Digital Commons Network^™

Green Cities Conference Proceedings-2026, Minoo Tehrani

Business Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Celebrating Faculty Scholarship And Service, Salve Regina University 2025-2026, Office Of Academic Affairs

Faculty and Staff - Ebooks

This e-book celebrates the diverse accomplishments of Salve Regina University faculty across scholarship, teaching, experiential learning, creative expression, community engagement, and service in 2026-2026. It highlights peer-reviewed research, books, artistic works, conference presentations, grant-funded projects, innovative teaching initiatives, and collaborations that extend learning beyond the classroom. Faculty achievements demonstrate a strong commitment to student mentorship, undergraduate research, interdisciplinary inquiry, and partnerships that benefit local and global communities. The e-book also recognizes significant external funding, Compass Summer leadership, sabbatical recipients, promotions, and new faculty appointments, reflecting the university’s ongoing dedication to academic excellence and mission-driven engagement.

Task-Aligned Knowledge Transfer For Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Visual Challenges, Dongyoun Kim

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pretrained vision–language models (VLMs) encode broad visual and semantic knowledge, but this knowledge does not always translate into reliable performance on specialized visual tasks. Multi-object region understanding requires fine-grained relational alignment, scientific document question answering requires structured reasoning over tables and charts, and robotic manipulation requires task-relevant perception to influence action generation. This dissertation studies these gaps as a problem of knowledge utilization: helping a pretrained model use available knowledge in a form aligned with the target task. Its central claim is that effective adaptation depends not only on model scale, data volume, or full-backbone fine-tuning, but also on three …

Ai Vs. Genai: Combating Llm Generated Prescription Fraud With Transformer Based Detection Models, Ankitha Vokkaleri Shankarappa

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced a sophisticated new vector for healthcare fraud: the generation of high-fidelity, synthetic medical prescriptions. Traditional fraud detection systems, which rely on rule-based engines and basic statistical anomalies, are increasingly ill-equipped to identify these AI-generated forgeries that mimic the structural and clinical logic of authentic records. This thesis presents a robust detection framework using Transformer-based architectures to distinguish between human-authored Medicare Part D prescriptions and fully synthetic records generated by GPT-4.

The research was conducted across two distinct phases: an initial pilot study using 4,000 samples and a rigorous validation stress …

1) Sing And Rejoice, O Daughter Of Zion (Zechariah 2:14)- Studies In Pesiqta Rabbati, Rivka Ulmer

Faculty Books

Chapters focusing on different aspects of Pesiqta Rabbati, a midrashic homiletic work, encompassing semiotic theories, prophesies, apocalypticism, halakhic issues, Chanukah, global theories of midrash, Hebrew manuscripts. messiah, scriptural quotations, mashal, historical issues, Greek loanwords, Parma, Casanata, JTS, Genizah, Vienna, and versions.

Broken Lands And Trusts: The Omnipresence Of The Natives’ Land Act Of 1913 And The Persistence Of Its Inequity, Emily Venkatesan

Emory International Law Review

The hallmark of all colonial and ex-colonial states is the preservation of racial hierarchy where a minority of white colonizers reserve complete control over the political, social, and economic landscape of a colonized nation. One of the most powerful exercises of this colonial oversight is the use of western property law to strip native landowners of their property interests and redistribute that land to white colonizer for economic and social power. Access and ownership of land is crucial for maintaining the colonial state. Land provides social and economic leverage in the hands of the indigenous nation, but strengthens the colonial …

Student And Teacher Perceptions Of Confirming Behaviors Across Instructional Modalities, April Nicole Wright

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation examined how undergraduate students and instructors evaluate lowinference teacher confirmation behaviors across instructional modalities and identified additional behaviors perceived as confirming in contemporary instructional contexts. Participants included 274 undergraduate students and 104 higher-education instructors who completed a survey measuring four clusters of confirming behaviors (willingness to engage, recognition, acknowledgment, and endorsement) using a 7-point Likert-type scale. Open-ended questions invited participants to describe confirming behaviors not represented in existing measures. Results indicated that both students and instructors rated most behaviors above the midpoint of the scale, with instructional responsiveness and course organization receiving the highest ratings. Instructors rated all …

Congolese Journalists: Professional Identity And Legitimacy, Hannah L. Heiskell

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This paper examines how Congolese journalists construct their professional identity

and legitimacy while working under conditions of conflict and state pressure, and how

international media outlets discursively represent them through Western journalistic norms.

