Making Numbers Meaningful

我们的日常活动在很大程度上取决于我们根据数字信息理解和做出决策的能力。然而，许多人都在与数字不清作斗争，数字相当于文盲。英国国家算术慈善机构2014年的一份报告估计，在英国，每年花费在低算术上的成本为200亿英镑。这个拟议的项目将不计算的负担从数字信息的消费者转移到通信者身上，认识到数字信息以语言和图形的外部呈现的重要性，以及特定的交流策略如何难以理解、偏见或直接扭曲事实。该项目的出发点是，为了打击不计算，我们首先需要了解人们在日常生活中实际使用数字交流的是什么。对于这个项目，我将召集一个跨学科的研究团队，对多个沟通渠道和多种形式的媒体进行迄今为止最大规模的数字沟通调查。该项目的创新之处在于将心理学、教育研究和统计学的现有研究与语言学和计算机科学的方法和见解结合在一起，从而将数字交流的研究转变为一项彻底的跨学科努力。该项目将对自然语言进行大规模描述性分析所产生的见解带回实验室，以便对最有效和最透明的交流策略进行实验，可以在野外模拟数字交流，从而将实验室条件与自然条件联系起来。这些对特定呈现形式的认知效应的实验研究将被用来开发自动分类文件的数字可及性的方法。这项研究将通过展示数字交流如何依赖于相互作用的多个通信系统而产生重大的学术影响，因此需要以综合的方式进行研究。该项目还将影响几个不同的学术领域，通过使用机器学习工具来创新方法，从语言和图形中自动提取数字信息。拟议的研究对非学术利益相关者具有广泛的好处。这种影响将通过与商业企业的数据分析师密切合作，以创新的方式让低数字能力的人更容易接触到紧迫的社会问题(如气候风险或健康风险)来实现。此外，该项目旨在改进对数据分析员的培训，以便更多地关注透明沟通事项。长期目标是建立数据分析培训的持久遗产，从而改进数字信息在大量依赖数据的业务部门之间的交流方式。

Much of our everyday activity depends on our ability to comprehend and make decisions based on numerical information. However, many people struggle with innumeracy, the numerical equivalent to illiteracy. A 2014 report for the National Numeracy charity has estimated the cost of low numeracy in the UK to be £20 billion per year. The proposed project shifts the burden of innumeracy from the consumer of numerical information to the communicator, recognising the importance of the external presentation of numerical information in language and graphs, and how particular communicative strategies can be unintelligible, biasing, or outright distorting the truth.The project's starting point is that in order to combat innumeracy, we first need to understand what it is that people actually do with numerical communication on a daily basis. For this project, I will assemble an interdisciplinary team of researchers to conduct the so-far largest investigation into numerical communication across multiple communication channels and multiple forms of media. The proposed project innovates by marrying existing research in psychology, education research, and statistics, with methods and insights from linguistics and computer science, thus transforming the study of numerical communication into a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavour.The project takes the insights generated from the large-scale descriptive analysis of naturally occurring language back into the lab, so that experiments into the most effective and transparent communication strategies can be modelled closely after numerical communication "in the wild", thus bridging laboratory conditions with natural conditions. These experimental investigations into the cognitive effects of particular presentational formats will be used to develop automated ways of classifying the numerical accessibility of documents.The research will make significant academic impact by showing how numerical communication depends on multiple communication systems that interact with each other and therefore need to be studied in an integrated fashion. The project will also impact several different academic fields by innovating methodologies via the use of machine learning tools to automatically extract numerical information from language and graphs.The proposed research has wide-ranging benefits to non-academic stakeholders. This impact will be realised by working closely together with data analysts from commercial businesses on innovative ways of making pressing societal issues (such as climate risks or health risks) more accessible to people with low numeracy. In addition, the project aims to improve the training of data analysts so that more attention is paid to matters of transparent communication. The long-term goal is to establish a lasting legacy of data analytics training that leads to improvements in how numerical information is communicated across a large range of data-dependent business sectors.