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1 – 10 of 211Mrinalini Luthra, Konstantin Todorov, Charles Jeurgens and Giovanni Colavizza
This paper aims to expand the scope and mitigate the biases of extant archival indexes.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to expand the scope and mitigate the biases of extant archival indexes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use automatic entity recognition on the archives of the Dutch East India Company to extract mentions of underrepresented people.
Findings
The authors release an annotated corpus and baselines for a shared task and show that the proposed goal is feasible.
Originality/value
Colonial archives are increasingly a focus of attention for historians and the public, broadening access to them is a pressing need for archives.
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Chih-Ming Chen and Xian-Xu Chen
This study aims to develop an associative text analyzer (ATA) to support users in quickly grasping and interpreting the content of large amounts of text through text association…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to develop an associative text analyzer (ATA) to support users in quickly grasping and interpreting the content of large amounts of text through text association recommendations, facilitating the identification of the contextual relationships between people, events, organization and locations for digital humanities. Additionally, by providing text summaries, the tool allows users to link between distant and close readings, thereby enabling more efficient exploration of related texts.
Design/methodology/approach
To verify the effectiveness of this tool in supporting exploration of historical texts, this study uses a counterbalanced design to compare the use of the digital humanities platform for Mr. Lo Chia-Lun’s Writings (DHP-LCLW) with and without the ATA to assist in exploring different aspects of text. The study investigated whether there were significant differences in effectiveness for exploring textual contexts and technological acceptance as well as used semi-structured in-depth interviews to understand the research participants’ viewpoints and experiences with the ATA.
Findings
The results of the experiment revealed that the effectiveness of text exploration using the DHP-LCLW with and without the ATA varied significantly depending on the topic of the text being explored. The DHP-LCLW with the ATA was found to be more suitable for exploring historical texts, while the DHP-LCLW without the ATA was more suitable for exploring educational texts. The DHP-LCLW with the DHP-LCLW was found to be significantly more useful in terms of perceived usefulness than the DHP-LCLW without the ATA, indicating that the research participants believed the ATA was more effective in helping them efficiently grasp the related texts and topics during text exploration.
Practical implications
The study’s practical implications lie in the development of an ATA for digital humanities, offering a valuable tool for efficiently exploring historical texts. The ATA enhances users’ ability to grasp and interpret large volumes of text, facilitating contextual relationship identification. Its practical utility is evident in the improved effectiveness of text exploration, particularly for historical content, as indicated by users’ perceived usefulness.
Originality/value
This study proposes an ATA for digital humanities, enhancing text exploration by offering association recommendations and efficient linking between distant and close readings. The study contributes by providing a specialized tool and demonstrating its perceived usefulness in facilitating efficient exploration of related texts in digital humanities.
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Ethiopia has enacted laws on transparency and disclosure of information in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). However, these laws are not strict enough, with the transparency and…
Abstract
Purpose
Ethiopia has enacted laws on transparency and disclosure of information in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). However, these laws are not strict enough, with the transparency and disclosure practices disappointing in the country. Thus, this study aims to investigate the legal framework governing transparency and disclosure in SOEs.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses doctrinal, qualitative and comparative approaches. Domestic legal texts are appraised based on the organization for economic co-operation and development Guideline on Corporate Governance of State-owned Enterprises, the World Bank Toolkit on Corporate Governance of State-owned Enterprises and best national practices. This approach has been further corroborated by qualitative analysis of the basic principles of transparency and disclosure.
Findings
The finding reveals that the laws on transparency and disclosure do not comply with global practices and are inadequate to ensure transparency and discourse in SOEs. They fail to establish appropriate disclosure frameworks and practices at the SOE and state-ownership entity levels. They also indiscriminately subject enterprises to multiple auditing functions and conflicting responsibilities.
Originality/value
To the author’s knowledge, this study is the first legal literature on transparency and disclosure in Ethiopian SOEs. This study assists the state as owner in reforming the laws and uplifting SOEs from their current unpleasant condition. It can also become a reference for future research.
