166 research outputs found
A Coherent Unsupervised Model for Toponym Resolution
Toponym Resolution, the task of assigning a location mention in a document to
a geographic referent (i.e., latitude/longitude), plays a pivotal role in
analyzing location-aware content. However, the ambiguities of natural language
and a huge number of possible interpretations for toponyms constitute
insurmountable hurdles for this task. In this paper, we study the problem of
toponym resolution with no additional information other than a gazetteer and no
training data. We demonstrate that a dearth of large enough annotated data
makes supervised methods less capable of generalizing. Our proposed method
estimates the geographic scope of documents and leverages the connections
between nearby place names as evidence to resolve toponyms. We explore the
interactions between multiple interpretations of mentions and the relationships
between different toponyms in a document to build a model that finds the most
coherent resolution. Our model is evaluated on three news corpora, two from the
literature and one collected and annotated by us; then, we compare our methods
to the state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised techniques. We also examine
three commercial products including Reuters OpenCalais, Yahoo! YQL Placemaker,
and Google Cloud Natural Language API. The evaluation shows that our method
outperforms the unsupervised technique as well as Reuters OpenCalais and Google
Cloud Natural Language API on all three corpora; also, our method shows a
performance close to that of the state-of-the-art supervised method and
outperforms it when the test data has 40% or more toponyms that are not seen in
the training data.Comment: 9 pages (+1 page reference), WWW '18 Proceedings of the 2018 World
Wide Web Conferenc
New Directions in Digital Government Using INSPIRE - Report from the Workshop at the INSPIRE Conference 2017
Digital government in Europe is evolving rapidly, thanks to both advances in technology and the tendency for governments to establish more participative relationships with businesses and citizens. There is a drive to promote economic growth in digital businesses through the better use of data, and location data play a very important role in this. INSPIRE has created a basis for the harmonisation of location information across Europe, and is able to support some of the more important developments in digital government. Some Member States have developed integrated strategies and have provided lessons from which others may learn. Technological advances have created an immense range of opportunities through developments such as the internet of things, cloud computing and big data; however, they have also introduced challenges in terms of privacy, trust and the need for new digital skills. A workshop entitled “New Directions in Digital Government using INSPIRE” at the INSPIRE Conference 2017 aimed to explore these new directions by sharing experiences and ideas. This formed part of the ISA2 work programme, undertaken by the European Location Interoperability Solutions for e-Government (ELISE) project, which involves the development of frameworks and solutions to exploit the potential of location information in digital public services across Europe
Scoping study on natural resources and climate change in Southeast Asia with a focus on agriculture. Final report
Climate change / Natural resources / Environmental effects / Agroecology / Agricultural production / Crops / Cropping systems / Farming systems / Livestock / Fisheries / Food security / Water management / Economic aspects / Rural poverty / Policy / Nutrient management / South East Asia / Cambodia / Laos / Thailand / Vietnam / Myanmar / China / Greater Mekong Subregion / Tonle Sap / Yunnan
Narrative Cartography with Knowledge Graphs
Narrative cartography is a discipline which studies the interwoven nature of stories and maps. However, conventional geovisualization techniques of narratives often encounter several prominent challenges, including the data acquisition & integration challenge and the semantic challenge. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose the idea of narrative cartography with knowledge graphs (KGs). Firstly, to tackle the data acquisition & integration challenge, we develop a set of KG-based GeoEnrichment toolboxes to allow users to search and retrieve relevant data from integrated cross-domain knowledge graphs for narrative mapping from within a GISystem. With the help of this tool, the retrieved data from KGs are directly materialized in a GIS format which is ready for spatial analysis and mapping. Two use cases — Magellan’s expedition and World War II — are presented to show the effectiveness of this approach. In the meantime, several limitations are identified from this approach, such as data incompleteness, semantic incompatibility, and the semantic challenge in geovisualization. For the later two limitations, we propose a modular ontology for narrative cartography, which formalizes both the map content (Map Content Module) and the geovisualization process (Cartography Module). We demonstrate that, by representing both the map content and the geovisualization process in KGs (an ontology), we can realize both data reusability and map reproducibility for narrative cartography
To Honor our Heroes: Analysis of the Obituaries of Australians Killed in Action in WWI and WWII
Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, in particular, are rich repositories of communal values, as they reflect the values and virtues that are admired and respected in individuals who are considered to be heroes in their communities. In this paper, we use natural language processing techniques to map the patterns of values and virtues attributed to Australian military personnel who were killed in action during World War I and World War II. Doing so reveals several clusters of values and virtues that tend to be attributed together. In addition, we use named entity recognition and geotagging the track the movements of these soldiers to various theatres of the wars, including North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific
Automated analysis of free-text comments and dashboard representations in patient experience surveys: a multimethod co-design study
BACKGROUND: Patient experience surveys (PESs) often include informative free-text comments, but with no
way of systematically, efficiently and usefully analysing and reporting these. The National Cancer Patient
Experience Survey (CPES), used to model the approach reported here, generates > 70,000 free-text
comments annually. MAIN AIM: To improve the use and usefulness of PES free-text comments in driving health service changes that improve the patient experience. SECONDARY AIMS: (1) To structure CPES free-text comments using rule-based information retrieval (IR) (‘text
