Towards a Gold Standard Corpus for Variable Detection and Linking in Social Science Publications

In this paper, we describe our effort to create a new corpus for the evaluation of detecting and linking so-called survey variables in social science publications (e.g., "Do you believe in Heaven?"). The task is to recognize survey variable mentions in a given text, disambiguate them, and link them to the corresponding variable within a knowledge base. Since there are generally hundreds of candidates to link to and due to the wide variety of forms they can take, this is a challenging task within NLP. The contribution of our work is the first gold standard corpus for the variable detection and linking task. We describe the annotation guidelines and the annotation process. The produced corpus is multilingual - German and English - and includes manually curated word and phrase alignments. Moreover, it includes text samples that could not be assigned to any variables, denoted as negative examples. Based on the new dataset, we conduct an evaluation of several state-of-the-art text classification and textual similarity methods. The annotated corpus is made available along with an open-source baseline system for variable mention identification and linking

Mining Social Science Publications for Survey Variables

Research in Social Science is usually based on survey data where individual research questions relate to observable concepts (variables). However, due to a lack of standards for data citations a reliable identification of the variables used is often difficult. In this paper, we present a work-in-progress study that seeks to provide a solution to the variable detection task based on supervised machine learning algorithms, using a linguistic analysis pipeline to extract a rich feature set, including terminological concepts and similarity metric scores. Further, we present preliminary results on a small dataset that has been specifically designed for this task, yielding modest improvements over the baseline

To clean or not to clean? A critical review of beach cleaning methods and impacts

Cleaning is a fundamental concern of beach managers in many destinations as well as an important requirement in beach quality awards. However, it has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper provides an overview of empirical studies on beach cleaning and analyzes cleaning-related requirements of 11 beach awards that generate controversy in the literature. This study comments on key aspects of beach cleaning, resolves various misconceptions, and provides new perspectives by integrating related topics drawn from a wide range of literature. The arguments based on both the ecological and tourism managerial perspectives are presented, indicating the gaps and proposing research solutions. The paper calls for empirical studies with regard to the efficiency of different cleaning approaches on beaches with varying levels of use intensity and for methodological designs that separate the impacts of mechanical grooming from those of trampling, dune destruction, shore armoring, artificial lighting, among others

Brain activation during anticipation of sound sequences

Music consists of sound sequences that require integration over time. As we become familiar with music, associations between notes, melodies, and entire symphonic movements become stronger and more complex. These associations can become so tight that, for example, hearing the end of one album track can elicit a robust image of the upcoming track while anticipating it in total silence. Here, we study this predictive “anticipatory imagery” at various stages throughout learning and investigate activity changes in corresponding neural structures using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Anticipatory imagery (in silence) for highly familiar naturalistic music was accompanied by pronounced activity in rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and premotor areas. Examining changes in the neural bases of anticipatory imagery during two stages of learning conditional associations between simple melodies, however, demonstrates the importance of fronto-striatal connections, consistent with a role of the basal ganglia in “training” frontal cortex (Pasupathy and Miller, 2005). Another striking change in neural resources during learning was a shift between caudal PFC earlier to rostral PFC later in learning. Our findings regarding musical anticipation and sound sequence learning are highly compatible with studies of motor sequence learning, suggesting common predictive mechanisms in both domains

Factors that facilitate and inhibit community-based tourism initiatives in developing countries

A spectrum of operational, structural, and cultural conditions leads to the successorfailureofcommunity-basedtourism(CBT)initiatives.Knowledge of these factors is crucial in the design, evaluation, and monitoring of CBT. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify the factors that facilitate and inhibitCBTinthenaturalareasofdevelopingcountries.Adirectedcontent analysis of 68 case studies from literature identified 25 external and 32 internal factors. Based on the 77 factors obtained, a methodology to evaluate CBT initiatives is proposed that can serve as a framework to (1) evaluate initiatives in terms of their feasibility for CBT, current performance, and issues to be solved by management; (2) compare the performance of various initiatives; (3) prioritize factors for the success of CBT; and (4) statistically analyse the relationships among factors. The paper concludes that although several previous studies identified success factors and barriers for CBT, surprisingly little work has been published to create a universal framework to evaluate CBT initiatives. Further research is suggested to explore the statistical relationships among the factors and to define the relative importance of each factor in the success or failure of CBT initiatives

