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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The Effects Of Linguistic Features And Evaluation Perspective On Perceived Difficulty Of Medical Text, Gondy Leroy, Stephen Helmreich, James Cowie Jan 2010

The Effects Of Linguistic Features And Evaluation Perspective On Perceived Difficulty Of Medical Text, Gondy Leroy, Stephen Helmreich, James Cowie

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Millions of laypersons need more medical information than they are customarily provided during their doctor’s visit. Health websites can help fill this knowledge gap, but the text is believed to be too difficult to understand for many laypersons. To help write text that is not perceived as too difficult and leads to better comprehension (actual difficulty), we study how linguistic structures influence text difficulty. Since perceived difficulty has been shown to be a barrier to self-education, evaluating perceived difficulty is an essential first step to take. In this study, we evaluated the impact of noun phrase complexity and of function …


Integrating Environmental Science Into Information Technology Content To Generate Student Interest, Rondalynne Mcclintock '13, Yoonmi Lee '12, June Hilton '04, Brian Hilton, Gondy Leroy Jan 2010

Integrating Environmental Science Into Information Technology Content To Generate Student Interest, Rondalynne Mcclintock '13, Yoonmi Lee '12, June Hilton '04, Brian Hilton, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

In an effort to increase female student interest in computing we applied and evaluated an interdisciplinary approach at a suburban high school in eastern Los Angeles County, California. Three classes, an IB Environmental Science class, an AP Environmental Science class, and a Computer Science were surveyed to assess attitude changes toward information technology. Results indicated gender differences between the participating classes, and differences before and after the project. Although the project did not uniformly impact the attitude of female high school students, it impacted teachers who are adjusting their teaching methods, an outcome that has a long-term positive influence.


A Life Cycle Perspective On Online Community Success, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy Leroy Feb 2009

A Life Cycle Perspective On Online Community Success, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Using the information systems lifecycle as a unifying framework, we review online communities research and propose a sequence for incorporating success conditions during initiation and development to increase their chances of becoming a successful community, one in which members participate actively and develop lasting relationships. Online communities evolve following distinctive lifecycle stages and recommendations for success are more or less relevant depending on the developmental stage of the online community. In addition, the goal of the online community under study determines the components to include in the development of a successful online community. Online community builders and researchers will benefit …


Persuading Consumers To Form Precise Search Engine Queries, Gondy Leroy Jan 2009

Persuading Consumers To Form Precise Search Engine Queries, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Today’s search engines provide a single textbox for searching. This input method has not changed in decades and, as a result, consumer search behaviour has not changed either: few and imprecise keywords are used. Especially with health information, where incorrect information may lead to unwise decisions, it would be beneficial if consumers could search more precisely. We evaluated a new user interface that supports more precise searching by using query diagrams. In a controlled user study, using paper-based prototypes, we compared searching with a Google interface with drawing new or modifying template diagrams. We evaluated consumer willingness and ability to …


The Pixtalk Communication System A Smartphone Application And Companion Website For The Improvement Of Communication Skills Of Children With Autism, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo Jan 2009

The Pixtalk Communication System A Smartphone Application And Companion Website For The Improvement Of Communication Skills Of Children With Autism, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Evaluating Online Health Information: Beyond Readability Formulas, Gondy Leroy, Stephen Helmreich, James Cowie, Trudi Miller '08, Wei Zheng '08 Nov 2008

Evaluating Online Health Information: Beyond Readability Formulas, Gondy Leroy, Stephen Helmreich, James Cowie, Trudi Miller '08, Wei Zheng '08

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Although understanding health information is important, the texts provided are often difficult to understand. There are formulas to measure readability levels, but there is little understanding of how linguistic structures contribute to these difficulties. We are developing a toolkit of linguistic metrics that are validated with representative users and can be measured automatically. In this study, we provide an overview of our corpus and how readability differs by topic and source. We compare two documents for three groups of linguistic metrics. We report on a user study evaluating one of the differentiating metrics: the percentage of function words in a …


E-Transcript Web Services System Supporting Dynamic Conversion Between Xml And Edi, Myungjae Kwak '11, Woohyun Kang '14, Gondy Leroy, Samir Chatterjee Aug 2008

E-Transcript Web Services System Supporting Dynamic Conversion Between Xml And Edi, Myungjae Kwak '11, Woohyun Kang '14, Gondy Leroy, Samir Chatterjee

