An Analysis of Lexical Chunks in Online Business Letters (OBL) and Business Letter Corpus (BLC): A Corpus-Based Study

Author(s):  
Hairul Azhar Mohamad ◽  
Muhammad Luthfi Mohaini ◽  
Pavithran Ravinthra Nath

This research investigated into the lexical density and frequencies of five types of lexical chunks located in 300 online business letters. Top 10 websites on business correspondence had been identified in terms of traffic visitors and bounce rate under one million web rankings worldwide. Criterion Sampling method was identified prior to extracting the sample letters from the websites. The data was then run with Antconc Concordance Program (ACP) for lexical density and frequency analysis. Top 15 lexical chunks in online business letters (OBL) were compared against those top 15 in Business Letter Corpus (BLC). Findings revealed that there was a total of 39 916-word tokens and 939 counts of lexical chunks found in this corpus. It was found that more lexical words do not imply more lexical chunks used in based on types of business letters.  All 5 types of lexical chunks were identified and ranked in descending order; Sentence Builders (SB) as the most frequent type, followed by Collocations (COL), Deictic locutions (DLs), Polywords (POLs) and Institutionalized Expressions (IUs) as the least frequent type of lexical chunk. Sub-divisional analysis indicated that Grammatical Collocations (GCs) were more common than Lexical Collocations (LCs). Majority of lexical chunks were formed more at sentence level than phrasal level. Comparative analysis between top 15 lexical chunks in OBL and BLC discovered that most top lexical chunks in online business letters are representative of those corporate business letters in BLC. Pedagogical implications in terms of the reliability of online business letters for academic reference and future research considerations are also addressed.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hanckel ◽  
Mark Petticrew ◽  
James Thomas ◽  
Judith Green

Abstract Background Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for identifying the configurations of conditions that lead to specific outcomes. Given its potential for providing evidence of causality in complex systems, QCA is increasingly used in evaluative research to examine the uptake or impacts of public health interventions. We map this emerging field, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of QCA approaches identified in published studies, and identify implications for future research and reporting. Methods PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science were systematically searched for peer-reviewed studies published in English up to December 2019 that had used QCA methods to identify the conditions associated with the uptake and/or effectiveness of interventions for public health. Data relating to the interventions studied (settings/level of intervention/populations), methods (type of QCA, case level, source of data, other methods used) and reported strengths and weaknesses of QCA were extracted and synthesised narratively. Results The search identified 1384 papers, of which 27 (describing 26 studies) met the inclusion criteria. Interventions evaluated ranged across: nutrition/obesity (n = 8); physical activity (n = 4); health inequalities (n = 3); mental health (n = 2); community engagement (n = 3); chronic condition management (n = 3); vaccine adoption or implementation (n = 2); programme implementation (n = 3); breastfeeding (n = 2), and general population health (n = 1). The majority of studies (n = 24) were of interventions solely or predominantly in high income countries. Key strengths reported were that QCA provides a method for addressing causal complexity; and that it provides a systematic approach for understanding the mechanisms at work in implementation across contexts. Weaknesses reported related to data availability limitations, especially on ineffective interventions. The majority of papers demonstrated good knowledge of cases, and justification of case selection, but other criteria of methodological quality were less comprehensively met. Conclusion QCA is a promising approach for addressing the role of context in complex interventions, and for identifying causal configurations of conditions that predict implementation and/or outcomes when there is sufficiently detailed understanding of a series of comparable cases. As the use of QCA in evaluative health research increases, there may be a need to develop advice for public health researchers and journals on minimum criteria for quality and reporting.


Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Irati Hurtado ◽  
Kacie Gastañaga

University Spanish courses designed specifically for heritage language learners (HLLs) are becoming more common, and researchers have indicated that empirical research is needed to evaluate their effectiveness. This longitudinal study investigates the writing development of 24 HLLs as a result of instruction over the course of the semester. Nine were enrolled in a heritage-only section of a Spanish composition course, and the remainder were from mixed HL/L2 sections of the same course. Both section types were taught online. The major assignments the students produced were two 500-word essays, and students also completed bi-weekly forum posts. We examined the development of lexical density, sophistication, and diversity as well as syntactic complexity and accuracy by comparing each student’s first and final essay and forum posts. Findings indicate that there were significant differences between the scores received on the forum posts in comparison to the essays. However, there were no significant developmental differences in terms of group. Implications, avenues for future research, and pedagogical suggestions are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Kapsali ◽  
Jens K. Roehrich ◽  
Pervaiz Akhtar

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine combinations of contract clauses in order to ascertain which combinations correlate to high operational performance (OP). Design/methodology/approach Two hypotheses were formulated from contracting theory and tested on data collected from 45 projects. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was used and validated with multiple regression and simulation. Findings The hypotheses were tested to determine whether combinations of classical, relational, and/or associational contract clauses correlate to high OP. The results show that whereas high OP correlates to combinations of relational and associational contract clauses, classical and relational clauses should not be combined. Research limitations/implications Directions are proposed to guide future research in order to produce a more nuanced testing of contractual complementarity. Practical implications The managerial implications of the findings include a more thorough understanding of the use of contract clauses and of which clauses managers should combine to achieve high OP. Originality/value This study contributes to the theory of contractual incompleteness and complementarity, specifically in the context of project contracting. The analysis produced two theoretical implications: first, that better performing contracts are created when combining relational and associational contract clauses; and second, that in projects, relational and classical contract clauses are not complementary with regards to realizing high OP.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Valentin Kisimov ◽  
Dorina Kabakchieva ◽  
Aleksandar Naydenov ◽  
Kamelia Stefanova

AbstractNew challenges in the dynamically changing business environment require companies to experience digital transformation and more effective use of Big Data generated in their expanding online business activities. A possible solution for solving real business problems concerning Big Data resources is proposed in this paper. The defined Agile Elastic Desktop Corporate Architecture for Big Data is based on virtualizing the unused desktop resources and organizing them in order to serve the needs of Big Data processing, thus saving resources needed for additional infrastructure in an organization. The specific corporate business needs are analyzed within the developed R&D environment and, based on that, the unused desktop resources are customized and configured into required Big Data tools. The R&D environment of the proposed Agile Elastic Desktop Corporate Architecture for Big Data could be implemented on the available unused resources of hundreds desktops.