Addressing previous research and centering local perspectives, this study uses critical

discourse analysis to compare language, framing, and narratives across Congolese and

international media texts, and the works in which they produce. Attention is given to how

agency, professionalism, and constraint are represented within each discourse. The analysis

focuses on metajournalistic discourse, or journalism talking about journalism, to examine

how professional norms and boundaries are articulated and …

A Comprehensive Survey On Facial Expression Generation: From Gans To Llm-Guided Multimodal Models, Murad Hasan, Rabab Abdelfattah, Kareem Abdelfatah, Mostafa Fouda, Ahmed Sherif

Faculty Publications

Facial expression generation (FEG) has emerged as a vital area in human–computer interaction, virtual avatars, and affective computing, aiming to synthesize natural and expressive facial behaviors across diverse interaction contexts. This survey presents a comprehensive analysis of recent advances in FEG, organized into six key paradigms: speech-driven expression generation, facial reaction generation, face video generation, facial animation, avatar-based generation, and text-driven expression generation. We review a wide range of model architectures, including VQ-VAEs, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs), Transformers, and diffusion-based approaches, and compare their performance using commonly adopted evaluation metrics such as Fréchet Distance (FD), Peak …

The Doctor Won't See You Now: Legal Proscriptions For Medical Tourism Control And Regulation, Shenley W. Wish

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

The Medical Tourism industry has experienced remarkable growth in the past decade and is tracking to exceed that growth dramatically in the coming decade. With this rapid expansion, however, comes growing pains—predominantly lackluster patient safety. This Note examines the opportunities and challenges that would arise from regulating Medical Tourism through an international treaty, recognizing that an international treaty approach provides the most comprehensive and practically feasible solution for addressing complex cross-border constraints to create a safer global medical industry. (from the author)

Structures Of Fantasy In Terry Gilliam's 'Time Bandits', Sean Fash

West Chester University Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Final Projects

Terry Gilliam’s use of fantasy genre conventions in his filmography is obvious in presence, but elusive in understanding.  Time Bandits, as an early entry into this filmography, simultaneously seems to mock and embody these genre conventions.  This paper seeks to find a way to understand Time Bandits on a structural level through existing frameworks in fantasy criticism and to see what deeper meanings the film holds behind its silly, fantastical presentation.  These structural templates of analysis are John Clute’s “full fantasy model” from his Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Farah Mendlesohn’s “portal quest fantasy” from her Rhetorics of Fantasy.  By deconstructing …

From Pañales To Partnership: An Ethnographic Investigation Of Knowledge, Gender, And Power Within A Family Literacy Program, Sara Mohler

West Chester University Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Final Projects

Within research on family literacy programming (Lynch & Prins, 2021), few studies bring together assets-based perspectives on knowledge and power alongside critical feminist lenses. This qualitative case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Yin, 2018) informed by ethnography (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019; Desmond, 2014; Günel & Watanabe, 2024) aimed to understand the culture of one family literacy program serving primarily Mexican-American families, named here the Treehouse Preschool, giving particular attention to the intersecting elements of knowledge, gender, and power as they are enacted across the roles and relationships of families and personnel participating in in the program. Data for this …

Valuing Life And Loss: Genre Analysis Of Insurance Claims Processing In Ghana, Cornelius Fuumaale Suom-Kogle

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis draws on theories from rhetorical genre studies (Spinuzzi’s genre ecology and Freadman’s uptake), biopolitics, and the social justice turn in Technical and Professional Communication to examine how decisions are made in the processing of insurance claims. I adopt a qualitative, interpretive approach to analyze one hundred and twelve (112) claims processing examples from Ghana’s insurance industry. The findings indicate that insurance claims processing is a complex communicative system in which institutional power is enacted, negotiated, and, at times, contested. The findings also reveal that insurer-authored genres frequently enact forms of oppression (exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness) through technical language …

Shap-Rc: A Framework For Explaining Annotator Disagreement In Sexism Detection, Madhuri Sawant, Arjumand Younus, Simon Caton, M. Atif Qureshi

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

The effectiveness of supervised machine learning models is heavily influenced by the quality of training data, which is often shaped by human annotators. Subjective NLP tasks such as hate speech detection, toxicity identification, and sexism classification frequently exhibit annotator disagreement due to differences in individual perspectives. This study investigates annotator disagreement in sexism detection using English tweets from the EXIST 2023 competition. To systematically analyse disagreement, tweets are categorised based on annotator consensus levels, examining how annotator demographics and linguistic features contribute to labelling inconsistencies. We interpret disagreement patterns using Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) and assess the consistency of SHAP-derived …

Implementing Culturally Responsive Teaching: A Qualitative Content Analysis Of Emerging Themes, Stephanie Yelder-Stovall

