Disambiguierung deutschsprachiger Diskursmarker: Eine Pilot-Studie

Discourse markers such as German aber, wohl or obwohl can be regarded as valuable information for a wide range of text-linguistic applications, since they provide important cues for the interpretation of texts or text segments. Unfortunately, many of them are highly ambiguous. Thus, for their use in applications like automatic text summarizations a reliable disambiguation of discourse markers is needed. This should be done automatically, since manual disambiguation is feasible only for small amounts of data. The aim of this pilot study, therefore, was to investigate methodological requirements of automatic disambiguation of German discourse markers. Two different methods known from word-sense disambiguation, Naive-Bayes and decisionlists, were used for the highly ambiguous marker wenn. A statistical approach was taken to compare the two approaches and different feature combinations

Citizen Perspectives on Necessary Safeguards to the Use of AI by Law Enforcement Agencies

In the light of modern technological advances, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is relied upon to enhance performance, increase efficiency, and maximize gains. For Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), it can prove valuable in optimizing evidence analysis and establishing proactive prevention measures. Nevertheless, citizens raise legitimate concerns around privacy invasions, biases, inequalities, and inaccurate decisions. This study explores the views of 111 citizens towards AI use by police through interviews, and integrates societal concerns along with propositions of safeguards from negative effects of AI use by LEAs in the context of cybercrime and terrorism.Comment: CSCE 2022 Conference Proceeding

What do citizens communicate about during crises? Analyzing twitter use during the 2011 UK riots

Abstract The use of social media during crises has been explored in a variety of natural and man-made crisis situations. Yet, most of these studies have focused exclusively on the communication strategies and messages sent by crisis responders. Surprisingly little research has been done on how crisis publics (i.e., those people interested in or affected by the crisis) use social media during such events. Our article addresses this gap in the context of citizens' Twitter use during the 2011 riots in the UK. Focusing on communications with and about police forces in two cities, we analyzed 5984 citizen tweets collected during the event for content and sentiment. Comparing the two cases, our findings suggest that citizens' Twitter communication follows a general logic of concerns, but can also be influenced very easily by single, non-crisis related events such as perceived missteps in a police force's Twitter communication. Our study provides insights into citizens' concerns and communication patterns during crises adding to our knowledge about the dynamics of citizens' use of social media in such times. It further highlights the fragmentation in Twitter audiences especially in later stages of the crisis. These observations can be utilized by police forces to help determine the appropriate organizational responses that facilitate coping across various stages of crisis events. In addition, they illustrate limitations in current theoretical understandings of crisis response strategies, adding the requirement for adaptivity, flexibility and ambiguity in organizational responses to address the observed plurivocality of crisis audiences

What Determines Inter-Coder Agreement in Manual Annotations? A Meta-Analytic Investigation

Recent discussions of annotator agreement have mostly centered around its calculation and interpretation, and the correct choice of indices. Although these discussions are important, they only consider the "back-end" of the story, namely, what to do once the data are collected. Just as important in our opinion is to know how agreement is reached in the first place and what factors influence coder agreement as part of the annotation process or setting, as this knowledge can provide concrete guidelines for the planning and set-up of annotation projects. To investigate whether there are factors that consistently impact annotator agreement we conducted a meta-analytic investigation of annotation studies reporting agreement percentages. Our meta-analysis synthesized factors reported in 96 annotation studies from three domains (word-sense disambiguation, prosodic transcriptions, and phonetic transcriptions) and was based on a total of 346 agreement indices. Our analysis identified seven factors that influence reported agreement values: annotation domain, number of categories in a coding scheme, number of annotators in a project, whether annotators received training, the intensity of annotator training, the annotation purpose, and the method used for the calculation of percentage agreements. Based on our results we develop practical recommendations for the assessment, interpretation, calculation, and reporting of coder agreement. We also briefly discuss theoretical implications for the concept of annotation quality

Citizen repertoires of smart urban safety: Perspectives from Rotterdam, the Netherlands

This article provides empirical research about the perspectives of citizens of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on the emergent phenomenon of ‘smart urban safety’, which advocates advanced uses of digital technologies and data for urban safety management, and is gaining currency in thinking about urban futures. While smart cities affect many dimensions of city management, applications to safety management belong to the most controversial, revealing important tensions between disparate perspectives on technology and society in the context of urban living environments. Despite their influence, the concepts of smart cities and smart urban safety are largely unknown to the public. To gain insights into citizens’ perspectives, this study uses smart urban safety vignettes to which participants are invited to respond. Using discourse analytical techniques, their interpretations of safety in the smart city are described, which center on functional designs, express lacking influence over technological developments, and reflect on benefits and risks and on their civic roles vis-à-vis technologically mediated urban safety management. Our article concludes by arguing how these findings complement, but also show limitations to traditional technology acceptance models that are as of yet dominant in research of smart urban safety specifically, and smart cities more generally

Best practice in police social media adaptation

Summary: Best Practice in Police Social Media Adaptation. This document describes best practice of European police forces in adapting social media. The description of these practices stems from a workshop series and other events where police ICT experts met with academics and industry experts; and from a study of the Twitter usage of British police forces during the 2011 riots. Grouped in nine categories, we describe different uses and implementation strategies of social media by police forces. Based on these examples, we show that there have been numerous ways in which police forces benefitted from adopting social media, ranging from improved information for investigations and an improved relationship with the public to a more efficient use of resources

Keine Angst vor Evaluationen - Eine Blaupause zur Evaluation der niederländischen Polizeireform

Im Januar 2013 wurde in den Niederlanden die Nationale Polizei eingeführt. Die damit verbundene Reorganisation der Polizei bedeutete die Reduktion von 26 lokalen Einheiten auf eine nationale Einheit – eine tiefgreifende und komplexe Veränderung, die verbunden war mit großen Erwartungen hinsichtlich erhöhter Effizienz, höherer Bürgernähe und besserer Kooperation sowohl intern als auch mit externen Partnern. Die Veränderung war politisch nicht unumstritten, weshalb eine Evaluation der Polizeireform nach drei und nach fünf Jahren vorgesehen wurde. Diese Evaluation sollte unabhängig (d. h. von außerhalb der Polizei) und nach wissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten erfolgen. Der erste Schritt, um diese Evaluation zu ermöglichen, war die Erstellung eines Evaluationsplans, der als »Blaupause« dienen sollte, um Veränderungen in der Effektivität und Effizienz und der Mitarbeiter- und Bürgerzufriedenheit sowohl aus einer polizeiinternen als auch polizeiexternen Sicht im Sinne einer Multi-Stakeholder-Perspektive zu erfassen