Engineering social media driven intelligent systems through crowdsourcing: Insights from a financial news summarisation system

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore implicit crowdsourcing, leveraging social media in real-time scenarios for intelligent systems. Design/methodology/approach A case study using an illustrative example system, which systematically employed a custom social media platform for automated financial news analysis and summarisation was developed, evaluated and discussed. Literature review related to crowdsourcing and collective intelligence in intelligent systems was also conducted to provide context and to further explore the case study. Findings It was shown how, and that useful intelligent systems can be constructed from appropriately engineered custom social media platforms which are integrated with intelligent automated processes. A recent inter-rater agreement measure for evaluating quality of implicit crowd contributions was also explored and found to be of value. Practical implications This paper argues that when social media platforms are closely integrated with other automated processes into a single system, this may provide a highly worthwhile online and real-time approach to intelligent systems through implicit crowdsourcing. Key practical issues, such as achieving high quality crowd contributions, challenges of efficient workflows and real-time crowd integration into intelligent systems were discussed. Important ethical and related considerations were also covered. Originality/value A contribution to existing theory was made by proposing how social media web platforms may benefit crowdsourcing. As opposed to traditional crowdsourcing platforms, the presented approach and example system has a set of social elements that encourages implicit crowdsourcing. Instances of crowdsourcing with existing social media, such as Twitter, often also called crowd piggybacking have been used in the past; however, employing an entirely custom-built social media system for implicit crowdsourcing is relatively novel and has several advantages. Some of the discussion in context of intelligent systems construction are novel and contribute to the existing body of literature in this field

Developing trading strategies based on risk-analysis of stocks

Risk Management has always been of fundamental importance to financial markets. The aim of all good trading strategies is based around minimising possible risk and at the same time achieving most profit. A balance between these two factors must be struck for different risk – profit profiles. In this paper we describe an innovative way for visually quantifying risk, and we show how our method can be used as a tool for developing trading strategies to help manage risk. We run our algorithm on selected historical FTSE-100 stocks and pick some companies for a more detailed study of trading strategies. The method shows considerable promise for future research work

The role of community and social metrics in ontology evaluation: An interview study of ontology reuse

Finding a "good" or the "right" ontology for reuse is an ongoing challenge in the field of ontology engineering, where the main aim is to share and reuse existing semantics. This paper reports on a qualitative study with interviews of ontologists and knowledge engineers in different domains, ranging from biomedical field to manufacturing industry, and investigates the challenges they face while searching, evaluating, and selecting an ontology for reuse. Analysis of the interviews reveals diverse sets of quality metrics that are used when evaluating the quality of an ontology. While some of the metrics have already been mentioned in the literature, the findings from our study identify new sets of quality metrics such as community and social related metrics. We believe that this work represents a noteworthy contribution to the field of ontology engineering, with the hope that the research community can further draw on these initial findings in developing relevant quality metrics and ontology search and selection

Ontology selection for reuse: Will it ever get easier?

Ontologists and knowledge engineers tend to examine different aspects of ontologies when assessing their suitability for reuse. However, most of the evaluation metrics and frameworks introduced in the literature are based on a limited set of internal characteristics of ontologies and dismiss how the community uses and evaluates them. This paper used a survey questionnaire to explore, clarify and also confirm the importance of the set of quality related metrics previously found in the literature and an interview study. According to the 157 responses collected from ontologists and knowledge engineers, the process of ontology selection for reuse depends on different social and community related metrics and metadata. We believe that the findings of this research can contribute to facilitating the process of selecting an ontology for reuse

An investigation of Cyberchondria in ‘The Age of Risk’

The importance of this paper arises in light of the increasing frequency for consumers to approach online sources about symptoms of illness, a process that has previously been described as 'Cyberchondria'. Critics are increasingly questioning the quality of interactive health information in 'The Age of Risk'. Research in this field is often concerned with a focus on the negatives of the Internet. This raises questions from sociological and feminist academics as to whether the Internet is a direct mediator of health and illness information, or whether there are other social and cultural factors involved which contribute to the risk of the ‘prosumer’. This paper approaches these problems discussing the importance of implementing software quality measures to control the potential negative effects of the information on those who are entering the information with a negative ‘lay epistemology’. Drawing on techniques of discourse analysis, qualitative data was collected in interviews concerning laypeople’s use of health and illness channels. This paper identifies the system that laypeople use in gathering knowledge from a number of sources in order to form their own ‘lay epistemology’. Using the method of ‘intersectionality’, cultural and socially constructed categories have been used in analysis. This paper suggests that although the Internet is a major source of information, there are decisions which the layperson makes prior to this approach which affect their discernment of their findings. This paper looks at how consumers differ in their interpretation of this information which aids academics in the development of systems to protect those groups that are vulnerable