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

As XML becomes a standard for communications between distributed heterogeneous machines, many schools plan to implement Web Services systems using the XML e-transcript (electronic transcript) standard. We propose a framework that supports both XML e-transcript Web Services and existing EDI e-transcript systems. The framework uses the workflow engine to exploit the benefits of workflow management mechanisms. The workflow engine manages the e-transcript business process by enacting and completing the tasks and sub-processes within the main business process. We implemented the proposed framework by using various open source projects including Java, Eclipse, and Apache Software Foundation’s Web Services projects. Compared with …


Smartphones To Facilitate Communication And Improve Social Skills Of Children With Severe Autism Spectrum Disorder: Special Education Teachers As Proxies, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo Jun 2008

Smartphones To Facilitate Communication And Improve Social Skills Of Children With Severe Autism Spectrum Disorder: Special Education Teachers As Proxies, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

We present an overview of the approach we used and the challenges we encountered while designing software for smartphones to facilitate communication and improve social skills of children with severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We employed participatory design, using special education teachers of children with ASD as proxies for our target population.


The Motivators And Benefits Of Sharing Knowledge To A Kms Repository In An Omani Organization, Kamla Al-Busaidi '05, Lorne Olfman, Terry Ryan, Gondy Leroy Jun 2008

The Motivators And Benefits Of Sharing Knowledge To A Kms Repository In An Omani Organization, Kamla Al-Busaidi '05, Lorne Olfman, Terry Ryan, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Knowledge is a powerful resource that enables individuals and organizations to achieve several benefits such as improved learning and decisionmaking. Repository knowledge management system (KMS) assists organizations to efficiently capture their knowledge for later reuse. However, the breadth and depth of a knowledge management system depends on the magnitude of knowledge contributed to the system. This paper aimed to empirically investigate the motivators of knowledge sharing behavior and the individual benefits of such behavior in a culture where knowledge is perceived as power and private. Based on 104 employees in a major private petroleum organization in Oman and the partial …


Mobile Communication And Data Gathering Software For Autistic Children And Their Caregivers, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo Apr 2008

Mobile Communication And Data Gathering Software For Autistic Children And Their Caregivers, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Positive design leads to positive change in our society. In most cases, discussions focus on those who receive the design. However, positive design may also have a positive, but often over-looked, effect on the designers themselves. Learning about difficulties others face and developing solutions is a benefit that can contribute to individual designers’ education and general sense of well-being. Having a broader understanding of alternative views and lifestyles makes one a better person. In addition, positive design may benefit the entire field of information science by improving its ability to renew itself and attract new, young talent.


Making Primarily Professional Terms More Comprehensible To The Lay Audience, Sergey Goryachev, Qing Zeng-Treitler, Catherine Arnott Smith, Allen C. Browne, Guy Divita, Alla Keselman, Gondy Leroy, Rosa Figueroa Jan 2008

Making Primarily Professional Terms More Comprehensible To The Lay Audience, Sergey Goryachev, Qing Zeng-Treitler, Catherine Arnott Smith, Allen C. Browne, Guy Divita, Alla Keselman, Gondy Leroy, Rosa Figueroa

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Certain texts, such as clinical reports and clinical trial records, are written by professionals for professionals while being increasingly accessed by lay people. To improve the comprehensibility of such documents to the lay audience, we conducted a pilot study to analyze terms used primarily by health professionals, and explore ways to make them more comprehensible to lay people.


An Online Community For Teachers Of Children With Autism To Support, Observe, And Evaluate Communication Enabled With Smartphones, Gianluca De Leo, Gondy Leroy Jan 2008

An Online Community For Teachers Of Children With Autism To Support, Observe, And Evaluate Communication Enabled With Smartphones, Gianluca De Leo, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

We are developing an online community for teachers of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder that will provide tools to share, analyze, and evaluate assisted communication. The data will be collected from software on smartphones that allows children to communicate with teachers using images. Since this is the first approach towards systematic data collection for children with ASD, we expect a significant impact on current teaching methods.


Enabling Synergy Between Psychology And Natural Language Processing For E-Government: Crime Reporting And Investigative Interview System, Alicia Iriberri '06, Chih Hao Ku '12, Gondy Leroy Jan 2008

Enabling Synergy Between Psychology And Natural Language Processing For E-Government: Crime Reporting And Investigative Interview System, Alicia Iriberri '06, Chih Hao Ku '12, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

We are developing an automated crime reporting and investigative interview system. The system incorporates cognitive interview techniques to maximize witness memory recall, and information extraction technology to extract and annotate crime entities from witness narratives and interview responses. Evaluations of the IE components of the system show that it captures 70 to 77% of information from witness narratives with 93 to 100% precision. Our development goal is for the system to approximate progressively the performance effectiveness of a human investigative interviewer and to generate graphical visualizations of crime report information.


