In academia, they say that you either publish or perish, thus it was good news to know that this year, I was not going to be falling under the latter. In June and July, I received news of six publications that were accepted, putting me in an even better mood before going for summer holidays.
Below is a summary of the papers and their highlights.
Natural language generation
Data-driven news generation for automated journalism: Leppänen, L., Munezero, M., Granroth-Wilding, M. and Toivonen, H., The 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG). Santiago de Compostela, Spain, September 2017. To appear.
Highlights: In this paper, we explore the field and challenges associated with building a journalistic natural language generation system. We present a set of requirements that should guide system design, including transparency, accuracy, modifiability and transferability. Guided by the requirements, we present a data-driven architecture for automated journalism that is largely domain and language independent. We illustrate its practical application in the production of news articles upon a user request about the 2017 Finnish municipal elections in three languages, demonstrating the successfulness of the data-driven, modular approach of the design.
Finding and expressing news from structured data: Leppänen, L., Munezero, M., Sirén-Heikel, S., Granroth-Wilding, M. and Toivonen, H., 21st International Academic Mindtrek Conference. Tampere, Finland, September 2017. To appear.
Highlights: This work proposes approaches for automatically finding news or newsworthy events from structured data using statistical analysis and for providing added value to audiences. Utilizing a real natural language news generation system as a case study, we demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of automating those processes. In particular, the paper reveals that through automation of the news generation process, a large amount of news can be expressed in digestible formats to audiences, at varying local levels, and in multiple languages. In addition, automation makes it easier to provide interactivity to the audience allowing them to tailor or personalize the news they want to read.
Open source community analysis
An exploratory analysis of a hybrid OSS company’s forum in search of sales leads: Munezero, M., Kojo, T. and Männistö, T., In Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2017 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, Toronto, Canada, November 2017 – To appear
Highlight: The paper presents ongoing work utilizing text analysis techniques to analyze the content of forum posts of a hybrid open source company that offers both free and commercial licenses, in order to help its community manager gain improved understanding of the forum discussions, sentiments, and automatically discover new opportunities such as sales leads.
The many hats and the broken binoculars: State of the practice in developer community management: Mäenpää, H., Munezero, M., Fagerholm, F. and Mikkonen, T., The 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym), Galway City, Ireland, August 2017 – To appear
Highlight: The paper investigates the varied tasks that community managers perform to ensure the health and vitality of their communities. We describe the challenges managers face while directing the community and seeking support for their work from the analysis tools provided by state-of-the-art software platforms. Our results describe seven roles that community managers may play, highlighting the versatile and people-centric nature of the community manager’s work.
Continuous experimentation
Introducing Continuous Experimentation in Large Software-Intensive Product and Service Organizations: Yaman, S.G., Munezero, M., Münch, J., Fagerholm, F., Syd, O., Aaltola, M., Palmu, C. and Männistö, T., Journal of Systems and Software, 2017 – In Press
Highlights: This article presents a multiple-case study that aims at better understanding the process of introducing continuous experimentation into an organization with an already established development process. Our findings indicate that organizational factors may limit the benefits of experimentation. Moreover, introducing continuous experimentation requires fundamental changes in how companies operate, and a systematic introduction process can increase the chances of a successful start.
Notifying and involving users in experimentation: Ethical perceptions of software practitioners: Yaman, S.G., Fagerholm, F., Munezero, M., Mäenpää, H. and Männistö, T., In Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2017 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, Toronto, Canada, November 2017 – To appear
Highlights: This paper examines how ethical issues involved in experimentation are currently understood by practitioners in software development. We conducted a survey within four software companies, inviting employees in different functional roles to indicate their attitudes and perceptions through a number of ethical statements. We observed that employees working in different roles have different viewpoints on ethical issues. While managers are more conscious about company-customer relationships, UX designers appear more familiar with involving users, and developers think that details of experiments can be withheld from users if the results depend on it.