The Ontology of Communications: Capturing Meaning From Organizational Communications

Structure of communications;Ontology;Information extraction;Management;Business and Economics;Business Administration

Keeves, GarethHarmon, Derek ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Structure of communications;    Ontology;    Information extraction;    Management;    Business and Economics;    Business Administration;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/147512/gkeeves_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation seeks to further scholarly understanding of the content and structure of organizational communications by developing an analytical approach to systematically transform communications into consistent ontologies. By representing the meaning of what is said in a consistent manner, while reflecting the underlying structuring of that information, this dissertation is intended to facilitate large-scale analysis of the evolution of meaning and different layers of structuring. Specifically, once textual information is transformed into consistent ontologies, it becomes feasible to examine the content of what is said, how that content is structured, and how sub-structures combine to overall meta-structures. As such, the overall approach developed is intended to enrich strategy, management, and social science research by allowing the development and testing of theories that inherently require large volumes of rich, nuanced data, such as the process by which high-level structuring of information evolves. While the approach developed is general, able to be expanded across the social sciences, this dissertation focuses on capturing and representing meaning from managerial backgrounds. Specific consideration is given to illustrate how by removing surface-level variations, such as acronyms, synonyms, and superficial differences in sentence construction, inconsistently written sentences can be transformed to consistent ontologies. This dissertation also illustrates how consistently representing the key dimensions of the experiences, positions, qualifications and professional licenses discussed in managerial backgrounds, provides the basis for capturing theoretically meaningful concepts, that can be measured across the population of managers. By providing a path by which theoretically motivated constructs can be developed and utilized, this dissertation is intended to bridge theoretically orientated social science research with advancements in data science, helping to facilitate the growth of theoretically-centered textual analysis, which has broad possibilities to enrich strategy and management theories.