Digital Commons Network^™

An Empirical Study On Uncertainty Identification In Social Media Context, Zhongyu Wei, Junwen Chen, Wei Gao, Binyang Li, Lanjun Zhou, Yulan He, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uncertainty text detection is important to many social-media-based applications since more and more users utilize social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as information source to produce or derive interpretations based on them. However, existing uncertainty cues are ineffective in social media context because of its specific characteristics. In this paper, we propose a variant of annotation scheme for uncertainty identification and construct the first uncertainty corpus based on tweets. We then conduct experiments on the generated tweets corpus to study the effectiveness of different types of features for uncertainty text identification.

Complete Description Of Idempotent Hedges In Fuzzy Logic, Jaime Nava

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In describing expert knowledge, it is often important to properly take into account hedges} like "very", "somewhat", etc. In particular, fuzzy logic provides a consistent way of describing hedges. For some of the hedges, a repetition changes the meaning: e.g., "very very small" is smaller than "very small". However, other hedges -- like "somewhat" -- are idempotent, in the sense that repeating this hedge twice does not change the meaning. In this paper, we provide a complete description of such idempotent hedges.

Mixture Of Poisson Distributions To Model Discrete Stock Price Changes., Rasitha Rangani Jayasekare Kodippuli Thanthillage Dona

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An application of a mixture of Poisson distributions is proposed to model the discrete changes in stock price based on the minimum price movement known as `tick-size'. The parameters are estimated using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm with a constant mixing probability as well as mixing probabilities which depend on order size. The model is evaluated using simulations and real data. Both the simulated and real data show reasonable estimates. Several adjustments are made to the model implementation to improve the efficiency with user written codes for the Newton Raphson algorithm and also implementing one of the most recent versions of …

Scitech Book News Reviews, Susan Fingerman

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Brief Report: Parental Child-Directed Speech As A Predictor Of Receptive Language In Children With Autism Symptomatology, Twyla Y. Perryman, Alice S. Carter, Daniel S. Messinger, Wendy L. Stone, Andrada Ivanescu, Paul J. Yoder

Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Facilitative linguistic input directly connected to children's interest and focus of attention has become a recommended component of interventions for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This longitudinal correlational study used two assessment time points and examined the association between parental undemanding topic-continuing talk related to the child's attentional focus (i.e.; follow-in comments) and later receptive language for 37 parent-child dyads with their young (mean = 21 months, range 15-24 months) children with autism symptomology. The frequency of parental follow-in comments positively predicted later receptive language after considering children's joint attention skills and previous receptive language abilities.

Geometry And Evolution Of Fold Structures Within The High Folded Zone: Zagros Fold-Thrust Belt, Kurdistan Region, Iraq, Mjahid Zebari

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Understanding the deformation style within the Zagros Fold-Thrust Belt is crucial for understanding the convergence between the colliding Arabian and Eurasian plates and nature of structures that trap hydrocarbons within the belt. The Zagros Fold-Thrust Belt has propagated ~250 km southwest-ward in Northern Iraq. In this study, deformation style of a number of fault-related folds within a part of the belt has been considered. The research intends to understand the geometry and formation mechanisms of these folds, via constructing models for the deformation geometry of folds and associated thrusts at depth using field data and seismic lines and detecting their …

Lexical And Prosodic Indicators Of Importance In Spoken Dialog, Nigel G. Ward, Karen A. Richart-Ruiz

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This technical report complements the paper, Patterns of Importance Variation in Spoken Dialog (Ward and Richart-Ruiz, 2013), providing additional evidence for the claims, additional findings, and more analysis. In particular, we report more on inter-annotator disagreement, on words that correlate with importance, on prosodic features and patterns that correlate with importance, and on how our predictive model of importance might be improved.

How To Explain (And Overcome) 2% Barrier In Teaching Computer Science: Fuzzy Ideas Can Help, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Computer science educators observed that in the present way of teaching computing, only 2% of students can easily handle computational concepts -- and, as a result, only 2% of the students specialize in computer science. With the increasing role of computers in the modern world, and the increasing need for computer-related jobs, this 2% barrier creates a shortage of computer scientists. We notice that the current way of teaching computer science is based on easiness of using two-valued logic, on easiness of dividing all situations, with respect to each property, into three classes: yes, no, and unknown. The fact that …

Integrating Disciplinary Perspectives: The Poincaré Institute For Mathematics Education, Montserrat Teixidor-I-Bigas, Analúcia D. Schliemann, David W. Carraher

The Mathematics Enthusiast

We describe the development of the Poincaré Institute, an NSF‐MSP supported program developed through Tufts University Departments of Mathematics, Education, and Physics and by TERC, in partnership with nine school districts in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. We focus on the challenges of developing an inter‐disciplinary program aimed at improving the teaching and learning of mathematics from grades 5 to 9, the choice of mathematical and educational content of the program, the course structure, and the progress of the first cohort of participant teachers. We also outline the changes we are implementing for future cohorts.

