Digital Commons Network^™

Reading Level Identification Using Natural Language Processing Techniques, William Arnost, Ellen Lull, Joseph Schueder, Joseph Engler

SMU Data Science Review

This paper investigates using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm and lexical-syntactic features to measure readability. Readability is important in many disciplines, for functions such as selecting passages for school children, assessing the complexity of publications, and writing documentation. Text at an appropriate reading level will help make communication clear and effective. Readability is primarily measured using well-established statistical methods. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have had mixed success incorporating higher-level text features in a way that consistently beats established metrics. This paper contributes a readability method using a modern transformer technique and compares the results …

Alternative Methods For Deriving Emotion Metrics In The Spotify® Recommendation Algorithm, Ronald M. Sherga Jr., David Wei, Neil Benson, Faizan Javed

SMU Data Science Review

Spotify's® recommendation algorithm tailors music offerings to create a unique listening experience for each user. Though what this recommender does is highly impressive, there is always room for improvement given that these techniques are not fully prescient. This study posits that in addition to creating certain features based on audio analysis, incorporating new features derived from album art color as well as lyrical sentiment analysis may provide additional value to the end user. This team did not find that a significant difference existed between color valence and Spotify® valence; however, all other comparisons resulted in statistically significant difference of means …

Qualitative Leveraging Natural Language Processing To Establish Judge Incrimination Statistics To Educate Voters In Re-Elections, Aurian Ghaemmaghami, Paul Huggins, Grace Lang, Julia Layne, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

The prevalence of data has given consumers the power to make informed choices based off reviews, ratings, and descriptive statistics. However, when a local judge is coming up for re-election there is not any available data that aids voters in making data-driven decision on their vote. Currently court docket data is stored in text or PDFs with very little uniformity. Scaling the collection of this information could prove to be complicated and tiresome. There is a demand for an automated, intelligent system that can extract and organize useful information from the datasets. This paper covers the process of web scraping …

Proquest Tdm Studio: A Text And Data Mining Solution, Anamika Megwalu, Anne Marie Engelsen

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

TDM Studio is an integrated platform offered by ProQuest for data and text mining. TDM stands for text and data mining. This cloud-based, all-in-one innovative product is designed to offer researchers a clean interface with rights-cleared content, Jupyter notebook, and data visualization tools. As a result, researchers can now search Pro-Quest databases, create large datasets, import data to Jupyter notebook for analysis, and download results within a day.

Final Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit Community Engagement Plan For Remedial Work, Josh Bryson, Eric Hassler

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

The Detection Of Sexual Harassment And Chat Predators Using Artificial Neural Network, Noor Amer Hamzah, Ban N. Dhannoon

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

The vast increase in using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook led to frequent sexual_harassment on the Internet, which is considered a major societal problem. This paper aims to detect sexual_harassment and cyber_predators in early phase. We used deeplearning like Bidirectionally-long-short-term memory. Word representations are carefully reviewed in text specific to mapping to real number vectors. The chat sexual predators Detection_approach with the proposed_model. The best results obtained by the performance measured with F0.5-score were the result is_0.927 with proposed_models. The accuracy measured is_97.27% in the proposed_model. The comments sexual_harassment Detection_approach the result is_0.925 F0.5-score, and accuracy measured is_99.12%.

Gr-118 - Sentiment Analysis On Hotel Review, Navya Pallapothu, Aravinda Pandanaboyana, Dilip Kumar

C-Day Computing Showcase

No abstract provided.

Semantically Meaningful Sentence Embeddings, Rojina Deuja

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Text embedding is an approach used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to represent words, phrases, sentences, and documents. It is the process of obtaining numeric representations of text to feed into machine learning models as vectors (arrays of numbers). One of the biggest challenges in text embedding is representing longer text segments like sentences. These representations should capture the meaning of the segment and the semantic relationship between its constituents. Such representations are known as semantically meaningful embeddings. In this thesis, we seek to improve upon the quality of sentence embeddings that capture semantic information.

