jodischneider.com/blog

Factor-based summarization of reviews is useful:

I’m currently looking for a review of social media summarization. Any pointers?

I’m very pleased to share our “A Review of Argumentation for the Social Semantic Web“.

You are very warmly invited to review this paper. You can post the review as a comment to the manuscript page publicly at SWJ’s website. Informal comments by email are also welcome.

Open review

I adore SWJ’s open review process: publicly available manuscripts are useful. In 11 months the landing page has had “1208 reads” and I’m sure that not all of those are mine! Further, knowing who reviewed a paper can add credibility to the process. (It means quite a lot to me when Simon Buckingham-Shum says “I anticipate that this will become a standard reference for the field.”!)

Two earlier versions

The paper evolved from my first year Ph.D. report. In the process of defining my Ph.D. topic, I reviewed the state-of-art of argumentation for the Social Semantic Web. This was further developed in conversations with my coauthors, my colleague Tudor Groza and my advisor Alexandre Passant.

The outdated first journal submission is available; May’s reviews refer to this version. A cover letter responding to the reviews summarizes what has changed. Shared since I am always encouraged by seeing how others’ work and ideas have developed over time! So read the most recent version, and let us know what you think!

Here’s an argument made on Twitter:

Difference between cakes and biscuits? When stale, cakes go hard, biscuits go soft. Hence Jaffa Cakes are cakes. (Was official EU ruling).

I just love this example:

1. First, you can find it with “hence” (see cue phrases from an appendix to Marcu‘s thesis).
2. Second, the notion of this EU (tax) ruling amuses me.
3. Third, it shows that 140 characters is enough for a complex argumentative structure. This has three main claims: When stale, cakes go hard, biscuits go soft; Jaffa Cakes are cakes; and [Jaffa Cakes are cakes due to] official EU ruling.
4. Enthymemes anyone?

It’s hard, though, to draw the line between an argument and an explanation in this context.
Jaffa Cakes, for you North American readers, are a common dessert-y snack in Ireland and the UK. Vaguely like Kandy Kakes found in the Philadelphia area/East Coast, but usually have an orange filling.

I’ve been digging SoundCloud lately.

Today I noticed time-based comments in their tracks. It’s a bit disorienting to have comments pop up as you’re listening. Maybe after adjusting, there’s a pleasant sense of having a conversation going on around you. Definitely feels like you’ve got company!

Comments pop up as the track plays

Avatars appear below the track to indicate that there are comments, and you can scroll over avatars to read comments. You can also hide the comments if you prefer.

Entering a comment from the timeline

Avatar icons appear in the overview

Example track due to Duncan.

A few weeks ago, I noticed something new on YouTube: an “I dislike this” button.

I wonder how long that’s been there?

When I talk about online argumentation, a frequent comment is “too bad there’s only +1 and Like; we need more expressivity”.

See related discussions:

• Misusing like
• Mood classification on GetSatisfaction
• Using reactions instead of comments on blogs

Loro Aroyo gave a talk in DERI on Friday, based on her “Crowdsourcing community science” slide deck. She was in town for Smita‘s viva. This is a deck of interest to anybody in digital cultural heritage.

The slide on “Ways to use the crowd” seemed particularly useful to me:

• tagging & classification
• editing & transcribing
• contextualising
• acquisition
• co-curation
• crowdfunding

What are the laws of information? Frank van Harmelen proposes seven laws of information science in his keynote to the Semantic Web community at ISWC2011.¹

1. Factual knowledge is a graph.²
2. Terminological knowledge is a hierarchy.
3. Terminological knowledge is much smaller³ than the factual knowledge.
4. Terminological knowledge is of low complexity.⁴
5. Heterogeneity is unavoidable.⁵
6. Publication should be distributed, computation should be centralized to decrease speed: “The Web is not a database, and I don’t think it ever will be.”
7. Knowledge is layered.

I wish every presentation came with this sort of summary: slides and transcript, presented in a linear fashion. But these laws deserve more attention and discussion–especially from information scientists. So I needed something even punchier to share, (prioritized thanks to Karen).

1. He presents them as “computer science laws” underlying the Semantic Web; yet they are laws about knowledge. This makes them candidate laws of information science, in my terminology. [↩]
2. “The vast majority of our factual knowledge consists of simple relationships between things,
   represented as an ground instance of a binary predicate.
   And lots of these relations between things together form a giant graph.” [↩]
3. by 1-2 orders of magnitude [↩]
4. This is seen in “the unreasonable effectiveness of low-expressive KR”: ”the information universe is apparently structured in such a way that the double exponential worse case complexity bounds don’t hit us in practice.” [↩]
5. But heterogeneity is solvable through mostly social, cultural, and economic means (algorithms contribute a little bit). [↩]

Yesterday I overheard two guys talking in the grocery store:

I am more of a John Lennon than you are.

The response?

My hair has more volume, therefore I am.

A brief, informal argument. Halloween-themed, I presume.

Today the DERI Reading Group starts up again for the fall. I’m talking about three papers from the IMPACT project.

For now this is just to provide my colleagues with links; check back later for slides, etc.Scroll down for slides and video.

1. Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers. A Framework for Enriched, Controlled On-line Discussion Forums for e-Government Policy-making. EGOVIS 2010. AcaWiki Summary
2. Adam Wyner, Tom van Enger, and Kiavash Bahreini. From Policy-making Statements to First-order Logic. Electronic Government and Electronic Participation 2010. AcaWiki Summary
3. Adam Wyner and Tom van Enger. Towards Web-based Mass Argumentation in Natural Language. (long version of this EKAW 2010 poster). AcaWiki Summary

Reading Group talk: Using Controlled Natural Language and First Order Logic to improve e-consultation discussion forums from Jodi Schneider on Vimeo.



When the topic of discussion changes, how do you indicate that? Tender Support seems clunky in some ways, but their forking mechanism helps conversations stay focused on their topic:

Forking with Tender Support

Lately forking has also been on my mind as the Library Linked Data group edits and reorganizes our draft report: wiki history and version control is helpful, but insufficient. What I miss most is a “fork” feature, where you could temporarily take ownership of a copy (socially, this indicates that something is a possibility, rather than the consensus; technically, it indicates provenance, would allow “show all forks of this”, and might help in merge changes back). Perhaps naming and tagging particular history items in MediaWiki could help address this, but I think really I want something like git.

I’ve seen a few examples of writing and editing prose with git; I’d like to get a better understanding of the best practices for making collaborative changes in texts with distributed version control systems. Surely somebody’s written up manuals on this?