Author(s):  
Aditya Budi ◽  
Mi Wang ◽  
Tianyuan Wang

In today’s increasingly competitive market, marketing a product or a service is getting tougher than before, especially in the industry domain of interaction digital media (IDM), which produces completely different types of digital goods. Knowing the key differences between them is vital, as it will allow IDM companies to position resources more effectively. Moreover, it will help get more profits from investments. Unfortunately, research done on this topic is still rare and inadequate. This chapter aims to give a comparative analysis between the digital products and services study from the perspective of marketing, in a bid to better understand their differences and similarities. The comparative analysis is divided into different stages according to the new digital goods development process. We use two case studies to support the points of view: WSJ.com and PayPal. Directions for future research are discussed at the end of this chapter.


Author(s):  
Oarabile Sebubi

The objective of democracy is to allow people the freedom to vote at ease and according to their individual choices. Mobile Election has high potentials of transforming and improving efficiency of the current electoral process, thereby enabling convenient and ubiquitous elections, hence, revolutionizing the institution of democracy. With so much potential though, its adoption is extremely low worldwide because the barriers to adoption are extremely high as mobile election is still lacking in addressing the critical and sensitive requirements of the electoral process worldwide. This chapter explores the potential impact of mobile elections to democratic establishments such as politics and voter participation. It then adopts a comparative analysis approach in exploring the barriers to adoption and possible solutions. Lastly, it provides recommendations for future research in the areas of voter trafficking, network and data security, inter-operability issue, digital/democratic divide issue, and voter satisfaction.


2016 ◽  
pp. 221-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhaolong Gou ◽  
Shingo Yamaguchi ◽  
B. B. Gupta

Cloud computing is a system, where the resources of a data center are shared using virtualization technology, such that it provides elastic, on demand and instant services to its customers and charges them based on the resources they use. In this chapter, we will discuss recent developments in cloud computing, various security issues and challenges associated with Cloud computing environment, various existing solutions provided for dealing with these security threats and will provide a comparative analysis these approaches. This will provide better understanding of the various security problems associated with the cloud, current solution space, and future research scope to deal with such attacks in better way.


Author(s):  
Naif Radi Aljohani ◽  
Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi ◽  
Fahad Mohammed Bawakid ◽  
Farrukh Saleem ◽  
Zahid Ullah ◽  
...  

In the present era of Big Data, with continuously increasing amounts of user-generated content, it is becoming a challenge to understand the relation between the content that is available on the Web and the users who are generating that content. Researchers have come up with many ways to understand today's Web better. One of the recently introduced concepts is a Web observatory (WO). This article provides a deep understanding about web observatories. It discusses the status of existing WO systems. The article investigates and gathers the common practices of WOs. This research has implications for researchers and communities in the adoption of the WO concept. The article highlights the challenges of WOs, such as data crawling, privacy and security. It also provides future research and development directions. The article provides a comparative analysis of existing WOs. It discusses the architecture of WOs. It presents components of a WO in a coherent manner and finally provides insights into challenges and limitations of WOs.


1981 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dipankar Chakravarti ◽  
Andrew Mitchell ◽  
Richard Staelin

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the findings of two field studies and three recent laboratory experiments that assessed the efficacy of judgment based models in aiding marketing decision making. This analysis indicates factors that may affect the effectiveness of these models. The implications of the findings for users of judgment based marketing decision models as well as model builders are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research to improve the models’ effectiveness.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 579-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heng-Li Yang ◽  
August F.Y. Chao

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose sentiment annotation at sentence level to reduce information overloading while reading product/service reviews in the internet. Design/methodology/approach The keyword-based sentiment analysis is applied for highlighting review sentences. An experiment is conducted for demonstrating its effectiveness. Findings A prototype is built for highlighting tourism review sentences in Chinese with positive or negative sentiment polarity. An experiment results indicates that sentiment annotation can increase information quality and user’s intention to read tourism reviews. Research limitations/implications This study has made two major contributions: proposing the approach of adding sentiment annotation at sentence level of review texts for assisting decision-making; validating the relationships among the information quality constructs. However, in this study, sentiment analysis was conducted on a limited corpus; future research may try a larger corpus. Besides, the annotation system was built on the tourism data. Future studies might try to apply to other areas. Practical implications If the proposed annotation systems become popular, both tourists and attraction providers would obtain benefits. In this era of smart tourism, tourists could browse through the huge amount of internet information more quickly. Attraction providers could understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of their facilities more easily. The application of this sentiment analysis is possible for other languages, especially for non-spaced languages. Originality/value Facing large amounts of data, past researchers were engaged in automatically constructing a compact yet meaningful abstraction of the texts. However, users have different positions and purposes. This study proposes an alternative approach to add sentiment annotation at sentence level for assisting users.


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