Digital Commons Network^™

Use Of Natural Language Processing (Nlp) In Civil Case Management: A Report On Three Proof Of Concept Projects, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Jannet Okazaki

Faculty Publications

In 2016, the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) endorsed recommendations to leverage technology to improve civil case management. In particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related tools could be used to support two areas of civil case processing: sorting cases at filing based on the anticipated level of judicial involvement in case management, and confirming that essential procedural requirements have been satisfied before entering final judgments in cases.

To explore the feasibility of NLP to support court operations in these two areas, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) designed three distinct …

Factors Influencing Consumers’ Willingness-To-Try Seafood Byproducts, Silvia Murillo, Ryan Ardoin, Witoon Prinyawiwatkul

Faculty Publications

With increasing global demand for seafood, seafood byproducts (SB) utilization can contribute to a more sustainable food supply chain through waste-to-value food product development. However, consumer perceptions of SB (e.g., fish skin and bones) are underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate some factors influencing consumers’ willingness-to-try seafood byproducts. An online survey was conducted in the USA regarding intervention of SB informational cues with N = 904 adult seafood consumers internationally. The proportion of consumers willing to try SB increased significantly (McNemar’s test, α = 0.05) from 47% to 68% after SB safety and health claims had been presented in …

Sophisticated Vs. Rugged: Examining Gendered Brand Communication Styles And Social Media Engagement, Joanne T. Cao, Jamye Foster, Gallayanee S. Yaoyuneyong, Lacey K. Wallace

Faculty Publications

Advertising and marketing managers understand that not all brands need to be on social media, but what is not clearly understood is consumers’ engagement expectations for brands that are on social media. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of brand personality, specifically sophisticated and rugged brands, and gendered communication styles on consumers’ expectations of social media engagement. A scenario-based experiment is performed to test the hypotheses using a mock brand. The main study consisted of a Qualtrics consumer panel, and a MANOVA was utilized to examine three components of social media engagement (consumption, contribution, and creation) on the two brand …

A Comparative Study Of Texas–Mexico Border Vs. Non-Border Students’ Achievement On High-Stakes State Test: A Propensity Score Matching Method, Zhuoying Wang, Shifang Tang, Feng Luo

Faculty Publications

Texas–Mexico border region is a unique place where two countries and culture connected. We sought to investigate border school district students’ academic performance as measured by Texas standardized test: the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR). To do so, we first used propensity score matching (PSM) techniques to analyze data collected from a public database: Texas Assessment Management System (TAMS). Specifically, we provided a PSM analysis of nonborder and border school districts regarding their demographic characteristics [i.e., identified as a rural district, percentage of economically disadvantaged (ED) students, percentage of English learners (ELs), mobility rate, instructional hours, principal …

Temporal Features Of Concepts Are Grounded In Time Perception Neural Networks: An Eeg Study, Karim Johari, Vicky T. Lai, Nicholas Riccardi, Rutvik H. Desai

Faculty Publications

Experimental evidence suggests that modality-specific concept features such as action, motion, and sound partially rely on corresponding action/perception neural networks in the human brain. Little is known, however, about time-related features of concepts. We examined whether temporal features of concepts recruit networks that subserve time perception in the brain in an EEG study using event and object nouns. Results showed significantly larger ERPs for event duration vs object size judgments over right parietal electrodes, a region associated with temporal processing. Additionally, alpha/beta (10–15 Hz) neural oscillation showed a stronger desynchronization for event duration compared to object size in the right …

Emotions In Crisis: Consequences Of Ceremonial Refugee Camp Visits To Bhutanese Refugee Camps In Nepal, Kamryn Warren

Faculty Publications

Research on refugee resettlement frequently overlooks the larger context of the experience of forced migration. As a result, the micro-level interactions between refugees and the bureaucrats who make resettlement decisions are obscured. We can better understand the socio-political dynamics between refugees and the officials deciding their resettlement cases if we approach encounters between refugees and migration officials during ceremonial visits as sites of emotional exchange. This article examines the complex socio-political emotional exchanges of power and vulnerability that underpin the refugee resettlement process through an ethnographic analysis of Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal.

