Digital Commons Network^™

Towards Robust Long-Form Text Generation Systems, Kalpesh Krishna

Doctoral Dissertations

Text generation is an important emerging AI technology that has seen significant research advances in recent years. Due to its closeness to how humans communicate, mastering text generation technology can unlock several important applications such as intelligent chat-bots, creative writing assistance, or newer applications like task-agnostic few-shot learning. Most recently, the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has resulted in systems like ChatGPT, capable of generating fluent, coherent and human-like text. However, despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs still suffer from several limitations, particularly when generating long-form text. In particular, (1) long-form generated text is filled with factual inconsistencies to …

Computerized Psychological Testing: Designing And Developing An Efficient Test Suite Using Hci And Reinforcement Learning Techniques, William Henry Hoskins

Theses and Dissertations

In this work we discuss the design and development of the Carolina Automated Reading Evaluation (CARE), created to facilitate the finding of deficits in the reading ability of children from four to nine years of age. Designed to automate the process of screening for reading deficits, the CARE is an interactive computer-based tool that helps eliminate the need for one-on-one evaluations of pupils to detect dyslexia and other reading deficits and facilitates the creation of new reading tests within the platform. While other tests collect specific data points in order to determine whether a pupil has dyslexia, they typically focus …

Beyond Algorithms: A User-Centered Evaluation Of A Feature Recommender System In Requirements Engineering, Oluwatobi Lasisi

Theses and Dissertations

Several studies have applied recommender technologies to support requirements engineering activities. As in other application areas of recommender systems (RS), many studies have focused on the algorithms’ prediction accuracy, while there have been limited discussions around users’ interactions with the systems. Since recommender systems are designed to aid users in information retrieval, they should be assessed not just as recommendation algorithms but also from the users’ perspective. In contrast to accuracy measures, user-related issues can only be effectively investigated via empirical studies involving real users. Furthermore, researchers are becoming increasingly aware that the effectiveness of the systems goes beyond recommendation …

Probabilistic Commonsense Knowledge, Xiang Li

Doctoral Dissertations

Commonsense knowledge is critical to achieving artificial general intelligence. This shared common background knowledge is implicit in all human communication, facilitating efficient information exchange and understanding. But commonsense research is hampered by its immense quantity of knowledge because an explicit categorization is impossible. Furthermore, a plumber could repair a sink in a kitchen or a bathroom, indicating that common sense reveals a probable assumption rather than a definitive answer. To align with these properties of commonsense fundamentally, we want to not only model but also evaluate such knowledge human-like using abstractions and probabilistic principles. Traditional combinatorial probabilistic models, e.g., probabilistic …

Improving Evaluation Methods For Causal Modeling, Amanda Gentzel

Doctoral Dissertations

Causal modeling is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. Active communities of researchers in machine learning, statistics, social science, and other fields develop and enhance algorithms that learn causal models from data, and this work has produced a series of impressive technical advances. However, evaluation techniques for causal modeling algorithms have remained somewhat primitive, limiting what we can learn from the experimental studies of algorithm performance, constraining the types of algorithms and model representations that researchers consider, and creating a gap between theory and practice. We argue for expanding …

Youth Leadership Development Program Evaluation, Loreley Lyn Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In competitive youth sports organizations, few organizational leaders focus on leadership development to prepare youth for life situations. Sports organizational leaders are concerned about youth leadership development, as development allows youth to build skills necessary to understand their strengths and weaknesses and recognize ways to overcome fears. Grounded in social learning theory, the purpose of this summative program evaluation was to determine the extent to which a competitive youth sports leadership development program aligned with the organization’s primary objective to provide skilled athletic training while providing lessons to prepare youth for adulthood. The participants comprised 40 key stakeholders, including participants …

A Framework For Personalized Content Recommendations To Support Informal Learning In Massively Diverse Information Wikis, Heba M Ismail

Dissertations

Personalization has proved to achieve better learning outcomes by adapting to specific learners’ needs, interests, and/or preferences. Traditionally, most personalized learning software systems focused on formal learning. However, learning personalization is not only desirable for formal learning, it is also required for informal learning, which is self-directed, does not follow a specified curriculum, and does not lead to formal qualifications. Wikis among other informal learning platforms are found to attract an increasing attention for informal learning, especially Wikipedia. The nature of wikis enables learners to freely navigate the learning environment and independently construct knowledge without being forced to follow a …

Deepcon-Pre: Improved Protein Contact Map Prediction Using Inverse Covariance And Deep Residual Networks, Nachammai Palaniappan

Theses

As with most domains where machine learning methods are applied, correct feature engineering is critical when developing deep learning algorithms for solving the protein folding problem. Unlike the domains such as computer vision and natural language processing, feature engineering is not rigorously studied towards solving the protein folding problem. A recent research has highlighted that input features known as precision matrix are most informative for predicting inter-residue contact map, the key for building three-dimensional models. In this work, we study the significance of the precision matrix feature when very deep residual networks are trained. Using a standard dataset of 3456 …

Evaluating Software Testing Techniques: A Systematic Mapping Study, Mitchell Mayeda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Software testing techniques are crucial for detecting faults in software and reducing the risk of using it. As such, it is important that we have a good understanding of how to evaluate these techniques for their efficiency, scalability, applicability, and effectiveness at finding faults. This thesis enhances our understanding of testing technique evaluations by providing an overview of the state of the art in research. To accomplish this we utilize a systematic mapping study; structuring the field and identifying research gaps and publication trends. We then present a small case study demonstrating how our mapping study can be used to …

A Microscopic Simulation Laboratory For Evaluation Of Off-Street Parking Systems, Yun Yuan

Theses and Dissertations

The parking industry produces an enormous amount of data every day that, properly analyzed, will change the way the industry operates. The collected data form patterns that, in most cases, would allow parking operators and property owners to better understand how to maximize revenue and decrease operating expenses and support the decisions such as how to set specific parking policies (e.g. electrical charging only parking space) to achieve the sustainable and eco-friendly parking.

However, there lacks an intelligent tool to assess the layout design and operational performance of parking lots to reduce the externalities and increase the revenue. To address …

Effects Of An Integrated Electronic Health Record On An Academic Medical Center, Kenneth E. Koppenhaver Ii

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The debate about healthcare reform revolves around a triple aim of improving the health of populations, improving the patient experience, and reducing the cost of care. A major tool discussed in this debate has been the adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems to record and guide care delivery. Due to low adoption rates and limited examples of success, the problem was a lack of understanding by healthcare organizations of how the EHR fundamentally changes an organization through the interactions of people, processes, and technology over time. The purpose of this case study was to explore the people, processes, and …

An Evaluation Framework For Scientific Programming Productivity, W.K. Umayanganie Munipala Munipala

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Substantial time is spent on building, optimizing and maintaining large-scale software that is run on supercomputers. However, little has been done to utilize overall resources efficiently when it comes to including expensive human resources. The community is beginning to acknowledge that optimizing the hardware performance such as speed and memory bottlenecks contributes less to the overall productivity than does the development lifecycle of high-performance scientific applications. Researchers are beginning to look at overall scientific workflows for high performance computing. Scientific programming productivity is measured by time and effort required to develop, configure, and maintain a simulation experiment and its constituent …

Exploiting Social Media Sources For Search, Fusion And Evaluation, Chia-Jung Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

The web contains heterogeneous information that is generated with different characteristics and is presented via different media. Social media, as one of the largest content carriers, has generated information from millions of users worldwide, creating material rapidly in all types of forms such as comments, images, tags, videos and ratings, etc. In social applications, the formation of online communities contributes to conversations of substantially broader aspects, as well as unfiltered opinions about subjects that are rarely covered in public media. Information accrued on social platforms, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to augment web sources such as Wikipedia or news pages, …

Adaptive Step-Sizes For Reinforcement Learning, William C. Dabney

Doctoral Dissertations

The central theme motivating this dissertation is the desire to develop reinforcement learning algorithms that “just work” regardless of the domain in which they are applied. The largest impediment to this goal is the sensitivity of reinforcement learning algorithms to the step-size parameter used to rescale incremental updates. Adaptive step-size algorithms attempt to reduce this sensitivity or eliminate the step-size parameter entirely by automatically adjusting the step size throughout the learning process. Such algorithms provide an alternative to the standard “guess-and-check” methods used to find parameters known as parameter tuning. However, the problems with parameter tuning are currently masked by …

An Investigation Of The Dayton Regional Stem School Public-Private Partnerships, Kimberly S. Poole

CCE Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation study documents in-depth the exploration of the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) between the Dayton Regional STEM School (DRSS) and their industry partners as well as the establishment of a framework for evaluating and assessing PPPs. The public-private partnership agreements were studied in order to answer the over-arching research question: How is an effective public-private partnership established, assessed, and evaluated in education? A descriptive case study methodology was used to study DRSS' public-private partnership agreements to determine if goals and objectives were established and whether or not the partnerships met those goals and objectives. This case study also included …

Indexing Proximity-Based Dependencies For Information Retrieval, Samuel Huston

Doctoral Dissertations

Research into term dependencies for information retrieval has demonstrated that dependency retrieval models are able to consistently improve retrieval effectiveness over bag-of-words models. However, the computation of term dependency statistics is a major efficiency bottleneck in the execution of these retrieval models. This thesis investigates the problem of improving the efficiency of dependency retrieval models without compromising the effectiveness benefits of the term dependency features. Despite the large number of published comparisons between dependency models and bag-of-words approaches, there has been a lack of direct comparisons between alternate dependency models. We provide this comparison and investigate different types of proximity …

An Information Security Control Assessment Methodology For Organizations, Angel Rafael Otero

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In an era where use and dependence of information systems is significantly high, the threat of incidents related to information security that could jeopardize the information held by organizations is more and more serious. Alarming facts within the literature point to inadequacies in information security practices, particularly the evaluation of information security controls in organizations. Research efforts have resulted in various methodologies developed to deal with the information security controls assessment problem. A closer look at these traditional methodologies highlights various weaknesses that can prevent an effective information security controls assessment in organizations. This dissertation develops a methodology that addresses …

Evaluating Usability Evaluations, Allen Leo Dunlea

Master's Theses

We live in an age when consumers can now shop and browse the web using hand-held devices. This means that competitive companies need to have a website to represent their brand and to conduct business. E-commerce sites need to pay special attention to the usability of their sites, since it has such an impact on how potential costumers view their brand.