Natural Language Processing And E-Government: Crime Information Extraction From Heterogeneous Data Sources, Chih Hao Ku '12, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy Leroy Jan 2008

Natural Language Processing And E-Government: Crime Information Extraction From Heterogeneous Data Sources, Chih Hao Ku '12, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Much information that could help solve and prevent crimes is never gathered because the reporting methods available to citizens and law enforcement personnel are not optimal. Detectives do not have sufficient time to interview crime victims and witnesses. Moreover, many victims and witnesses are too scared or embarrassed to report incidents. We are developing an interviewing system that will help collect such information. We report here on one component, the crime information extraction module, which uses natural language processing to extract crime information from police reports, newspaper articles, and victims’ and witnesses’ crime narratives. We tested our approach with two …


Crime Information Extraction From Police And Witness Narrative Reports, Chih Hao Ku '12, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy A. Leroy Jan 2008

Crime Information Extraction From Police And Witness Narrative Reports, Chih Hao Ku '12, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy A. Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

To solve crimes, investigators often rely on interviews with witnesses, victims, or criminals themselves. The interviews are transcribed and the pertinent data is contained in narrative form. To solve one crime, investigators may need to interview multiple people and then analyze the narrative reports. There are several difficulties with this process: interviewing people is time consuming, the interviews - sometimes conducted by multiple officers - need to be combined, and the resulting information may still be incomplete. For example, victims or witnesses are often too scared or embarrassed to report or prefer to remain anonymous. We are developing an online …


Women And Technology: Reversing The Trends Of Attrition And Obtaining A Balance, Gondy Leroy, Kristin M. Tolle, Linda Perkins Jan 2008

Women And Technology: Reversing The Trends Of Attrition And Obtaining A Balance, Gondy Leroy, Kristin M. Tolle, Linda Perkins

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Many reports and technical news bulletins presented by organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) highlight that few female and minority college students are choosing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields of study or careers. For those who choose STEM fields, attrition both during education and in the workplace is pervasive. NSF reports in its 2006 Science Indicators that women account for only 27% of the bachelor’s degrees in computer sciences. And although the …


The Impact Of Directionality In Predications On Text Mining, Gondy Leroy, Marcelo Fiszman, Thomas C. Rindflesch Jan 2008

The Impact Of Directionality In Predications On Text Mining, Gondy Leroy, Marcelo Fiszman, Thomas C. Rindflesch

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The number of publications in biomedicine is increasing enormously each year. To help researchers digest the information in these documents, text mining tools are being developed that present co-occurrence relations between concepts. Statistical measures are used to mine interesting subsets of relations. We demonstrate how directionality of these relations affects interestingness. Support and confidence, simple data mining statistics, are used as proxies for interestingness metrics. We first built a test bed of 126,404 directional relations extracted from biomedical abstracts, which we represent as graphs containing a central starting concept and 2 rings of associated relations. We manipulated directionality in four …


An Integrated Social Actor And Service Oriented Architecture (Soa) Approach For Improved Electronic Health Record (Ehr) Privacy And Confidentiality In The Us National Healthcare Information Network (Nhin), Gondy Leroy, Elliot Sloane, Steven Sheetz Dec 2007

An Integrated Social Actor And Service Oriented Architecture (Soa) Approach For Improved Electronic Health Record (Ehr) Privacy And Confidentiality In The Us National Healthcare Information Network (Nhin), Gondy Leroy, Elliot Sloane, Steven Sheetz

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The emerging US National Healthcare Information Network (NHIN) will improve healthcare’s efficacy, efficiency, and safety. The first-generation NHIN being developed has numerous advantages and limitations. One of the most difficult aspects of today’s NHIN is ensuring privacy and confidentiality for personal health data, because family and caregivers have multiple complex legal relationships to a patient. A Social Actor framework is suggested to organize and manage these legal roles, but the Social Actor framework would be very difficult to implement in today’s NHIN. Social Actor Security Management could, however, be effectively implemented using Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), which are rapidly becoming …


Natural Language Processing And E-Government: Extracting Reusable Crime Report Information, Gondy A. Leroy, Alicia Iriberri '06 Jan 2007

