Temporal dynamics of semantic relations in word embeddings: an application to predicting armed conflict participants

This paper deals with using word embedding models to trace the temporal dynamics of semantic relations between pairs of words. The set-up is similar to the well-known analogies task, but expanded with a time dimension. To this end, we apply incremental updating of the models with new training texts, including incremental vocabulary expansion, coupled with learned transformation matrices that let us map between members of the relation. The proposed approach is evaluated on the task of predicting insurgent armed groups based on geographical locations. The gold standard data for the time span 1994--2010 is extracted from the UCDP Armed Conflicts dataset. The results show that the method is feasible and outperforms the baselines, but also that important work still remains to be done.Comment: to appear in EMNLP 2017 proceeding

Redefining part-of-speech classes with distributional semantic models

This paper studies how word embeddings trained on the British National Corpus interact with part of speech boundaries. Our work targets the Universal PoS tag set, which is currently actively being used for annotation of a range of languages. We experiment with training classifiers for predicting PoS tags for words based on their embeddings. The results show that the information about PoS affiliation contained in the distributional vectors allows us to discover groups of words with distributional patterns that differ from other words of the same part of speech. This data often reveals hidden inconsistencies of the annotation process or guidelines. At the same time, it supports the notion of `soft' or `graded' part of speech affiliations. Finally, we show that information about PoS is distributed among dozens of vector components, not limited to only one or two features

Cross-lingual porting of distributional semantic classification

Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 246-249. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

Investigating the IT Silo problem: From Strict to Adaptive mirroring between IT Architecture and Organisational Health Services

A crucial problem reducing efficient information flow within healthcare is the presence of siloed IT architectures. Siloed IT Architectures causes disruptive and disconnected information flow within and between health institutions, and complicates the establishment of qualitative health services to practitioners and citizens. In this paper, we analyze this challenge using a mirroring lens. Our research question is, how can we establish a supportive IT architecture that reduces the IT silo problem? Our empirical evidence comes from a case in Norway, where we analyzed a transformation initiative on the national, regional, and local levels. Our investigation into the IT silo problem contributes to the literature on information flow and IT architecture within healthcare in two ways. First, we find that strict mirroring that leads to sub-optimization and silofication, is a major cause for the presence of IT silos. Second, we demonstrate how adaptive mirroring – a modular strategy for combining global and local requirements in IT architecture – improves the changeability and manageability of IT architectures

Exploring loose coupling in system interaction

The concept of loose coupling is used in various disciplines, such as organisation science, computer science, information systems and geography, but its definition and application is elusive. In this paper we investigate the roots and meanings of the concept, and ask two research questions: (i) How is the concept of loose coupling used within streams of IS research? And (ii) how can we apply the concept to design the system interaction within the field of IS? Our method is a systematic review of the literature, where we identify the definitions and uses, conduct a cross-disciplinary meta-analysis, and deduct a framework for analysing and using the principle of loose coupling. We then discuss implications for the dynamics of information infrastructures. We offer two contributions. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of the loose coupling research, and gives rich insight into uses of the concept. Second, we propose a framework where we synthesize the insights