Purpose – Large terminologies usually contain a mix of terms that are either generic or domain specific, which makes the use of the terminology itself a difficult task that may limit the positive effects of these systems. The purpose of this paper is to systematically evaluate the degree of domain specificity of the AGROVOC controlled vocabulary terms as a representative of a large terminology in the agricultural domain and discuss the generic/specific boundaries across its hierarchy. Design/methodology/approach – A user-oriented study with domain-experts in conjunction with quantitative and systematic analysis. First an in-depth analysis of AGROVOC was carried out to make a proper selection of terms for the experiment. Then domain-experts were asked to classify the terms according to their domain specificity. An evaluation was conducted to analyse the domain-experts’ results. Finally, the resulting data set was automatically compared with the terms in SUMO, an upper ontology and MILO, a mid-level ontology; to analyse the coincidences. Findings – Results show the existence of a high number of generic terms. The motivation for several of the unclear cases is also depicted. The automatic evaluation showed that there is not a direct way to assess the specificity degree of a term by using SUMO and MILO ontologies, however, it provided additional validation of the results gathered from the domain-experts. Research limitations/implications – The “domain-analysis” concept has long been discussed and it could be addressed from different perspectives. A resume of these perspectives and an explanation of the approach followed in this experiment is included in the background section. Originality/value – The authors propose an approach to identify the domain specificity of terms in large domain-specific terminologies and a criterion to measure the overall domain specificity of a knowledge organisation system, based on domain-experts analysis. The authors also provide a first insight about using automated measures to determine the degree to which a given term can be considered domain specific. The resulting data set from the domain-experts’ evaluation can be reused as a gold standard for further research about these automatic measures.

Fraud detection systems support advanced detection techniques based on complex rules, statistical modelling and machine learning. However, alerts triggered by these systems still require expert judgement to either confirm a fraud case or discard a false positive. Reducing the number of false positives that fraud analysts investigate, by automating their detection with computer-assisted techniques, can lead to significant cost efficiencies. Alert reduction has been achieved with different techniques in related fields like intrusion detection. Furthermore, deep learning has been used to accomplish this task in other fields. In our paper, a set of deep neural networks have been tested to measure their ability to detect false positives, by processing alerts triggered by a fraud detection system. The performance achieved by each neural network setting is presented and discussed. The optimal setting allowed to capture 91.79% of total fraud cases with 35.16% less alerts. Obtained alert reduction rate would entail a significant reduction in cost of human labor, because alerts classified as false positives by the neural network wouldn't require human inspection.