The adoption of data science brings vast benefits to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) including business productivity, economic growth, innovation and job creation. Data science can support SMEs to optimise production processes, anticipate customers’ needs, predict machinery failures and deliver efficient smart services. Businesses can also harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, and the smart use of digital technologies to enhance productivity and performance, paving the way for innovation. However, integrating data science decisions into an SME requires both skills and IT investments. In most cases, such expenses are beyond the means of SMEs due to their limited resources and restricted access to financing. This paper presents trends and challenges towards effective data-driven decision making for organisations based on a 3-year long study which covered more than 85 UK SMEs, mostly from the West Midlands region of England. In particular, this study attempts to find answers to several key research questions around data science and AI adoption among UK SMEs, and the advantages of digitalisation and data-driven decision making, as well as the challenges hindering their effective utilisation of these technologies. We also present two case studies that demonstrate the potential of digitisation and data science, and use these as examples to unveil challenges and showcase the wealth of currently available opportunities for SMEs.

In the cybersecurity industry, where legitimate transactions far outnumber fraudulent ones, detecting fraud is of paramount significance. In order to evaluate the accuracy of detecting fraudulent transactions in imbalanced real datasets, this study compares the efficacy of two approaches, random under-sampling and oversampling, using the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE). Random under-sampling aims for fairness by excluding examples from the majority class, but this compromises precision in favor of recall. To strike a balance and ensure statistical significance, SMOTE was used instead to produce artificial examples of the minority class. Based on the data obtained, it is clear that random under-sampling achieves high recall (92.86%) at the expense of low precision, whereas SMOTE achieves a higher accuracy (86.75%) and a more even F1 score (73.47%) at the expense of a slightly lower recall. As true fraudulent transactions require at least two methods for verification, we investigated different machine learning methods and made suitable balances between accuracy, F1 score, and recall. Our comparison sheds light on the subtleties and ramifications of each approach, allowing professionals in the field of cybersecurity to better choose the approach that best meets the needs of their own firm. This research highlights the need to resolve class imbalances for effective fraud detection in cybersecurity, as well as the need for constant monitoring and the investigation of new approaches to increase applicability.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach for sentence paraphrase identification. The proposal addresses the problem of evaluating sentence-to-sentence semantic similarity when the sentences contain a set of named-entities. The essence of the proposal is to distinguish the computation of the semantic similarity of named-entity tokens from the rest of the sentence text. More specifically, this is based on the integration of word semantic similarity derived from WordNet taxonomic relations, and named-entity semantic relatedness inferred from Wikipedia entity co-occurrences and underpinned by Normalized Google Distance. In addition, the WordNet similarity measure is enriched with word part-of-speech (PoS) conversion aided with a Categorial Variation database (CatVar), which enhances the lexico-semantics of words. We validated our hybrid approach using two different datasets; Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MSRPC) and TREC-9 Question Variants. In our empirical evaluation, we showed that our system outperforms baselines and most of the related state-of-the-art systems for paraphrase detection. We also conducted a misidentification analysis to disclose the primary sources of our system errors.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) now generate digital data at an unprecedented rate from online transactions, social media marketing and associated customer interactions, online product/service reviews and feedback, clinical diagnosis, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and production processes. All these forms of data can be transformed into monetary value if put into a proper data value chain. This requires both skills and IT investments for the longterm benefit of businesses. However, such spending is beyond the capacity of most SMEs due to their limited resources and restricted access to finance. This paper presents lessons learned from a case study of 53 UK SMEs, mostly from the West Midlands region of England, supported as part of a 3-year ERDF ^{1 1} European Regional Development Fund. project – Big Data Corridor ^{2 2} An ERDF funded 3-year project from 2016 to 2019: https://bigdatacorridor.com/. – in the areas of big data management, analytics and related IT issues. Based on our study's sample companies, several perspectives including digital technology trends, challenges facing the UK SMEs, and the state of their adoption in data analytics and big data, are presented.

Query‐focused multi‐document summarization (Qf‐MDS) is a sub‐task of automatic text summarization that aims to extract a substitute summary from a document cluster of the same topic and based on a user query. Unlike other summarization tasks, Qf‐MDS has specific research challenges including the differences and similarities across related document sets, the high degree of redundancy inherent in the summaries created from multiple related sources, relevance to the given query, topic diversity in the produced summary and the small source‐to‐summary compression ratio. In this work, we propose a semantic diversity feature based query‐focused extractive summarizer (SDbQfSum) built on powerful text semantic representation techniques underpinned with Wikipedia commonsense knowledge in order to address the query‐relevance, centrality, redundancy and diversity challenges. Specifically, a semantically parsed document text is combined with knowledge‐based vectorial representation to extract effective sentence importance and query‐relevance features. The proposed monolingual summarizer is evaluated on a standard English dataset for automatic query‐focused summarization tasks, that is, the DUC2006 dataset. The obtained results show that our summarizer outperforms most state‐of‐the‐art related approaches on one or more ROUGE measures achieving 0.418, 0.092 and 0.152 in ROUGE‐1, ROUGE‐2, and ROUGE‐SU4 respectively. It also attains competitive performance with the slightly outperforming system(s), for example, the difference between our system's result and best system in ROUGE‐1 is just 0.006. We also found through the conducted experiments that our proposed custom cluster merging algorithm significantly reduces information redundancy while maintaining topic diversity across documents.

The fact that everyone with a social media account can create and share content, and the increasing public reliance on social media platforms as a news and information source bring about significant challenges such as misinformation, fake news, harmful content, etc. Although human content moderation may be useful to an extent and used by these platforms to flag posted materials, the use of AI models provides a more sustainable, scalable, and effective way to mitigate these harmful contents. However, low-resourced languages such as the Somali language face limitations in AI automation, including scarce annotated training datasets and lack of language models tailored to their unique linguistic characteristics. This paper presents part of our ongoing research work to bridge some of these gaps for the Somali language. In particular, we created two human-annotated social-media-sourced Somali datasets for two downstream applications, fake news \& toxicity classification, and developed a transformer-based monolingual Somali language model (named SomBERTa) -- the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. SomBERTa is then fine-tuned and evaluated on toxic content, fake news and news topic classification datasets. Comparative evaluation analysis of the proposed model against related multilingual models (e.g., AfriBERTa, AfroXLMR, etc) demonstrated that SomBERTa consistently outperformed these comparators in both fake news and toxic content classification tasks while achieving the best average accuracy (87.99%) across all tasks. This research contributes to Somali NLP by offering a foundational language model and a replicable framework for other low-resource languages, promoting digital and AI inclusivity and linguistic diversity.