Tme Volume 10, Number 3

The Mathematics Enthusiast

No abstract provided.

Teacher Learning In Lesson Study, Jennifer M. Lewis, Davida Fischman, Iris Riggs, Kelli Wasserman

The Mathematics Enthusiast

This article documents teacher learning through participation in lesson study, a form of professional development that originated in Japan and is currently practiced widely in the US. Specifically, the paper shows how teachers in three different lesson study teams 1) expanded their mathematical content knowledge, 2) grew more skillful at eliciting and analyzing student thinking, 3) became more curious about mathematics and about student thinking, 4) emphasized students’ autonomous problem‐solving, and 5) increasingly used multiple representations for solving mathematics problems. These outcomes were common across three lesson study teams, despite significant differences among the teams’ composition, leadership, and content foci.

Mining User Relations From Online Discussions Using Sentiment Analysis And Probabilistic Matrix Factorization, Minghui Qiu, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

The Accessible User Interaction Framework For Android Applications, Xiaoxi Luo

Master's Theses

As mobile technologies advance, accessibility features of smartphones are continu- ously improving and becoming more prevalent. It is essential that the user interaction design of mobile applications provides equal access and equal service to all our com- munity, especially for people with disabilities. However, there are no general mobile accessibility design guidelines publicly available. This paper reviews the web acces- sibility development guidelines as a reference, and the current accessibility features provided by modern mobile operating systems.

It is proposed in this paper to use interactive spoken dialogues as the user interac- tion framework for accessible mobile applications. The idea …

Understanding Common Perceptions From Online Social Media, Derek Doran, Swapna S. Gokhale, Aldo Dagnino

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Modern society habitually uses online social media services to publicly share observations, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs at any time and from any location. These geotagged social media posts may provide aggregate insights into people's perceptions on a bad range of topics across a given geographical area beyond what is currently possible through services such as Yelp and Foursquare. This paper develops probabilistic language models to investigate whether collective, topic-based perceptions within a geographical area can be extracted from the content of geotagged Twitter posts. The capability of the methodology is illustrated using tweets from three areas of different sizes. An …

A Latent Variable Model For Viewpoint Discovery From Threaded Forum Posts, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Explore Global Opportunities For Mathematics Scholarship, Teaching, And Service, Ron Benbow

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2013

There are numerous overseas opportunities in which to apply your knowledge and interest in mathematics. These international experiences allow you to expand your scholarship, to extend your teaching skills, to offer professional services to K-12 teachers or other university instructors, and to provide much personal enrichment as well. Examples from recent professional experiences in Liberia, Haiti, Guatemala, and Ecuador will be shared to illustrate the connections to teaching, scholarship, and service. Information regarding MAA Study Tours, Fulbright Specialist grants, and other relevant organizations will be provided.

Mining User Relations From Online Discussions Using Sentiment Analysis And Probabilistic Matrix Factorization, Minghui Qiu, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advances in sentiment analysis have enabled extraction of user relations implied in online textual exchanges such as forum posts. However, recent studies in this direction only consider direct relation extraction from text. As user interactions can be sparse in online discussions, we propose to apply collaborative filtering through probabilistic matrix factorization to generalize and improve the opinion matrices extracted from forum posts. Experiments with two tasks show that the learned latent factor representation can give good performance on a relation polarity prediction task and improve the performance of a subgroup detection task.

Sociophone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Chanyou Hwang, Jaeung Lee, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Chungkuk Yoo, Miri Moon, Uichin Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose SocioPhone, a novel initiative to build a mobile platform for face-to-face interaction monitoring. Face-to-face interaction, especially conversation, is a fundamental part of everyday life. Interaction-aware applications aimed at facilitating group conversations have been proposed, but have not proliferated yet. Useful contexts to capture and support face-to-face interactions need to be explored more deeply. More important, recognizing delicate conversational contexts with commodity mobile devices requires solving a number of technical challenges. As a first step to address such challenges, we identify useful meta-linguistic contexts of conversation, such as turn-takings, prosodic features, a dominant participant, and pace. …

Demo: Sociophone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Chanyou Hwang, Jaeung Lee, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Chungkuk Yoo, Miri Moon, Uichin Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we introduce SocioPhone, a novel initiative toward everyday face-to-face interaction monitoring platform. Among diverse verbal, aural, visual cues expressed during face-to-face interaction, SocioPhone captures diverse meta-linguistic information from conversations and provides interaction-aware applications on-the-fly. Undoubtedly, conversations are a key channel for face-to-face interaction. Specifically, monitoring conversational turns, i.e., alternation of different speakers (including none speaking), is the first crucial step to derive diverse interesting aspects of conversations, e.g., who is talking right now, how long and often one talks, how quickly one responds to another, and so on. In this demo, we will show the core technique …