Jakob Nielsen defines usability as a "quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use"; he separates usability into five quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. The current standard for testing usability involves having …

Predictive Modeling For Navigating Social Media, Meiqun Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Social media changes the way people use the Web. It has transformed ordinary Web users from information consumers to content contributors. One popular form of content contribution is social tagging, in which users assign tags to Web resources. By the collective efforts of the social tagging community, a new information space has been created for information navigation. Navigation allows serendipitous discovery of information by examining the information objects linked to one another in the social tagging space. In this dissertation, we study prediction tasks that facilitate navigation in social tagging systems. For social tagging systems to meet complex navigation needs …

Efficient And Scalable Evaluation Of Continuous, Spatio-Temporal Queries In Mobile Computing Environments, Jonathan M. Cazalas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A variety of research exists for the processing of continuous queries in large, mobile environments. Each method tries, in its own way, to address the computational bottleneck of constantly processing so many queries. For this research, we present a two-pronged approach at addressing this problem. Firstly, we introduce an efficient and scalable system for monitoring traditional, continuous queries by leveraging the parallel processing capability of the Graphics Processing Unit. We examine a naive CPU-based solution for continuous range-monitoring queries, and we then extend this system using the GPU. Additionally, with mobile communication devices becoming commodity, location-based services will become ubiquitous. …

The Impact Of The User Interface On Simulation Usability And Solution Quality, Bruce Ray Montgomery

CCE Theses and Dissertations

This research outlines a study that was performed to determine the effects of user interface design variations on the usability and solution quality of complex, multivariate discrete-event simulations. Specifically, this study examined four key research questions: what are the user interface considerations for a given simulation model, what are the current best practices in user interface design for simulations, how is usability best evaluated for simulation interfaces, and specifically what are the measured effects of varying levels of usability of interface elements on simulation operations such as data entry and solution analysis. The overall goal of the study was to …

A Task-Centered Visualization Design Environment And A Method For Measuring The Complexity Of Visualization Designs, Xiaoyuan Suo

Computer Science Dissertations

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the emerging area of computer security visualization which is about developing visualization methods to help solve computer security problems. In this thesis, we will first present a method for measuring the complexity of information visualization designs. The complexity is measured in terms of visual integration, number of separable dimensions for each visual unit, the complexity of interpreting the visual attributes, number of visual units, and the efficiency of visual search. This method is designed to better assist fellow developers to quickly evaluate multiple design choices, potentially enables computer to automatically measure the …

A Study Of The Influences Of Computer Interfaces And Training Approaches On End User Training Outcomes, Raj Gururajan

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Effective and efficient training is a key factor in determining the success of end user computing (EUC) in organisations. This study examines the influences of two application interfaces, namely icons and menus, on training outcomes. The training outcomes are measured in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and perceived ease of use. Effectiveness includes the keystrokes used to accomplish tasks, the accuracy of correct keystrokes, backtracks and errors committed. Efficiency includes the time taken to accomplish the given tasks. Perceived ease of use rates the ease of the training environment including training materials, operating system, application software and associated resources provided to …

Software Metrics For Monitoring Software Engineering Projects, Edwin C. Lim

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

As part of the undergraduate course offered by Edith Cowan University, the Department of Computer Science has (as part of a year's study) a software engineering group project. The structure of this project was divided into two units, Software Engineering l and Software Engineering 2. ln Software Engineering 1, students were given the group project where they had to complete and submit the Functional Requirement and Detail System Design documentation. In Software Engineering 2, students commenced with the implementation of the software, testing and documentation. The software was then submitted for assessment and presented to the client. To aid the …

A Study Of The Approaches And Attitudes Of Information Systems Executives To Measuring Information Systems Effectiveness, Falantina Tjakra

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The purpose of the research is to examine the attitudes of IS executives to the current and future importance of some of the approaches to measuring IS efficiency and IS effectiveness in large Australian organisations. The study identified the nature of IS effectiveness approaches along the lines of whether they are business-oriented, IS internal/operational, financial, quantitative or qualitative measures. It also examined whether the structure of the IS management and industry sector had an effect on attitudes towards these measures.

The Use Of A Factory Simulation To Evaluate A Flexible Control Structure For Integrated Manufacturing, Ling Ling Pan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Once a control structure for an integrated manufacturing system is decided upon, manufacturing activities are limited by that structure. A flexible control structure is presented as an approach for accommodating a variety of manufacturing activities, without being limited to a single control structure. A flexible control structure is one that allows multiple types of control structure in the manufacturing process. For example, both hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures may be used in a flexible structure. The properties of a flexible control structure are discussed from the point of view of graph theory.

Control structures for automated manufacturing are difficult to evaluate …