Cross-lingual Distillation for Text Classification

Cross-lingual text classification(CLTC) is the task of classifying documents written in different languages into the same taxonomy of categories. This paper presents a novel approach to CLTC that builds on model distillation, which adapts and extends a framework originally proposed for model compression. Using soft probabilistic predictions for the documents in a label-rich language as the (induced) supervisory labels in a parallel corpus of documents, we train classifiers successfully for new languages in which labeled training data are not available. An adversarial feature adaptation technique is also applied during the model training to reduce distribution mismatch. We conducted experiments on two benchmark CLTC datasets, treating English as the source language and German, French, Japan and Chinese as the unlabeled target languages. The proposed approach had the advantageous or comparable performance of the other state-of-art methods.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2017; Code available at https://github.com/xrc10/cross-distil

New product development in professional communities: using members to help innovate

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The purpose of this research is to study how firms can use professional communities to support their new product development activities and processes in their business . The central constructs whose relationships have been explored are customer participation and new product development in the setting of professional virtual communities. The processes of managing the virtual community and the relationship between a firm with its virtual community and its community members are also studied in this research. METHODOLOGY The empirical part of this study was conducted through three case studies. The data for three virtual professional communities were gathered using the methods of netnography and interviews. Data collected included 13 pages of field notes based on observations of the communities, 26 saved community discussions, 16 blog posts, three ExamCard, three best practice, three case study and 6 transcribed interviews.. The analysis was carried out using the method of grounded theory introduced by Stauss and Corbin (1993) in order to build a holistic picture of the phenomena in question. FINDINGS The findings of this research suggest that firms have to consider various aspects when designing their virtual communities, including customer roles and new product development phases, member related issues, interaction related issues and integration related issues. In general, firms seemed to put much more focus on building the virtual community to the needs of the target group rather than considering how the community is part of the overall organization. The community is often treated as an autonomous unit separated from the actual business operations of the firm, and the links to the business of the firm is quite weak