Web Fact Seeking Meta Engine for Business Information Needs

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Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and the Real-Name Registration Policy

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The effects of lender-borrower communication on P2P lending outcomes

Conference Theme: Exploring the Information FrontierLenders face great uncertainty because of the information asymmetry problem in peerto-peer (P2P) marketplaces. This paper studies an online feature on a P2P platform, which allows lenders to seek information directly from the borrower of a loan, and examines the impact of the direct lender-borrower communication on the funding outcomes and the loan performance. Our analysis results show that the number of lender comments is negatively associated with funding success. This implies that as a listing receives more comments from lenders, the chance of getting funded is lower. On the other hand, the number of borrower responses and response length are positively associated with funding success, although they cannot help reduce the final interest rate. The role of borrower response is even stronger for listings with poor credit grades. The loan performance (i.e., default ratio), however, cannot be predicted based on the amount of lender-borrower communication.postprin

Building on Redundancy: Factoid Question Answering, Robust Retrieval and the "Other"

We have explored how redundancy based techniques can be used in improving factoid question answering, definitional questions (“other”), and robust retrieval. For the factoids, we explored the meta approach: we submit the questions to the several open domain question answering systems available on the Web and applied our redundancy-based triangulation algorithm to analyze their outputs in order to identify the most promising answers. Our results support the added value of the meta approach: the performance of the combined system surpassed the underlying performances of its components. To answer definitional (“other”) questions, we were looking for the sentences containing re-occurring pairs of noun entities containing the elements of the target. For robust retrieval, we applied our redundancy based Internet mining technique to identify the concepts (single word terms or phrases) that were highly related to the topic (query) and expanded the queries with them. All our results are above the mean performance in the categories in which we have participated, with one of our robust runs being the best in its category among all 24 participants. Overall, our findings support the hypothesis that using as much as possible textual data, specifically such as mined from the World Wide Web, is extremely promising.published_or_final_versio

A Data-Driven Approach to Measure Web Site Navigability

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Design and evaluation of a Facebook game for self-directed e-learning

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Evaluating Students' Perception of a Three-Dimensional Virtual World Learning Environment

Three-dimensional virtual environments have gained wide popularity due to improvement in graphic rendering technology and networking infrastructure. Many education institutions have been trying to leverage the potential of 3D virtual environments in their application in education. In this research, we aim to evaluate the students’ perception of virtual environments in teaching and learning activities. We set up a virtual classroom, where a short presentation was delivered to students through virtual projectors in Second Life, the most widely adopted 3D virtual environment. The students filled in a questionnaire after the class. We found that the students gave a statistically higher evaluation to 3D virtual environments in terms of satisfaction and enjoyment, while comparable scores between 3D and traditional learning environment in terms of concentration, perceived usefulness, and learning and understanding were obtained. Our results show that virtual learning environment is of great potential in e-learning. Some recommendations in using the virtual environment for learning activities are given.published_or_final_versio

Sexual and mental health in compensated dating in youth in Hong Kong: An exploratory quantitative study

Compensated dating, also known as enjo kosai (in Japanese), assisted relationship, freelance teenage sex work, and casual teen prostitution, emerged in Japan in 1990s and has spread to other Asian societies including Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Shanghai and Hong Kong in the early 2000s. The compensated dating phenomenon was considered similar to youth sexual exploitation, defined as the exchange of sexual activity for money or other consideration according to Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.published_or_final_versio

Blog Mining: Extracting Knowledge from Blogs

Web logs, or blogs, have become more widely-used in recent years. Many people are now documenting their daily lives and expressing their opinions in blogs. These blogs contain such knowledge as market trends, customers' opinions, and social relationship that were previously unavailable. In this paper, we discuss how knowledge can be extracted from blogs automatically using various text mining and web mining techniques

Driving Value through Social Media Analytics

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become important sources for understanding the stakeholders of an organization, such as customers, suppliers, and pressure groups. There are ample opportunities for organizations to gain managerial and strategic insights by gathering, cleaning, and analyzing social media contents. This talk introduces the concepts and techniques for social media analytics, including text mining and sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and network visualization. Several real-world applications will be presented to illustrate the value of social media analytics. Research opportunities and challenges in this emerging area also will be discussed