Do You Ever Get Off Track in a Conversation? The Conversational System’s Anatomy and Evaluation Metrics

Conversational systems are now applicable to almost every business domain. Evaluation is an important step in the creation of dialog systems so that they may be readily tested and prototyped. There is no universally agreed upon metric for evaluating all dialog systems. Human evaluation, which is not computerized, is now the most effective and complete evaluation approach. Data gathering and analysis are evaluation activities that need human intervention. In this work, we address the many types of dialog systems and the assessment methods that may be used with them. The benefits and drawbacks of each sort of evaluation approach are also explored, which could better help us understand the expectations associated with developing an automated evaluation system. The objective of this study is to investigate conversational agents, their design approaches and evaluation metrics. This approach can help us to better understand the overall process of dialog system development, and future possibilities to enhance user experience. Because human assessment is costly and time consuming, we emphasize the need of having a generally recognized and automated evaluation model for conversational systems, which may significantly minimize the amount of time required for analysis.

Development of a Mobile Application to Buy Books through Visual Recognition

Mobile devices have become the most used tool for a large number of tasks that we regularly perform such as relating them, searching for information, and in particular for making purchases. A situation that is frequently repeated in many areas is discovering an object that belongs to another person but we would be interested in being able to acquire it. However, the problem arises of knowing where to buy it. For example, this happens with the clothes that other people are wearing. Today, technology offers recognition mechanisms that can help solve this problem. This article presents an Android app that can recognize a book based on an image and offer places where it can be purchased. For this, Google technology was used to recognize objects from images and it has been combined with the information provided by Google Books to find stores that sell recognized books. In this way, a system has been created that makes it easier for any user to identify and purchase books that they discover at any given time.

Crowdsourced Knowledge in Organizational Decision Making

Inefficiencies naturally form as organizations grow in size and complexity. The knowledge required to address these inefficiencies is often stove-piped across different organizational silos, geographic locations, and professional disciplines. Crowdsourcing provides a way to tap into the knowledge and experiences of diverse groups of people to rapidly identify and more effectively solve inefficiencies. We developed a prototype crowdsourcing system based on design thinking practices to allow employees to build a shared mental model and work collaboratively to identify, characterize, and rank inefficiencies, as well as to develop possible solutions. We conducted a study to assess how presenting crowdsourced knowledge (votes/preferences, supporting argumentation, etc.) from employees affected organizational Decision Makers (DMs). In spite of predictions that crowdsourced knowledge would influence their decisions, presenting this knowledge to DMs had no significant effect on their voting for various solutions. We found significant differences in the mental models of employees and DMs. We offer various explanations for this behavior based on rhetorical analysis and other survey responses from DMs and contributors. We further discuss different theoretical explanations, including the effects of various biases and decision inertia, and potential issues with the types of knowledge elicited and presented to DMs.

Linking Entities from Text to Hundreds of RDF Datasets for Enabling Large Scale Entity Enrichment

There is a high increase in approaches that receive as input a text and perform named entity recognition (or extraction) for linking the recognized entities of the given text to RDF Knowledge Bases (or datasets). In this way, it is feasible to retrieve more information for these entities, which can be of primary importance for several tasks, e.g., for facilitating manual annotation, hyperlink creation, content enrichment, for improving data veracity and others. However, current approaches link the extracted entities to one or few knowledge bases, therefore, it is not feasible to retrieve the URIs and facts of each recognized entity from multiple datasets and to discover the most relevant datasets for one or more extracted entities. For enabling this functionality, we introduce a research prototype, called LODsyndesisIE, which exploits three widely used Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation tools (i.e., DBpedia Spotlight, WAT and Stanford CoreNLP) for recognizing the entities of a given text. Afterwards, it links these entities to the LODsyndesis knowledge base, which offers data enrichment and discovery services for millions of entities over hundreds of RDF datasets. We introduce all the steps of LODsyndesisIE, and we provide information on how to exploit its services through its online application and its REST API. Concerning the evaluation, we use three evaluation collections of texts: (i) for comparing the effectiveness of combining different Named Entity Recognition tools, (ii) for measuring the gain in terms of enrichment by linking the extracted entities to LODsyndesis instead of using a single or a few RDF datasets and (iii) for evaluating the efficiency of LODsyndesisIE.

Analysis of Different Digital Alternatives as Teaching Tools to Improve the Teaching–Learning Process

Virtual tools are frequently used in education. Among them, the use of virtual laboratories could be an interesting alternative to strengthen the practical concepts of the students, especially in the current paradigm in which the presence of students is often not possible. For this reason, the aim of this study was to analyse the use of different digital tools for the improvement of the teaching process during the COVID-19 pandemic period. To this end, a comparison of the application of different digital alternatives was carried out, evaluating the differences found with previous teaching courses. The results indicate that, although students welcome these activities, they cannot replace face-to-face practices, being considered as a complementary activity.