The current state-of-the-art models are …

Negations Of Probability Distributions: A Survey, Ildar Z. Baryrshin, Nailya I. Kubysheva, Venera R. Bayrasheva, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In recent years many papers have been devoted to the analysis and applications of negations of finite probability distributions (PD), first considered by Ronald Yager. This paper gives a brief overview of some formal results on the definition and properties of negations of PD. Negations of PD are generated by negators of probability values transforming element-by-element PD into a negation of PD. Negators are non-increasing functions of probability values. There are two types of negators: PD-independent and PD-dependent negators. Yager's negator is fundamental in the characterization of linear PD-independent negators as a convex combination of Yager's negator and uniform negator. …

Human Behavior In Domestic Environments: Prediction And Applications, Sharare Zehtabian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

A longstanding goal of human behavior science is to model and predict how humans interact with each other or with other systems. Such models are beneficial and have many applications, including designing and implementing assistive technologies, improving users' experiences and quality of life and making better decisions to create public policies. Behavior is highly complex due to uncertainties and a lack of scientific tools to measure it. Hence prediction of human behavior cannot be 100% accurate. However, prediction is also not hopeless because the biological needs, as well as cultural conventions (for instance, regarding meal times) set the general patterns …

Full Issue, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Machine Learning Techniques For Topic Detection And Authorship Attribution In Textual Data, Fereshteh Jafariakinabad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The unprecedented expansion of user-generated content in recent years demands more attempts of information filtering in order to extract high-quality information from the huge amount of available data. In this dissertation, we begin with a focus on topic detection from microblog streams, which is the first step toward monitoring and summarizing social data. Then we shift our focus to the authorship attribution task, which is a sub-area of computational stylometry. It is worth mentioning that determining the style of a document is orthogonal to determining its topic, since the document features which capture the style are mainly independent of its …

Early Prediction Of Hate Speech Propagation, Ken-Yu Lin, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wei Gao, Wen-Chih Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online hate speech has disrupted the social connectedness in online communities and raises public safety concerns in our societies. Motivated by this rising issue, researchers have developed many machine learning and deep learning methods to detect hate speech in social media automatically. However, most of the existing automated solutions have focused on detecting hate speech in a single post, neglecting the network and information propagation effects of social media platforms. Ideally, the content moderators would want to identify the hateful posts and monitor posts and threads that are likely to induce hate. This paper aims to address this research gap …

Self-Supervised Learning Disentangled Group Representation As Feature, Tan Wang, Zhongqi Yue, Jianqiang Huang, Qianru Sun, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A good visual representation is an inference map from observations (images) to features (vectors) that faithfully reflects the hidden modularized generative factors (semantics). In this paper, we formulate the notion of “good” representation from a group-theoretic view using Higgins’ definition of disentangled representation [38], and show that existing Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) only disentangles simple augmentation features such as rotation and colorization, thus unable to modularize the remaining semantics. To break the limitation, we propose an iterative SSL algorithm: Iterative Partition-based Invariant Risk Minimization (IP-IRM), which successfully grounds the abstract semantics and the group acting on them into concrete contrastive learning. …

Etherlearn: Decentralizing Learning Via Blockchain, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Tian Jun Joel Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In institutes of higher learning, most of the time course material development and delivery follow a centralized model which is fully lecturer-controlled. In this model, engaging students as partners in learning is a challenging problem as: 1) students are usually hesitant to contribute due to the fear of getting it wrong, 2) not much incentive for them to put in the extra effort, and 3) current online learning systems lack adequate facilities to support seamless and anonymous interactions between students. In this work, we propose EtherLearn, a blockchain based peer-learning system to distribute the control of how course material and …

Graph Learning Assisted Multi-Objective Integer Programming, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang, Abhishek Gupta, Mingyan Simon Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Objective-space decomposition algorithms (ODAs) are widely studied for solvingmulti-objective integer programs. However, they often encounter difficulties inhandling scalarized problems, which could cause infeasibility or repetitive nondominatedpoints and thus induce redundant runtime. To mitigate the issue, we presenta graph neural network (GNN) based method to learn the reduction rule in the ODA.We formulate the algorithmic procedure of generic ODAs as a Markov decisionprocess, and parameterize the policy (reduction rule) with a novel two-stage GNNto fuse information from variables, constraints and especially objectives for betterstate representation. We train our model with imitation learning and deploy it ona state-of-the-art ODA. Results show that …

From Language Comprehension Towards General Ai, Binay Dahal

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Language comprehension or more formally, natural language understanding is one of the major undertakings in Artificial Intelligence. In this work, we explore a few of the problems in language understanding using fixed deep learning models. Specifically, first, we look into question generation. Asking questions relates to the cognitive ability of language comprehension and context understanding. For that reason, making progress in question generation is significant. We introduce a novel task called “question generation with masked target answer” and propose various models and present the baseline result for the task. Next, we extend on the question generation task and develop a …