Ecological Validity Of Don't Remember And Don't Know For Distinguishing Accessibility-Versus Availability-Based Retrieval Failures In Older And Younger Adults: Knowledge For News Events, Sharda Umanath, Jennifer H. Coane, Mark J. Huff, Tamar Cimenian, Kai Chang

Faculty Publications

With pursuit of incremental progress and generalizability of findings in mind, we examined a possible boundary for older and younger adults’ metacognitive distinction between what is not stored in memory versus merely inaccessible with materials that are not process pure to knowledge or events: information regarding news events. Participants were asked questions about public events such as celebrity news, tragedies, and political events that were widely experienced in the previous 10–12 years, responding “I don’t know” (DK) or “I don’t remember” (DR) when retrieval failed. Memories of these events are relatively recently acquired in rich, naturalistic contexts and are likely …

History's Speech Acts, Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

This Essay considers the historic relationship between symbolic public expressions of racial and religious identity—in particular, Confederate symbols and Christian religious displays. These displays sometimes comprise shared symbology, and the adoption of this symbology overlaps at distinct moments in U.S. history in which Confederate and Christian symbolism converged to express messages of combined religious and racial superiority. This Essay argues that these forms of expression can best be understood as “speech acts” that seek to construct a particular social reality, often in defiance of political and social fact. They thus not only express but also enact social hierarchies. It further …

Comprehensive List Satirical News Websites, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

Index of Satirical News Websites created by Dr. Salvatore Attardo.

Overwhelmed Or Overteaching?: Humanism For Time Use And Pedagogy, Kim M. Thompson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Tabal, Central Anatolia: Iron Age Interaction At Alişar Höyük, Lisa Kealhofer

Faculty Publications

Trajectories of social complexity following socio-political collapse have provided fertile ground for new theoretical and methodological perspectives in archaeology. Here we investigate ceramics from the site of Alişar Höyük, a settlement that was likely part of the Iron Age polity of Tabal. Best known from Assyrian texts, Tabal emerged in central Anatolia after the Late Bronze Age Hittite collapse, but its structure and operation remain enigmatic. Excavated in the 1920s and 1930s, a large sample of ceramics from Alişar has since been curated at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Using multiple perspectives on this Middle Iron Age ceramic sample, …

Corpus Of Founding Era American English: Designing A Corpus For Interpreting The United States Constitution, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

The original meaning of words or phrases is often in dispute in Founding Era legislation, especially the US Constitution. The Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) accurately provides evidence for the meaning of contested terms during the Founding Era. COFEA consists of 126,394 texts and over 136 million words. This corpus has been and is being used by legal researchers and interpreters in scholarly research as well as various courts, including the Supreme Court. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of COFEA and describes the process of designing and collecting the corpus.

The Missionary Voice: Perceptions Of An Emerging Register, Josh Stevenson, Joseph A. Stanley, Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Faculty Publications

Today’s presentation is on a particular way of speaking among certain members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, today I’ll be telling you about Latter-day Saint missionaries, who you may encountered before. Let’s set aside any preconceived notions you may have about missionaries or their faith and explore what appears to be an emerging missionary-based register.

In essence, missionaries are Latter-day Saint volunteers who dedicate 18 months to two years to tell others about their faith. They’re assigned around the world and often have to learn a new language, are typically college-aged, and adhere to strict …

Enriching Our Understanding Of Language Change With Vowel Formant Trajectories, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

American English vowels are variable in pronunciation

• ban vs. bat, too vs. boo
• feel vs. fill, [bæt] vs. [bæ̞̙ t]

We can categorize these differences:

Shifts:

• I pronounce /u/ fronter than my grandparents do.
• My students pronounce /æ/ as lower and more centralized than I do.

Mergers:

• For me, cot and caught are distinct; for 95% of my students, they’re homophones
• In Utah, feel and fill are often pronounced the same

Language change happens as some variants spread to more and more people.

Human Subthalamic Nucleus Neurons Differentially Encode Speech And Limb Movement, Karim Johari, Ryan M. Kelley, Kris Tjaden, Charity G. Patterson, Andrea H. Rohl, Joel I. Berger, Daniel M. Corcos, Jeremy D.W. Greenlee

Faculty Publications

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN), which consistently improves limb motor functions, shows mixed effects on speech functions in Parkinson’s disease (PD). One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that STN neurons may differentially encode speech and limb movement. However, this hypothesis has not yet been tested. We examined how STN is modulated by limb movement and speech by recording 69 single- and multi-unit neuronal clusters in 12 intraoperative PD patients. Our findings indicated: (1) diverse patterns of modulation in neuronal firing rates in STN for speech and limb movement; (2) a higher number of STN neurons …

