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Home > News index > "Sea change" paper nominated for two awards
"Sea change" paper nominated for two awards23 March 2006
A conference paper presented at Research 2007 by Tim Macer, Mark Pearson and Fabrizio Sebastiani on a novel method for processing verbatim responses automatically has been shortlisted for two awards. It is among one of four nominations for Best Paper and is also one of four nominations for Best New Thinking. The paper documents the trio's successful application of human language processing technology to the task of analysing and interpreting open-ended comments written by survey respondents when completing online questionnaires. The application was devloped by online bank Egg and is based on the technology pioneered by Dr Sebastiani at the Italian National Council for Research in Pisa. Tim Macer, from meaning, was engaged by Egg to facilitate and manage the project, and work on the design with developers from ISTI-CNR. After extensive testing, the team had discovered that the software was able to categorise the highly unstructured, informal and often very lengthy responses given by respondents to Egg's customer satisfaction surveys to levels of accuracy highly comparable to human coders, yet automatically and in a fraction of the time. On hearing the paper, veteran researcher and head of the award judging panel, John Samuels said that he considered he had "just witnessed one of those rare sea-change moments in research." Nominations for all five conference awards were annouced as the conference closed on 23 March. The winners will not be disclosed until the awards are presented at the annual Research Excellence and Effectiveness awards in London on 26 November. |
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