Leave No Place Behind: Improved Geolocation in Humanitarian Documents Best Paper Award

Leave No Place Behind: Improved Geolocation in Humanitarian Documents

In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good 

Belliardo, E., Kalimeri, K. and Mejova, Y. 

In this study, we enhance Named Entity Recognition (NER) tools like Spacy and roBERTa for geotagging humanitarian texts by developing annotated resources for fine-tuning. We introduce a geocoding method, FeatureRank, to link identified locations with the GeoNames database. Our findings show that incorporating humanitarian-domain data not only boosts the classifiers' performance (achieving up to F1 = 0.92) but also reduces the Western bias present in existing tools. We highlight the need for more non-Western resources to adapt off-the-shelf NER systems effectively for humanitarian use, ensuring global relevance and accuracy.

Monitoring Gender Gaps via LinkedIn Advertising Estimates: the case study of Italy.

“Monitoring Gender Gaps via LinkedIn Advertising Estimates: the case study of Italy”.

In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (pp. 229-238).

Berte M., Paolotti D, Kalimeri K.

Our study enhances the understanding of gender inequalities in the labor market by leveraging LinkedIn data alongside official sources, focusing on Italy's subnational patterns. We confirm LinkedIn's effectiveness in capturing gender disparities across various sociodemographic dimensions, despite noting a digitalization gap affecting data representativity, particularly under-representing women in Southern Italy. Our analysis also highlights a trend of highly skilled women migrating from the South. This approach offers dynamic, detailed insights into gender inequalities, proving valuable for policymakers to design targeted interventions.

GENDER GAPS

“Gender gaps in urban mobility”. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2020, vol. 7, no 1, p. 1-13. 

Gauvin L, Tizzoni M, Piaggesi S, et al.

Mobile phone data have been extensively used to study urban mobility. However, studies based on gender-disaggregated large-scale data are still lacking, limiting our understanding of

gendered aspects of urban mobility and our ability to design policies for gender equality. Here we study urban mobility from a gendered perspective, combining commercial and open datasets for the city of Santiago, Chile. We analyze call detail records for a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users and reveal a gender gap in mobility: women visit fewer unique locations than men, and distribute their time less equally among such locations.

Mapping this mobility gap over administrative divisions, we observe that a wider gap is associated with lower income and lack of public and private transportation options. Our results uncover a complex interplay between gendered mobility patterns, socio-economic

factors and urban affordances, calling for further research and providing insights for policy-makers and urban planners.

FACEBOOK ADS AND THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE

“Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide”. Proceedings of The Web Conference. 2020.

Rama D, Mejova Y, Tizzoni M, Kalimeri K, Weber I

In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging to track important statistics concerning this sparse, geographically dispersed population, resulting in a lack of reliable, up-to-date data. In this study, we examine the usefulness of the Facebook Advertising platform, which offers a digital “census” of over two billions of its users, in measuring potential rural-urban inequalities. The findings of this study illustrate the necessity of improving existing tools and methodologies to include under-represented populations in digital demographic studies – the failure to do so could result in misleading observations, conclusions, and most importantly, policies.

Visualization: http://www.datainterfaces.org/projects/facebookmap/ 

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL MEDIA

“Young Adult Unemployment Through the Lens of Social Media: Italy as a Case Study”. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. 

Urbinati A, Kalimeri K, Bonanomi A, Rosina A, Cattuto C, Paolotti D

Youth unemployment rates are still in alerting levels for many countries, among which Italy.  In this study, we employ survey data together with social media data, and in particular likes on Facebook Pages, to analyse personality, moral values, but also cultural elements of the young unemployed population in Italy. Our findings show that there are small but significant differences in personality and moral values, with the unemployed males to be less agreeable while females more open to new experiences. At the same time, unemployed have a more collectivist point of view, valuing more in-group loyalty, authority, and purity foundations. We believe these findings can help policymakers get a deeper understanding of this population and initiatives that improve both the hard and the soft skills of this fragile population.