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Samuel Owusu Asare, Godfred Fobiri and Francis Kwesi Bondinuba
Ghana’s legal framework for procurement has undergone substantial reform to increase its efficacy. However, disregard for legal obligations set forth has resulted in issues of…
Abstract
Purpose
Ghana’s legal framework for procurement has undergone substantial reform to increase its efficacy. However, disregard for legal obligations set forth has resulted in issues of fraud, corruption and poor oversight. This study seeks to synthesize literature on the recognition of legal obligations arising from tendering procedures and measures to promote fairness, transparency and accountability under Ghana’s procurement framework.
Design/methodology/approach
Legal frameworks and publications from diverse countries have been synthesized using a systematic literature review across three databases (Scopus, JSTOR and HeinOnline) to illuminate key concepts, issues and best practices relevant to the study. Data obtained from included publications was synthesized using Sandelowski and Barroso’s two-step approach by using a qualitative meta-summary and thematic synthesis.
Findings
The study reveals that issues of conflict of interest, corruption, lack of capacity, inadequate oversight and insufficient legal follow-through hinder the effectiveness of procurement regulations. The findings highlight the need for targeted improvements in resource allocation for consistent application of transparency measures, regular publication of notices and robust enforcement of accountability mechanisms. The report proposes the creation of a common data environment for networking and information dissemination, implementing feedback systems and trust rating schemes.
Practical implications
The study contributes to the body of knowledge on procurement regulation by providing a thorough analysis of Ghana’s procurement framework. The findings will help policymakers close the observed implementation gaps by guiding the revision of current legislation and the introduction of new regulations. Research findings can be used to guide the creation of focused training courses.
Originality/value
This study, one of the first of its kind in Ghana, examines the current procurement framework, including legal obligations and implementation challenges. It contributes to the body of knowledge on the subject by providing a current and fact-based analysis as well as relevant recommendations for strengthening the framework.
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Francesca Bartolacci, Roberto Del Gobbo and Michela Soverchia
This paper contributes to the field of public services’ performance measurement systems by proposing a benchmarking-based methodology that improves the effective use of big and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper contributes to the field of public services’ performance measurement systems by proposing a benchmarking-based methodology that improves the effective use of big and open data in analyzing and evaluating efficiency, for supporting internal decision-making processes of public entities.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed methodology uses data envelopment analysis in combination with a multivariate outlier detection algorithm—local outlier factor—to ensure the proper exploitation of the data available for efficiency evaluation in the presence of the multidimensional datasets with anomalous values that often characterize big and open data. An empirical implementation of the proposed methodology was conducted on waste management services provided in Italy.
Findings
The paper addresses the problem of misleading targets for entities that are erroneously deemed inefficient when applying data envelopment analysis to real-life datasets containing outliers. The proposed approach makes big and open data useful in evaluating relative efficiency, and it supports the development of performance-based strategies and policies by public entities from a data-driven public sector perspective.
Originality/value
Few empirical studies have explored how to make the use of big and open data more feasible for performance measurement systems in the public sector, addressing the challenges related to data quality and the need for analytical tools readily usable from a managerial perspective, given the poor diffusion of technical skills in public organizations. The paper fills this research gap by proposing a methodology that allows for exploiting the opportunities offered by big and open data for supporting internal decision-making processes within the public services context.
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Victor Diogho Heuer de Carvalho and Ana Paula Cabral Seixas Costa
This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is…
Abstract
Purpose
This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.
Design/methodology/approach
The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.
Findings
Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.
Research limitations/implications
Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.
Practical implications
The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.
Originality/value
The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.
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Zijian Wang, Ximing Xiao, Shiwei Fu and Qinggong Shi
This study aims to uncover the mechanisms behind the marginalization of county-level public libraries.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to uncover the mechanisms behind the marginalization of county-level public libraries.
Design/methodology/approach
The research surveyed 25 counties in central China, including Hubei, Chongqing, Hunan, and Guizhou provinces. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with library directors and deputy directors, focusing on main and branch library construction, cultural inclusivity, library assessment, and digital services.
