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1 – 10 of 10Miaomiao Chen, Lu An, Gang Li and Chuanming Yu
The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public events.
Design/methodology/approach
This study constructed the severity assessment system of public events from the dimensions of the netizens' role, the Internet media's role, the spread of public events and the attitudes and feelings of netizens. The method of analyzing the influence tendency of the public event severity indicators was proposed. A total of 1,107,308 microblogging entries regarding four public events were investigated. The severity of public events was divided into four levels.
Findings
It is found that serious public events have higher indicator values than medium level events on the microblogging platform. A quantitative severity classification standard for public events was established and the early warning mechanism of public events was built.
Research limitations/implications
Microblogging and other social media platforms provide rich clues for the real-time study and judgment of public events. This study only investigated the Weibo platform as the data source. Other social media platforms can also be considered in future.
Originality/value
Different from the ex-post evaluation method of judging the severity of public events based on their physical loss, this study constructed a quantitative method to dynamically determine the severity of public events according to the clues reflected by social media. The results can help the emergency management departments judge the severity of public events objectively and reduce the subjective negligence and misjudgment.
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Lu An, Yan Shen, Yanfang Tao, Gang Li and Chuanming Yu
This study aims to profile the government microbloggers and evaluate their roles. The results can help improve the governments' response capability to public emergencies.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to profile the government microbloggers and evaluate their roles. The results can help improve the governments' response capability to public emergencies.
Design/methodology/approach
This study proposes the user profiling and role evaluation model of government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies. The indicators are designed from the four dimensions of time, content, scale and influence, and the feature labels are identified. Three different public emergencies were investigated, including the West Africa Ebola outbreak, the Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak and the Shandong vaccine case in China.
Findings
The results found that most government microbloggers were follower responders, short-term participants, originators, occasional participants and low influencers. The role distribution of government microbloggers was highly concentrated. However, in terms of individual profiles, the role of a government microblogger varied with events.
Social implications
The findings can provide a reference for the performance assessment of the government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies and help them improve their ability to communicate with the public and respond to public emergencies.
Originality/value
By analyzing the performance of government microbloggers from the four dimensions of time, content, scale and influence, this paper fills the gap in existing literature on designing the user profiling and role evaluation model of government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies.
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Lu An, Yan Shen, Gang Li and Chuanming Yu
Multiple topics often exist on social media platforms that compete for users' attention. To explore how users’ attention transfers in the context of multitopic competition can…
Abstract
Purpose
Multiple topics often exist on social media platforms that compete for users' attention. To explore how users’ attention transfers in the context of multitopic competition can help us understand the development pattern of the public attention.
Design/methodology/approach
This study proposes the prediction model for the attention transfer behavior of social media users in the context of multitopic competition and reveals the important influencing factors of users' attention transfer. Microblogging features are selected from the dimensions of users, time, topics and competitiveness. The microblogging posts on eight topic categories from Sina Weibo, the most popular microblogging platform in China, are used for empirical analysis. A novel indicator named transfer tendency of a feature value is proposed to identify the important factors for attention transfer.
Findings
The accuracy of the prediction model based on Light GBM reaches 91%. It is found that user features are the most important for the attention transfer of microblogging users among all the features. The conditions of attention transfer in all aspects are also revealed.
Originality/value
The findings can help governments and enterprises understand the competition mechanism among multiple topics and improve their ability to cope with public opinions in the complex environment.
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Lu An, Chuanming Yu, Xia Lin, Tingyao Du, Liqin Zhou and Gang Li
The purpose of this paper is to identify salient topic categories and outline their evolution patterns and temporal trends in microblogs on a public health emergency across…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify salient topic categories and outline their evolution patterns and temporal trends in microblogs on a public health emergency across different stages. Comparisons were also examined to reveal the similarities and differences between those patterns and trends on microblog platforms of different languages and from different nations.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 459,266 microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 on Twitter and Weibo were collected for nine months after the inception of the outbreak. Topics were detected by the latent Dirichlet allocation model and classified into several categories. The daily tweets were analyzed with the self-organizing map technique and labeled with the most salient topics. The investigated time span was divided into three stages, and the most salient topic categories were identified for each stage.
Findings
In total, 14 salient topic categories were identified in microblogs about the Ebola outbreak and were summarized as increasing, decreasing, fluctuating or ephemeral types. The topical evolution patterns of microblogs and temporal trends for topic categories vary on different microblog platforms. Twitter users were keen on the dynamics of the Ebola outbreak, such as status description, secondary events and so forth, while Weibo users focused on background knowledge of Ebola and precautions.
