Role of emotion in information retrieval

The main objective of Information Retrieval (IR) systems is to satisfy searchers’ needs. A great deal of research has been conducted in the past to attempt to achieve a better insight into searchers’ needs and the factors that can potentially influence the success of an Information Retrieval and Seeking (IR&S) process. One of the factors which has been considered is searchers’ emotion. It has been shown in previous research that emotion plays an important role in the success of an IR&S process, which has the purpose of satisfying an information need. However, these previous studies do not give a sufficiently prominent position to emotion in IR, since they limit the role of emotion to a secondary factor, by assuming that a lack of knowledge (the need for information) is the primary factor (the motivation of the search). In this thesis, we propose to treat emotion as the principal factor in the system of needs of a searcher, and therefore one that ought to be considered by the retrieval algorithms. We present a more realistic view of searchers’ needs by considering not only theories from information retrieval and science, but also from psychology, philosophy, and sociology. We extensively report on the role of emotion in every aspect of human behaviour, both at an individual and social level. This serves not only to modify the current IR views of emotion, but more importantly to uncover social situations where emotion is the primary factor (i.e., source of motivation) in an IR&S process. We also show that the emotion aspect of documents plays an important part in satisfying the searcher’s need, in particular when emotion is indeed a primary factor. Given the above, we define three concepts, called emotion need, emotion object and emotion relevance, and present a conceptual map that utilises these concepts in IR tasks and scenarios. In order to investigate the practical concepts such as emotion object and emotion relevance in a real-life application, we first study the possibility of extracting emotion from text, since this is the first pragmatic challenge to be solved before any IR task can be tackled. For this purpose, we developed a text-based emotion extraction system and demonstrate that it outperforms other available emotion extraction approaches. Using the developed emotion extraction system, the usefulness of the practical concepts mentioned above is studied in two scenarios: movie recommendation and news diversification. In the movie recommendation scenario, two collaborative filtering (CF) models were proposed. CF systems aim to recommend items to a user, based on the information gathered from other users who have similar interests. CF techniques do not handle data sparsity well, especially in the case of the cold start problem, where there is no past rating for an item. In order to predict the rating of an item for a given user, the first and second models rely on an extension of state-of-the-art memory-based and model-based CF systems. The features used by the models are two emotion spaces extracted from the movie plot summary and the reviews made by users, and three semantic spaces, namely, actor, director, and genre. Experiments with two MovieLens datasets show that the inclusion of emotion information significantly improves the accuracy of prediction when compared with the state-of-the-art CF techniques, and also tackles data sparsity issues. In the news retrieval scenario, a novel way of diversifying results, i.e., diversifying based on the emotion aspect of documents, is proposed. For this purpose, two approaches are introduced to consider emotion features for diversification, and they are empirically tested on the TREC 678 Interactive Track collection. The results show that emotion features are capable of enhancing retrieval effectiveness. Overall, this thesis shows that emotion plays a key role in IR and that its importance needs to be considered. At a more detailed level, it illustrates the crucial part that emotion can play in • searchers, both as a primary (emotion need) and secondary factor (influential role) in an IR&S process; • enhancing the representation of a document using emotion features (emotion object); and finally, • improving the effectiveness of IR systems at satisfying searchers’ needs (emotion relevance)

NECE: Narrative Event Chain Extraction Toolkit

To understand a narrative, it is essential to comprehend the temporal event flows, especially those associated with main characters; however, this can be challenging with lengthy and unstructured narrative texts. To address this, we introduce NECE, an open-access, document-level toolkit that automatically extracts and aligns narrative events in the temporal order of their occurrence. Through extensive evaluations, we show the high quality of the NECE toolkit and demonstrates its downstream application in analyzing narrative bias regarding gender. We also openly discuss the shortcomings of the current approach, and potential of leveraging generative models in future works. Lastly the NECE toolkit includes both a Python library and a user-friendly web interface, which offer equal access to professionals and layman audience alike, to visualize event chain, obtain narrative flows, or study narrative bias

The Black Box of Enrollment Management: The Influence of Academic Capitalism and Values of the Public Good

