Dong Zhou, Séamus Lawless, Xuan Wu, Wenyu Zhao and Jianxun Liu
With an increase in the amount of multilingual content on the World Wide Web, users are often striving to access information provided in a language of which they are non-native…
Abstract
Purpose
With an increase in the amount of multilingual content on the World Wide Web, users are often striving to access information provided in a language of which they are non-native speakers. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive study of user profile representation techniques and investigate their use in personalized cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems through the means of personalized query expansion.
Design/methodology/approach
The user profiles consist of weighted terms computed by using frequency-based methods such as tf-idf and BM25, as well as various latent semantic models trained on monolingual documents and cross-lingual comparable documents. This paper also proposes an automatic evaluation method for comparing various user profile generation techniques and query expansion methods.
Findings
Experimental results suggest that latent semantic-weighted user profile representation techniques are superior to frequency-based methods, and are particularly suitable for users with a sufficient amount of historical data. The study also confirmed that user profiles represented by latent semantic models trained on a cross-lingual level gained better performance than the models trained on a monolingual level.
Originality/value
Previous studies on personalized information retrieval systems have primarily investigated user profiles and personalization strategies on a monolingual level. The effect of utilizing such monolingual profiles for personalized CLIR remains unclear. The current study fills the gap by a comprehensive study of user profile representation for personalized CLIR and a novel personalized CLIR evaluation methodology to ensure repeatable and controlled experiments can be conducted.
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In recent years, school districts have faced numerous questions surrounding accommodations of transgender students. Strong objections to accommodations have been voiced in public…
Abstract
In recent years, school districts have faced numerous questions surrounding accommodations of transgender students. Strong objections to accommodations have been voiced in public argument and litigation, primarily in the areas of athletics, bathrooms, and dress codes. As younger transgender students express their gender identity at school, however, the existing objections are weakened by considering the context of elementary rather than high school students. Greater numbers of young transgender students will likely encourage accommodation of trans students of all ages, as well as challenge the gender binary unconsciously taught in school.
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Seamus McGuinness and Hugh Cronin
The purpose of this paper is to use a linked employer-employee data set, the National Employment Survey, to examine the determinants of organisational change and employee…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use a linked employer-employee data set, the National Employment Survey, to examine the determinants of organisational change and employee resistance to change and, specifically, to examine the influence of employee inflexibility on the implementation of firm-level policies aimed at increasing competitiveness and workforce flexibility. A key finding arising from the research is that while workforce resistance to job-related change often forces firms to seek alternative means of achieving labour flexibility, there appears little that firms can do to prevent such resistance occurring. The presence of HRM staff, consultation procedures, wage bargaining mechanisms, bullying and equality polices, etc. were found to have little impact on the incidence of workforce resistance to changes in job conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
The objectives of this paper are twofold: first, the authors model the determinants of a measure of workforce resistance to job-related change and, second, the authors assess the impact of workforce resistance on the probability that firms will implement various wider forms of organisational change using linked employer-employee data.
Findings
Workforce resistance to proposed changes in job conditions was found to be lower in organisations employing higher shares of educated workers and also in smaller firms. HRM and employee relations measures were found to have little impact on worker resistance to changing employment conditions, while trade union density was important only with respect to alterations to core terms and conditions. Resistance was found to be important for wider organisational change.
Research limitations/implications
From a policy perspective, the key finding arising from the research is that while workforce resistance to job-related change often forces firms to seek alternative means of achieving flexibility, there appears little that firms can do to prevent such resistance occurring or mediating its impacts. The presence of HRM staff, consultation procedures, wage bargaining mechanisms, bullying and equality polices, etc. were found to have little impact on the incidence of workforce resistance to changes in job conditions.
Social implications
The results support the hypothesis that the increased use of peripheral workers observed in many aspect of the economy is due, at least in part, to inflexibility among existing workers to take on additional roles and responsibilities.
Originality/value
The paper utilises a linked employee-employer data set in a novel way to investigate within firm relationships and tests a number of hypotheses using advanced econometric techniques.