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is a research-grounded pedagogical approach for educational equity centering cultural knowledge to make learning meaningful and relevant (Gay, 2002). However, a persistent gap remains between CRT as a concept and classroom implementation. Research suggests translating the principles of CRT frameworks into classroom practice remains challenging (Gay, 2000, 2010; Sleeter, 2012). Guided by the research question and using Schreier’s (2012) qualitative content analysis approach, I analyzed a dataset of 14 varied sources through a deductive coding frame derived from four theoretical frameworks: (a) Gay’s (2000, 2010) CRT, (b) Hammond’s (2015) ready for rigor, (c) Paris and Alim’s …

Cultus: Eco-Phenomenology In The Work Of John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, And Jack London, Carter D. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In the face of increasingly dire environmental crises, proposed solutions have gravitated toward imperatives for faster, cleaner, and more efficient technologies and resources. While practical solutions are necessary, they are entirely insufficient to deal with an underlying issue driving environmental degradation: unbridled instrumental reason. In this dissertation, I suggest a theoretical posture, cultus, which attempts to balance the necessity of instrumental action with the guiding counterweight of receptivity. Furthermore, I argue that such personal receptivity is uniquely fostered in aesthetic experiences, attuning the individual to the non-identical and renewing a relationship of care.

I examine the life and work of …

Eastern Michigan University, Spring Commencement, May 2, 2026, Eastern Michigan University

Commencement Programs and Materials

No abstract provided.

Displacement And Belonging: The Search For Identity Through Latina Literature, Noelia A. Alvarado Torres

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez and Infinite Country by Patricia Engel are two novels that highlight the Latino search for identity and belonging in the United States.  The characters in these books navigate adolescence and adulthood in the face of displacement, each illustrating how history, culture, and society interfere with the search for one’s self. They also highlight the multicultural experience of being shaped by different spaces that at times contradict one another. Furthermore, these books, written by women and with women at the center, bring forth a voice that often gets left out in …

Humanising Language Teaching In The Age Of Ai, Anuchaya Montakantiwong, Napat Jitpaisarnwattana

PASAA

No abstract provided.

What Makes An Ideal English Teacher? Thai Secondary School Students’ Perceptions, Monthon Kanokpermpoon, Israporn Chuntharusmi Sanongpong

PASAA

No abstract provided.

A Competence-Based, Technology-Mediated Speaking Intervention In Vietnamese Efl Classrooms : A Comparative Study Of Collaborative And Expert-Novice Dyads, Tran Anh Vu, Kwanjira Chatpunnarangsee

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Development Of A Sustainable Web Application For A Blended Learning Environment To Improve Standardized English Test Performance Of Undergraduates At King Mongkut’S University Of Technology North Bangkok, Rayong Campus, Kusuma Bangkom

PASAA

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Content And Paralinguistic Cues In Enhancing Vocabulary Learning Across Different Themes In Young Learners, Sri Agustini, Imam Wahyudi Karimullah

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Are They Ready To Speak English With Students? A Clil Adaptation To Thai Efl Classrooms, Wipada Sutthiroj, Phanatdao Chantarasiri

PASAA

No abstract provided.

How Teaching Experience Shapes Efl Teachers’ Integration Of Extramural English In Thai Classrooms, Santipap Upara, Ruedeerath Chusanachoti

PASAA

No abstract provided.

No Red Pen, Just Ai : Student Perceptions Of Ai-Generated Feedback In Research Proposal Writing, Flora D. Floris, Willy A. Renandya, Wiwiet E. Savitri

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Epistemic Lexical Verbs As Hedging Devices And Their Semantic Prosodies In Applied Linguistics Abstracts In Thai International Journals, Soranut Kumdee

PASAA

No abstract provided.

The Grammatical L1 Transfer Of Self-Forms Among Asian Learners Of English, Kittinata Rhekhalilit, Pong-Ampai Kongcharoen

PASAA

No abstract provided.

L1 Thai Learners’ Acquisition Of English Wh-Nominal Clauses, Supakit Thiamtawan

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Advancing Task-Oriented Dialog Systems: Scalability, Generalization, And Evaluation, Adib Mosharrof

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems enable conversational interfaces for complex tasks like flight booking and restaurant reservations. However, deploying TOD systems at scale faces three critical barriers: scalability, generalization, and evaluation. Scalability is primarily restricted by the human-annotation bottleneck, as current systems depend on vast quantities of manually labeled data for every new domain, making deployment prohibitively expensive. Generalization remains a persistent challenge, as systems optimized for known domains often suffer significant performance degradation when encountering new, unseen ones. Existing evaluation metrics measure response quality and fluency, but fail to measure functional task success. As TOD systems are deployed across diverse …