Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations

Sections are the building blocks of Wikipedia articles. They enhance readability and can be used as a structured entry point for creating and expanding articles. Structuring a new or already existing Wikipedia article with sections is a hard task for humans, especially for newcomers or less experienced editors, as it requires significant knowledge about how a well-written article looks for each possible topic. Inspired by this need, the present paper defines the problem of section recommendation for Wikipedia articles and proposes several approaches for tackling it. Our systems can help editors by recommending what sections to add to already existing or newly created Wikipedia articles. Our basic paradigm is to generate recommendations by sourcing sections from articles that are similar to the input article. We explore several ways of defining similarity for this purpose (based on topic modeling, collaborative filtering, and Wikipedia's category system). We use both automatic and human evaluation approaches for assessing the performance of our recommendation system, concluding that the category-based approach works best, achieving precision@10 of about 80% in the human evaluation.Comment: SIGIR '18 camera-read

Supporting EU, home and foreign students in London writing final year undergraduate BA English language studies dissertations

The London Metropolitan University BA English Language Studies degree (BA ELS) attracts more than 50% “non-traditional” entrants, including many with English as a second language. This paper reports on challenges of the compulsory third year Undergraduate Dissertation, and on implementing and evaluating interventions to help students meet these challenges. My colleague and I carried out pre- and post-module surveys of student perception and made use of an ongoing student diary from one student to determine student needs and experiences. We discovered that students find structuring their literature reviews challenging and need to be trained to see the applicability of some of the literature to their particular thesis situations. There is evidence that students in European institutions face similar challenges. Our action research was informed by a constructivist, dialogic, pedagogic approach which, importantly, included supporting students’ writing from within their subject area. In attempting to find solutions to these problems, we were influenced by the academic literacies with its emphasis on learner differences, but more by the genre approach. I argue that existing manuals on research Dissertations, which focus largely on topic choice, storage of notes and may need to give higher priority to structuring the literature review. Our report includes a survey of students’ attitudes and expectations regarding the Dissertation, then moves on to describe and assess changes which were made to the Dissertation in the Degree in question. The greatest focus is on the “literature review”, but we also describe changes to the module documentation (Handbook), changes to the Dissertation structure, to the process of choice of Dissertation topic, and attention to students’ time management

Righteous patriots, corrupted élites, undeserving poors. The construction of multiple social boundaries in the National Front

Based on life histories of National Front activists, this article analyses how multiple boundaries - pertaining to ethnic and political, but also class and spatial divides - are constructed and negotiated in the party. Ethnicity and class shape the ways in which the activists identify with the party and accommodate the construction of political outsiders and ethnic Others forged by the party populist propaganda. The article thus contributes to the study of radical right-wing populist parties by considering the impact of ethnicity and class on activism and party membership

Mathematics Education Communities: Crossing Virtual Boundaries

The growth of social media has yielded a range of virtual communities focused on issues related to education (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014; Hur & Brush, 2009). These communities, which operate across a range of different platforms, create an evolving landscape for users to navigate. Moreover, interactions within and across virtual communities has become a norm within society at large as well as within mathematics education. The Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere (MTBoS), Mathematics Stack Exchange, specialized Facebook groups, and myNCTM are just a few examples of communities that are currently popular with mathematics teachers and educators in North America. Similarly, students of mathematics use virtual communities to make records of information that, in earlier times, would have been available through more informal channels. For example, solution clearinghouse sites (e.g., Chegg. com) allow students to request or post answers to problems sets and teacher-rating sites (e.g., RateMyProfessor.com) offer a platform where students can trade information about their instructors. With the ubiquity of internet-enabled devices, negotiating virtual communities has become a norm within mathematics teaching and learning. Consequently, educators, both new and old, who participate in these communities are encountering issues and ideas that they likely have limited experience with. This raises a number of questions for mathematics teacher educators seeking to help themselves, preservice teachers (PSTs), and current teachers understand these virtual communities. For example: How can the differences, similarities, and affordances of communities be highlighted? How can the boundaries that define and separate these communities be made clear? Within this chapter, we seek to address these and related questions by providing a framework for understanding these communities. We then use this framework to examine several communities currently popular within North America

How do MNC R&D laboratory roles affect employee international assignments?

Research and development (R&D) employees are important human resources for multinational corporations (MNCs) as they are the driving force behind the advancement of innovative ideas and products. International assignments of these employees can be a unique way to upgrade their expertise; allowing them to effectively recombine their unique human resources to progress existing knowledge and advance new ones. This study aims to investigate the effect of the roles of R&D laboratories in which these employees work on the international assignments they undertake. We categorise R&D laboratory roles into those of the support laboratory, the locally integrated laboratory and the internationally interdependent laboratory. Based on the theory of resource recombinations, we hypothesise that R&D employees in support laboratories are not likely to assume international assignments, whereas those in locally integrated and internationally interdependent laboratories are likely to assume international assignments. The empirical evidence, which draws from research conducted on 559 professionals in 66 MNC subsidiaries based in Greece, provides support to our hypotheses. The resource recombinations theory that extends the resource based view can effectively illuminate the international assignment field. Also, research may provide more emphasis on the close work context of R&D scientists rather than analyse their demographic characteristics, the latter being the focus of scholarly practice hitherto

Understanding Communities of Practice:Taking Stock and Moving Forward

This paper provides a comprehensive, integrative conceptual review of work on communities of practice (CoPs), defined broadly as groups of people bound together by a common activity, shared expertise, a passion for a joint enterprise, and a desire to learn or improve their practice. We identify three divergent views on the intended purposes and expected effects of CoPs: as mechanisms for fostering learning and knowledge-sharing, as sources of innovation, and as mechanisms to defend interests and perpetuate control over expertise domains. We use these different lenses to make sense of the ways CoPs are conceptualized and to review scholarly work on this topic. We argue that current debate on the future of work and new methodological developments are challenging the received wisdom on CoPs and offer research opportunities and new conceptual combinations. We argue also that the interaction between the lenses and between CoP theory and adjacent literatures might result in new theory and conceptualizations