A Latent Variable Model For Viewpoint Discovery From Threaded Forum Posts, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Threaded discussion forums provide an important social media platform. Its rich user generated content has served as an important source of public feedback. To automatically discover the viewpoints or stances on hot issues from forum threads is an important and useful task. In this paper, we propose a novel latent variable model for viewpoint discovery from threaded forum posts. Our model is a principled generative latent variable model which captures three important factors: viewpoint specific topic preference, user identity and user interactions. Evaluation results show that our model clearly outperforms a number of baseline models in terms of both clustering …

Real Time Event Detection In Twitter, Xun Wang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Sujian Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event detection has been an important task for a long time. When it comes to Twitter, new problems are presented. Twitter data is a huge temporal data flow with much noise and various kinds of topics. Traditional sophisticated methods with a high computational complexity aren’t designed to handle such data flow efficiently. In this paper, we propose a mixture Gaussian model for bursty word extraction in Twitter and then employ a novel time-dependent HDP model for new topic detection. Our model can grasp new events, the location and the time an event becomes bursty promptly and accurately. Experiments show the …

Concept Graphs: Applications To Biomedical Text Categorization And Concept Extraction, Said Bleik

Dissertations

As science advances, the underlying literature grows rapidly providing valuable knowledge mines for researchers and practitioners. The text content that makes up these knowledge collections is often unstructured and, thus, extracting relevant or novel information could be nontrivial and costly. In addition, human knowledge and expertise are being transformed into structured digital information in the form of vocabulary databases and ontologies. These knowledge bases hold substantial hierarchical and semantic relationships of common domain concepts. Consequently, automating learning tasks could be reinforced with those knowledge bases through constructing human-like representations of knowledge. This allows developing algorithms that simulate the human reasoning …

Iterative Statistical Verification Of Probabilistic Plans, Colin M. Potts

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Artificial intelligence seeks to create intelligent agents. An agent can be anything: an autopilot, a self-driving car, a robot, a person, or even an anti-virus system. While the current state-of-the-art may not achieve intelligence (a rather dubious thing to quantify) it certainly achieves a sense of autonomy. A key aspect of an autonomous system is its ability to maintain and guarantee safety—defined as avoiding some set of undesired outcomes. The piece of software responsible for this is called a planner, which is essentially an automated problem solver. An advantage computer planners have over humans is their ability to consider and …

Analysis Of Features Composing An Automated Text Readability Formula., Michael Schneider

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In an effort to make reading more accessible, an automated readability formula can help pair readers with material appropriate for their reading level. This study attempts to discover and analyze a set of possible features that may be included in a future automated readability formula. This set is not a definitive list of readability formula features, but rather an overview of current features being study in the Natural Language Processing field.

Data Carving Parser Generation, Benjamin Nathaniel Kelley

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

As our day to day interaction with technology continues to grow, so does the amount of data created through this interaction. The science of digital forensics grew out of the need for specialists to recover, analyze, and interpret this data. When events or actions, either by accident or with criminal intent create, delete or manipulate data, it is the role of a digital forensics analyst to acquire this data and draw conclusions about the discovered facts about who or what is responsible for the event. This thesisidentifies a gap in the research between data analysis and interpretation. Current research and …

The Use Of Relation Valued Attributes In Support Of Fuzzy Data, Larry Ritchie Williams Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

In his paper introducing fuzzy sets, L.A. Zadeh describes the difficulty of assigning some real-world objects to a particular class when the notion of class membership is ambiguous. If exact classification is not obvious, most people approximate using intuition and may reach agreement by placing an object in more than one class. Numbers or ‘degrees of membership’ within these classes are used to provide an approximation that supports this intuitive process. This results in a ‘fuzzy set’. This fuzzy set consists any number of ordered pairs to represent both the class and the class’s degree of membership to provide a …

The Role Of String Similarity Metrics In Ontology Alignment, Michelle Cheatham, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned a much different world wide web than the one we have today - one that computers as well as humans could search for the information they need [3]. There are currently a wide variety of research efforts towards achieving this goal, one of which is ontology alignment.

Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a …

Collocation Error Correction In Web Queries And Text Documents, Alan T. Varghese

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Collocations are words in English that occur together frequently. Non-native speakers of English tend to confuse certain terms with other similar terms. This causes one of the terms to be substituted with a term that is not commonly used with the other term. “Powerful tea” is an example of such an odd collocation. In this scenario the more commonly used term is “strong tea”.

This paper proposes an approach called CollOrder to detect such odd collocations in written English. CollOrder also provides suggestions to correct the odd collocate. These suggestions are filtered and ranked as top-k suggestions.

We make use …