Computer‐Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text

The (unheralded) first step in many applications of automated text analysis involves selecting keywords to choose documents from a large text corpus for further study. Although all substantive results depend on this choice, researchers usually pick keywords in ad hoc ways that are far from optimal and usually biased. Most seem to think that keyword selection is easy, since they do Google searches every day, but we demonstrate that humans perform exceedingly poorly at this basic task. We offer a better approach, one that also can help with following conversations where participants rapidly innovate language to evade authorities, seek political advantage, or express creativity; generic web searching; eDiscovery; look‐alike modeling; industry and intelligence analysis; and sentiment and topic analysis. We develop a computer‐assisted (as opposed to fully automated or human‐only) statistical approach that suggests keywords from available text without needing structured data as inputs. This framing poses the statistical problem in a new way, which leads to a widely applicable algorithm. Our specific approach is based on training classifiers, extracting information from (rather than correcting) their mistakes, and summarizing results with easy‐to‐understand Boolean search strings. We illustrate how the technique works with analyses of English texts about the Boston Marathon bombings, Chinese social media posts designed to evade censorship, and others.     

Choosing mates—the American way

He has published numerous works on family sociology and contemporary Chinese social organization. He is currently involved in a comparative study of mate choice and marital relations in China and the United States. His latest book is Dating, Mating, and Marriage.     

Hong kong public administration under stress: the significance and implications of management paradoxes

The purpose of this study is to identify the major obstacles to administrative reform in Hong Kong so as to generate a basis for addressing one critical question, “what is to be done to ensure the occurrence of effective reform?” Based on 35 interviews with 48 public executives, this researcher finds that there are various paradoxical forces acting in concert in their impacts upon the bureaucracy, that public executives are unable to cope with those forces, and that unless those paradoxes are effectively managed, administrators' ability to act (or to undertake reform measures) is seemingly very limited. Policy and research implications are discussed.     

Forensic Evidence and Criminal Investigations: The Impact of Ballistics Information on the Investigation of Violent Crime in Nine Cities,

We explore the impact of information from ballistics imaging hit reports on the investigation into violent crimes. Ballistics imaging hits link two crimes involving the same firearm by forensically matching tool marks on the fired bullets or cartridge cases. Interview data collected from detectives who received a hit report were used to explore the relationship between the presence of a hit report and outcomes in 65 gun‐related violent crime investigations in nine U.S. police agencies. Findings indicate hit reports rarely contribute to identification, arrest, charging, or sentencing of suspects, because of delays in producing hit reports. On average, hit reports were completed 181.4 days after the focal crime. This delay forces investigations to proceed without the benefit of information from ballistics analysis. Additionally, hit reports rarely contained detailed information that was immediately useful to investigators. Instead, hit reports required additional research by the investigator to unlock useful information.     

Evaluating interviews which search for the truth with suspects: but are investigators’ self-assessments of their own skills truthful ones?

Self-evaluation of one’s own performance has been found in prior research to be an enabler of professional development. The task of evaluation is also a core component of a model of the investigative interviewing of victims, witnesses and suspects, being increasingly used throughout the world. However, it remains the case that there has been little research as to how practitioners approach the task itself. The present study examined the topic through the lens of observing how effectively 30 real-life investigators in the UK undertook evaluation of their interviews, representing almost the entire investigative frontline workforce of a small law enforcement agency in this country. Using an established scale of measurement, both investigators’ and an expert’s ratings of the same sample of interviews were compared across a range of tasks and behaviours. It was found that in almost all the assessed behaviours, requiring of the investigators to provide a self-rating, their scores tended to significantly outstrip those applied to the sample by the expert. Reasons are explored for the investigators’ overstated assessments. Implications for practice are then discussed.     

Demography of the Legal Profession and Racial Disparities in Sentencing

The demography of the legal profession has changed rather dramatically in recent decades, yet the consequences of a more racially and ethnically diverse pool of lawyers for the administration of justice have not received significant attention. The present research examines how the racial composition of the local legal profession affects one facet of criminal law: the sentencing of convicted defendants. Building on prior work in the fields of law, stratification, and mobility, we hypothesize that racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing are mitigated where the legal profession is more diverse. In line with this hypothesis, analysis of data from a sample of large urban counties taken between 1990 and 2002 shows that the black-white racial disparity in sentencing attenuates as the number of black attorneys in the county increases, net of the percent black in the county and other possible confounding variables. Comparable results are found for Hispanics. The findings are discussed in the context of a demographically changing legal profession and prior work on racial disparities in the justice system.