Digital Commons Network^™

Empirical Analysis Of Cbow And Skip Gram Nlp Models, Tejas Menon

University Honors Theses

CBOW and Skip Gram are two NLP techniques to produce word embedding models that are accurate and performant. They were invented in the seminal paper by T. Mikolov et al. and have since observed optimizations such as negative sampling and subsampling. This paper implements a fully-optimized version of these models using Py-Torch and runs them through a toy sentiment/subject analysis. It is weakly observed that different corpus types affect the skew of word embeddings such that fictional corpus are better suited for sentiment analysis and non-fictional for subject analysis.

Automatic Keyphrase Extraction From Russian-Language Scholarly Papers In Computational Linguistics, Yves Wienecke

University Honors Theses

The automatic extraction of keyphrases from scholarly papers is a necessary step for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including text retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization. However, due to the different grammatical and semantic intricacies of languages, this is a highly language-dependent task. Many free and open source implementations of state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction techniques exist, but they are not adapted for processing Russian text. Furthermore, the multi-linguistic character of scholarly papers in the field of Russian computational linguistics and NLP introduces additional complexity to keyphrase extraction. This paper describes a free and open source program as a proof of …

Exploring Perceptions Of Healthcare Quality In Oregon Male Prisons: Interviews With Individuals Recently Released From Long-Term Imprisonment, Rén Rosz

University Honors Theses

The healthcare that people who are imprisoned receive is inadequate and does not meet the requirements owed to them by the Eighth Amendment. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has repeatedly surveyed inmates about the health care that they receive (Bureau of Justice Statistics [BJS], n.d.). One of the most recent iterations, in 2004, showed that there were large gaps in the health care that prisoners received: not being able to see a healthcare provider after an injury, necessary medications being discontinued, and lab tests being restricted (Wilper, et al, 2009). The surveys were implemented to highlight policies needing correction and …

Self-Disclosure And Physiological Responses Among Adults Who Stutter, Sulema Rodriguez, Megann Mcgill

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Purposes: (1) To explore self-disclosure, physiological and affective responses in easy and difficult speaking situations, (2) to investigate physiological and affective responses in self-disclosure and no self-disclosure speaking contexts, (3) to examine types of self-disclosure statements used along with physiological responses, (4) and to gain an understanding of reasons why and how adults who stutter choose to self-disclose or not self-disclose about their stuttering.

Method: Four adults who stutter were randomly assigned to self-disclosure and non self-disclosure speaking contexts. Heart rate, skin conductance, and affective responses were measured during the following focus areas: 1) start baseline, 2) anticipation of the …

All In One Place: References Cited In 21 Cleo Work, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

We have created a Google sheet that contains the resources that we've used in our blog posts so far. You can sort or filter the sheet by author, title, keyword, etc. to easily find what you're looking for. We've also included a brief summary of each article. You can download or save the sheet to your drive. We will continue to update it as we discover new materia I, so be sure to check back on occasion. We hope that you find it useful!

Weekend Spanish Immersion Camp: A Non-Traditional Teaching World Language To Middle School American Students, Jorge Oscar Ramirez

Dissertations and Theses

The nature of today's global economy demands that students demonstrate high levels of proficiency in foreign languages. To meet global demand, most countries around the world are including comprehensive world language instruction in their educational systems beginning at an early age. The increasingly multi-lingual nature of culture within and beyond the Unites States. is escalating the importance of immersing students in world languages as early as possible to ensure a high level of written and oral foreign language skill proficiency by the time students graduate from high school. However, most American students do not have the opportunity to study a …

Mathematical Silences, Matthew Nathan Petersen

Dissertations and Theses

Previous studies have shown that mathematicians employ lengthy silences in their collaborations, contrary to the norms that govern every-day collaborations. Such results shows the relevance of an investigation of silence in mathematical collaboration. This dissertation builds off these results in a series of three papers. The first paper describes a methodology that can be employed in the investigation of silence in mathematical collaboration. The second paper analyses silence in the mathematical collaboration of students in junior-level introductory proof classes. It identifies two forms of mathematical activity, reading and ruminating, that students regularly engage in, and which violate the norms of …

Animal Magic, Secret Spells, And Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages Of Children's Storytelling, Angela Molloy Murphy