Social media analytics in museums: extracting expressions of inspiration

Museums have a remit to inspire visitors. However, inspiration is a complex, subjective construct and analyses of inspiration are often laborious. Increased use of social media by museums and visitors may provide new opportunities to collect evidence of inspiration more efficiently. This research investigates the feasibility of a system based on knowledge patterns from FrameNet – a lexicon structured around models of typical experiences – to extract expressions of inspiration from social media. The study balanced interpretation of inspiration by museum staff and computational processing of Twitter data. This balance was achieved by using prototype tools to change a museum’s Information Systems in ways that both enabled the potential of new, social-media-based information sources to be assessed, and which caused the museum staff to reflect upon the nature of inspiration and its role in the relationships between the museum and its visitors. The prototype tools collected and helped analyse Twitter data related to two events. Working with museum experts, the value of finding expressions of inspiration in Tweets was explored and an evaluation using annotated content achieved an F-measure of 0.46, indicating that social media may have some potential as a source of valuable information for museums, though this depends heavily upon how annotation exercises are conducted. These findings are discussed along with the wider implications of the role of social media in museums

Emotive ontology: extracting fine-grained emotions from terse, informal messages

A range of new biphenylazepinium salt organocatalysts effective for asymmetric epoxidation has been developed incorporating an additional substituted oxazolidine ring, and providing improved enantiocontrol in alkene epoxidation over the parent structure. Starting from enantiomerically pure amino-alcohols, tetracyclic iminium salts were obtained as single diastereoisomers through an atroposelective oxazolidine formation

What about mood swings? Identifying depression on Twitter with temporal measures of emotions

Depression is among the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders around the world. With the increasing popularity of online social network platforms and the advances in data science, more research efforts have been spent on understanding mental disorders through social media by analysing linguistic style, sentiment, online social networks and other activity traces. However, the role of basic emotions and their changes over time, have not yet been fully explored in extant work. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach for identifying users with or at risk of depression by incorporating measures of eight basic emotions as features from Twitter posts over time, including a temporal analysis of these features. The results showed that emotion-related expressions can reveal insights of individuals’ psychological states and emotions measured from such expressions show predictive power of identifying depression on Twitter. We also demonstrated that the changes in an individual’s emotions as measured over time bear additional information and can further improve the effectiveness of emotions as features, hence, improve the performance of our proposed model in this task

National security and social media monitoring: a presentation of the emotive and related systems

Today social media streams, such as Twitter, represent vast amounts of 'real-time' daily streaming data. Topics on these streams cover every range of human communication, ranging from banal banter, to serious reactions to events and information sharing regarding any imaginable product, item or entity. It has now become the norm for publicly visible events to break news over social media streams first, and only then followed by main stream media picking up on the news. It has been suggested in literature that social-media are a valid, valuable and effective real-time tool for gauging public subjective reactions to events and entities. Due to the vast big-data that is generated on a daily basis on social media streams, monitoring and gauging public reactions has to be automated and most of all scalable - i.e. human, expert monitoring is generally unfeasible. In this paper the EMOTIVE system, a project funded jointly by the DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) and EPSRC, which focuses on monitoring fine-grained emotional responses relating to events of national security importance, will be presented. Similar systems for monitoring national security events are also presented and the primary traits of such national security social media monitoring systems are introduced and discussed

Emotive ontology: extracting fine-grained emotions from terse, informal messages

With the uptake of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, there is now a vast amount of new user generated content on a daily basis, much of it in the form of short, informal free-form text. Businesses, institutions, governments and law enforcement organisations are now actively seeking ways to monitor and more generally analyse public response to various events, products and services. Our primary aim in this project was the development of an approach for capturing a wide and comprehensive range of emotions from sparse, text based messages in social-media, such as Twitter, to help monitor emotional responses to events. Prior work has focused mostly on negative / positive sentiment classification tasks, and although numerous approaches employ highly elaborate and effective techniques with some success, the sentiment or emotion granularity is generally limiting and arguably not always most appropriate for real-world problems. In this paper we employ an ontology engineering approach to the problem of fine-grained emotion detection in sparse messages. Messages are also processed using a custom NLP pipeline, which is appropriate for the sparse and informal nature of text encountered on micro-blogs. Our approach detects a range of eight high-level emotions; anger, confusion, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, shame and surprise. We report f-measures (recall and precision) and compare our approach to two related approaches from recent literature. © 2013 IADIS