64,134 research outputs found
Review-guided Helpful Answer Identification in E-commerce
Product-specific community question answering platforms can greatly help
address the concerns of potential customers. However, the user-provided answers
on such platforms often vary a lot in their qualities. Helpfulness votes from
the community can indicate the overall quality of the answer, but they are
often missing. Accurately predicting the helpfulness of an answer to a given
question and thus identifying helpful answers is becoming a demanding need.
Since the helpfulness of an answer depends on multiple perspectives instead of
only topical relevance investigated in typical QA tasks, common answer
selection algorithms are insufficient for tackling this task. In this paper, we
propose the Review-guided Answer Helpfulness Prediction (RAHP) model that not
only considers the interactions between QA pairs but also investigates the
opinion coherence between the answer and crowds' opinions reflected in the
reviews, which is another important factor to identify helpful answers.
Moreover, we tackle the task of determining opinion coherence as a language
inference problem and explore the utilization of pre-training strategy to
transfer the textual inference knowledge obtained from a specifically designed
trained network. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world data across
seven product categories show that our proposed model achieves superior
performance on the prediction task.Comment: Accepted by WWW202
An Economic Analysis of Privacy Protection and Statistical Accuracy as Social Choices
Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an economic solution: operate where the marginal cost of increasing privacy equals the marginal benefit. Our model of production, from computer science, assumes data are published using an efficient differentially private algorithm. Optimal choice weighs the demand for accurate statistics against the demand for privacy. Examples from U.S. statistical programs show how our framework can guide decision-making. Further progress requires a better understanding of willingness-to-pay for privacy and statistical accuracy
Seagrass and Aquatic Habitat Assessment Workshop Summary
Seagrass communities are among the richest and most productive, photoautotrophic coastal systems in the world. They protect and improve water quality, provide shoreline
stabilization, and are important habitats for an array of fish, birds, and other wildlife. Hence, much can be gained by protecting and restoring these important living resources. Human’s impact on these vital resources from population growth, pollution, and physical damage from boating and other activities can disrupt the growth of these seagrasses communities and have devastating
effects on their health and vitality. Inventory and monitoring are required to determine the dynamics of seagrasses and devise better protection and restoration for these rich resources.
The purpose of this seagrass workshop, sponsored by NOAA’s CSC , USGS, and FMRI, was to move toward greater objectivity and accuracy in seagrass mapping and monitoring. This workshop helped foster interaction and communication among seagrass professionals. In order to
begin the process of determining the best uniform mapping process for the biological research community. Increasing such awareness among the seagrass and management communities, it is hoped that an improved understanding of the monitoring and mapping process will lead to more
effective and efficient preservation os submerged aquatic vegetation. (PDF contains 20 pages
A requirements framework for novice web developers
This paper introduces a requirements framework intended to guide novice web developers. The work is based on two earlier studies which found that the requirements phase is not well served in web development methods and that there is no agreed set of requirements from practitioners as to what they would like to see in a web development method. The requirements framework outlined here is developed by novice practitioners and later evaluated by them as flexible, simple and easy to use
Empirical Evaluation of Automated Sentiment Analysis as a Decision Aid
Research has consistently shown that online word-of-mouth (WOM) plays an important role in shaping customer attitudes and behaviors. Yet, despite their documented utility, explicit user scores, such as star ratings have limitations in certain contexts. Automatic sentiment analysis (SA), an analytics technique that assesses the “tone” of text, has been proposed as a way to deal with these shortcomings. While extant research on SA has focused on issues surrounding the design of algorithms and output accuracy, this research-in-progress examines the behavioral and interface design issues in regards to SA scores as perceived by their intended users. Specifically, in an online context, we experimentally investigate the role of product (product category) and review characteristics (review extremity) in influencing the perceived usefulness of SA scores. Further, we investigate whether variations in how the SA scores are presented to the user, and the nature of the scores themselves further affect user perceptions
Motivations, Classification and Model Trial of Conversational Agents for Insurance Companies
Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational
agents. So-called chatbots have reached maturity for industrial applications.
German insurance companies are interested in improving their customer service
and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the
potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies by determining
which classes of agents are of interest to insurance companies, finding
relevant use cases and requirements, and developing a prototype for an
exemplary insurance scenario. Based on this approach, we derive key findings
for conversational agent implementation in insurance companies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure, accepted for presentation at The International
Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2019 (ICAART 2019
Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey
Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant
responses to customer's questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing
attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits
unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated
contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel
methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this
paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA.
Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of
the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present
existing datasets and evaluation protocols for each setting. We further
summarize the most significant challenges that characterize PQA from general QA
applications and discuss their corresponding solutions. Finally, we conclude
this paper by providing the prospect on several future directions
Potential Improvements to National Park Service Visitor Surveys and Money Generation Modeling in Alaska
This study presents options for improving the use of the Money Generation Model in National Park
Service (NPS) land units in Alaska. The Money Generation Model (MGM) is used nationwide to model
economic impacts of visitation to public lands, including National Park Units. This analysis identifies
potential improvements to the application of the MGM model and visitor survey processes for use in
Alaska. Improvements include changes to visitor intercept methods to improve statistical reliability of
the sampling process and a more representative sample, changes in the survey instrument to more
accurately reflect Alaska visitor travel and expenditure patterns, and better identification of the
economic sphere of influence of Alaska national park units.National Park Service, Alaska Director's Office.
National Park Conservation Association, Alaska Office.Abstract / Introduction / Purpose of Analysis / Potential Improvements to Visitor Survey and Economic Impact Model / National MGM Economic Impact Estimates / Summary / References / Appendix A. Katmai National Park and Preserve 2006 VSP Survey Instrument / Appendix B. Survey Questions Suggested Re-Write / Appendix C. Maps Showing Access to Alaska National Parks / Appendix D. Alaska Visitor Statistics Survey Instrumen
An Exploration into Technological Capabilities among early stage Indian product based Telecom start-ups
New technology based start-ups play a very important role in developing the economy of a country. In India, telecom sector has seen unprecedented growth over the last decade and this has led to emergence of several telecom related start-ups. However, product based B2B start-ups are rare and existing ones have to undergo several challenges in commercializing. Surprisingly not much research work has been undertaken in identifying capabilities among early stage start-ups although the early phase represents a very crucial phase for product based firms and has been known to determine the success or failure for start-ups. Present study explores the technological capabilities that enable commercialization among such early stage start-ups by adopting a multiple case (four independent cases) based inductive methodology with Indian telecom start-ups as the context. We have identified architectural design, algorithmic implementation and product adaptation as components of technological capability of such start-ups. We further drill in to each of the sub-components of the technological capabilities to unearth their antecedents and peculiarities in telecom product company context. As a result we also present a classification scheme for studying the product architecture in the telecom context. We analyze and point out differences in technological capability among telecom start-ups vis-ďż˝-vis established firms in the sector .
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