Effective pattern discovery for text mining

Many data mining techniques have been proposed for mining useful patterns in text documents. However, how to effectively use and update discovered patterns is still an open research issue, especially in the domain of text mining. Since most existing text mining methods adopted term-based approaches, they all suffer from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern (or phrase) based approaches should perform better than the term-based ones, but many experiments did not support this hypothesis. This paper presents an innovative technique, effective pattern discovery which includes the processes of pattern deploying and pattern evolving, to improve the effectiveness of using and updating discovered patterns for finding relevant and interesting information. Substantial experiments on RCV1 data collection and TREC topics demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves encouraging performance.

Mining positive and negative patterns for relevance feature discovery

It is a big challenge to guarantee the quality of discovered relevance features in text documents for describing user preferences because of the large number of terms, patterns, and noise. Most existing popular text mining and classification methods have adopted term-based approaches. However, they have all suffered from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern-based methods should perform better than term-based ones in describing user preferences, but many experiments do not support this hypothesis. The innovative technique presented in paper makes a breakthrough for this difficulty. This technique discovers both positive and negative patterns in text documents as higher level features in order to accurately weight low-level features (terms) based on their specificity and their distributions in the higher level features. Substantial experiments using this technique on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 and TREC topics show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms both the state-of-the-art term-based methods underpinned by Okapi BM25, Rocchio or Support Vector Machine and pattern based methods on precision, recall and F measures.

Selected new training documents to update user profile

Relevance Feedback (RF) has been proven very effective for improving retrieval accuracy. Adaptive information filtering (AIF) technology has benefited from the improvements achieved in all the tasks involved over the last decades. A difficult problem in AIF has been how to update the system with new feedback efficiently and effectively. In current feedback methods, the updating processes focus on updating system parameters. In this paper, we developed a new approach, the Adaptive Relevance Features Discovery (ARFD). It automatically updates the system's knowledge based on a sliding window over positive and negative feedback to solve a nonmonotonic problem efficiently. Some of the new training documents will be selected using the knowledge that the system currently obtained. Then, specific features will be extracted from selected training documents. Different methods have been used to merge and revise the weights of features in a vector space. The new model is designed for Relevance Features Discovery (RFD), a pattern mining based approach, which uses negative relevance feedback to improve the quality of extracted features from positive feedback. Learning algorithms are also proposed to implement this approach on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 and TREC topics. Experiments show that the proposed approach can work efficiently and achieves the encouragement performance.

Parents’ views about child sexual abuse prevention education : a systematic review

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of literature on the topic of parents’ views about child sexual abuse prevention education. It describes: i) what parents know about child sexual abuse prevention education; ii) what child sexual abuse prevention messages parents provide to their children and what topics they discuss; iii) what parents’ attitudes are towards child sexual abuse prevention education in schools; and iv) their preferences for content. Electronic database searches were conducted to identify relevant literature published in English relating to child sexual abuse prevention programs and parent’s views. A total of 429 papers were evaluated with 13 studies identified as meeting the study’s inclusion criteria. Worldwide, empirical research on parents’ views about child sexual abuse prevention programs is limited and more research is needed in Australia. Implications for future research and practice are outlined.

Green, Greener, BPM?