Natural Language Processing And E-Government: Extracting Reusable Crime Report Information, Gondy A. Leroy, Alicia Iriberri '06

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Crime reporting needs to be possible 24/7. Although 911 and tip-lines are the most publicized reporting mechanisms, several other options exist, ranging from in-person reporting to online submissions. Internet-based crime reporting systems allow victims and witnesses of crime to report incidents to police 24/7 from any location. However, these existing e-mail and text-based systems provide little support for witnesses' memory recall leading to reports with less information and lower accuracy. These systems also do not facilitate reuse and integration of the reported information with other information systems. We are developing an anonymous Online Crime Reporting System that is designed to …


A Classifier To Evaluate Language Specificity In Medical Documents, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy A. Leroy, Samir Chatterjee, Jie Fan, Brian Thoms '09 Jan 2007

A Classifier To Evaluate Language Specificity In Medical Documents, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy A. Leroy, Samir Chatterjee, Jie Fan, Brian Thoms '09

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Consumer health information written by health care professionals is often inaccessible to the consumers it is written for. Traditional readability formulas examine syntactic features like sentence length and number of syllables, ignoring the target audience's grasp of the words themselves. The use of specialized vocabulary disrupts the understanding of patients with low reading skills, causing a decrease in comprehension. A naive Bayes classifier for three levels of increasing medical terminology specificity (consumer/patient, novice health learner, medical professional) was created with a lexicon generated from a representative medical corpus. Ninety-six percent accuracy in classification was attained. The classifier was then applied …


Predicting Crime Reporting With Decision Trees And The National Crime Victimization Survey, Gondy Leroy, Juliette Gutierrez '13 Jan 2007

Predicting Crime Reporting With Decision Trees And The National Crime Victimization Survey, Gondy Leroy, Juliette Gutierrez '13

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Crime reports are used by law enforcement to find criminals, prevent further violations, identify problems causing crimes and allocate government resources. Unfortunately, many crimes go unreported. This may lead to an incorrect crime picture and suboptimal responses to the existing situation. Our goal is to use a data mining approach to increase understanding of when crime is reported or not. An increased understanding could lead to new, more effective programs to fight crime or changes to existing programs. We use the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which comprises data collected from 45,000 households about incidents, victims, suspects and if the …


Revealing The Antecedents And Benefits Of Kms Use: An Exploratory Study In A Petroleum Company In Oman, Kamla Al-Busaidi '05, Lorne Olfman, Terry Ryan, Gondy Leroy Jan 2007

Revealing The Antecedents And Benefits Of Kms Use: An Exploratory Study In A Petroleum Company In Oman, Kamla Al-Busaidi '05, Lorne Olfman, Terry Ryan, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This pilot study aimed to explore technical and social antecedents and benefits of KMS use in a petroleum company in Oman. Data was collected through questionnaire given to KMS users. From the technical perspective, results uncovered that both knowledge utilizers and contributors were concerned about the system ease of use, speed and integration. Knowledge utilizers also valued knowledge richness in terms of relevancy and timeliness. From the social perspective, both knowledge utilizers and contributors considered time/availability as the major determinant of their behaviors. The results also suggested that knowledge utillizers valued the technical factors more than the social factors, whereas, …


Reporting On-Campus Crime Online: User Intention To Use, Gondy A. Leroy, Alicia Iriberri '06, Nathan Garrett Jan 2006

Reporting On-Campus Crime Online: User Intention To Use, Gondy A. Leroy, Alicia Iriberri '06, Nathan Garrett

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

National surveys demonstrate that millions of crimes go unreported in the United States. Several reasons may contribute to this lack of reporting and we are investigating these potential reasons and how they may be addressed. We are developing an online system that provides an anonymous and secure mechanism for both victims and witnesses to report crimes to police. The system is being implemented and tested on a university campus. Potential users (i.e., students, staff) were surveyed to determine their intent to use the system. Respondents claimed to report crimes already, which is in contrast with the findings from the national …


Data Mining Techniques To Study Therapy Success With Autistic Children, Gondy A. Leroy, Annika Irmscher, Marjorie H. Charlop Jan 2006

Data Mining Techniques To Study Therapy Success With Autistic Children, Gondy A. Leroy, Annika Irmscher, Marjorie H. Charlop

