Search results
1 – 10 of 174In the COVID-19 era, sign language (SL) translation has gained attention in online learning, which evaluates the physical gestures of each student and bridges the communication…
Abstract
Purpose
In the COVID-19 era, sign language (SL) translation has gained attention in online learning, which evaluates the physical gestures of each student and bridges the communication gap between dysphonia and hearing people. The purpose of this paper is to devote the alignment between SL sequence and nature language sequence with high translation performance.
Design/methodology/approach
SL can be characterized as joint/bone location information in two-dimensional space over time, forming skeleton sequences. To encode joint, bone and their motion information, we propose a multistream hierarchy network (MHN) along with a vocab prediction network (VPN) and a joint network (JN) with the recurrent neural network transducer. The JN is used to concatenate the sequences encoded by the MHN and VPN and learn their sequence alignments.
Findings
We verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and provide experimental results on three large-scale datasets, which show that translation accuracy is 94.96, 54.52, and 92.88 per cent, and the inference time is 18 and 1.7 times faster than listen-attend-spell network (LAS) and visual hierarchy to lexical sequence network (H2SNet) , respectively.
Originality/value
In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can fuse multimodal input (i.e. joint, bone and their motion stream) and align input streams with nature language. Moreover, the provided framework is improved by the different properties of MHN, VPN and JN. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of translation accuracy and speed.
Details
Keywords
Johan Nordgren and Fredrik Tiberg
Drug sales facilitated through digital communication on the surface web and on darknet cryptomarkets have increased during the past two decades. This has resulted in an increase…
Abstract
Purpose
Drug sales facilitated through digital communication on the surface web and on darknet cryptomarkets have increased during the past two decades. This has resulted in an increase in drug law enforcement efforts to combat these markets and a subsequent increase in judicial sentencing of people selling drugs online. The aim of this study was to analyze how Swedish courts describe sentenced sellers and how the courts apply case law.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical material consists of 71 sentencing documents produced by Swedish courts in cases of online drug selling between January 1, 2010 and January 1, 2020. In total, 99 sentenced persons occur in the documents. Using a qualitative research design, the authors analyzed the material through thematic text analysis.
Findings
Overall, in their descriptions of online drug sale operations, the courts’ characterizations of the concepts of street capital and digital capital show a dichotomy. These forms of capital are situationally described as both aggravating and mitigating aspects in the application of case law, indicating that it may be fruitful to view both street and digital capital as resources used on contemporary drug markets in general.
Originality/value
Very little research exists into how judicial systems describe and perceive the developing phenomenon of online drug sales. Using a relatively large sample from a decade of sentencing, the authors provide an analysis of how Swedish courts view and valuate capital forms in the online drugs trade.
Details
Keywords
Claire M. Mason, Haohui Chen, David Evans and Gavin Walker
This paper aims to demonstrate how skills taxonomies can be used in combination with machine learning to integrate diverse online datasets and reveal skills gaps. The purpose of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to demonstrate how skills taxonomies can be used in combination with machine learning to integrate diverse online datasets and reveal skills gaps. The purpose of this study is then to show how the skills gaps revealed by the integrated datasets can be used to achieve better labour market alignment, keep educational offerings up to date and assist graduates to communicate the value of their qualifications.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the ESCO taxonomy and natural language processing, this study captures skills data from three types of online data (job ads, course descriptions and resumes), allowing us to compare demand for skills and supply of skills for three different occupations.
Findings
This study illustrates three practical applications for the integrated data, showing how they can be used to help workers who are disrupted by technology to identify alternative career pathways, assist educators to identify gaps in their course offerings and support students to communicate the value of their training to employers.
Originality/value
This study builds upon existing applications of machine learning (detecting skills from a single dataset) by using the skills taxonomy to integrate three datasets. This study shows how these complementary, big datasets can be integrated to support greater alignment between the needs and offerings of educators, employers and job seekers.
Details
Keywords
Kinjal Bhargavkumar Mistree, Devendra Thakor and Brijesh Bhatt
According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper…
Abstract
Purpose
According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.
Design/methodology/approach
This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation. The authors’ approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.
Findings
As per the experimental results, pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to convert ISL text into English text. The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%, respectively.
Research limitations/implications
It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words, strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion. The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places, numbers and dates. Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence, it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.
Originality/value
Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society. Because of the shortage of human interpreters, an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf. To motivate research in this field, the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos. As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC, the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.
Details
Keywords
Background: Commodity-driven deforestation is a major driver of forest loss worldwide, and globalisation has increased the disconnect between producer and consumer countries…
Abstract
Background: Commodity-driven deforestation is a major driver of forest loss worldwide, and globalisation has increased the disconnect between producer and consumer countries. Recent due-diligence legislation aiming to improve supply chain sustainability covers major forest-risk commodities. However, the evidence base for specific commodities included within policy needs assessing to ensure effective reduction of embedded deforestation.
Methods: We conducted a rapid evidence synthesis in October 2020 using three databases; Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus, to assess the literature and identify commodities with the highest deforestation risk linked to UK imports. Inclusion criteria include publication in the past 10 years and studies that didn't link commodity consumption to impacts or to the UK were excluded. The development of a review protocol was used to minimise bias and critical appraisal of underlying data and methods in studies was conducted in order to assess the uncertainties around results.
Results: From a total of 318 results, 17 studies were included in the final synthesis. These studies used various methodologies and input data, yet there is broad alignment on commodities, confirming that those included in due diligence legislation have a high deforestation risk. Soy, palm oil, and beef were identified as critical, with their production being concentrated in just a few global locations. However, there are also emerging commodities that have a high deforestation risk but are not included in legislation, such as sugar and coffee. These commodities are much less extensively studied in the literature and may warrant further research and consideration.
Conclusion: Policy recommendations in the selected studies suggests further strengthening of the UK due diligence legislation is needed. In particular, the provision of incentives for uptake of policies and wider stakeholder engagement, as well as continual review of commodities included to ensure a reduction in the UK's overseas deforestation footprint.
Details
Keywords
Yi-Hung Liu and Sheng-Fong Chen
Whether automatically generated summaries of health social media can assist users in appropriately managing their diseases and ensuring better communication with health…
Abstract
Purpose
Whether automatically generated summaries of health social media can assist users in appropriately managing their diseases and ensuring better communication with health professionals becomes an important issue. This paper aims to develop a novel deep learning-based summarization approach for obtaining the most informative summaries from online patient reviews accurately and effectively.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a framework to generate summaries that integrates a domain-specific pre-trained embedding model and a deep neural extractive summary approach by considering content features, text sentiment, review influence and readability features. Representative health-related summaries were identified, and user judgements were analysed.
Findings
Experimental results on the three real-world health forum data sets indicate that awarding sentences without incorporating all the adopted features leads to declining summarization performance. The proposed summarizer significantly outperformed the comparison baseline. User judgement through the questionnaire provides realistic and concrete evidence of crucial features that remarkably influence patient forum review summaries.
Originality/value
This study contributes to health analytics and management literature by exploring users’ expressions and opinions through the health deep learning summarization model. The research also developed an innovative mindset to design summarization weighting methods from user-created content on health topics.
Details
Keywords
Jose Celso Contador, Jose Luiz Contador and Walter Cardoso Satyro
This paper proposes the “fields and weapons of the competition model applied to business networks” – CAC-Redes (in Portuguese, Campos e Armas da Competição – Redes de negócio), an…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper proposes the “fields and weapons of the competition model applied to business networks” – CAC-Redes (in Portuguese, Campos e Armas da Competição – Redes de negócio), an extension of the fields and weapons of the competition model (CAC) – to study the competition and competitiveness of companies operating in business networks in a competitive environment while integrating organizational competencies, interorganizational ties and company positioning to provide competitive advantage.
Design/methodology/approach
CAC-Redes is born from the cross-fertilization process of various theoretical perspectives, namely, industrial organization, traditional view of operational activities and resources, relational view, strategic alignment, transaction cost theory and social perspectives in networks, structured according to systems theory and under the mantle of competitive advantage theory. To discover the structure of existing models of competitiveness in networks, a bibliographic search was conducted in the Scopus database. Quali-quantitative empirical research was undertaken in companies from six different economic sectors through structured questionnaires and personal interviews to understand how companies competed and discover the determining factors of their competitive advantage.
Findings
Only seven models of competitiveness in network were found, and their structures and characteristics are quite different from those of CAC-Redes. Empirical research confirms all the hypotheses that support CAC-Redes, which, combined with those of CAC, indicate the CAC-Redes corroboration.
Research limitations/implications
CAC-Redes does not apply to networks without intercompany competition, studies on network governance and corporate strategy formulation.
Practical implications
CAC-Redes is effective in studying complex competitiveness phenomena because it considers multiple influences; provides a process based on qualitative and quantitative variables that increase the probability of formulating successful competitive strategies; simplifies the differentiation of skills from core competencies and determines them; proposes a competitive advantage criterion to select suppliers; creates a unifying language to represent the different strategic specificities of companies, competitors, suppliers, customers and the company environment and provides a library containing 181 weapons (resources) and dozens of interorganizational ties that can be used in empirical studies with other methodologies.