Dissertations and Theses

Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and sociocultural interests disputing their purpose. Recent years have shown increased pressure on children in early education settings to demonstrate predetermined learning outcomes, which (a) limits the scope of what is possible in the classroom, (b) narrows the range of what learning is considered valid, and (c) privileges the experience and values of the dominant culture, thereby determining who and what matters in early childhood settings. Thus, in the current education climate where conventional knowledges are routinely privileged, unconventional knowledges and small stories from children's lives are …

The Library Has Infinite Streaming Content, But Are Users Infinitely Content? The Library Catalog Vs. Vendor Platform Discovery, Jian Wang, Elsa Loftis

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Despite the widespread adoption of streaming video by academic libraries, there has been little discussion about how video content is discovered and accessed through the library catalog as compared to vendor platforms. This article explores the current status of video resources in the library catalog to better understand how users find and access streaming content. MARC records were evaluated, and searches were performed to gauge issues related to metadata quality and its impact on discovery. The study reveals new trends in how users access streaming content for teaching, learning, and research.

Dreaming Revolutionary Futures: Critical Race’S Centrality To Ending White Supremacy, Sofia Y. Leung, Jorge R. López-Mcknight

Communications in Information Literacy

Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods dangerously lacked a centering, and critique, of white supremacy, as a structure of domination; we see the continuation of that active avoidance, or a progress approach through liberal or multicultural frameworks that do not precisely identify roots of racialized oppression in critical librarianship currently. In this essay, we reject progress narratives depicting the profession as having arrived, or even moved further, to a critical space, paying particular close attention to the absence of white supremacy, not only in the text Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods but in critical library instruction. We then explore …

The Stuttering Characteristics Of Spanish-English Bilingual Adult Speakers, Sima Sokolov

University Honors Theses

As the number of bilinguals and multilinguals continues to grow globally, researchers and clinicians in the field of speech-language pathology are faced with a unique challenge and opportunity - the need to understand the experiences of bilingual and multilingual clients who stutter. Yet, research and clinical guidelines about assessment and treatment of bilinguals who stutter has been scarce. There is a critical need for research to explore the types of stuttering produced by bilinguals in each of their languages. This research study has two aims: (1) to compare and contrast stuttering characteristics in two languages (English and Spanish) and across …

Teachers' Critical Reflection In An Equity-Focused Professional Learning Community: A Case Study, Patrizia Lina Mastne

Dissertations and Theses

In a culturally diverse world, teachers adopt complex roles to educate a changing student body toward higher standards. They can respond to students' needs and design responsive curriculum by engaging in ongoing learning and improvement. When teachers have time and space for collaboration and reflection, they can learn and improve. Professional learning communities (PLCs) are forums for educators to think deeply about praxis. In this study, the problem of practice is that teachers have had few opportunities to reflect critically within PLCs. The purpose of my study was to describe and explain how critical reflection occurred in an equity-focused PLC …

Fidelity And Rhetorical Strategies: An Introduction To And Translation Of Arunika Senarath’S Diese Eine Nacht (2017) With An Interview With The Author, Malcolm A. Goldman

University Honors Theses

Arunika Senarath’s 2017 novel Diese eine Nacht [That One Night] addresses political themes ranging from right-wing extremism to racism to sexual assault, which are combined with the day-to-day life of the main character, a young woman attending university in Dresden. This combination is aimed to increase political engagement in young people by making difficult or complicated topics accessible, while also exposing them to a more diverse range of perspectives. The novel is situated in contemporary Dresden, examining the prominence of right-wing populist movements such as PEGIDA in former East Germany (GDR) and their impact on people of color. …

Hearing The Voices Of Bicultural And Bilingual Teachers: Using A Case Study Approach To Explain The Professional Identity Development Of Early Career Native Chinese Mandarin Teachers, Jing Chen

Dissertations and Theses

Increasingly, Native Chinese Mandarin teachers have been migrating to the United States and taking positions as Mandarin teachers in U.S. schools. Many have needed support for professional identity development as bicultural and bilingual teachers given their new social cultural context. The purpose of this study was to describe and explain the experiences and professional identity development of early-career Native Chinese Mandarin teachers in one Northwest Pacific city. Using a theoretical framework of social cultural theory in education and the bicultural identity integration construct, I conducted a multiple case study of four early-career Native Chinese Mandarin teachers in four different school …

