Search

The central argument of this paper is that the design, implementation and use of technologies that underpin general semantic search have implications for what we know and the way in which knowledge is understood. Semantic search is an assemblage of technologies that most Internet users would use regularly without necessarily realising. Users of search engines implementing semantic search can obtain answers to questions rather than just retrieve pages that include their search query. This paper critically examines the design of the Semantic Web, upon which semantic search is based. It demonstrates that implicit in the design of the Semantic Web are particular assumptions about the nature of classification and the nature of knowledge. The Semantic Web was intended for interoperability within specific domains. It is here argued that the extension to general semantic search, for use by the general public, has implications for what type of knowledge is visible and what counts as legitimate knowledge. The provision of a definitive answer to a query, via the reduction of discursive knowledge into machine-processable data, provides the illusion of objectivity and authority in a way that is increasingly impenetrable to critical scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Q&A sites initially run only in English, and then gradually release their multi-lingual variants to serve users who speak other languages. The launch of such multi-lingual sites always lead to an intense dispute about the pros and cons of multi-lingual sites. Although all arguments and concerns sound reasonable, people can rarely provide solid evidence to convince each other. In this paper, from users' comments about the launch of several non-English Stack Overflow sites, we first identify three major concerns including community split, knowledge needs and interests in other languages, and knowledge fragmentation and duplication. To validate these three concerns, we conduct an evidence-based data analysis and comparison of user characteristics, tag usage and cross-site links between the Russian Stack Overflow and the English Stack Overflow on these three concerns. Our study sheds light on the existence value and risks of multi-lingual Q&A sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional repositories have positioned themselves as an essential service for many libraries. Content-enriched metadata in library records is reported as being helpful to library users in identifying and selecting information objects for their needs. The presence of this extra-enriched content helps users to decide on the relevance of the item without the need to access the full text. Through this paper, we report content enrichment of records in an Institutional Repository using Linked Open Data datasets. In particular, this is done by application of a linked dataset in an institutional repository. The design, implementation, configuration, and workflow of the application is discussed along with implications and potential future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including information and communication technology, crowdsourcing and selfies among college students in India.

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to quickly understand the cross-categorical use of object-function denoting nouns (e.g., This is a nice brush) as denominal verbs (e.g., Brush your teeth) when the semantic relationship between the objects, referred to by the nouns, and their functions, referred to by the denominal verbs, is transparent. French-speaking 2.5-year-olds were taught the cross-categorical use of three novel parent noun and denominal verb pairs by presenting these pairs with semantic information coupled with noun and verb distributional cues. The results from Experiment 1 showed that, contrary to the one-form/one-function principle, 2.5-year-old children were able to fast-map the novel object-function noun-verb pairs onto novel objects and actions they had never seen before after three exemplars were shown. However, the results from Experiment 2 indicated that after being taught the cross-categorical use of two novel object-function noun-verb pairs, 2.5-year-olds were not able to interpret the third novel object-function noun-verb pair correctly when it was presented with semantic information coupled with noun distributional cues only. These findings suggest that although 2.5-year-olds do not have a strong one-form/one-function mapping constraint, they are not able to quickly form abstract class extension rules that enable them to immediately understand the cross-categorical use of new noun-verb pairs they have not heard before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring quick and consistent access to large collections of unstructured documents is one of the biggest challenges facing knowledge-intensive organizations. Designing specific vocabularies to index and retrieve documents is often deemed too expensive, full-text search being preferred despite its known limitations. However, the process of creating controlled vocabularies can be partly automated thanks to natural language processing and machine learning techniques. With a case study from the biopharmaceutical industry, we demonstrate how small organizations can use an automated workflow in order to create a controlled vocabulary to index unstructured documents in a semantically meaningful way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]