Originality/value
This study revealed evolution patterns and temporal trends of microblog topics on a public health emergency. The findings can help administrators of public health emergencies and microblog communities work together to better satisfy information needs and physical demands by the public when public health emergencies are in progress.
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Chuanming Yu, Haodong Xue, Manyi Wang and Lu An
Owing to the uneven distribution of annotated corpus among different languages, it is necessary to bridge the gap between low resource languages and high resource languages. From…
Abstract
Purpose
Owing to the uneven distribution of annotated corpus among different languages, it is necessary to bridge the gap between low resource languages and high resource languages. From the perspective of entity relation extraction, this paper aims to extend the knowledge acquisition task from a single language context to a cross-lingual context, and to improve the relation extraction performance for low resource languages.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a cross-lingual adversarial relation extraction (CLARE) framework, which decomposes cross-lingual relation extraction into parallel corpus acquisition and adversarial adaptation relation extraction. Based on the proposed framework, this paper conducts extensive experiments in two tasks, i.e. the English-to-Chinese and the English-to-Arabic cross-lingual entity relation extraction.
Findings
The Macro-F1 values of the optimal models in the two tasks are 0.880 1 and 0.789 9, respectively, indicating that the proposed CLARE framework for CLARE can significantly improve the effect of low resource language entity relation extraction. The experimental results suggest that the proposed framework can effectively transfer the corpus as well as the annotated tags from English to Chinese and Arabic. This study reveals that the proposed approach is less human labour intensive and more effective in the cross-lingual entity relation extraction than the manual method. It shows that this approach has high generalizability among different languages.
Originality/value
The research results are of great significance for improving the performance of the cross-lingual knowledge acquisition. The cross-lingual transfer may greatly reduce the time and cost of the manual construction of the multi-lingual corpus. It sheds light on the knowledge acquisition and organization from the unstructured text in the era of big data.
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Chuanming Yu, Zhengang Zhang, Lu An and Gang Li
In recent years, knowledge graph completion has gained increasing research focus and shown significant improvements. However, most existing models only use the structures of…
Abstract
Purpose
In recent years, knowledge graph completion has gained increasing research focus and shown significant improvements. However, most existing models only use the structures of knowledge graph triples when obtaining the entity and relationship representations. In contrast, the integration of the entity description and the knowledge graph network structure has been ignored. This paper aims to investigate how to leverage both the entity description and the network structure to enhance the knowledge graph completion with a high generalization ability among different datasets.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors propose an entity-description augmented knowledge graph completion model (EDA-KGC), which incorporates the entity description and network structure. It consists of three modules, i.e. representation initialization, deep interaction and reasoning. The representation initialization module utilizes entity descriptions to obtain the pre-trained representation of entities. The deep interaction module acquires the features of the deep interaction between entities and relationships. The reasoning component performs matrix manipulations with the deep interaction feature vector and entity representation matrix, thus obtaining the probability distribution of target entities. The authors conduct intensive experiments on the FB15K, WN18, FB15K-237 and WN18RR data sets to validate the effect of the proposed model.
Findings
The experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the traditional structure-based knowledge graph completion model and the entity-description-enhanced knowledge graph completion model. The experiments also suggest that the model has greater feasibility in different scenarios such as sparse data, dynamic entities and limited training epochs. The study shows that the integration of entity description and network structure can significantly increase the effect of the knowledge graph completion task.
Originality/value
The research has a significant reference for completing the missing information in the knowledge graph and improving the application effect of the knowledge graph in information retrieval, question answering and other fields.
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Ying Zheng, Chuanming Chen and Hualiang Ren
Studies on China suggest that institutional environment plays a significant role in business activities; however, the issue of how firms attend to institutional environment is…
Abstract
Purpose
Studies on China suggest that institutional environment plays a significant role in business activities; however, the issue of how firms attend to institutional environment is largely under-explored. This paper responds to the oversight by examining the potential ways in which firms can demonstrate heterogeneity in terms of vigilance to government policy. Drawing from the attention-based view of firms and the institutional logic perspective, the authors aim to propose that firms with market logic or non-market logic will show difference in vulnerability to policy change. Further, firm ownership type and policy-leveraging capability would moderate the relationship between institutional logic and attention to policy environment.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical background of this study is based on Chinese pharmaceutical firms. The new reform on health-care system launched by Chinese government in 2009 provides a fertile context to observe firms’ attention to government policy. The hypotheses are tested by using data of 145 Chinese pharmaceutical public firms from 2009 to 2013.
Findings
The results generally support the hypotheses: market logic has a positive effect on attention to policy, whereas non-market logic has a negative effect. The impact of market logic is weakened when firms have a higher policy-leveraging capability (in terms of getting government subsidies); the non-market logic effect is strengthened both when firms are state-owned enterprises and have a higher policy-leveraging capability.
Originality/value
Instead of focusing on how institutional environment have an influence on firm behavior as previous studies do, this paper examines the interaction between institution and firms by exploring how firms pay attention to government policy. Under the context of China, this study sheds light on how institutional logic plays a role in determining cognitive resource allocation of firms.
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Fan Yu, Junping Qiu and Wen Lou
This paper aims to solve the disadvantages of content-based domain ontology (CBDO) and metadata-based domain ontology (MDO) and improve organization and discovery efficiency of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to solve the disadvantages of content-based domain ontology (CBDO) and metadata-based domain ontology (MDO) and improve organization and discovery efficiency of library resources by resource ontology (RO).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper constructed an RO model. Methods of informetrics are utilized to reveal semantic relationships among library resources. Methods of ontology, ontology-relational database mapping (O-R mapping) and relational database modelling are utilized to construct RO. Take author co-occurrence for example, the paper demonstrated the capability of RO model.
Findings
RO not only revealed the deep-level semantic relationships of metadata of library resources but also realized totally computer-automated processing. RO improved the efficiency of knowledge organization and discovery.
Research limitations/implications
Semantic relationships revealed by RO are limited to simple metadata, which makes it difficult to reveal fine-grained semantic relationships. Ongoing research focuses on the revelation of semantic relationships based on the title and abstract.
Practical implications
The paper includes implications for utilizing methods of Informetrics to construct ontology.
Originality/value
This paper proposed a standardized process of ontology construction in library resources. It may be of potential interest for anyone who needs to effectively organize library resources.
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Lin Gui, Zhendong Yin and Huihua Nie
The stability maintenance system has played an essential role in maintaining social stability although it also has brought about social problems worthy of attention. Admittedly…
Abstract
Purpose
The stability maintenance system has played an essential role in maintaining social stability although it also has brought about social problems worthy of attention. Admittedly compensation-based stability maintenance policy can address the appeals of citizens whose rights are infringed and the dissolving effect in the provision of compensation can save the cost of stability maintenance but such stability maintenance system lacks equilibrium.
Design/methodology/approach
The establishment of a strict assessment system for stability maintenance performance can encourage the stability maintenance authorities to eliminate the “fuse effect” as much as possible and ensure the effective implementation of the stability maintenance system. However, the rigorous stability maintenance performance assessment also provides the possibility for profit-driven petitions.
Findings
Due to the continuous accumulation of social dissatisfaction and the lack of stability maintenance equilibrium in the implementation of the compensation-based stability maintenance policy, public governance will fall into a stability maintenance paradox of “greater instability resulting from stability maintenance”.
Originality/value
The provision of sufficient means for the people to protect their interest by implementing measures such as strengthening the rule of law mechanisms is the key to achieve long-term social stability.
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With the rapid development of social media, the occurrence and evolution of emergency events are often accompanied by massive users' expressions. The fine-grained analysis on…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid development of social media, the occurrence and evolution of emergency events are often accompanied by massive users' expressions. The fine-grained analysis on users' expressions can provide accurate and reliable information for event processing. Hence, 2,003,814 expressions on a major malignant emergency event were mined from multiple dimensions in this paper.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper conducted finer-grained analysis on users' online expressions in an emergency event. Specifically, the authors firstly selected a major emergency event as the research object and collected the event-related user expressions that lasted nearly two years to describe the dynamic evolution trend of the event. Then, users' expression preferences were identified by detecting anomic expressions, classifying sentiment tendencies and extracting topics in expressions. Finally, the authors measured the explicit and implicit impacts of different expression preferences and obtained relations between the differential expression preferences.
Findings
Experimental results showed that users have both short- and long-term attention to emergency events. Their enthusiasm for discussing the event will be quickly dispelled and easily aroused. Meanwhile, most users prefer to make rational and normative expressions of events, and the expression topics are diversified. In addition, compared with anomic negative expressions, anomic expressions in positive sentiments are more common. In conclusion, the integration of multi-dimensional analysis results of users' expression preferences (including discussion heat, preference impacts and preference relations) is an effective means to support emergency event processing.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first research to conduct in-depth and fine-grained analysis of user expression in emergencies, so as to get in-detail and multi-dimensional characteristics of users' online expressions for supporting event processing.
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