Theoretical Models Of Integration Of Interactive Learning Technologies Into Teaching: A Systematic Literature Review, Laila Mohebi

All Works

With the fast progress of technology and the vast amount of research papers related to technology integration in education being published yearly, a study that reviews models used in these papers is needed. Therefore, this paper (1) reviewed and analysed theoretical frameworks with models used for integration of technology in classrooms, (2) reviewed studies that discussed the impact of technology integration on students' learning capabilities, and (3) discussed the importance of preparing teachers to effectively integrate technology in teaching. The models reviewed were: Teacher Thoughts and Action Process (TTAP), Theory of Planned Behavior, Expectancy-Value Theory of Achievement Motivation (EVAM), Substitution …

Enhancing The Performance Of Text Mining, Farah Mahmoud Al Shanik

All Dissertations

The amount of text data produced in science, finance, social media, and medicine is growing at an unprecedented pace. The raw text data typically introduces major computational and analytical obstacles (e.g., extremely high dimensionality) to data mining and machine learning algorithms. Besides, the growth in the size of text data makes the search process more difficult for information retrieval systems, making retrieving relevant results to match the users’ search queries challenging. Moreover, the availability of text data in different languages creates the need to develop new methods to analyze multilingual topics to help policymakers in governmental and health systems to …

Notions Of Explainability And Evaluation Approaches For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has experienced a significant growth over the last few years. This is due to the widespread application of machine learning, particularly deep learning, that has led to the development of highly accurate models that lack explainability and interpretability. A plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, developed and tested, coupled with several studies attempting to define the concept of explainability and its evaluation. This systematic review contributes to the body of knowledge by clustering all the scientific studies via a hierarchical system that classifies theories and notions related to the concept of explainability …

Russian Logics And The Culture Of Impossible: Part 1. Recovering Intelligentsia Logics, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Anya Yermakova, Liesbeth De Mol

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This article reinterprets algorithmic rationality by looking at the interaction between mathematical logic, mechanized reasoning, and, later, computing in the Russian Imperial and Soviet contexts to offer a history of the algorithm as a mathematical object bridging the inner and outer worlds, a humanistic vision that we, following logician Vladimir Uspensky, call the “culture of the impossible.” We unfold the deep roots of this vision as embodied in scientific intelligentsia. In Part I, we examine continuities between the turn-of-the-twentieth-century discussions of poznaniye—an epistemic orientation towards the process of knowledge acquisition—and the postwar rise of the Soviet school of mathematical logic. …

Similarity Identification Of Large-Scale Biomedical Documents Using Cosine Similarity And Parallel Computing, Merlinda Wibowo, Christoph Quix, Nur Syahela Hussien, Herman Yuliansyah, Faisal Dharma Adhinata

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Document similarity computation is an important research topic in information retrieval, and it is a crucial issue for automatic document categorization. The similarity value is between 0 and 1, then the closest value to 1 is represented both documents is considered more relevant, vice versa. However, the large scale of textual information has created the problem of finding the relevance level between documents. Therefore, the relevance between mesh heading text in the PubMed documents is higher than the relevance of the abstract text in the PubMed documents. Furthermore, parallel computing is implemented to speed up the large-scale documents similarity identification …

Learning To Iteratively Solve Routing Problems With Dual-Aspect Collaborative Transformer, Yining Ma, Jingwen Li, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song, Le Zhang, Zhenghua Chen, Jing Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, Transformer has become a prevailing deep architecture for solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs). However, it is less effective in learning improvement models for VRP because its positional encoding (PE) method is not suitable in representing VRP solutions. This paper presents a novel Dual-Aspect Collaborative Transformer (DACT) to learn embeddings for the node and positional features separately, instead of fusing them together as done in existing ones, so as to avoid potential noises and incompatible correlations. Moreover, the positional features are embedded through a novel cyclic positional encoding (CPE) method to allow Transformer to effectively capture the circularity and symmetry …

Towards Understanding Why Lookahead Generalizes Better Than Sgd And Beyond, Pan Zhou, Hanshu Yan, Xiaotong Yuan, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To train networks, lookahead algorithm [1] updates its fast weights k times via an inner-loop optimizer before updating its slow weights once by using the latest fast weights. Any optimizer, e.g. SGD, can serve as the inner-loop optimizer, and the derived lookahead generally enjoys remarkable test performance improvement over the vanilla optimizer. But theoretical understandings on the test performance improvement of lookahead remain absent yet. To solve this issue, we theoretically justify the advantages of lookahead in terms of the excess risk error which measures the test performance. Specifically, we prove that lookahead using SGD as its inner-loop optimizer can …

