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Negative Reversion: Toward Intelligent Co-raters for Coding Qualitative Data in Quantitative Ethnography

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Advances in Quantitative Ethnography (ICQE 2023)

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has been applied to simulate many human activities in Quantitative Ethnography(QE). This paper evaluates the creation of an intelligent co-rater for coding qualitative (text) data in QE research. The intelligent task for a computer agent in this study is helping human researchers identify patterns by smartly sampling items that contain patterns of interest the researcher has yet to identify. This study compares the performance of an existing bidirectional LSTM model, bLSTM, a new nearest neighbor model, weNN, and a newly proposed combination of the two. The study focuses on learning data collected from implementations of an epistemic game and associated qualitative coding data coded by regexes. The contributions of this paper include: 1) a newly proposed combination of bLSTM and weNN, referred to as bwInter, which was identified to have the best performance among the three models, with efficiency from approximately 5.8 (lower recall band) to 10.3 (upper recall band) times greater than random searching, compared to the existing bLSTM which had 4.8 (lower recall band) to 5.8 (upper recall band); 2) an examination of the effectiveness of bwInter at five different phases of automated classifier development, which showed, when compared to random searching, increasingly better performance from earlier to later phases in classifier development; and 3) an investigation of performance across different qualitative codes, which showed that, while the effectiveness varies from code to code, the model bwInter always performed significantly better than others, with a minimum efficiency 3.20 times that of random searching. Overall, this paper suggests that, the newly identified model bwInter could be used to create highly effective intelligent co-raters that help identify missing text patterns in coding qualitative data in QE research.

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Acknowledgment

This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (DRL-2100320, DRL-2201723, DRL-2225240), the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The opinions, findings, and conclusions do not reflect the views of the funding agencies, cooperating institutions, or other individuals.

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Correspondence to Zhiqiang Cai .

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Cai, Z., Eagan, B., Williamson Shaffer, D. (2023). Negative Reversion: Toward Intelligent Co-raters for Coding Qualitative Data in Quantitative Ethnography. In: Arastoopour Irgens, G., Knight, S. (eds) Advances in Quantitative Ethnography. ICQE 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1895. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47014-1_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47014-1_29

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