Digital Commons Network^™

From Sesame Street To Beyond: Multi-Domain Discourse Relation Classification With Pretrained Bert, Isaac R. Raff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research efforts in transfer learning have gained massive popularity in recent years. Pretrained language models have demonstrated the most successful results in producing high quality neural networks capable of quality inference after training across domains via transfer learning. This study expands on the domain transfer introduced in \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} exploring neural methods for transfer learning of discourse parsing between a news source domain and a medical target domain. \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} specifically discuss transfer learning from news articles to PubMed medical journal articles. Experiments in transfer learning in the current work expand to include three domains: Wall Street Journal articles previously annotated with …

From The Unspoken To The Verbalized: Different Ways Of Communication And Their Relationship To Culture In A Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto Na Wičhá Ha Kiŋ”, Or “Ikto And The Racoon Skin”, Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master’s thesis is a discourse analysis of a traditional Lakota story, " Iktó na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin”, one of the 64 stories included in the “Dakota Texts”, which were collected by Ella Deloria at three Lakota reservations in 1930s as a part of Franz Boas’ language documentation project. The thesis is also an attempt to examine different communicative strategies employed within the narrative and their relationship to culture, as well as the relationship between form and the transfer of meaning and culture and meaning. The analysis is conducted using Dell Hymes’ ethnographic approach …

Attitudes Towards Racism In Kkk Forums: Denouncement, Avoidance, And Neutralization, Natasha R. Wood

Student Theses

Recent research has attempted to better understand the complexity of modern terrorism, which seems evermore present in our worldview. However, the scope of the literature lacks representation of far-right ideology, and that of White supremacists within the campaign. Specifically, the potential fear of being labeled as a racist has been recognized as both an obstacle to communicating racial issues and as a potential driver behind the self-imposed social exclusion of White supremacists, which may further contribute to their radicalization rigidity around race-relevant political issues. The current study is an inquiry into the internal perceptions and conceptualizations of racism among members …

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if …