Digital Commons Network^™

Immersive Inoculation: Testing If Architecture Can Become A Form Of Emotional Supplementation, Julia Kazubowsi, Chloe De Marco

Architecture Thesis Prep

The environments, objects, and spaces we encounter rub off on us, even if we don't notice. Like a human interaction, every inanimate encounter we have have with surrounding objects and architecture has a positive or negative affect on us.

We recognize that ordinary things have a surprising power to create extraordinary feelings and reactions. This thesis propose a visual medium that bridges the gap between us and the inanimate. Where we meet in the middle is an architectural experience that is emotionally charged, introducing specific emotions to the body. Just as movies, books, and happy pills elicit a response from …

Supervised Acoustic Embeddings And Their Transferability Across Languages, Sreepratha Ram, Hanan Aldarmaki

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

In speech recognition, it is essential to model the phonetic content of the input signal while discarding irrelevant factors such as speaker variations and noise, which is challenging in low-resource settings. Self-supervised pretraining has been proposed as a way to improve both supervised and unsupervised speech recognition, including frame-level feature representations and Acoustic Word Embeddings (AWE) for variable-length segments. However, self-supervised models alone cannot learn perfect separation of the linguistic content as they are trained to optimize indirect objectives. In this work, we experiment with different pre-trained self-supervised features as input to AWE models and show that they work best …

Camelira: An Arabic Multi-Dialect Morphological Disambiguator, Ossama Obeid, Go Inoue, Nizar Habash

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

We present Camelira, a web-based Arabic multi-dialect morphological disambiguation tool that covers four major variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Gulf, and Levantine. Camelira offers a user-friendly web interface that allows researchers and language learners to explore various linguistic information, such as part-of-speech, morphological features, and lemmas. Our system also provides an option to automatically choose an appropriate dialect-specific disambiguator based on the prediction of a dialect identification component. Camelira is publicly accessible at http://camelira.camel-lab.com.

Pasta: Table-Operations Aware Fact Verification Via Sentence-Table Cloze Pre-Training, Zihui Gu, Ju Fan, Nan Tang, Preslav Nakov, Xiaoman Zhao, Xiaoyong Du

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Fact verification has attracted a lot of research attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and disinformation online can sway one's opinion and affect one's actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table-based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column …

Greener: Graph Neural Networks For News Media Profiling, Panayot Panayotov, Utsav Shukla, Husrev T. Sencar, Mohamed Nabeel, Preslav Nakov

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

We study the problem of profiling news media on the Web with respect to their factuality of reporting and bias. This is an important but under-studied problem related to disinformation and “fake news” detection, but it addresses the issue at a coarser granularity compared to looking at an individual article or an individual claim. This is useful as it allows to profile entire media outlets in advance. Unlike previous work, which has focused primarily on text (e.g., on the articles published by the target website, or on the textual description in their social media profiles or in Wikipedia), here we …

Asdot: Any-Shot Data-To-Text Generation With Pretrained Language Models, Jiannan Xiang, Zhengzhong Liu, Yucheng Zhou, Eric P. Xing, Zhiting Hu

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Data-to-text generation is challenging due to the great variety of the input data in terms of domains (e.g., finance vs sports) or schemata (e.g., diverse predicates). Recent end-to-end neural methods thus require substantial training examples to learn to disambiguate and describe the data. Yet, real-world data-to-text problems often suffer from various data-scarce issues: one may have access to only a handful of or no training examples, and/or have to rely on examples in a different domain or schema. To fill this gap, we propose Any-Shot Data-to-Text (ASDOT), a new approach flexibly applicable to diverse settings by making efficient use of …

Resel: N-Ary Relation Extraction From Scientific Text And Tables By Learning To Retrieve And Select, Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Jerry Junyang Cheung, Yue Yu, Yingjun Mou, Xiang Chen, Le Song, Chao Zhang

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

We study the problem of extracting N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document. Our proposed method RESEL decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component. For the high-level retrieval stage, RESEL designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multilevel lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components. For the low-level selection stage, RESEL designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view …

