Investigating Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives: Examining the case of corporate Covid-19 response

In todays age of freely available information, policy makers have to take into account a huge amount of information while making decisions affecting relevant stakeholders. While increase in the amount of information sources and documents increases credibility of decisions based on the corpus of available text, it is challenging for policymakers to make sense of this information. This paper demonstrates how policy makers can implement some of the most popular topic recognition methods, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Deep Distributed Representation method, text summarization approaches, Word Based Sentence Ranking method and TextRank for sentence extraction method, to sum up the content of large volume of documents to understand the gist of the overload of information. We have applied popular NLP methods to corporate press releases during the early period and advanced period of Covid-19 pandemic which has resulted in a global unprecedented health and socio-economic crisis, when policymaking and regulations have become especially important to standardize corporate practices for employee and social welfare in the face of similar future unseen crises. The steps undertaken in this study can be replicated to yield insights from relevant documents in any other social decision-making context.

An Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Coronary Heart Disease Prediction

This study proposes an efficient neural network with convolutional layers to classify significantly class-imbalanced clinical data. The data are curated from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) with the goal of predicting the occurrence of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). While the majority of the existing machine learning models that have been used on this class of data are vulnerable to class imbalance even after the adjustment of class-specific weights, our simple two-layer CNN exhibits resilience to the imbalance with fair harmony in class-specific performance. In order to obtain significant improvement in classification accuracy under supervised learning settings, it is a common practice to train a neural network architecture with a massive data and thereafter, test the resulting network on a comparatively smaller amount of data. However, given a highly imbalanced dataset, it is often challenging to achieve a high class 1 (true CHD prediction rate) accuracy as the testing data size increases. We adopt a two-step approach: first, we employ least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) based feature weight assessment followed by majority-voting based identification of important features. Next, the important features are homogenized by using a fully connected layer, a crucial step before passing the output of the layer to successive convolutional stages. We also propose a training routine per epoch, akin to a simulated annealing process, to boost the classification accuracy. Despite a 35:1 (Non-CHD:CHD) ratio in the NHANES dataset, the investigation confirms that our proposed CNN architecture has the classification power of 77% to correctly classify the presence of CHD and 81.8% the absence of CHD cases on a testing data, which is 85.70% of the total dataset. ( (<1920 characters)Please check the paper for full abstract)