Findings
Contributing factors to library marginalization were identified as economic pressure, institutional domain, longstanding issues, organizational entity, and societal misconceptions. Building on this, the study introduces the HBAC model to explain county-level public library marginalization. Considering the actual social context of these libraries, the article proposes a “3 + 1” approach to mitigate their marginalization.
Originality/value
The research methodology, analysis process, theoretical model, and recommendations provided could shed light on academic research and practical exploration in the field of public libraries globally.
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Song Wang, Ying Luo and Xinmin Liu
The overload of user-generated content in online mental health community makes the focus and resonance tendencies of the participating groups less clear. Thus, the purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
The overload of user-generated content in online mental health community makes the focus and resonance tendencies of the participating groups less clear. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to build an early identification mechanism for users' high attention content to promote early intervention and effective dissemination of professional medical guidance.
Design/methodology/approach
We decouple the identification mechanism from two processes: early feature combing and algorithmic model construction. Firstly, based on the differentiated needs and concerns of the participant groups, the multiple features of “information content + source users” are refined. Secondly, a multi-level fusion model is constructed for features processing. Specifically, Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT)-Bi-directional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM)-Linear are used to refine the semantic features, while Graph Attention Networks (GAT) is used to capture the entity attributes and relation features. Finally, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to optimize the multi-level fusion features.
Findings
The results show that the ACC of the multi-level fusion model is 84.42%, F1 is 79.43% and R is 76.71%. Compared with other baseline models and single feature elements, the ACC and F1 values are improved to different degrees.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in analyzing multiple features based on early stages and constructing a new multi-level fusion model for processing. Further, the study is valuable for the orientation of psychological patients' needs and early guidance of professional medical care.
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Nina Du Toit, Philip Steenkamp and Andre Groenewald
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the measures that could be taken to combat the risk of economic crime in the aftermath of South African disasters.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the measures that could be taken to combat the risk of economic crime in the aftermath of South African disasters.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper used secondary sources including, but not limited to, institutional reports, newspaper articles and peer-reviewed academic journal articles.
Findings
The COVID-19 pandemic was used as an example in this paper to discuss the susceptibility of post-disaster funding to the risk of economic crime and to assess how the South African government attempted to combat this risk during the pandemic. The Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) conducted a real-time audit of the government’s essential COVID-19 initiatives in collaboration with the newly established Fusion Centre. Through their collaborative efforts, they successfully identified mismanaged funds, facilitated the recovery thereof and prosecuted individuals and entities involved. This paper found that to proactively combat economic crime in future post-disaster events, the collaborative use of the AGSA and the Fusion Centre, in conjunction with existing bodies established under the Disaster Management Act, should be considered.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the body of knowledge in disaster risk management and forensic accountancy. As the frequency of disasters is expected to increase in the future, so will the economic crime risk associated with post-disaster funding. This paper demonstrates that post-disaster funding is especially susceptible to the risk of economic crime and it is therefore important to research methods to combat this problem and prevent further losses.
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Azanzi Jiomekong and Sanju Tiwari
This paper aims to curate open research knowledge graph (ORKG) with papers related to ontology learning and define an approach using ORKG as a computer-assisted tool to organize…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to curate open research knowledge graph (ORKG) with papers related to ontology learning and define an approach using ORKG as a computer-assisted tool to organize key-insights extracted from research papers.
Design/methodology/approach
Action research was used to explore, test and evaluate the use of the Open Research Knowledge Graph as a computer assistant tool for knowledge acquisition from scientific papers.
Findings
To extract, structure and describe research contributions, the granularity of information should be decided; to facilitate the comparison of scientific papers, one should design a common template that will be used to describe the state of the art of a domain.
Originality/value
This approach is currently used to document “food information engineering,” “tabular data to knowledge graph matching” and “question answering” research problems and the “neurosymbolic AI” domain. More than 200 papers are ingested in ORKG. From these papers, more than 800 contributions are documented and these contributions are used to build over 100 comparison tables. At the end of this work, we found that ORKG is a valuable tool that can reduce the working curve of state-of-the-art research.
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