Efficient (Soft) Q-Learning For Text Generation With Limited Good Data, Han Guo, Bowen Tan, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhiting Hu

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial attacks or generating prompts to control language models. Reinforcement learning (RL) on the other hand offers a more flexible solution by allowing users to plug in arbitrary task metrics as reward. Yet previous RL algorithms for text generation, such as policy gradient (on-policy RL) and Q-learning (off-policy RL), are often notoriously inefficient or unstable to train due to the large sequence space and the sparse reward received only …

Amplifying Southern Charm: A Case Study On Visit Music City’S Digital Media Practices, Susanna Cleary Honggui Hoffman

Experience Industry Management

Digital marketing has become a vital player for companies, especially destination marketing organizations (DMOs), by helping them grow and expand their brand image. Digital marketing includes email, social media, and search-engine marketing. The purpose of this study was to examine Visit Music City’s (Nashville’s DMO) digital media marketing tactics. Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp (NCVC) is the company that is behind the brand Visit Music City. The research was conducted utilizing information from NCVC’s website and social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and YouTube). Visit Music City sends a weekly newsletter called Amplify, they have a strong social …

Eureka: Euphemism Recognition Enhanced Through Knn-Based Methods And Augmentation, Sedrick Scott Keh, Rohit Bharadwaj, Emmy Liu, Simone Tedeschi, Varun Gangal, Roberto Navigli

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

We introduce EUREKA, an ensemble-based approach for performing automatic euphemism detection. We (1) identify and correct potentially mislabelled rows in the dataset, (2) curate an expanded corpus called EuphAug, (3) leverage model representations of Potentially Euphemistic Terms (PETs), and (4) explore using representations of semantically close sentences to aid in classification. Using our augmented dataset and kNN-based methods, EUREKA was able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the public leaderboard of the Euphemism Detection Shared Task, ranking first with a macro F1 score of 0.881.

Mongo Beti, Un Intellectuel Inorganique, Mohamed Aït-Aarab

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Few African intellectuals left their mark on their century more than Mongo Beti. His work built up a form of progressive thinking which found its raison d’être and its consistency in the fight for subalterns. Today, it is important to understand the ideals which motivated the citizen, the writer, the teacher, committed in the most Sartrean way. But what matters just as much is to question his political and aesthetic reflection which started in 1953. Was Mongo Beti an « out-of-the-system » intellectual ? His forthrightness, his opposition to any political, union or membership organisation, which might want to discipline …

Mongo Beti Tel Qu’En Lui-Même : Portrait D’Un Loup Solitaire, Ambroise Kom

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The present article is essentially an analysis of letters exchange between Mongo Beti and Présence Africaine, the publishing house that edited his first novel, Cruel City (1954). Reading the said letters informs us much about the pamphleteer’s character and personality as we will discover them much more clearly in Mongo Beti à Yaoundé (2005), a collection of media interventions published during some ten years stay in Cameroon after he returns from his long exile in France.

Bostock And Textualism: A Response To Berman And Krishnamurthi, Andrew Koppelman

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

The Bostock Court adopted an argument I’ve been making for years, and that I pressed upon it in an amicus brief: that discrimina-tion against gay people is necessarily sex discrimination. I defended Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for the Court in my article, Bostock, LGBT Discrimination, and the Subtractive Moves, which catalogues various common but unsuccessful strategies for evading the force of the sex discrimination argument. That piece, originally drafted before the Supreme Court’s decision as a critique of arguments by Court of Appeals judges, was easy to revise and update. The dissenters, Justices Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence …

On The Construction, Operations, And Analysis Of Borders In Science And Across South Asian Religious Traditions, Mauricio Najarro

Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology

No abstract provided.

"So Many Hopes": A Qualitative Content Analysis Of Children's Picture Books That Portray Refugees, Janine J. Darragh, Jane E. Kelley

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Researchers used content analysis to analyze 40 award-winning and “best of” children’s picture books that portray refugees to answer the questions: How are refugees depicted in picture books? What messages are embedded in those depictions? Results show patterns and themes regarding depictions of trauma and violence in conjunction with setting as well as the portrayal of the arts as a vehicle for refugees to ignite personal agency in coping with the trauma they experienced. Implications for practice are discussed.

