future research
Tracking the History and Evolution of Entities: Entity-centric Temporal Analysis of Large Social Media Archives
How did the popularity of the Greek Prime Minister evolve in 2015? How did
the predominant sentiment about him vary during that period? Were there any
controversial sub-periods? What other entities were related to him during these
periods? To answer these questions, one needs to analyze archived documents and
data about the query entities, such as old news articles or social media
archives. In particular, user-generated content posted in social networks, like
Twitter and Facebook, can be seen as a comprehensive documentation of our
society, and thus meaningful analysis methods over such archived data are of
immense value for sociologists, historians and other interested parties who
want to study the history and evolution of entities and events. To this end, in
this paper we propose an entity-centric approach to analyze social media
archives and we define measures that allow studying how entities were reflected
in social media in different time periods and under different aspects, like
popularity, attitude, controversiality, and connectedness with other entities.
A case study using a large Twitter archive of four years illustrates the
insights that can be gained by such an entity-centric and multi-aspect
analysis.Comment: This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in the
International Journal on Digital Libraries (2018
How Digital Are the Digital Humanities? An Analysis of Two Scholarly Blogging Platforms
In this paper we compare two academic networking platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses, to show the distinct ways in which they serve specific communities in the Digital Humanities (DH) in different national and disciplinary contexts. After providing background information on both platforms, we apply co-word analysis and topic modeling to show thematic similarities and differences between the two sites, focusing particularly on how they frame DH as a new paradigm in humanities research. We encounter a much higher ratio of posts using humanities-related terms compared to their digital counterparts, suggesting a one-way dependency of digital humanities-related terms on the corresponding unprefixed labels. The results also show that the terms digital archive, digital literacy, and digital pedagogy are relatively independent from the respective unprefixed terms, and that digital publishing, digital libraries, and digital media show considerable cross-pollination between the specialization and the general noun. The topic modeling reproduces these findings and reveals further differences between the two platforms. Our findings also indicate local differences in how the emerging field of DH is conceptualized and show dynamic topical shifts inside these respective contexts
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