Using DBpedia as a knowledge source for culture-related user modelling questionnaires

In the culture domain, questionnaires are often used to obtain profiles of users for adaptation. Creating questionnaires requires subject matter experts and diverse content, and often does not scale to a variety of cultures and situations. This paper presents a novel approach that is inspired by crowdwisdom and takes advantage of freely available structured linked data. It presents a mechanism for extracting culturally-related facts from DBpedia, utilised as a knowledge source in an interactive user modelling system. A user study, which examines the system usability and the accuracy of the resulting user model, demonstrates the potential of using DBpedia for generating culture-related user modelling questionnaires and points at issues for further investigation

Mnemonic Convergence: From Empirical Data to Large-Scale Dynamics

This study builds on the assumption that large-scale social phenomena emerge out of the interaction between individual cognitive mechanisms and social dynamics. Within this framework, we empirically investigated the propagation of memory effects (retrieval induced forget- ting and practice effects) through sequences of social interactions. We found that the influence a public figure has on an individual’s memories propagates in conversations between attitudinally similar, but not attitudinally dissimilar interactants, further affecting their subsequent memories [3]. The implementation of this transitivity principle in agent based simulations revealed the impact of community size, number of conversations and network structure on the dynamics of collective memory