Mongo Beti Et La Fabrique De L’Écrivain Africain, Romuald Fonkoua

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article analyses the correspondence between Mongo Beti, and his editor, Les Éditions Africaines or Présence Africaine, from the early 50s to 90s. At the beginning of his writer life, Mongo Beti was confronted conditions of publication in French postcolonial era. Because of the political ideology of decolonization that presided over his creation, Présence Africaine (both Revue and publishing Company) seems to have not taking in account the real meaning of writing in French colonial country, the ambitions of young black African writer in the new era and the representation of African literature for him. Through his constant criticism on …

Perdurer In Absentia, Armelle Cressent

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The purpose of this text is to address questions surrounding institutionalization of African knowledge. By wondering what remained of him when his mother died and by explicitly asking historians to look towards Akometam, Mongo Beti forces his reader to reconsider the diagnosis of intellectual sterility applied to African societies “without literacy”. He also suggests avenues for epistemological consideration by identifying a vulnerable spot in the transmission of African knowledge which is the inability of the young generation of African intellectuals to embrace the philosophical legacy of their predecessors. Finally it highlights the decisive role played by Odile Biyidi-Awala in the …

Mongo Beti Et La Condition Humaine En Afrique, Hervé Tchumkam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Although the importance of history in Mongo Beti’s work is well established, research is less prolific on the vision that this Cameroonian writer had of the future of the African people. Yet his work, inspired by everyday life and anchored in the immediate history of the African continent, is strewn with precise reflections on the future of the Black world. The present article explores in Beti’s critical and literary production the foundations of an “omniprésent présent” (François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, 2003) which highlights another obsession, that of a dream of self-determination and prosperity for the African peoples. By drawing …

Mongo Beti, L’Idéologie Paysanne Et L’Environnement Rural, Étienne-Marie Lassi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article examines the ideological aspect of the representation of the rural environment in Mongo Beti’s works. It analyses the presuppositions or implicit ideas that underlie the fictionalization of the countryside in order to elucidate the author’s representation of the peasants. It comes to the conclusion that the idea of a new rurality put forward in Mongo Beti’s writing results from the author’s ambivalent attitude towards the peasants : even though he takes their side against the (post)colonial political and economic powers, he decries their cultural and technical backwardness.

South-To-North Migration Preceded The Advent Of Intensive Farming In The Maya Region, Douglas J. Kennett, Mark Lipson, Keith M. Prufer, David Mora-Marín, Richard J. George, Nadin Rohland, Mark Robinson, Willa R. Trask, Heather H. J. Edgar, Ethan C. Hill, Erin E. Ray, Paige Lynch, Emily Moes, Lexi O’Donnell, Thomas K. Harper, Emily J. Kate, Josue Ramos, John Morris, Said M. Gutierrez

Faculty and Student Publications

The genetic prehistory of human populations in Central America is largely unexplored leaving an important gap in our knowledge of the global expansion of humans. We report genome-wide ancient DNA data for a transect of twenty individuals from two Belize rock-shelters dating between 9,600-3,700 calibrated radiocarbon years before present (cal. BP). The oldest individuals (9,600-7,300 cal. BP) descend from an Early Holocene Native American lineage with only distant relatedness to present-day Mesoamericans, including Mayan-speaking populations. After ~5,600 cal. BP a previously unknown human dispersal from the south made a major demographic impact on the region, contributing more than 50% of …

"Introduction" To Varieties Of Context-Sensitivity In A Pluri-Propositionalist Reflexive Semantic Framework, Robert Stainton, Arthur Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

Progressive Changes In Descriptive Discourse In First Episode Schizophrenia: A Longitudinal Computational Semantics Study, Maria Francisca Alonso-Sánchez, Sabrina D. Ford, Michael Mackinley, Angélica Silva, Roberto Limongi, Lena Palaniyappan