What Makes Inclusion Work: An Autoethnography On Coordinating An Inclusive Youth Advocacy Program, Megan Price

University Honors Theses

In this autoethnographic thesis, I analyze my observations as the co-coordinator of an inclusive youth advocacy program (YAP) to detail what made inclusion successful, and what was ineffective. I had the unique position of facilitating conversations and workshops around social justice issues and how to advocate using self-expression and art. In this thesis, I will reflect on the Inclusive Education Conference (IEC) in Spring of 2019, and the Summer Summit in the summer of 2019, both in Portland, Oregon. At the IEC some of the observations noted as harmful to inclusion included: people wanting to silence the youth, inclusion being …

Snowfall On Orhan Pamuk's Literary Canvas, Jane Eden Hartle

Anthós

In the novels Snow, My Name is Red, and The Black Book, and the memoir Istanbul: Memories and The City, Orhan Pamuk uses the symbolism of snowfall the way a visual artist would use paint. It is used to blur and define boarders on a micro and macro level, both covering and revealing historical, cultural, and political content. Snow simultaneously hides and announces, shelters and exposes. These equally powerful, often contradictory, and ultimately interdependent concepts, symbolized by the use of snow, are characteristic of the duality and identity conflict explored throughout these literary works. The readers’ interpretation of …

The Pacific Sentinel, May 2020, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

The Pacific Sentinel

Editor: Jake Johnson

Articles in this issue include:

• Letter from the Editor
• Ongoing Crisis in Yemen
• Coronavirus Updates
• Squashing Coronavirus Will Take Time
• There Is No “Chinese Virus”
• An Unequal Pandemic
• Do Not Go Gently Into That Pandemic
• The Coronavirus Outbreak Reveals the Flaws of Our Social Safety N
• Language, Thought, Freedom, and the Soul
• Stop Going on Twitter
• Crocheting COVID-19
• Isolation in the Time of Coronavirus
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons Review
• Mysteries, Wonder Boys, and Other Phenomena

Raps Sheet, May 2020, Retirement Association Of Portland State

RAPS Sheet: Monthly Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Pregnancy Outcomes And Documentation Status Among Latina Women: A Systematic Review, Dawn M. Richardson, Sarah B. Andrea, Amber Ziring, Cassandra Robinson, Lynne Messer

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose: The impression that Latinas experience paradoxically good pregnancy outcomes in the United States persists, despite evidence showing that these outcomes are not enjoyed by all Latina subgroups. We conducted this systematic literature review to examine the relationship between documentation status and pregnancy outcomes among Latinas.

Methods: This review synthesizes empirical evidence on this relationship; examines how these studies define and operationalize documentation status; and makes recommendations of how a more comprehensive methodological approach can guide public health research on the impact of documentation status on Latina immigrants to the United States. We searched the literature within PubMed, …

Teaching Spanish In The United States In The Digital Age: Strategies And Approaches On Teaching Spanish In Online And Hybrid Classes, Liane She, Eli Sears

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Virtual technologies are omnipresent in everyday life and are becoming essential to either online, or hybrid classes. In higher education institutions in the United States, virtual platforms are increasingly used for teaching Spanish as a foreign language to students from varying backgrounds. As such, this article proposes an approach to teaching grammar in virtual spaces, that takes into account the communicative goals established in a given syllabus. The methods and strategies we propose offer an attractive language course that allows students to remotely learn and practice a language. As Spanish professors who teach beginning to intermediate level students, we will …

Jazz Banned: How Jazz Music Shaped Nazi Germany, Stella Coomes

Young Historians Conference

Jazz is widely known to be a formative element in American history, but it also played an important role during some of Europe’s most formative and memorable years: the time of World War II and Adolf Hitler’s reign in Germany and surrounding countries. With its roots in Black American culture, it is easy to believe that Hitler would not have supported the increasing popularity of jazz music in his homeland. However, that did not stop him from using it to his advantage (of course, denouncing any form of jazz that was not sponsored by the state). Also not to be …

Cultural Wealth And The Racialized Experiences Of Persisting Latinx Business Students In A Predominantly White Institution: A Study On Sense Of Belonging, Rebecca Sue Sanchez

