Measuring Variability in Sentence Ordering for News Summarization

The issue of sentence ordering is an important one for natural language tasks such as multi-document summarization, yet there has not been a quantitative exploration of the range of acceptable sentence orderings for short texts. We present results of a sentence reordering experiment with three experimental conditions. Our findings indicate a very high degree of variability in the orderings that the eighteen subjects produce. In addition, the variability of reorderings is significantly greater when the initial ordering seen by subjects is different from the original summary. We conclude that evaluation of sentence ordering should use multiple reference orderings. Our evaluation presents several metrics that might prove useful in assessing against multiple references. We conclude with a deeper set of questions: (a) what sorts of independent assessments of quality of the different reference orderings could be made and (b) whether a large enough test set would obviate the need for such independent means of quality assessment

The association of thinking styles with research agendas among academics in the social sciences

Research agendas are understudied, despite being key to academic knowledge creation. The literature suggests that the ways that academics determine their research agendas are conditioned by individual, organisational and environmental characteristics. This study explores the cognitive aspects of academics' research agendas in the social sciences by using a theory on thinking styles as an analytical framework. The results suggest that the research agendas of academics in the social sciences are significantly associated with their thinking styles. These findings aid understanding of how academics set their research agendas. This study also represents an important landmark in research on thinking styles, focusing on academic research work as a potential venue for further studies. The findings are relevant for policymakers, research funding agencies, university administrators and academics because they have implications for academic research development processes, outcomes, and for research and academic identity socialisation during doctoral studies.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Assumptions behind grammatical approaches to code-switching: when the blueprint is a red herring

Many of the so-called ‘grammars’ of code-switching are based on various underlying assumptions, e.g. that informal speech can be adequately or appropriately described in terms of ‘‘grammar’’; that deep, rather than surface, structures are involved in code-switching; that one ‘language’ is the ‘base’ or ‘matrix’; and that constraints derived from existing data are universal and predictive. We question these assumptions on several grounds. First, ‘grammar’ is arguably distinct from the processes driving speech production. Second, the role of grammar is mediated by the variable, poly-idiolectal repertoires of bilingual speakers. Third, in many instances of CS the notion of a ‘base’ system is either irrelevant, or fails to explain the facts. Fourth, sociolinguistic factors frequently override ‘grammatical’ factors, as evidence from the same language pairs in different settings has shown. No principles proposed to date account for all the facts, and it seems unlikely that ‘grammar’, as conventionally conceived, can provide definitive answers. We conclude that rather than seeking universal, predictive grammatical rules, research on CS should focus on the variability of bilingual grammars

Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Researchers and Research Topics Using Web Search Engines

Researchers' networks have been subject to active modeling and analysis. Earlier literature mostly focused on citation or co-authorship networks reconstructed from annotated scientific publication databases, which have several limitations. Recently, general-purpose web search engines have also been utilized to collect information about social networks. Here we reconstructed, using web search engines, a network representing the relatedness of researchers to their peers as well as to various research topics. Relatedness between researchers and research topics was characterized by visibility boost-increase of a researcher's visibility by focusing on a particular topic. It was observed that researchers who had high visibility boosts by the same research topic tended to be close to each other in their network. We calculated correlations between visibility boosts by research topics and researchers' interdisciplinarity at individual level (diversity of topics related to the researcher) and at social level (his/her centrality in the researchers' network). We found that visibility boosts by certain research topics were positively correlated with researchers' individual-level interdisciplinarity despite their negative correlations with the general popularity of researchers. It was also found that visibility boosts by network-related topics had positive correlations with researchers' social-level interdisciplinarity. Research topics' correlations with researchers' individual- and social-level interdisciplinarities were found to be nearly independent from each other. These findings suggest that the notion of "interdisciplinarity" of a researcher should be understood as a multi-dimensional concept that should be evaluated using multiple assessment means.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in PLoS On

Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities as a Means to Maintain Entrepreneurial Talent in Corporations

This paper considers how to retain the right talent to support corporate entrepreneurial interests such as internal corporate ventures by taking a new look at why individuals leave corporations and become entrepreneurs. We sought to first examine why entrepreneurs leave. The job satisfaction model tests the popular belief that individuals quit due to dissatisfaction. This is compared to the person-environment (P-E) fit model that theorizes individuals are pushed away and pulled into environments that present a better fit. In all, 715 nascent entrepreneurs were compared with 399 employees by regression and graphic analyses. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we found that for these entrepreneurs, dissatisfaction does not precede the entrepreneurial exodus from established companies. Rather, the perceptions of their new venture’s competitive certainty and financial certainty pull them into new business ventures. Implications and suggestions for the managers are discussed

Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping

We present VOSviewer, a freely available computer program that we have developed for constructing and viewing bibliometric maps. Unlike most computer programs that are used for bibliometric mapping, VOSviewer pays special attention to the graphical representation of bibliometric maps. The functionality of VOSviewer is especially useful for displaying large bibliometric maps in an easy-to-interpret way. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, an overview of VOSviewer's functionality for displaying bibliometric maps is provided. In the second part, the technical implementation of specific parts of the program is discussed. Finally, in the third part, VOSviewer's ability to handle large maps is demonstrated by using the program to construct and display a co-citation map of 5,000 major scientific journals

All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of US academic careers

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00072.Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6 or 10 years). A long-term US researcher is operationalised as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016-2019, with US main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalised citation impact of long- and shorter-term US researchers’ journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls to the last articles published that may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above US average citation impact research and end by publishing below US average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers