Computational Linguistics Commons^™

Towards Multipurpose Readability Assessment, Ion Madrazo

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Readability refers to the ease with which a reader can understand a text. Automatic readability assessment has been widely studied over the past 50 years. However, most of the studies focus on the development of tools that apply either to a single language, domain, or document type. This supposes duplicate efforts for both developers, who need to integrate multiple tools in their systems, and final users, who have to deal with incompatibilities among the readability scales of different tools. In this manuscript, we present MultiRead, a multipurpose readability assessment tool capable of predicting the reading difficulty of texts of varied …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Latent Semantic Indexing In The Discovery Of Cyber-Bullying In Online Text, Jacob L. Bigelow

Computer Science Summer Fellows

The rise in the use of social media and particularly the rise of adolescent use has led to a new means of bullying. Cyber-bullying has proven consequential to youth internet users causing a need for a response. In order to effectively stop this problem we need a verified method of detecting cyber-bullying in online text; we aim to find that method. For this project we look at thirteen thousand labeled posts from Formspring and create a bank of words used in the posts. First the posts are cleaned up by taking out punctuation, normalizing emoticons, and removing high and low …

Detection Of Cyberbullying In Sms Messaging, Bryan W. Bradley

Computer Science Summer Fellows

Cyberbullying is a type of bullying that uses technology such as cell phones to harass or malign another person. To detect acts of cyberbullying, we are developing an algorithm that will detect cyberbullying in SMS (text) messages. Over 80,000 text messages have been collected by software installed on cell phones carried by participants in our study. This paper describes the development of the algorithm to detect cyberbullying messages, using the cell phone data collected previously. The algorithm works by first separating the messages into conversations in an automated way. The algorithm then analyzes the conversations and scores the severity and …

Data-Driven Synthesis And Evaluation Of Syntactic Facial Expressions In American Sign Language Animation, Hernisa Kacorri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology to automatically synthesize linguistically accurate and natural-looking animations of American Sign Language (ASL) would make it easier to add ASL content to websites and media, thereby increasing information accessibility for many people who are deaf and have low English literacy skills. State-of-art sign language animation tools focus mostly on accuracy of manual signs rather than on the facial expressions. We are investigating the synthesis of syntactic ASL facial expressions, which are grammatically required and essential to the meaning of sentences. In this thesis, we propose to: (1) explore the methodological aspects of evaluating sign language animations with facial expressions, …

Argumentation Mining In Parliamentary Discourse, Nona Naderi

OSSA Conference Archive

In parliamentary discourse, politicians expound their beliefs and goals through argumentation, and, to persuade the audience, they communicate their values by highlighting some aspect of an issue, an action which is commonly known as framing. The choices of frames are typically dependent upon the speaker’s ideology.

In this proposed doctoral work, we will computationally analyze framing strategies and present a model for discovering the latent structure of framing of real-world issues in Canadian parliamentary discourse.

Cest: City Event Summarization Using Twitter, Deepa Mallela

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Twitter, with 288 million active users, has become the most popular platform for continuous real-time discussions. This leads to huge amounts of information related to the real-world, which has attracted researchers from both academia and industry. Event detection on Twitter has gained attention as one of the most popular domains of interest within the research community. Unfortunately, existing event detection methodologies have yet to fully explore Twitter metadata and instead rely solely on identifying events based on prior information or focus on events that belong to specific categories. Given the heavy volume of tweets that discuss events, summarization techniques can …

Hpcnmf: A High-Performance Toolbox For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Karthik Devarajan, Guoli Wang

COBRA Preprint Series

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for dimension reduction of large-scale data. It has found successful applications in a variety of fields such as computational biology, neuroscience, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing and speech recognition. In bioinformatics, for example, it has been used to extract patterns and profiles from genomic and text-mining data as well as in protein sequence and structure analysis. While the scientific performance of NMF is very promising in dealing with high dimensional data sets and complex data structures, its computational cost is high and sometimes could be critical for …

Radical Recognition In Off-Line Handwritten Chinese Characters Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Xiangying Shuai

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the past decade, handwritten Chinese character recognition has received renewed interest with the emergence of touch screen devices. Other popular applications include on-line Chinese character dictionary look-up and visual translation in mobile phone applications. Due to the complex structure of Chinese characters, this classification task is not exactly an easy one, as it involves knowledge from mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.

Given a large image database of handwritten character data, the goal of my senior project is to use Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), a recent method for finding a suitable representation (parts-based representation) of image data, to detect specific …