How To Do The History Of Sexual Science, Benjamin Kahan, Greta Lafleur

Faculty Publications

This introduction maps the ways in which sexual scientific thought circulated during the fin de siècle, tracing the interconnections between and breaks in the global circuits of sexological thought and how this circuitry continues to structure sexuality in the present. In so doing, Kahan and LaFleur position their approach and that of the special issue as a whole within the larger field of sexology, placing it in more robust dialogue with sexuality studies and attending in particular to sexology's racial and imperial logics. They examine the ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous …

Preliminary Findings From A Collaborative Storytelling Program On Life Participation And Communication Among Persons With Aphasia, Bijoyaa Mohapatra, Ranjini Mohan

Faculty Publications

Aims: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the outcomes of a remotely delivered collaborative storytelling program based on the TimeslipsTM approach in persons with aphasia (PWA). The program aims to improve social interaction, communication, and participation through a guided experience. Methods: Six PWA of mild-moderate severity and of fluent and nonfluent types participated in the program twice a week for seven weeks. They collaboratively created 28 free-form stories from staged pictures. PWA were tested pre- and post-treatment on several validated outcome measures representing each of the Living with Aphasia: Framework for Outcome Measurement (A-FROM) domains. PWA self-rated on …

Remote Assessment Of Negative Symptoms Of Schizophrenia, David G. Daniel, Alex S. Cohen, Dawn Velligan, Phillip D. Harvey, Larry Alphs, Michael Davidson, William Potter, Alan Kott, Nina Schooler, Christopher R. Brodie, Raeanne C. Moore, Pierre Lindenmeyer, Stephen R. Marder

Faculty Publications

In contrast to the validated scales for face-to-face assessment of negative symptoms, no widely accepted tools currently exist for remote monitoring of negative symptoms. Remote assessment of negative symptoms can be broadly divided into 3 categories: (1) remote administration of an existing negative-symptom scale by a clinician, in real time, using videoconference technology to communicate with the patient; (2) direct inference of negative symptoms through detection and analysis of the patient's voice, appearance, or activity by way of the patient's smartphone or other device; and (3) ecological momentary assessment, in which the patient self-reports their condition upon receipt of periodic …

Secondary Courses Taught By Secondary Faculty: A (Personal) Call To Fully Integrate Skills Faculty And Skills Courses Into The Law School Curriculum Ahead Of The Nextgen Bar Exam, Oscar J. Salinas

Faculty Publications

This essay contends that law schools must reconsider how they educate future lawyers by elevating practical skills and the faculty who teach them, especially as the NextGen bar exam shifts toward assessing real‑world lawyering competencies. Through a blend of analysis and personal narrative, the author demonstrates how the traditional casebook‑Socratic model narrows the definition of merit, sidelines students whose strengths are not centered on rapid oral performance, and reinforces a hierarchy that undervalues skills faculty—who are often women and people of color—despite their central role in preparing students for practice.

Tracing the expansion of experiential learning after the Carnegie Report, …

Part I — Introduction: Social Physics And The Vespace Project, Jeffrey M. Leichman, Ben Samuel

Faculty Publications

This article introduces the VESPACE project, an international, multi-disciplinary digital humanities initiative to build a computer-mediated playable simulation—a video game—of the eighteenth-century Paris Fair theatre. As part of this project, a weeklong postgraduate workshop was convened by the authors in May 2020 to develop protocols and procedures for coding literary and historical data for the Ensemble social physics engine that will govern behaviour of non-player characters (NPCs) in the interactive model. This article lays out the history and theory of social physics, the potential impacts of this project on historiographic practice, and the methodology and outcomes of the workshop week. …

In Search Of Founding Era Registers: Automatic Modeling Of Registers From The Corpus Of Founding Era American English, Liina Repo, Brett James Hashimoto, Veronika Laippala

Faculty Publications

Registers are situationally defined text varieties, such as letters, essays, or news articles, that are considered to be one of the most important predictors of linguistic variation. Often historical databases of language lack register information, which could greatly enhance their usability (e.g. Early English Books Online). This article examines register variation in Late Modern English and automatic register identification in historical corpora. We model register variation in the corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) and develop machine-learning methods for automatic register identification in COFEA. We also extract and analyze the most significant grammatical characteristics estimated by the classifier for …

Exploring The Effects Of Cross-Cultural Variation And Tourism In Utah English, Zoe Eldredge, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Emerging Social Meaning

• Eckert (2016): sociolinguistic variation is not just a consequence of social change but helps contribute to it.
• Such changes become enregistered and are linked to groups or personae.
• Fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000) may contribute to the beginnings of such differences (e.g. Zhang 2021).