Social implications
CAC-Redes, due to its originality and peculiarities, theoretically contributes to theory of resources because it dispenses with the assumption, “unique resource, source of competitive advantage”; to relational view because it considers interorganizational relationships as a competence and treats it quali-quantitatively and to core competencies because if the strategy changes, different core competencies will be needed. Furthermore, it is an alternative to the dynamic capabilities perspective, and it transforms the five manufacturing performance objectives into nine for the entire company.
Originality/value
CAC-Redes is an original model because its structure and characteristics comparatively differ from those of existing models, and 14 singularities are detected.
Details
Keywords
Jonan Phillip Donaldson, Ahreum Han, Shulong Yan, Seiyon Lee and Sean Kao
Design-based research (DBR) involves multiple iterations, and innovations are needed in analytical methods for understanding how learners experience a learning experience in ways…
Abstract
Purpose
Design-based research (DBR) involves multiple iterations, and innovations are needed in analytical methods for understanding how learners experience a learning experience in ways that both embrace the complexity of learning and allow for data-driven changes to the design of the learning experience between iterations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of crafting design moves in DBR using network analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper introduces learning experience network analysis (LENA) to allow researchers to investigate the multiple interdependencies between aspects of learner experiences, and to craft design moves that leverage the relationships between struggles, what worked and experiences aligned with principles from theory.
Findings
The use of network analysis is a promising method of crafting data-driven design changes between iterations in DBR. The LENA process developed by the authors may serve as inspiration for other researchers to develop even more powerful methodological innovations.
Research limitations/implications
LENA may provide design-based researchers with a new approach to analyzing learner experiences and crafting data-driven design moves in a way that honors the complexity of learning.
Practical implications
LENA may provide novice design-based researchers with a structured and easy-to-use method of crafting design moves informed by patterns emergent in the data.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose a method for using network analysis of qualitative learning experience data for DBR.
Details
Keywords
Hao Wang, Hamzeh Al Shraida and Yu Jin
Limited geometric accuracy is one of the major challenges that hinder the wider application of additive manufacturing (AM). This paper aims to predict in-plane shape deviation for…
Abstract
Purpose
Limited geometric accuracy is one of the major challenges that hinder the wider application of additive manufacturing (AM). This paper aims to predict in-plane shape deviation for online inspection and compensation to prevent error accumulation and improve shape fidelity in AM.
Design/methodology/approach
A sequence-to-sequence model with an attention mechanism (Seq2Seq+Attention) is proposed and implemented to predict subsequent layers or the occluded toolpath deviations after the multiresolution alignment. A shape compensation plan can be performed for the large deviation predicted.
Findings
The proposed Seq2Seq+Attention model is able to provide consistent prediction accuracy. The compensation plan proposed based on the predicted deviation can significantly improve the printing fidelity for those layers detected with large deviations.
Practical implications
Based on the experiments conducted on the knee joint samples, the proposed method outperforms the other three machine learning methods for both subsequent layer and occluded toolpath deviation prediction.
Originality/value
This work fills a research gap for predicting in-plane deviation not only for subsequent layers but also for occluded paths due to the missing scanning measurements. It is also combined with the multiresolution alignment and change point detection to determine the necessity of a compensation plan with updated G-code.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of the antimoney laundering measures in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in response to its commitments to the Financial…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of the antimoney laundering measures in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in response to its commitments to the Financial Action Task Force and treaties in combatting money laundering.
Design/methodology/approach
To explore the effectiveness of the Saudi antimoney laundering measures, this research’s data have been obtained by a qualitative approach that uses a combination of primary and secondary resources. It relies on analyzing Anti-Money Laundering Law (AML) and the process of money laundering detection in Saudi Arabia in relation to three cases from Saudi courts supported by journal articles, academic books and reliable websites.
Findings
This study concludes that the Saudi AML has been efficient and effective in the battle against money laundering. This study finds that there is close coordination and collaboration between financial institutions, banks and governmental agencies in Saudi Arabia to combat this phenomenon. This study also concludes that the AML is compatible with other criminal laws such as the Anti-Bribery Law, the Anti Trafficking in Person Law and the Anti-Drug Trafficking Law.
Research limitations/implications
This paper relies mainly on publicly available information regarding the detection of money laundering schemes and the confiscation of proceeds of crime in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a main source of information. There data available on the money laundering cases in the Saudi prosecution and criminal courts were limited due to the lack of public disclosure of such cases because of their sensitivity. This was made up for by using reliable sources in which some cases were reported.
Originality/value
This paper underlines the efficient aspects of the current AML that contribute to reduction of money laundering in Saudi Arabia. This paper emphasizes on the importance of the structure of collaboration between regulatory, financial and law officers to implement the rule of law and achieve justice.
Details