Design of a Home Fire Detection System Using Arduino and SMS Gateway

Fire is a problem that can happen at any time. Delay in coping with house fires can induce in loss of human life or material. If the fire is not held severely, incidents like house fires can occur and create more significant losses, especially with the increasing number of residents’ settlements in the formation of huddled houses, which will be more challenging to handle in case of a fire. This research aims to build a prototype system that quickly helps house owners and firefighters to detect fires and gas leaks. This home fire detection system is utilized to measure room temperature and gas levels in a room, then the output of this system is sending information of short messages and alarms. The results revealed that the prototype room with a scale of 1:25, 1:50, and 1:75 which uses a temperature sensor and a gas sensor could run as desired. In 10 testing trials, the system works according to the designed plan, which means the system could interpret the temperature and gas leakage of a room, then the system will send a short message and ring the alarm.

Picture Hesitant Fuzzy Clustering Based on Generalized Picture Hesitant Fuzzy Distance Measures

Certain scholars have generalized the theory of fuzzy set, but the theory of picture hesitant fuzzy set (PHFS) has received massive attention from distinguished scholars. PHFS is the combination of picture fuzzy set (PFS) and hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) to cope with awkward and complicated information in real-life issues. The well-known characteristic of PHFS is that the sum of the maximum of the membership, abstinence, and non-membership degree is limited to the unit interval. This manuscript aims to develop some generalized picture hesitant distance measures (GPHDMs) as a generalization of generalized picture distance measures (GPDMs). The properties of developed distance measures are investigated, and the generalization of developed theory is proved with the help of some remarks and examples. A clustering problem is solved using GPHDMs and the results obtained are explored. Some advantages of the proposed work are discussed, and some concluding remarks based on the summary of the proposed work and as well as future directions, are added.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Administrative Burden in the Australian National Immunisation Program: An Analysis of Twitter Discourse

In Australia, the National Immunisation Program and its Standard Vaccination Schedule are administered by the Australian Government Department of Health. While the public vaccination program’s safety and worth are generally agreed upon by doctors and public health professionals, some continue to see vaccinations as a source of danger and harm. The burden of vaccination in order to receive public services aligns government and medical interests, but a less-than-trusting public may see conspiracy in such requirements, resulting in vaccine hesitancy. The media’s attention to the topic, and a tendency toward misinformation on the part of anti-government opinion leaders, necessitate additional exploration of the administrative burden of vaccinations in an increasingly complex policy environment, where public health benefits are weighed against individual freedom and belief. This paper examines vaccinations as a burden, with costs in compliance, learning, and psychological terms, using posts from the social networking site Twitter as a corpus for exploratory content analysis in the specific case of Australia and its requirements. It is worth considering whether the positive aspects messaged by public health professionals are successfully entering into the discourse on vaccinations.

Seeking Gender Equality in the Tourism Sector: A Systematic Bibliometric Review

Sustainability in tourism cannot be achieved without decent work, gender equality and empowerment of all women. Most of the workforce in the tourism sector is women, and although this sector offers great opportunities for empowerment and gender equality, there are many inequalities that occur in it. To find solutions it is necessary to have a greater knowledge, and therefore it is necessary to analyze how the gender equality research is progressing. The objective of this paper is to analyse how the concept of gender equality in tourism is present in academic research. For this purpose, a systematic review of the existing scientific literature is carried out, based on a bibliometric review of the works on gender equality in the field of tourism published in the Scopus database. The analysis carried out shows that, although there has been a year-on-year increase in publications related to gender equality in the field of tourism, there are still few studies focused on this subjetc, and that only in the last time have they been linked to the family. The analysis also reveals that only a few journals and authors concentrate publications related to gender equality in tourism.

Modes and Forms of Knowledge of Farming Entrepreneurship: An Ethnographic Analysis among Small Farmers in NW Italy

This article investigates the modes and forms of knowledge underpinning farming entrepreneurship through an ethnographic case study of Alessandria province in NW Italy. It shows that farming entrepreneurs base their decisions on explicit and implicit knowledge encompassing forms of knowledge linked to the environment where they live, their trade, the characteristics of their firms, issues concerning their family and private life, and even the emotions linked with their surroundings. All these forms of knowledge inform their vision of their future and guide them in their choices in terms of investments and crop selection. Accordingly, the article argues that farming entrepreneurship is embedded in the locale.