International Journal of Web Based Communities (8 papers in press)

Regular Issues

• The effect of e-retailers’ innovations on shoppers’ impulsiveness and addiction in web-based communities: The case of Amazon’s Prime Now  
  by Zahy Ramadan, Maya Farah, Shireen Daouk 
  Abstract: In the era of exponential growth of online shopping, e-commerce has accelerated consumers’ shift from offline to online shopping, specifically in the FMCG industry. In 2015, Amazon launched the Amazon Prime Now service based on same-day delivery. The research objective is to understand the implications of this ordering tool on the consumer journey from the shopper web-based community, the retailer and brand perspectives. In order to investigate the usage of Amazon Prime Now and its impact on the overall consumer journey, a survey was devised and completed by 25 Prime users who reside in the UK. The findings show that clients’ gratification is due to the outstanding customer service Amazon offers, which as a result established a trust and love relationship with the retailer. Moreover, the findings show that while the minimum order fees have reduced shoppers’ impulsive behaviour in web-based communities, an overall addiction toward the use of Amazon Prime Now was taking place.
  Keywords: Amazon; retailing; shopper web-based community; UK.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10022389
   
  
• Automated Question Extraction and Tagging for Cloud based Online Communities  
  by Subramaniyaswamy Vairavasundaram, Saikishor Jangiti, Logesh Ravi, V. Vijayakumar, G. Swathi 
  Abstract: Crowd-based question answering forums and cloud-based community question answering platforms provide us with the dais to post questions and answers online. This helps the users to get desired answers from expert users. It is challenge for a person with mobility needs to go out and explore. The
  Keywords: Community question answering; Review Generation; Tagging; Question extraction; Authenticity of reviews.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10022390
   
  
• Likes, comments and shares on social media: exploring user engagement with a state tourism Facebook page  
  by Ritesh Chugh, Smit Bhaveshkumar Patel, Niharikaben Patel, Umar Ruhi 
  Abstract: This paper explores an Indian state's (Gujarat) tourism Facebook page with the intent of examining user engagement and interaction. Quantitative content analysis of Facebook posts over a one-year timeframe has been conducted, particularly looking at the multi-media type and the content posted. User engagement is determined by analysing likes, comments and shares on posts. Findings indicate that images form part of most posts, but videos tend to get more interaction with users. Facebook likes are not directly correlated to shares or comments. Comments and shares can be seen as a more reliable source of measuring engagement with users. Advertisements posts had the lowest engagement levels whereas development posts demonstrated the highest engagement levels. Social media managers, who are always keen to enhance user engagement and interaction with their Facebook pages, could utilise the findings to create posts that are related to customer interests to deliver more value.
  Keywords: social media; Facebook; government; tourism; engagement; interaction; likes; shares; comments; India.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10020618
   
  
• Citizens' electronic participation: a systematic review of their challenges and how to overcome them  
  by Carlos Oliveira, Ana C.B. Garcia 
  Abstract: The evolution of the internet and the popularity of the social media have brought new possibilities for citizens' participation into government decision-making. Laws, in democratic countries, have enforced government's data and process transparency. Nevertheless, the e-government research has demonstrated that citizen's participation is still very low. This paper presents a systematic literature review of e-participation research addressing three questions: 1) what are the reasons for the low citizens' participation?; 2) what is the role of the government in e-participation?; 3) what are the current approaches to promote e-participation? Although participation is a right for which the citizens should be fighting for, they have been neglecting to act. Researchers have indicated the government still plays a central role since information and opportunities flow through the government-controlled technological platforms. Nonetheless, there is hope, to initiate a virtuous cycle in which citizens control and expand popular participation, leading to a greater demand for government action.
  Keywords: systematic review; e-participation; engagement.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10020619
   
  
• Arabic language sentiment analysis via cross-language translation  
  by Fahad Kamal Alsheref 
  Abstract: Social platforms on the web give us a huge amount of data like comments, messages, products' reviews and posts. Sentiment analysis on social users' data is a valuable analysis for automatically understanding people's opinions about products or some interesting topics, and this analysis provides valuable information for informed decision making in different domains. Arab web users number is about 200 million users; this huge number represents the strong impact on marketing which makes the sentiment analysis of Arabic language hot topic. This paper proposed an Arabic sentiment analysis model to increase the accuracy of Arabic sentiment analysis. It is based on a cross-language retrieval model. The proposed model was tested on a dataset extracted from twitter and manually sentimentally classified by experts, and it achieved 90.62% accuracy.
  Keywords: the social network; cross-language; information retrieval correlation coefficient; Facebook; Twitter; sentiment analysis; social network service; text mining.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10021806
   
  
• A fanpage of sexual and reproductive health education with good information quality: youth perception  
  by Muhamad Taufik Hidayat, Endang Fauziati, Abdillah Nugroho, Rafidah Hanim Binti Mokhtar 
  Abstract: Griya Muda fanpage is a fanpage which provides sexual and reproductive health education (SRHE) for Semarang City (Indonesia) youth. The aims of this study were to identify the perceptions of Griya Muda Fanpage's followers on the quality of its SRHE information as well as to investigate how the follower's attitude and behaviour have been changed. The method for data collection of this qualitative descriptive study was an in-depth interview. Based on some qualitative framework content analysis of the previous studies, the authors developed a semi-structured interview. Seventeen followers (youth) from various districts in Central Java Province were interviewed. The results indicated that the followers agreed that SRHE information in Griya Muda fanpage was relevant, clear, credible, adequate, useful and needed more material coverage. Griya Muda fanpage also influenced the sexual and reproductive health attitude and behaviour of its followers.
  Keywords: perception; fanpage; sexual education; SRHE; youth; information quality.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10021805
   
  
• Chat-bot-based natural language interface for blogs and information networks  
  by M. Poongodi, V. Vijayakumar, L. Ramanathan, Xiao-Zhi Gao, Vaibhav Bhardwaj, Tanay Agarwal 
  Abstract: Chat-bot is a computer code that interacts with humans by itself without taking any human assistance. The chat-bot uses natural language processing (NLP) for understanding a human request or query. Blog is an information network where people (group) post information in their area of expertise and people with similar interests read and learn from them. The problem with traditional blog websites is that the user can only get the data which is linked to the home page and also the user have to manually go to every page to get the data. The proposed research work aims in designing and building a chat-bot which, with which the administrators and any common man can interact in English and ask for questions like 'show all the posts by abc', which hence provides a natural language (NL) interface between user's language (English) and the blog's (an information network) database.
  Keywords: chat-bot; natural language processing; NLP; language-bot; database-bot; query chat-bot; blog-bot; bot-interaction; social-bot; information-network; autonomous-bot.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10021864
   
  
• Extensive use of online social networks: a qualitative analysis of Iranian students' perspectives  
  by Elham Akbari 
  Abstract: In accordance with media dependency theory, the greater people's dependence on the media, the more important its role in their social lives. The research sample included 65 Iranian university students, with in-depth interviews used to collect data. The results demonstrated that students spent excessive time on online social networks, especially at the time of social and political events. Students perceived that these networks had both advantages and disadvantages. They argued that their belief systems were changing and that they faced new experiences. Moreover, a discrepancy was identified between Iranian users and users in other parts of the world in terms of their preferred social network and its function: Telegram was the most popular social network and none of the participants mentioned the educational function of these sites.
  Keywords: dependency; dependency theory; extensive use; media; online social networks; student.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2019.10021030