The study addresses the widening income and racial access gap in higher education resulting from enrollment management teams’ operationalization of academic capitalism. The study focuses on the local, micro level, emphasizing how enrollment management leadership teams make sense of enrollment management, recognizing that enrollment management and the work of enrollment management stakeholders exist within an organizational space encompassing the values of both public good and academic capitalism. Using a case study methodology and critical sensemaking theory, the research explored how academic capitalism and values of the public good shaped enrollment management leadership teams’ sensemaking and sensegiving as they enacted decisions, actions, and practices to recruit and admit students. The main conclusion includes the critical role of the EMLTs and its members’ agency in public good enactments, especially driving the sensemaking process, and a more nuanced and complicated picture between academic capitalism and values of the public good in enrollment management. The study is the first to demonstrate that academic capitalism and the public good can coexist and overlap, in various ways, within the field of enrollment management despite existing literature’s overwhelming characterization of enrollment management as firmly existing within the space of academic capitalism. Recommendations for colleges and universities include leveraging capitalist tools to drive a public good agenda; using predictive data analytics to have a measured approach to increase access; balancing the use of tuition discounting; investing in hiring organizational actors who can operate with contradictory logics and share public good values; developing key public good metrics; diversifying revenue streams; and for wealthy institutions to be bold in their public good enactments

Sloth Speed: Finance Classes Slow to Incorporate Important Research

Traditional finance contains many models which misrepresent human behavior. In order to mathematicise the field and make it more like hard sciences, economics in the 20th century presupposed that people act “rationally.” In economics, rationality means adherence to the neoclassical model, which presents persons as utility maximizers. This presupposition was useful for certain applications but dominated the academic landscape. Later, the Chicago School of Economics built on the rationality premise, advocating less regulation in favor of the free market. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis was built on these same ideas and argued that markets have a wisdom that individuals do not. As a result of his belief in this hypothesis, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan stood idly by a market dabbling with novel financial instruments. Though at one time uneasy, he soon became convinced that rising stock prices were not a concern. When the 2008 financial crisis occurred, he was left to admit, before Congress, that the markets were not as wise as he assumed. The type of economics that led up to the catastrophe was faulty. For example, traditional economics tends to oversimply reality. Additionally, applying statistics to markets is erroneous since constituent actors are not independent of each other. Behavioral finance, the component of behavioral economics that deals with markets, presents human tendencies which impact the financial world. Therefore, it is important to include behavioral finance in introductory courses so business graduates can have the information they need to prevent future crises. Several behavioral ideas are summarized in this paper to give the reader an understanding of what the field entails and how it differs from the rationality premise. As well, the paper examines a selection of course syllabi, textbooks, and CFA bodies of knowledge to find out if behavioral economics, which may play such an important role in preventing calamities, is included in introductory courses. The findings about the field’s inclusion in textbooks is especially interesting as one publisher includes a commentary concerning their choices regarding this matter in their text. In all, however, behavioral finance is covered to a limited extent in the materials examined. There are several reasons for this, including explanations from behavioral finance itself. In the future, publishers and universities should approach the teaching of finance differently. They should present the truth of finance, even if it is not as neatly organized as what has been taught for decades

Symington family estates : how to mitigate buyers’ bargaining power?

Port wine is a traditional Portuguese beverage that can only be produced in Douro Demarcated Region. The Portuguese consumption has been increasing while the exports have been decreasing. In terms of value the market as sustained its position due to an increase of sales in the special categories. This dissertation aims to assess the challenges SFE, one of the biggest Port producers, has been facing in its relationship with large retailers – super and hyper markets. The latter impose some pressures to the former, mainly through their bargaining power, resultant from a dependency on retailers. Price is the main variable of dependency, with implications on SFE’s profitability and economic performance. In order to mitigate such pressures and to ensure the future sustainability of SFE, the analysis here conducted will attempt on provide and summarize the drivers of this unbalanced power amongst the players, as well as, some solutions to mitigate them.O vinho do Porto é um vinho tradicional Português que apenas pode ser produzido na região demarcada do Douro. O consumo Portuguêstem aumentado ao mesmo tempo que as exportações diminuem. Em termos de valor o mercado ten«m conseguido manter a sua posição devido ao aumento de vendas de vinhos do Porto de categoria especial. Esta dissertação propõe-se a avaliar os desafios enfrentados pela SFE, um dos maiores produtores Portugueses de vinho do Porto, devido à grade distribuição – super e hipermercados. A grande distribuição, através do seu poder negocial, impõe certas pressões à SFE, nomeadamente de preço que têm implicações na performance e rentabilidade da empresa. No sentido de mitigar as pressões mencionadas e, para garantir a futura sustentabilidade da SFE, a análise aqui conduzida tenta evidenciar as principais causas deste poder desequilibrado, assim como, possíveis soluções