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Autism spectrum disorder has become one of the most prevalent developmental disorders, characterized by a wide variety of symptoms. Many children need extensive therapy for years to improve their behavior and facilitate integration in society. However, few systematic evaluations are done on a large scale that can provide insights into how, where, and how therapy has an impact. We describe how data mining techniques can be used to provide insights into behavioral therapy as well as its effect on participants. To this end, we are developing a digital library of coded video segments that contains data on appropriate and inappropriate …


Dynamic Generation Of A Table Of Contents With Consumer-Friendly Labels, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy Leroy, Elizabeth Wood Jan 2006

Dynamic Generation Of A Table Of Contents With Consumer-Friendly Labels, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy Leroy, Elizabeth Wood

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Consumers increasingly look to the Internet for health information, but available resources are too difficult for the majority to understand. Interactive tables of contents (TOC) can help consumers access health information by providing an easy to understand structure. Using natural language processing and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), we have automatically generated TOCs for consumer health information. The TOC are categorized according to consumer-friendly labels for the UMLS semantic types and semantic groups. Categorizing phrases by semantic types is significantly more correct and relevant. Greater correctness and relevance was achieved with documents that are difficult to read than with …


Health Information Text Characteristics, Gondy Leroy, Evren Eryilmaz '11, Benjamin T. Laroya Jan 2006

Health Information Text Characteristics, Gondy Leroy, Evren Eryilmaz '11, Benjamin T. Laroya

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Millions of people search online for medical text, but these texts are often too complicated to understand. Readability evaluations are mostly based on surface metrics such as character or words counts and sentence syntax, but content is ignored. We compared four types of documents, easy and difficult WebMD documents, patient blogs, and patient educational material, for surface and content-based metrics. The documents differed significantly in reading grade levels and vocabulary used. WebMD pages with high readability also used terminology that was more consumer-friendly. Moreover, difficult documents are harder to understand due to their grammar and word choice and because they …


Using A Digital Library Of Images For Communication: Comparison Of A Card-Based System To Pda Software, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy Leroy, John Huang '05, Serena Chuang '05 Jan 2006

Using A Digital Library Of Images For Communication: Comparison Of A Card-Based System To Pda Software, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy Leroy, John Huang '05, Serena Chuang '05

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Autism spectrum disorder has become one of the most prevalent developmental disorders and one of the main impairments is difficulty with communication. One method of augmentative and alternative communication is the use of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) to create messages using a series of images printed on cards and organized in binders. We are developing a digital alternative based on an image library that is displayed on a personal digital assistant (PDA). We conducted an initial user acceptance study that compared the effectiveness and usability of both systems. The study showed that the PDA system was able to …


Effects Of Information And Machine Learning Algorithms On Word Sense Disambiguation With Small Datasets, Gondy Leroy, Thomas C. Rindflesch Aug 2005

Effects Of Information And Machine Learning Algorithms On Word Sense Disambiguation With Small Datasets, Gondy Leroy, Thomas C. Rindflesch

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Current approaches to word sense disambiguation use (and often combine) various machine learning techniques. Most refer to characteristics of the ambiguity and its surrounding words and are based on thousands of examples. Unfortunately, developing large training sets is burdensome, and in response to this challenge, we investigate the use of symbolic knowledge for small datasets. A naïve Bayes classifier was trained for 15 words with 100 examples for each. Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types assigned to concepts found in the sentence and relationships between these semantic types form the knowledge base. The most frequent sense of a word …


Non-Verbal Communication With Autistic Children Using Digital Libraries, Gondy A. Leroy, John Huang '05, Serena Chuang '05, Marjorie H. Charlop Jan 2005

Non-Verbal Communication With Autistic Children Using Digital Libraries, Gondy A. Leroy, John Huang '05, Serena Chuang '05, Marjorie H. Charlop

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become one of the most prevalent mental disorders over the last few years and its prevalence is still growing. The disorder is characterized by a wide variety of symptoms such as lack of social behavior, extreme withdrawal, and problems communicating. Because of the diversity in symptoms and the wide variety in severity for those, each autistic child has different needs and requires individualized therapy. This leads to long waiting lists for therapy.


A Syntactic Parser With Semantic Filtering For Biomedical Text, Gondy Leroy, Thomas C. Rindflesch, Bisharah Libbus, Halil Kilicoglu, Hsinchun Chen Jan 2004

A Syntactic Parser With Semantic Filtering For Biomedical Text, Gondy Leroy, Thomas C. Rindflesch, Bisharah Libbus, Halil Kilicoglu, Hsinchun Chen

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.