engineering’), drawing on health-care domain-specific gazetteers of terms, with in-built transferability to
other surveys and conditions; (2) to display the results usefully for health-care professionals, in a digital toolkit
dashboard display that drills down to the original free text; (3) to explore the usefulness of interdisciplinary
mixed stakeholder co-design and consensus-forming approaches in technology development, ensuring that
outputs have meaning for all; and (4) to explore the usefulness of Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) in
structuring outputs for implementation and sustainability. DESIGN: A scoping review, rapid review and surveys with stakeholders in health care (patients, carers,
health-care providers, commissioners, policy-makers and charities) explored clinical dashboard design/patient
experience themes. The findings informed the rules for the draft rule-based IR [developed using half of the
2013 Wales CPES (WCPES) data set] and prototype toolkit dashboards summarising PES data. These were
refined following mixed stakeholder, concept-mapping workshops and interviews, which were structured to
enable consensus-forming ‘co-design’ work. IR validation used the second half of the WCPES, with comparison
against its manual analysis; transferability was tested using further health-care data sets. A discrete choice
experiment (DCE) explored which toolkit features were preferred by health-care professionals, with a simple
cost–benefit analysis. Structured walk-throughs with NHS managers in Wessex, London and Leeds explored
usability and general implementation into practice. KEY OUTCOMES: A taxonomy of ranked PES themes, a checklist of key features recommended for digital
clinical toolkits, rule-based IR validation and transferability scores, usability, and goal-oriented, cost–benefit
and marketability results. The secondary outputs were a survey, scoping and rapid review findings, and
concordance and discordance between stakeholders and methods. RESULTS: (1) The surveys, rapid review and workshops showed that stakeholders differed in their
understandings of the patient experience and priorities for change, but that they reached consensus on
a shortlist of 19 themes; six were considered to be core; (2) the scoping review and one survey explored
the clinical toolkit design, emphasising that such toolkits should be quick and easy to use, and embedded
in workflows; the workshop discussions, the DCE and the walk-throughs confirmed this and foregrounded
other features to form the toolkit design checklist; and (3) the rule-based IR, developed using noun and
verb phrases and lookup gazetteers, was 86% accurate on the WCPES, but needs modification to improve
this and to be accurate with other data sets. The DCE and the walk-through suggest that the toolkit would
be well accepted, with a favourable cost–benefit ratio, if implemented into practice with appropriate
infrastructure support. LIMITATIONS: Small participant numbers and sampling bias across component studies. The scoping review
studies mostly used top-down approaches and focused on professional dashboards. The rapid review of
themes had limited scope, with no second reviewer. The IR needs further refinement, especially for
transferability. New governance restrictions further limit immediate use. CONCLUSIONS: Using a multidisciplinary, mixed stakeholder, use of co-design, proof of concept was shown
for an automated display of patient experience free-text comments in a way that could drive health-care
improvements in real time. The approach is easily modified for transferable application. FUTURE WORK: Further exploration is needed of implementation into practice, transferable uses and
technology development co-design approaches. FUNDING: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme
Making Sense of Document Collections with Map-Based Visualizations
As map-based visualizations of documents become more ubiquitous, there is a greater need for them to support intellectual and creative high-level cognitive activities with collections of non-cartographic materials -- documents. This dissertation concerns the conceptualization of map-based visualizations as tools for sensemaking and collection understanding. As such, map-based visualizations would help people use georeferenced documents to develop understanding, gain insight, discover knowledge, and construct meaning. This dissertation explores the role of graphical representations (such as maps, Kohonen maps, pie charts, and other) and interactions with them for developing map-based visualizations capable of facilitating sensemaking activities such as collection understanding. While graphical representations make document collections more perceptually and cognitively accessible, interactions allow users to adapt representations to users’ contextual needs. By interacting with representations of documents or collections and being able to construct representations of their own, people are better able to make sense of information, comprehend complex structures, and integrate new information into their existing mental models. In sum, representations and interactions may reduce cognitive load and consequently expedite the overall time necessary for completion of sensemaking activities, which typically take much time to accomplish. The dissertation proceeds in three phases. The first phase develops a conceptual framework for translating ontological properties of collections to representations and for supporting visual tasks by means of graphical representations. The second phase concerns the cognitive benefits of interaction. It conceptualizes how interactions can help people during complex sensemaking activities. Although the interactions are explained on the example of a prototype built with Google Maps, they are independent iv of Google Maps and can be applicable to various other technologies. The third phase evaluates the utility, analytical capabilities and usability of the additional representations when users interact with a visualization prototype – VIsual COLlection EXplorer. The findings suggest that additional representations can enhance understanding of map-based visualizations of library collections: specifically, they can allow users to see trends, gaps, and patterns in ontological properties of collections
Climate change, water and agriculture in the Greater Mekong subregion
Climate change / Adaptation / Indicators / Water resource management / River basins / Water availability / Water quality / Groundwater / Fisheries / Ecosystems / Water power / Population growth / Land use / Biofuels / Sea level / South East Asia / Cambodia / Laos / Myanmar / Thailand / Vietnam / China / Greater Mekong Subregion / Yunnan Province
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