Virtual Reality (VR) training simulations are an idea which is being explored in numerous industries and professions. However, evidence purporting to the effectiveness of VR technology in relation to standard real-world exercises is still relatively thin. In this paper, we discuss our approach for validating the effectiveness of a VR training for law enforcement professionals in the context of the AUGGMED project, and present results of the validation study. Our study indicates that realistic VR-based trainings, either by themselves or in combination with the traditional hands-on training, can be as effective as highly resource-intensive practical training sessions.

With this paper we take a first step to understand the appropriation of social media by the police. For this purpose we analyzed the Twitter communication by the London Metropolitan Police (MET) and the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) during the riots in August 2011. The systematic comparison of tweets demonstrates that the two forces developed very different practices for using Twitter. While MET followed an instrumental approach in their communication, in which the police aimed to remain in a controlled position and keep a distance to the general public, GMP developed an expressive approach, in which the police actively decreased the distance to the citizens. In workshops and interviews, we asked the police officers about their perspectives, which confirmed the identified practices. Our study discusses benefits and risks of the two approaches and the potential impact of social media on the evolution of the role of police in society.

Recent discussions of annotator agreement have mostly centered around its calculation and interpretation, and the correct choice of indices. Although these discussions are important, they only consider the “back-end” of the story, namely, what to do once the data are collected. Just as important in our opinion is to know how agreement is reached in the first place and what factors influence coder agreement as part of the annotation process or setting, as this knowledge can provide concrete guidelines for the planning and set-up of annotation projects. To investigate whether there are factors that consistently impact annotator agreement we conducted a meta-analytic investigation of annotation studies reporting agreement percentages. Our meta-analysis synthesized factors reported in 96 annotation studies from three domains (word-sense disambiguation, prosodic transcriptions, and phonetic transcriptions) and was based on a total of 346 agreement indices. Our analysis identified seven factors that influence reported agreement values: annotation domain, number of categories in a coding scheme, number of annotators in a project, whether annotators received training, the intensity of annotator training, the annotation purpose, and the method used for the calculation of percentage agreements. Based on our results we develop practical recommendations for the assessment, interpretation, calculation, and reporting of coder agreement. We also briefly discuss theoretical implications for the concept of annotation quality.

For highly interdependent yet location-specific tasks, distributed teams need to closely coordinate activities and processes. This field study in the upstream oil and gas industry focused on challenges in the coordination of highly interdependent tasks if teams work remotely on an ongoing basis. Based on 78 semi-structured interviews and observations over a period of 12 months, we identified coordination requirements for primary team activities, as well as effects of changing media capabilities to overcome difficulties of ongoing distribution. Implications for media requirements in the support of ongoing distributed teams are discussed.

Teams working on highly interdependent yet geographically distributed tasks need to closely coordinate their activities across distances. This field study in the upstream oil and gas industry illustrates that apart from geographical distribution, the onshore and offshore teams are confronted by considerable challenges due to asymmetries in tasks related, demographic, and cultural attributes. While with the industrywide move towards real-time data and video communication physical distances have become easier to bridge, other asymmetries still require attention. Using semi-structured interviews and observations, coordination requirements between subgroups, interdependencies, and task-specific asymmetries were identified. Implications for media requirements to support distributed asymmetric teams are discussed.

Many annotation projects have shown that the quality of manual annotations often is not as good as would be desirable for reliable data analysis. Identifying the main sources responsible for poor annotation quality must thus be a major concern. Generalizability theory is a valuable tool for this purpose, because it allows for the differentiation and detailed analysis of factors that influence annotation quality. In this article we will present basic concepts of Generalizability Theory and give an example for its application based on published data.

We present an approach on how to investigate what kind of semantic information is regularly associated with the structural markup of scientific articles. This approach addresses the need for an explicit formal description of the semantics of text-oriented XML-documents. The domain of our investigation is a corpus of scientific articles from psychology and linguistics from both English and German online available journals.For our analyses, we provide XML-markup representing two kinds of semantic levels: the thematic level (i.e.\ topics in the text world that the article is about) and the functional or rhetorical level. Our hypothesis is that these semantic levels correlate with the articles' document structure also represented in XML. Articles have been annotated with the appropriate information. Each of the three informational levels is modelled in a separate XML document, since in our domain, the different description levels might conflict so that it is impossible to model them within a single XML document.For comparing and mining the resulting multi-layered\linebreak XML annotations of one article, a Prolog-based approach is used. It focusses on the comparison of XML markup that is distributed among different documents. Prolog predicates have been defined for inferring relations between levels of information that are modelled in separate XML documents. We demonstrate how the Prolog tool is applied in our corpus analyses.