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Purpose – Global cooperation between and within organisations has become essential for successful businesses. For the information management within such an international and necessarily multilingual environment, new challenges arise due to the diversity of the stakeholders and participants as well as due to the heterogeneity of approaches and traditions of information handling.

Design/methodology/approach – Key technologies like search technologies need to be adapted to support content in multiple languages and efficient access to it. Information processes need to be analysed while bearing in mind that problems may arise due to cross-cultural misunderstandings. The diversity requires appropriate treatment and appropriate methods in information systems in order to improve international information flows.

Findings – This chapter identifies some of these challenges and shows how they can be approached from an information science perspective. User-oriented research at the University of Hildesheim in the areas information retrieval, information seeking and human–computer interaction is presented.

Originality/value – Global enterprises and organisations may use this chapter to identify challenges and solutions for adapting their information technology to an international scale. Researchers who work on multilingual information access and intercultural aspects of information systems get an overview on some current research.

The increasing importance and proliferation of text data provide a unique opportunity and novel lens to study human communication across a myriad of business and marketing applications. For example, consumers compare and review products online, individuals interact with their voice assistants to search, shop, and express their needs, investors seek to extract signals from firms' press releases to improve their investment decisions, and firms analyze sales call transcripts to increase customer satisfaction and conversions. However, extracting meaningful information from unstructured text data is a nontrivial task. In this chapter, we review established natural language processing (NLP) methods for traditional tasks (e.g., LDA for topic modeling and lexicons for sentiment analysis and writing style extraction) and provide an outlook into the future of NLP in marketing, covering recent embedding-based approaches, pretrained language models, and transfer learning for novel tasks such as automated text generation and multi-modal representation learning. These emerging approaches allow the field to improve its ability to perform certain tasks that we have been using for more than a decade (e.g., text classification). But more importantly, they unlock entirely new types of tasks that bring about novel research opportunities (e.g., text summarization, and generative question answering). We conclude with a roadmap and research agenda for promising NLP applications in marketing and provide supplementary code examples to help interested scholars to explore opportunities related to NLP in marketing.

With the continuous development of intelligent technologies, knowledge graph, the backbone of artificial intelligence, has attracted much attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its powerful capability of knowledge representation and reasoning. Besides, knowledge graph has been widely applied in different kinds of applications, such as semantic search, question answering, knowledge management, and so on. In recent years, knowledge graph techniques in China are also developing rapidly and different Chinese knowledge graphs have been built to support various applications. Under the background of “One Belt One Road (OBOR)” initiative, cooperating with the countries along OBOR on studying knowledge graph techniques and applications will greatly promote the development of artificial intelligence. At the same time, the accumulated experience of China on developing knowledge graph is also a good reference. Thus, in this chapter, the authors mainly introduce the development of Chinese knowledge graphs and their applications. The authors first describe the background of OBOR, and then introduce the concept of knowledge graph and three typical Chinese knowledge graphs, including Zhishi.me, CN-DBpedia, and XLORE. Finally, the authors demonstrate several applications of Chinese knowledge graphs.

This chapter considers the reception of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire through the music of the Soviet metal band Chernyi Obelisk. It argues that Chernyi Obelisk's four Baudelaire settings, performed in Russian, as part of their early live sets in 1986/1987, offer an important part of the poet's reception history, within the Soviet Union. Taking as a starting point, Michael Robbins's claim that ‘metal and poetry are […] arts of accusation and instruction’, the chapter explores ideas of alienation and of the carnivalesque in Baudelaire's works, as presented through the medium of metal music. Focussing particular on settings of ‘Spleen’ and ‘Une Gravure fantastique’, the chapter contends that Chernyi Obelisk's intertextual and interlingual dialogue with Baudelaire can be read as an aesthetic response to social and political uncertainty during the era of glasnost and perestroika.

This chapter briefly explores selected English and general education policy documents, curricula, and textbooks within the context of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective and examines how they have changed pre- and post-21st century. First, a policy document related to education in KSA in general (pre-21st century) is analyzed along with an English language teaching (ELT) policy document of the same period. Next, two general policy documents post-21st century are explored, followed by one related to ELT policy. Finally, one post-21st century document related to higher education is discussed. The “network of practices” within which these documents are situated are first detailed, as well as the structural order of the discourse, and some linguistic analysis of the choice of vocabulary and grammatical structures (Meyer, 2001). Issues which might be problematic to the learning and teaching identities of the students and teachers interpreting these documents are also highlighted. Finally, we consider whether the network of practices at this institution and KSA in general “needs” the problems identified in the analysis and critically reflect on the analysis.

With an extensive range of information available at the swipe of a finger, the smartphone has become a ubiquitous tool for augmenting conversation. Users of English as a lingua franca (ELF) often rely on such technology to help establish friendships by using them to sustain intersubjectivity. But how do they manage the multiple involvements this entails, such as participating in current talk while searching for linguistic items?

This study employs multimodal Conversation Analysis to undertake a detailed account of the way two young people, a Japanese male (22) and an Indonesian male (16) incorporate smartphones into their lingua franca English interaction. The analysis is based on naturally occurring conversations video-recorded by the Japanese participant, while both boys were living with an American homestay family.

The analysis explores the role of the smartphone in forward-oriented repair, including how the interactants, look up unfamiliar words, delay turn progressivity to fit those words into the turn-in-progress, and use images to accompany an unclear term. Speakers also occasionally abandon a look-up in order to reformulate the turn without the smartphone, relying instead on their own interactional competence.

The study offers insight into the way young people use smartphones as an affordance to manage and repair aspects of their L2 talk, enabling them to enhance their current interactional competence by drawing on the vast range of semiotic resources the phone possesses. Ensuring understanding is essential for developing and maintaining friendships, and for this particular peer culture of lingua franca English speakers, smartphones are a key tool for accomplishing that. As such, the study will be of interest to researchers and educators in the fields of both technology and interaction.

This chapter calls attention to how creating a digital story, which focused on teaching and learning spaces for writing, served as a mediational tool to support preservice teachers’ reflective practice and understanding of writing and the writing process.

Data from over 50 students were parsed using Kember, McKay, Sinclair and Wong’s (2008) approach to determine levels of reflection. From the students whose work fell into the reflection-to-critical reflection range, we selected three students from different disciplines and adopted a case study approach for analyzing and discussing their work. Students’ informal and formal reflections and learning artifacts, as well as researcher field notes, contributed to a rich understanding of each case.

Review of students’ digital stories and related artifacts (i.e., storyboards, scripts, and reflections), as well as other course-related work, revealed that digital storytelling facilitated students’ developing understanding in three dimensions: writing, pedagogy, and reflective practice.

The findings suggest that digital storytelling can engage students in multimodal iterative practices analogous to the writing process that cultivates reflective thinking. Activities that scaffold such iteration and cross-literate practices can foster reflective thinking about inspired pedagogy within and beyond the classroom.