Digital Commons Network^™

Grit And Resilience In Wlsps: The Potential Of Blending Translation And Indirect Service Learning, Isabelle Drewelow, Xabier Granja Ibarreche

Global Advances in Business Communication

This study explores how blending translation with service learning has the potential to support the development of grit and resilience. The participants collaborated on translating documents from English to Spanish for local organizations, as part of a service learning component of an advanced Spanish grammar course. Using reflection papers written by students at the end of the semester, the study adopted a qualitative interpretive approach to examine their perspectives. Students were asked to consider the skills they developed, share their perceptions of the value of the translations for the community and for themselves, and reflect on the emotions they experienced …

Online Intercultural Exchanges In A French For The Professions Course, Deborah Reisinger

Global Advances in Business Communication

This research study explores the experiences of post-secondary students in the United States and the France (n=28) who participated together in synchronous online intercultural exchanges (OIE) in the context of two distinct World Languages for Specific Purposes (WLSP) courses. The study design draws on research in OIE and WLSP, as well as on the researcher’s experience conducting a pilot OIE during the pandemic (spring 2021). Findings suggest that US students benefit considerably from these exchanges, self-reporting gains in business content, cultural knowledge, and language proficiency. Enthusiasm for the project demonstrates that OIE projects can also increase learner engagement and motivation …

Vol. 47 No. 3 - Whole No. 332, Jason Fisher

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 47 No. 2 - Whole No. 331, Janet Croft

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Vol. 47 No. 1 - Whole No. 330, Janet Croft

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Exploring The Strategic Elements Of Backers’ Persuasion In Reward-Based Crowdfunding, Sabina Grižančič, Mateja Drnovšek

Economic and Business Review

In this paper we investigate the strategic elements that project founders' use in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns to achieve a higher level of persuasion. Exploration of these elements not only provides insights into an entrepreneur's experience with crowdfunding but also provides material for comparing results reported by other (quantitative) studies. We conducted an empirical study with 13 Kickstarter project founders through in-depth, semi-structured interviews which were analysed through a reflexive thematic analysis approach. Drawing from our findings, we propose four strategic elements that founders use to persuade backers and achieve success drawing from individual-level experiences and observations.

Predicting Publication Of Clinical Trials Using Structured And Unstructured Data: Model Development And Validation Study, Siyang Wang, Simon Šuster, Timothy Baldwin, Karin Verspoor

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Background: Publication of registered clinical trials is a critical step in the timely dissemination of trial findings. However, a significant proportion of completed clinical trials are never published, motivating the need to analyze the factors behind success or failure to publish. This could inform study design, help regulatory decision-making, and improve resource allocation. It could also enhance our understanding of bias in the publication of trials and publication trends based on the research direction or strength of the findings. Although the publication of clinical trials has been addressed in several descriptive studies at an aggregate level, there is a lack …

Assisting The Human Fact-Checkers: Detecting All Previously Fact-Checked Claims In A Document, Shaden Shaar, Nikola Georgiev, Firoj Alam, Giovanni Da San Martino, Aisha Mohamed, Preslav Nakov

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Given the recent proliferation of false claims online, there has been a lot of manual fact-checking effort. As this is very time-consuming, human fact-checkers can benefit from tools that can support them and make them more efficient. Here, we focus on building a system that could provide such support. Given an input document, it aims to detect all sentences that contain a claim that can be verified by some previously fact-checked claims (from a given database). The output is a re-ranked list of the document sentences, so that those that can be verified are ranked as high as possible, together …

Overview Of The Wanlp 2022 Shared Task On Propaganda Detection In Arabic, Firoj Alam, Hamdy Mubarak, Wajdi Zaghouani, Giovanni Da San Martino, Preslav Nakov

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Propaganda is the expression of an opinion or an action by an individual or a group deliberately designed to influence the opinions or the actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends, which is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Propaganda techniques are commonly used in social media to manipulate or to mislead users. Thus, there has been a lot of recent research on automatic detection of propaganda techniques in text as well as in memes. However, so far the focus has been primarily on English. With the aim to bridge this language gap, …

Embodied Sisterhood: God-Talk In The Work Of Delores S. Williams, Amina Wadud, And Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Lara Dotson-Renta

Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology

No abstract provided.

Nursing Students' Knowledge Of And Attitudes Towards Near-Death Experiences, Laura Lee Varela

Theses & Dissertations

Incidence of reported near-death experiences (NDEs) has increased over decades; however, they continue to be inappropriately pathologized or dismissed. These types of responses to disclosures of NDEs by patients can potentially lead to them having problems integrating the experience into their lives. The purpose of this study was to assess undergraduate nursing students’ levels of accurate knowledge of and attitudes towards NDEs and to determine the predictors of nursing students’ knowledge of and attitudes toward NDEs. Additionally, I explored the sources in which nursing students acquire NDE knowledge. I accomplished this by using a cross-sectional, correlational research study design. I …

Final Master's Portfolio, Marisa Mount

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following portfolio project contains four separate pieces of writing produced during the author's MA coursework.

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 …