Dissertations and Theses

The changing landscape of higher education calls for a shift in approach to ensure that all students are given not just the opportunity but also the environment in which to succeed. In order to facilitate the growing demand for a diverse workforce, universities must work to retain students and support them sufficiently as they move toward graduation. Student persistence rates from year one to year two show markedly different rates based on race and ethnicity with the lowest persistence rates associated with Latinx and Black students. National projections of college attendance by race and ethnicity predict that Latinx students will …

Amplifying Latinx Voice Through Interview Study: Highlighting Mathematics Identity As A Pathway To Student Self-Empowerment And Academic Agency, Brea Justine Cohen

Dissertations and Theses

Nationally, the percentage of high school students taking higher-level mathematics courses (beyond Algebra 2) has increased from the late 20th century to the present. However, as compared to White high school students enrolled in advanced math classes, the rate is lower among students of color, specifically students who identify as Latinx, African American, or Native American. My school district (a suburban district in the Northwestern United States) is working to address this problem by implementing several district-wide initiatives that focus on increasing students' engagement in mathematics, which focuses teacher pedagogy on leveraging mathematics communities to support collaborative mathematics dialogue. The …

A Blade Of Grass Magazine Issue 4: Governance Reimagined, A Blade Of Grass

A Blade of Grass

Issue 4: Governance Reimagined

Artists from across a diversity of geographies take on how we might live otherwise, how we might rethink governance. Guest edited by Laura Raicovich.

A Blade of Grass provides resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change. They evaluate the quality of work in this evolving field by fostering an inclusive, practical discourse about the aesthetics, function, ethics and meaning of socially engaged art that resonates within and outside the contemporary art dialogue.

Book Review Of, Beneath The Sleepless Tossing Of The Planets: Selected Poems Of Makoto Ōoka, Jon Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book review of Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems ofcMakoto Ōoka.

The Negotiated Syllabus: How To Create Community In Online International Studies Classes, Shawn Smallman

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

As online education expands how do professors create the sense of community and engagement that students crave? This paper will argue that the concept of a Negotiated Syllabus -in which students take responsibility for choosing content in the class- provides a framework to promote student engagement in online coursework. This paper describes how to have the students serve as co-creators for the final course content. Other carefully designed assignments and tasks -such as peer review of student work and a carefully designed discussion board- can involve students deeply in their classes. Based on a careful review of the literature on …

“Le Soleil De France”: Warm Translations Of Guy De Maupassant In Works By Isaak Babel’ And Ivan Bunin, Cassio De Oliveira

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the wake of Lev Tolstoi’s appraisals of his work, Guy de Maupassant was embraced by Russian twentieth-century authors who admired his mastery of the short story. The Soviet writer Isaak Babel’ and the émigré writer Ivan Bunin reference stories and other texts by Maupassant in their stories ‘Guy de Maupassant’ and ‘Bernard’. To these authors, Maupassant constitutes a means of expressing their own outlook on the craft of literature. Mediated by the act of translation from French into Russian, Maupassant’s writing enables the Russian authors to articulate distinct identities regarding their national literature: as Soviet and émigré.

Best Practices For A Translingual Pedagogy: An Undergraduate Perspective, Jacob S. Wilson

University Honors Theses

This thesis traces the last nine years of translingual scholarship in the hopes of theorizing best practices to enact a translingual pedagogy in first year composition (FYC) contexts. Despite translingual theory’s high profile in the field, scholars like Ligia Mihut (2019) have brought attention to the fact that little has been done to bring translingual theory into classrooms. After reviewing relevant literature in Composition Studies, the author explores how translingual tenets can be implemented within current university curricula. Through three well-established pedagogical approaches, the author suggests, instructors can adopt translingual practices that support students’ linguistic agency and challenge monolingual ideologies. …

Dynamic Assessment For Evaluating Bilingual Children's Potential For Language Development Over Time: A Pilot Study, Camryn R. Perez

University Honors Theses

Dynamic assessment for children of diverse cultural or linguistic backgrounds has been developed within multiple language domains and found as a valid measure for diagnosing a developmental language disorder. However, there remains a need to research its efficacy and stability over time. This study examined the predictive validity of dynamic assessment through a comparison of changes in performance over time as well as the relationship between dynamic assessment scores with grammaticality and mean length of utterance. Using pilot data from a larger project, seven Spanish-English bilingual children’s performance on dynamic assessment tasks of word and rule learning was examined over …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet February 2020, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The February 3, 2020 Monthly packet includes the February agenda and appendices and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held January 6, 2020.