Data Visualization In 10-K Filings, Theodore E. Christensen, Karson E. Fronk, Joshua A. Lee, Karen K. Nelson

Faculty Publications

The Securities and Exchange Commission encourages the presentation of information or data in graphical form to improve users’ ability to understand financial disclosures. We find a dramatic increase in the disclosure of both qualitative and quantitative infographics in 10-K filings over time and substantial cross-sectional variation in firms’ choices regarding image types, data content, and the placement of infographics within 10-Ks. We provide evidence on factors associated with firms’ use of infographics and explore the persistence with which they are disclosed over time. Finally, we investigate the relation between the use of infographics and uncertainty in capital markets.

“Wilfrid Sellars And Pragmatism”, Willem A. Devries

Faculty Publications

A brief survey of Wilfrid Sellars' relation to Pragmatism, focusing on the priority of the practical in the constitution of meaning, the critique of the given, and sociality of thought and inquiry.

Where The Action Is: Positioning Matters In Interaction, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

Position matters. As a conversation analyst examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – I constantly monitor for, and organize my collections of target phenomena around structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? Because conversation analysis (CA) is primarily focused upon action sequences, I use CA methods to examine the ways in which participants’ audible utterances and visible body-behaviors accomplish particular social actions due at least in part to their positioning within a sequence of interaction – …

A Multi-Measure Approach For Lexical Diversity In Writing Assessments: Considerations In Measurement And Timing, Kelly Woods, Brett James Hashimoto, Earl K. Brown

Faculty Publications

Several researchers (e.g., Gebril & Plakans, 2016; Crossley & McNamara, 2012) have noted a relationship between lexical diversity (LD) and writing proficiency. Previous research has indicated that typical LD measures can account for as much as 44 % of variability in writing proficiency (Crossley et al., 2011). However, it remains unclear which of the numerous LD measures (or combination of measures) that exist best predict writing proficiency (e.g., McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010). The present study addresses these issues using scored writing assessment samples from 911 ESL students. LD was assessed with a battery of ten measures through the Python lexical-diversity …

Boomer Peak Or Gen X Cliff? From Svs To Lbms In Georgia English, Margaret E. L. Renwick, Joseph A. Stanley, Jon Forrest, Lelia Glass

Faculty Publications

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift.We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (DRESS, TRAP), plus PRICE and FACE, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated LOT/ THOUGHT. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in FACE-centralization. In …

Multiple-Choice Reading Behaviors Of Esl Students: An Eye-Tracking Study, Juan Escalante, Grant Eckstein, Troy L. Cox, Steven Luke

Faculty Publications

Only recently has eye-tracking been used to investigate test-taker reading behavior, and results have been primarily used to confirm a range of cognitive tasks elicited by test items. This study explores test taker reading behavior for its own sake by describing how ESL readers of different proficiency levels behaviorally view multiple-choice passages and test items at different difficulty levels. Data were gathered from 51 students at three proficiency levels attending a university-sponsored intensive English program (IEP). Participants read eight validated reading comprehension items at varying difficulty levels while their eye movements were recorded on the passage, multiple-choice stem, correct answer, …

Rapid Prediction Of Verbs Based On Pronoun Interpretation Is Modulated By Individual Differences In Pronoun Processing, Jeffrey Jack Green

Faculty Publications

How quickly can pronoun interpretation affect the prediction of a following verb? Readers were presented with implicit causality contexts in which a specific pronoun and following verb were predictable. N400 and reaction time results indicated that predictable verbs were facilitated relative to unpredictable verbs when following predicted pronouns, suggesting that verbal predictions were rapidly updated based on pronoun interpretation. There was also some evidence for rapid updating of verb predictions after unexpected pronouns, but this was modulated by individual differences. Some readers appear to have placed higher weight on top–down implicit causality predictions to interpret unexpected pronouns, and others on …

Surzhyk: Attitudes & Usage Among Ukrainian People, Kateryna Kravchenko, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

What is Surzhyk?

• refers to a range of macaronic (mixed) sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages
• originally meant mixing of two different types of flour (wheat and rye), which is considered a lower grade flour
• there is no unifying set of characteristics
• the term is used for norm-breaking, non-obedience to or non-awareness of the rules of the Ukrainian and Russian standard languages
• it is not Russian-accented Ukrainian