Understanding the Twitter Usage of Humanities and Social Sciences Academic Journals

Scholarly communication has the scope to transcend the limitations of the physical world through social media extended coverage and shortened information paths. Accordingly, publishers have created profiles for their journals in Twitter to promote their publications and to initiate discussions with public. This paper investigates the Twitter presence of humanities and social sciences (HSS) journal titles obtained from mainstream citation indices, by analysing the interaction and communication patterns. This study utilizes webometric data collection, descriptive analysis, and social network analysis. Findings indicate that the presence of HSS journals in Twitter across disciplines is not yet substantial. Sharing of general websites appears to be the key activity performed by HSS journals in Twitter. Among them, web content from news portals and magazines are highly disseminated. Sharing of research articles and retweeting was not majorly observed. Inter-journal communication is apparent within the same citation index, but it is very minimal with journals from the other index. However, there seems to be an effort to broaden communication beyond the research community, reaching out to connect with the public.Comment: 2018 Annual Meeting of The Association for Information Science & Technolog

Themes, communities and influencers of online probiotics chatter: A retrospective analysis from 2009-2017

We build on recent examinations questioning the quality of online information about probiotic products by studying the themes of content, detecting virtual communities and identifying key influencers in social media using data science techniques. We conducted topic modelling (n = 36,715 tweets) and longitudinal social network analysis (n = 17,834 tweets) of probiotic chatter on Twitter from 2009–17. We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to build the topic models and network analysis tool Gephi for building yearly graphs. We identified the top 10 topics of probiotics-related communication on Twitter and a constant rise in communication activity. However the number of communities grew consistently to peak in 2014 before dipping and levelling off by 2017. While several probiotics industry actors appeared and disappeared during this period, the influence of one specific actor rose from a hub initially to an authority in the latter years. With multi-brand advertising and probiotics promotions mostly occupying the Twitter chatter, scientists, journalists, or policymakers exerted minimal influence in these communities. Consistent with previous research, we find that probiotics-related content on social media veers towards promotions and benefits. Probiotic industry actors maintain consistent presence on Twitter while transitioning from hubs to authorities over time; scientific entities assume an authoritative role without much engagement. The involvement of scientific, journalistic or regulatory stakeholders will help create a balanced informational environment surrounding probiotic products

A task-based scientific paper recommender system for literature review and manuscript preparation

In the domain of scholarly communication lifecycle, recommender systems have been built to provide research papers for researchers’ explicit and implicit information needs. Previous studies (Jardine, 2014; Mcnee, 2006) have employed an algorithmic approach of providing solutions to researcher’s tasks. The characteristics of the tasks, their inter-relationships and intra-relationships with algorithms have been largely ignored since the focus has mainly been to propose different recommendation techniques on top of a variety of algorithms. Driven by these research gaps, the overarching goal of this research is to build an assistive system for helping researchers in finding papers for key Literature Review (LR) and Manuscript Preparatory (MP) tasks. To achieve this goal, two research objectives are proposed. The first objective is to identify an appropriate method to map the identified LR and MP tasks to relevant algorithms. The deliverable for this objective is a prototype assistive system that provides recommendations for three tasks. The second research objective is to evaluate whether the performance of the proposed recommendation techniques and the overall system are at the expected level. To address the research objectives, the research is divided into two interrelated studies. In Study I, a university-wide survey was conducted on the topic of Inadequate and Omitted Citations in manuscripts (IOC). The 207 survey respondents were classified into manuscript reviewer and author groups. Survey results indicated that manuscript authors frequently miss citing seminal and topically-similar papers in journal manuscripts. The lack of experience in a specific research area was perceived as a major reason for IOC, followed by lack of overall research experience and the scenario of working in interdisciplinary research projects. Authors frequently needed external assistance in finding interdisciplinary and topically-similar papers for LR. Based on the findings, two LR search tasks of building reading list and finding topically similar papers were shortlisted. A third task meant to help researchers in identifying unique and important papers from their final reading list was selected, thereby making it a total of three tasks for the assistive system. A prototype called Rec4LRW (Recommendations for Literature Review and Writing) system was developed for providing recommendations for the shortlisted three tasks. The system development was guided a threefold intervention framework comprising of (i) task redesign for addressing the algorithmic improvements, (ii) task interconnectivity addressing the management of papers between the tasks and (iii) informational display features in the system’s user-interface for expediting researcher’s relevance judgment decisions. The second research objective is addressed in Study II. As a part of Study II, an offline evaluation experiment and a user evaluation study were conducted. An extract of papers from the ACM Digital Library was used as the corpus for the evaluations. A total of 119 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers, participated in the user study. Predictors and correlates for the output quality measures were identified for each task. This study established the effectiveness of the three interventions in providing relevant recommendations. Graduate students and novice researchers found the recommendations and the overall system to be more useful and effective.​Doctor of Philosophy (WKWSCI

Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunities

The concept of empathy is vital in human-agent systems as it contributes to mutual understanding, problem-solving and sustained relationships. Despite the increasing adoption of conversational systems as one of the most significant events in the recent decade, the emotional aspects require considerable improvements, particularly in effectively displaying empathy. This paper provides a critical review of this rapidly growing field by examining the current advances in four dimensions: (i) conceptual empathy models and frameworks, (ii) the adopted empathy-related concepts, (iii) the datasets and algorithmic techniques developed, and (iv) the evaluation strategies. The review findings show that the most studies centred on the use of the EMPATHETICDIALOGUES dataset, and the text-based modality dominated research in this field. Moreover, studies have focused mainly on extracting features from the messages of both users and the conversational systems, with minimal emphasis on user modelling and profiling. For implementation in variegated real-world domain settings, we recommend that future studies address the gaps in detecting and authenticating emotions at the entity level, handling multimodal inputs, displaying more nuanced empathetic behaviours, and encompassing additional dialogue system features.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

Multi-method evaluation in scientific paper recommender systems

Recommendation techniques in scientific paper recommender systems (SPRS) have been generally evaluated in an offline setting, without much user involvement. Nonetheless, user relevance of recommended papers is equally important as system relevance. In this paper, we present a scientific paper recommender system (SPRS) prototype which was subject to both offline and user evaluations. The lessons learnt from the evaluation studies are described. In addition, the challenges and open questions for multi-method evaluation in SPRS are presented.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Accepted versio

Zika reveals India’s risk communication challenges and needs

India’s approach to disseminating information about the first three cases of the Zika virus was criticised nationally and internationally after the issue came to light in May 2017 through a World Health Organization news release. We analyse the incident from a risk communication perspective. This commentary recaps the events and synthesises key arguments put forth by the news media and public health stakeholders. We use Peter Sandman’s risk = hazard + outrage framework – also adopted by India’s risk communication planners – to analyse India’s risk communication response and contextualise it against the mandate of the National Risk Communication Plan and Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme. We conclude with recommendations for India’s risk communication policymakers, including the need to develop capacity for risk communication research and scholarship in the country

More Than Just Black and White: A Case for Grey Literature References in Scientific Paper Information Retrieval Systems

In this paper, we start by analyzing the presence of grey literature (GL) references in the bibliographies of different article-types using an extract of 122,406 articles from the ACM Digital Library. GL articles accounted for about 16% of the overall references with highest presence in proceedings (17.61%). Boosting techniques for promoting GL references are proposed for information retrieval systems for two specific scenarios. A simple IR experiment was conducted with 103,739 articles to validate the proposed boosting techniques with 10 research topics. Results show that GL references were consistently pushed to the top of the search results along with an increased visibility in top 20 results.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Accepted versio

Survey on inadequate and omitted citations in manuscripts: a precursory study in identification of tasks for a literature review and manuscript writing assistive system

Introduction.This paper looks at the issue of inadequate and omitted citations in manuscripts by collecting the experiential opinions of researchers from the dual perspectives of manuscript reviewers and authors. Method. An online survey was conducted with participation from 207 respondents who had experience of reviewing and authoring research papers. Analysis. The collected data were analysed quantitatively. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were performed. Results. Reviewer and author groups opined that manuscript authors fail to cite seminal and topically-similar papers, while the reviewer group indicated that authors include too few papers and cite irrelevant papers. The lack of experience was perceived as a major reason for inadequate and omitted citations, followed by lack of overall research experience and working in interdisciplinary research projects. Authors needed external assistance in finding papers for a literature review. Google Scholar was the most used system among the list of information sources. Conclusions. The findings may benefit subsequent studies conducted to solve the issue of inadequate and omitted citations through process improvements and technological interventions. The findings helped in identifying three tasks for a literature review and manuscript writing assistive system. The usage preferences on information sources helped in shortlisting Google Scholar's user-interface as a basis for the user-interface design for the assistive system.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Accepted versio