Overview of the SV-Ident 2022 Shared Task on Survey Variable Identification in Social Science Publications

In this paper, we provide an overview of the SV-Ident shared task as part of the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at COLING 2022. In the shared task, participants were provided with a sentence and a vocabulary of variables, and asked to identify which variables, if any, are mentioned in individual sentences from scholarly documents in full text. Two teams made a total of 9 submissions to the shared task leaderboard. While none of the teams improve on the baseline systems, we still draw insights from their submissions. Furthermore, we provide a detailed evaluation. Data and baselines for our shared task are freely available at https://github.com/vadis-project/sv-iden

Personalized web learning: merging Open Educational Resources into adaptive courses for higher education

In this paper, educational and technical challenges for applying learning pathways in Massive(ly) Open Online Courses in higher education are outlined. The authors argue that quality issues and didactical concerns may be overcome by (1) reverting to small Open Educational Resources that are (2) adaptively joined into concise courses by considering (3) predefined learning pathways with proper semantic annotations and (4) the observation of learner behaviour. Such a merger does not only require conceptual work and corresponding support tools, but also a new meta data format and an engine which interprets the semantic annotations as well as the measures of learner’s actions. These factors are then turned into didactically meaningful recommendations for the next learning steps, thereby creating a personalized learning pathway for each learner. The EU FP7 project INTUITEL is introduced, which has already contributed to the conceptual work and is currently developing the software to achieve these tasks. (DIPF/Orig.

Making the UN Ocean Decade work? The potential for, and challenges of, transdisciplinary research and real‐world laboratories for building towards ocean solutions

1. Due to the strong interconnectedness between the ocean and our societies worldwide, improved ocean governance is essential for sustainable development in the context of the UN Ocean Decade. However, a multitude of different perspectives—ecological, societal, political, economic—and relations between these have to be understood and taken into consideration to foster transformative pathways towards marine sustainability. 2. A core challenge that we are facing is that the ‘right’ response to complex societal issues cannot be known beforehand as abilities to predict complex systems are limited. Consequently, societal transformation is necessarily a journey towards the unknown and therefore requires experimental approaches that must enable the involvement of everyone with stakes in the future of our marine environment and its resources. 3. A promising transdisciplinary research method that fulfils both criteria—being participatory and experimental—are real-world laboratories. Here, we discuss how real-world labs can serve as an operational framework in the context of the Ocean Decade by facilitating and guiding successful knowledge exchange at the interface of science and society. The core element of real-world labs is transdisciplinary experimentation to jointly develop potential strategies leading to targeted real-world interventions, essential for achieving the proposed ‘Decade Outcomes’. 4. The authors specifically illustrate how deploying the concept of real-world labs can be advantageous when having to deal with multiple, overlapping challenges in the context of ocean governance and the blue economy. 5. Altogether, we offer a first major contribution to synthesizing knowledge on the potentials of marine real-world labs, considering how they act as a way of exploring options for sustainable ocean futures. Indeed, in the marine context, real-world labs are still under-explored but are a tangible way for addressing the societal challenges of working towards sustainability transformations over the coming UN Ocean Decade and beyond.BMBF CREATEBMBF MariscoVolkswagen Foundation ‘Niedersächsisches Vorab’BMBF ‘Innovation and structural change—WIR!’Peer Reviewe

Personalized web learning by joining OER

We argue that quality issues and didactical concerns of MOOCs may be overcome by relying on small Open Educational Resources, joining them into concise courses by gluing them together along predefined learning pathways with proper semantic annotations. This new approach to adaptive learning does not attempt to model the learner, but rather concentrates on the learning process and established models thereof. Such a new approach does not only require conceptual work and corresponding support tools, but also a new meta data format and an engine which may interpret the semantic annotations as well as measure a learner’s response to these. The EU FP7 project INTUITEL is introduced, which employs these technologies in a novel learning environment