Kindly Do Not Ignore User-generated Content (UGC)

As digital advertising spend has increased globally, the whole market is itself getting crowded day-by-day. To cut through the clutter, the user-generated content (UGC) is the best possible way for a brand to grow organically by increasing its reach and engagement across multiple platforms. In a nutshell, it is all about creating a meaningful connection between a brand and its followers

Holaaa!! Writin like u talk is kewl but kinda hard 4 NLP

We present work in progress aiming to build tools for the normalization of User-Generated Content (UGC). As we will see, the task requires the revisiting of the initial steps of NLP processing, since UGC (micro-blog, blog, and, generally, Web 2.0 user texts) presents a number of non-standard communicative and linguistic characteristics, and is in fact much closer to oral and colloquial language than to edited text. We present and characterize a corpus of UGC text in Spanish from three different sources: Twitter, consumer reviews and blogs. We motivate the need for UGC text normalization by analyzing the problems found when processing this type of text through a conventional language processing pipeline, particularly in the tasks of lemmatization and morphosyntactic tagging, and finally we propose a strategy for automatically normalizing UGC using a selector of correct forms on top of a pre-existing spell-checker.Postprint (published version

Media Communication, Consumption and Use: The Changing Role of the Designer

Consumers are changing the way in which they create, experience and consume media. User Generated Content (UGC) marks a shift in the way in which ordinary people are now able to contribute to the creation of media. They have become active citizens in what is now a two way conversation. The advent of UGC has created new challenges for communication designers who now need to take on the role of a facilitator in this process. The challenge for communication design is not only to identify appropriate methods for communication, but to understand how best to facilitate connections between users such that they create structures that they can inhabit. This paper explores the changing role of design in UGC rich media communication and presents a Decision Making Framework (DMF) that engages designers in the consideration of the user in the development process. In-depth interviews with leading industry proponents ensure currency of the insights gained. Keywords: Design Process, User Generated Content, Communication Design, Fraimwork</p

Effects of narcissism, leisure boredom, and gratifications sought on user-generated content among net-generation users

This research identifies the gratifications sought by the net-generation when producing user-generated content (UGC) on the internet. Members of the Net-generation want to vent negative feelings, show affection to their frieds and relatives, be involved in others' lives, and fulfill their need to be recognized. These gratifications were all found to be significantly associated with the users' various levels of participation in UGC (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, blogs, online forums, etc.) What's more, narcissism was predictive of content generation in social networking sites, blogs, and personal webpage, while leisure boredom was significantly linked to expressing views in forums, updating personal website, and participating in consumer reviews. In particular, the results showed the Net-geners who encountered leisure boredom had a higher tendency to seek interaction with friends online. Implications of findings are discussed. --Narcissism,leisure boredom,user-generated content,uses and gratifications

VirtualIdentity : privacy preserving user profiling

User profiling from user generated content (UGC) is a common practice that supports the business models of many social media companies. Existing systems require that the UGC is fully exposed to the module that constructs the user profiles. In this paper we show that it is possible to build user profiles without ever accessing the user's original data, and without exposing the trained machine learning models for user profiling - which are the intellectual property of the company - to the users of the social media site. We present VirtualIdentity, an application that uses secure multi-party cryptographic protocols to detect the age, gender and personality traits of users by classifying their user-generated text and personal pictures with trained support vector machine models in a privacy preserving manner

Copyright and innovation: Fit for digitization?

It is contentious to what extent the existing copyright system contributes to the positive development of the regulated sectors of society. The present report shows that substantially more musical works and movies have been released in recent years than before the diffusion of digital copying technology. At the same time, the average quality of these works has been stable according to user assessments. Countries with stronger copyright protection do not exhibit greater supply of new works. Accordingly, the relatively strict copyright protection in some countries does not seem to promote the supply of new creative works. The present report also considers whether user-generated content (UGC) complements or substitutes professional content. An increasing supply of valuable UGC is not reflected in official economic statistics. In all probability, copyright protection promotes user-generated content less than professional content. As a result, substituting professional content with "amateur material" could reduce the socially desirable strength of copyright protection. However, we find that almost half of all works available on YouTube are professional content. Professional works are watched and recommended more frequently than the average. In addition, a large proportion of UGC on YouTube draws on professional works. There is little evidence that professional content would be widely replaced. It follows that UGC could also be supported by an efficient copyright system, which strengthens the supply of professional content without excessively limiting its further use as input for UGC

Awareness, values and attitudes of user generated content website users and non-users towards privacy in Europe : a quantitative study

The analyses and results in this document are based on an online survey regarding the awareness, values and attitudes of user generated content (UGC) website users towards privacy. This study was undertaken as part of the CONSENT project. This document highlights the overall findings from the study; other reports focusing on individual countries are available for each of the countries listed in the table below.CONSENT Consumer Sentiment regarding privacy on user generated content (UGC) services in the digital economy (G.A. 244643). The project was co-financed by the European Union within the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013).peer-reviewe

Awareness, values and attitudes of user generated content website users and non-users towards privacy in Germany : a qualitative study

This document presents the Germany results of a qualitative study undertaken as part of the CONSENT project (work package 8). The analyses and results are based on a set of ten semi-structured in-depth interviews regarding the awareness, values and attitudes of user generated content (UGC) website users towards privacy. The interview guideline consisted of 27 questions and sub-questions. The selection of interviewees was aiming at a 8:2 split between UGC users and non-users, an even gender distribution, and a further split by age group to ensure as wide a representation as possible.CONSENT Consumer Sentiment regarding privacy on user generated content (UGC) services in the digital economy (G.A. 244643). The project was co-financed by the European Union within the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013).peer-reviewe

Awareness, values and attitudes of user generated content website users and non-users towards privacy in Europe : a qualitative study

The analyses and results in this document are based on a set of semi-structured in-depth interviews regarding the values and attitudes of user generated content (UGC) website users towards privacy. This study was undertaken as part of the CONSENT project. This document synthesises the findings from all participating countries. Separate country-specific reports are available for Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.CONSENT Consumer Sentiment regarding privacy on user generated content (UGC) services in the digital economy (G.A. 244643). The project was co-financed by the European Union within the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013).peer-reviewe