Environmental Justice Issues And Sea Level Rise In Frontline Communties Along The Gulf Coast, Karla Michel Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Sea level rise poses a great threat to coastal areas and our way of life. As flooding increases in frequency and intensity across the country, vulnerable populations become a target to its impacts. The U.S. dedicates much research to risk communication and climate change adaptation strategies; however, these coastal areas are home to a large percentage of underserved and underrepresented communities that can be challenging to meaningfully engage. The impacts of short-term sea level rise combined with long-term sea level rise will not only cause flooding, erosion, and intrusion of saltwater into freshwater resources but also increased financial consequences, such …

Conceptual Replication And Extension Of The Relation Between The Number Line Estimation Task And Mathematical Competence Across Seven Studies, Alexa Ellis, María Inés Susperreguy, David J. Purpura, Pamela E. Davis-Kean

Purdue Center for Early Learning Faculty and Staff Publications

A recent meta-analysis demonstrated the overall correlation between the number line estimation (NLE) task and children’s mathematical competence was r = .44 (positively recoded), and this relation increased with age. The goal of the current study was to conceptually replicate and extend these results by further synthesizing this correlation utilizing studies not present in the meta-analysis. Across seven studies, 954 participants, ranging from 3 to 11 years old (Age M = 6.02 years, SD = 1.57), the overall estimation-competence correlations were similar to those of the meta-analysis and ranged from r = −.40 to −.35. The current conceptual replication demonstrated …

Improving Text-To-Image Synthesis Using Contrastive Learning, Hui Ye, Xiulong Yang, Martin Takáč, Raj Sunderraman, Shihao Ji

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

The goal of text-to-image synthesis is to generate a visually realistic image that matches a given text description. In practice, the captions annotated by humans for the same image have large variance in terms of contents and the choice of words. The linguistic discrepancy between the captions of the identical image leads to the synthetic images deviating from the ground truth. To address this issue, we propose a contrastive learning approach to improve the quality and enhance the semantic consistency of synthetic images. In the pretraining stage, we utilize the contrastive learning approach to learn the consistent textual representations for …

Multi-Modal Transformers Excel At Class-Agnostic Object Detection, Muhammad Maaz, Hanoona Bangalath Rasheed, Salman Hameed Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

What constitutes an object? This has been a longstanding question in computer vision. Towards this goal, numerous learning-free and learning-based approaches have been developed to score objectness. However, they generally do not scale well across new domains and for unseen objects. In this paper, we advocate that existing methods lack a top-down supervision signal governed by human-understandable semantics. To bridge this gap, we explore recent Multi-modal Vision Transformers (MViT) that have been trained with aligned image-text pairs. Our extensive experiments across various domains and novel objects show the state-of-the-art performance of MViTs to localize generic objects in images. Based on …

A Marine Gis-Based Alert System To Prevent Vessels Collision With Offshore Platforms, Sheng-Long Kao, Ki-Yin Chang, Tai-Wen Hsu

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

How to effectively use an intelligent aid-to-navigation (AtoN) to prevent ships from accidentally colliding with offshore marine platforms (OMPs) is an important issue for maritime environment. This study proposes a novel collision alert system with three components to process Automatic Identification System (AIS) data in the cloud and broadcast AtoNs to ships in order to avoid collision with OMPs. The first component receives as input fuzzy linguistic variables (vessel size, relative speed, and approach distance) from the AIS data and calculates the radius of the guarding ring. The second component serves a Marine GIS (MGIS), where the system simulates the …

Provenance: An Intermediary-Free Solution For Digital Content Verification, Bilal Yousuf, M. Atif Qureshi, Brendan Spillane, Gary Munnelly, Oisin Carroll, Matthew Runswick, Kirsty Park, Eileen Culloty, Owen Conlan, Jane Suiter

Articles

The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Provenance is designed to help combat this threat by warning users when the content they are looking at may be misinformation or disinformation. It is also designed to improve media literacy among its users and ultimately reduce susceptibility to the threat among vulnerable groups within society. The Provenance browser plugin checks the content that users see on the Internet and social media and provides warnings in their browser or social media feed. Unlike similar plugins, which require human experts to provide evaluations and …