I am sure you’ve heard it too: Green is the new Black. While this was true back in the days when Henry Ford introduced process standardization with his assembly line for the Ford Model T (over 15 million of these were sold!), Green is also the color of choice for many business organizations, private and public. I am not talking about the actual color of their business shirts or their logo 2.0.; I am referring to the eco-aware movement that has pushed sustainability into the top ten list of business buzz-words. What used to be a boutique market for tourism and political activists has become the biggest business revolution since the e-commerce boom. Public and private organizations alike push towards “sustainable” solutions and practices. That push is partly triggered by the immense reputational gains associated with branding your organization as “green”, and partly by emerging societal, legal and constitutional regulations that force organizations to become more ecologically aware and sustainable. But the boom goes beyond organizational reality. Even in academia, sustainability has become a research “fashion wave” (see [1] if you are interested in research fashion waves) similar to the hype around Neuroscience that our colleagues in the natural sciences are witnessing these days. Mind you, I’m a fan. A big fan in fact. As academics, we are constantly searching for problem areas that are characterized by an opportunity to do rigorous research (studies that are executed to perfection) on relevant topics (studies that have applied practical value and provide impact to the community). What would be a better playground than exploring the options that Business Process Management provides for creating a sustainable, green future? I’m getting excited just writing about this! So, join me in exploring some of the current thoughts around how BPM can contribute to the sustainability fashion parade and let me introduce you to some of the works that scholars have produced recently in their attempts to identify solutions.

A design science research roadmap

This paper proposes and synthesizes from previous design science(DS) methodological literature a structured and detailed DS Roadmap for the conduct of DS research. The Roadmap is a general guide for researchers to carry out DS research by suggesting reasonably detailed activities.Though highly tentative, it is believed the Roadmap usefully inter-relates many otherwise seemingly disparate, overlapping or conflicting concepts. It is hoped the DS Roadmap will aid in the planning, execution and communication of DS research,while also attracting constructive criticism, improvements and extensions. A key distinction of the Roadmap from other DS research methods is its breadth of coverage of DS research aspects and activities; its detail and scope. We demonstrate and evaluate the Roadmap by presenting two case studies in terms of the DS Roadmap.

Coursework masters students' perspectives on career development learning

Coursework Masters’ students have been identified as a ‘forgotten’ cohort by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Careers and Employment (C&E) Service. Traditionally, these students have been included in undergraduate career development activities. However, coursework Masters’ students are arguably a specialised cohort due to the advanced learning implicit in many of their degrees. A brief survey was designed to better understand how to assist QUT coursework Masters students with career development activities. Students were emailed an invitation to complete a brief online survey asking for their assistance in planning appropriate career development activities for their cohort. Questions included reasons for undertaking a Masters degree and preferred topics and times for career development activities. 615 students completed the survey. This brief report will report the results of the survey and highlight suggestions for career development practitioners and services

Inter-sector leader transitions and organisation transformation : a research agenda

Faced with the need for strategic change, structural and cultural realignment, innovation and value-adding, many public sector organisations are tapping into a wider senior leadership talent pool and attracting successful leaders from other sectors (Flynn and Thompson, 2009). Leadership renewal has resulted, in some cases, in the external recruitment of whole senior leadership teams (Hockridge, 2008), raising issues about the influence of context on leader success (Pawar and Eastman, 1997) and potential leader transition failure, a costly outcome for leaders and organisations (Howard, 2001). There is little research on inter-sector leader transitions, which is surprising given the significant costs associated with leader acquisition and failure(Conger, 2010; Day and Halpin, 2004). For example, it is not clear what organizations do (or do not do) to ensure the outcomes of their significant investment in inter sector transitions are realised. In addition, it is not clear how the individual leader manages the challenging transition into a new leadership context and how their approach to leadership facilitates or inhibits successful transition (Avolio, 2010). Leader assimilation programs have been developed to assimilate new leaders (Manderscheid, 2008); however, assimilation is not necessarily a desired organisational outcome (Denis and Pineault, 2000). In this paper we critically review the limited literature on inter-sector leader transitions and transformational change outcomes and argue for a mutual accommodation approach. We draw on our own initial empirical work to propose the elements of a program for achieving this outcome from the perspective of the public organisation and the inter-sector appointee.

Empirical research in business process management : introduction to the special issue

In this editorial letter, we provide the readers of Information Systems and e-Business Management with an introduction to Business Process Management and the challenges of empirical research in this field. We then briefly describe selected examples of current research efforts in this fields and how the papers accepted for this special issue contribute to extending our body of knowledge.