Listening between the Lines: Learning Personal Attributes from Conversations

Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream Web applications, by extracting personal attributes from conversations. This problem is more challenging than the established task of information extraction from scientific publications or Wikipedia articles, because dialogues often give merely implicit cues about the speaker. We propose methods for inferring personal attributes, such as profession, age or family status, from conversations using deep learning. Specifically, we propose several Hidden Attribute Models, which are neural networks leveraging attention mechanisms and embeddings. Our methods are trained on a per-predicate basis to output rankings of object values for a given subject-predicate combination (e.g., ranking the doctor and nurse professions high when speakers talk about patients, emergency rooms, etc). Experiments with various conversational texts including Reddit discussions, movie scripts and a collection of crowdsourced personal dialogues demonstrate the viability of our methods and their superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: published in WWW'1

The irrelevance of methodology and the art of the possible: Reading Sen and Hirschman

Economic methodologists have observed that economists do not practice what they think their methodology is. Two positions follow from this. One insists on the need for `better' practice in maintaining `scientific' standard, while the other takes the literary turn. Following the second route we argue that appraisal of economic theories cannot be done by applying a general `scientific method' apart from practice. Methodological conversations, which are shaped by various strategies taken by practitioners to persuade each other, can only be studied and improved by reading the most persuasive of the authors in the discipline. Writings of Albert Hirschman and Amartya Sen are chosen to be read following our approach.Methodology, positivism, rhetoric, methodological conversation, internal criticism

The Future of the Journal? Integrating research data with scientific discourse

To advance the pace of scientific discovery we propose a conceptual format that forms the basis of a truly new way of publishing science. In our proposal, all scientific communication objects (including experimental workflows, direct results, email conversations, and all drafted and published information artifacts) are labeled and stored in a great, big, distributed data store (or many distributed data stores that are all connected). Each item has a set of metadata attached to it, which includes (at least) the person and time it was created, the type of object it is, and the status of the object including intellectual property rights and ownership. Every researcher can (and must) deposit every knowledge item that is produced in the lab into this repository. With this deposition goes an essential metadata component that states who has the rights to see, use, distribute, buy or sell this item. Into this grand (and system-wise distributed, cloud-based) architecture, all items produced by a single lab, or several labs, are stored, labeled and connected

BRIDGING A SUPPOSEDLY UNBRIDGEABLE GAP: ELABORATING SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE FROM AND FOR PRACTICE

This article aims at advancing the still on-going conversations about the so-called research/practice gap. Some academics argue that it is not possible to develop knowledge that is both academically valuable and helpful for practice, while others hold the opposite view, justifying it on the basis of works published in top tier journals. The paper argues that the main reason scholars hold such contradictory views on this topic central to management science is the lack of explicitness of a number of founding assumptions which underlie their discourses, in particular the lack of explicitness of the epistemological framework in which the parties' arguments are anchored. The paper presents methodological guidelines for elaborating scientific knowledge both from and for practice, and illustrates how to use these guidelines on examples from a published longitudinal research project. In order to avoid the lack of explicitness pitfall, the paper specifies scientific and epistemological frameworks in which the knowledge elaborated in this methodological approach, when properly justified, can be considered as legitimate scientific knowledge.collaborative research ; constructivist epistemological paradigm ; sciences of the artificial ; organizational design science; rigor; actionability

The Role of Middle Range Publications in the Development of Engineering Knowledge

This paper explores the role of publications in the development of engineering knowledge. Previous studies of scientific and technical publications tend to assume that engineers are like scientists in their use of scientific journals as a means of communicating new technical knowledge. But science differs from technology and we should not expect scientists and engineers to use the same sources of knowledge. We contend that previous studies of publications have been flawed because they ignore other forms of publication more suited to the communication of technical and engineering knowledge. This paper argues that technologists use "middle range" publications to exchange knowledge and explore implications of their technological experiences. By providing more visual images, experience-based reports and background information on technologies and products, middle range publications better reflect the ways in which engineers think and work. They allow for visual conversations and support visual communities. The paper provides a detailed exploration of the role of middle range publications and suggests a framework for future research on patterns of publication by technologists and engineers.engineering knowledge, engineering and design organisations, construction, scientific publications, technical publications, innovation studies

The myths and realities of Bayesian chronological modeling revealed

We review the history of Bayesian chronological modeling in archaeology and demonstrate that there has been a surge over the past several years in American archaeological applications. Most of these applications have been performed by archaeologists who are self-taught in this method because formal training opportunities in Bayesian chronological modeling are infrequently provided. We define and address misconceptions about Bayesian chronological modeling that we have encountered in conversations with colleagues and in anonymous reviews, some of which have been expressed in the published literature. Objectivity and scientific rigor is inherent in the Bayesian chronological modeling process. Each stage of this process is described in detail, and we present examples of this process in practice. Our concluding discussion focuses on the potential that Bayesian chronological modeling has for enhancing understandings of important topics

Progress in strategic research areas

Three years ago through conversations with resource managers, assessing the status of knowledge of the scientific literature, and our own interests, we set forth several strategic research areas that we believed would be timely for advancing Mojave Desert conservation and management

Supplementary Material for the Article “Using Chatbots for Literature Searches and Scholarly Writing: Is the Integrity of the Scientific Discourse in Jeopardy?”

Supplementing our paper “Using Chatbots for Literature Searches and Scholarly Writing: Is the Integrity of the Scientific Discourse in Jeopardy?”, we present complete transcripts of two conversations with ChatGPT that corroborate the assertions in the paper

On Designing a Time Sensitive Interaction Graph to Identify Twitter Opinion Leaders

What happened on social media during the recent pandemic? Who was the opinion leader of the conversations? Who influenced whom? Were they medical doctors, ordinary people, scientific experts? Did health institutions play an important role in informing and updating citizens? Identifying opinion leaders within social platforms is of particular importance and, in this paper, we introduce the idea of a time sensitive interaction graph to identify opinion leaders within Twitter conversations. To evaluate our proposal, we focused on all the tweets posted on Twitter in the period 2020-21 and we considered just the ones that were Italian-written and were related to COVID-19. After mapping these tweets into the graph, we applied the PageRank algorithm to extract the opinion leaders of these conversations. Results show that our approach is effective in identifying opinion leaders and therefore it might be used to monitor the role that specific accounts (i.e., health authorities, politicians, city administrators) have within specific conversations