Neuroscience Institute Publications

Computational semantics, a branch of computational linguistics, involves automated meaning analysis that relies on how words occur together in natural language. This offers a promising tool to study schizophrenia. At present, we do not know if these word-level choices in speech are sensitive to the illness stage (i.e., acute untreated vs. stable established state), track cognitive deficits in major domains (e.g., cognitive control, processing speed) or relate to established dimensions of formal thought disorder. In this study, we collected samples of descriptive discourse in patients experiencing an untreated first episode of schizophrenia and healthy control subjects (246 samples of 1-minute …

First-Person Plural Indexicals, Robert Stainton, Arthur Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

This is a study of an under-developed topic in philosophy of language, namely first-person plural pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’, etc.) Richard Vallee has made very important progress by identifying crucial desiderata and putting forward an ingenious proposal about ‘we’ which addresses them. We contend that, despite this impressive progress, he makes some missteps, both omissions and errors; furthermore, his proposal appears implausible as a personal-level psychological story. We thus sketch an alternative approach to the semantics of the first-person plural indexical which, though it builds on Vallee’s important work, departs substantially from it.

The Teacher’S Role In Writing: A Study Of Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions, Joy Myers, Kelly Tracy, Amanda Wall, Linda D. Smetana, Chinwe H. Ikpeze, Sonia M. Kline, Jenn Raskauskas, Roya Q. Scales, Vicki Mcquitty, Pamela Hickey

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

A team of teacher education researchers conducted a qualitative study to explore how teacher candidates viewed the teacher’s role in teaching students to write. Participants (N = 107) enrolled in writing-focused methods courses across four universities completed a reflective quick write near the end of the course. Since writing is a complex and multidimensional activity, these responses were analyzed through the theoretical framework of social cognitive theory. When describing the role of the teacher, the data indicated candidates across all institutions primarily focused on the affective aspects of teaching writing, specifically supporting and developing students’ confidence in writing. Some mentioned …

Differences In Elementary Students’ Self-Regulated Processes For Computer Versus Printed Reading Assignments, Katerina Sergi, Anastasia Elder, Tianlan Wei, Kristin H. Javorsky, Jianzhong Xu

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

The purpose of this study was to investigate metacognitive self-regulated learning (SRL) differences in computer- and paper-based reading assignments across elementary students. Students in two after-school programs in a southeastern U.S. public school district were recruited. The final sample consisted of 48 students in Grades 2–5 who participated in two counterbalanced conditions involving a computer- and a paper-based reading assignment. The study employed a 2 x 4 (condition-by-grade) mixed-model analysis of variance (ANOVA) and followup tests to examine metacognitive SRL differences between conditions and grades. The results indicate that elementary students used various metacognitive SRL skills across both conditions. The …

Digital Humanities At Work In The World, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

An Exploration Of The Garden Metaphor In The Poetry Of Song Of Songs, Kizito Jasper

Harding School of Theology Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of Models To Predict The Remaining Useful Life Of Prestressed Concrete Cylinder Pipe, Ahmad Mahmoud Jibreen

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The water distribution system in the United States consists of 2.2 million miles of pipelines with water main breaks that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2021 Report Card estimated results in six billion gallons of drinking water lost daily. Detecting the state of pipeline deterioration should always be a top priority in the water pipeline industry This dissertation statistically evaluates data from more than 70,000 electromagnetic inspections that have been performed since the installation of these pipes in 1971. The scope of this dissertation is related to performance and degradation of prestressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP) which is …

Pedagogical Uses For Machine Translation: Korean L2 Writing, Manali Khandekar

2022 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Korean is a particularly challenging language for English speakers due to its typological distance from English, and as such, learning Korean typically requires hundreds or thousands of additional hours of instruction to reach intermediate and advanced levels. One solution that this study analyzes is the use of a rapidly improving technology: machine translation (MT). Participants were tasked with producing a short composition in Korean and then trained to use MT-based strategies to improve their writing; they also completed pre- and post-surveys to gauge their attitudes toward machine translation. Results showed improvement in vocabulary choice and grammar as well as case/locative …

Full Issue: 14(5s) 2022: Emerging Scholars Issue

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

No abstract provided.