Communication Commons^™

Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields For Improved Sequence Segmentation And Labeling, Feng Jiao, Shaojun Wang, Chi-Hoon Lee, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new semi-supervised training procedure for conditional random fields (CRFs) that can be used to train sequence segmentors and labelers from a combination of labeled and unlabeled training data. Our approach is based on extending the minimum entropy regularization framework to the structured prediction case, yielding a training objective that combines unlabeled conditional entropy with labeled conditional likelihood. Although the training objective is no longer concave, it can still be used to improve an initial model (e.g. obtained from supervised training) by iterative ascent. We apply our new training algorithm to the problem of identifying gene and protein …

An Investigation Of Codon Usage Bias Including Visualization And Quantification In Organisms Exhibiting Multiple Biases, Douglas W. Raiford, Travis E. Doom, Dan E. Krane, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Prokaryotic genomic sequence data provides a rich resource for bioinformatic analytic algorithms. Information can be extracted in many ways from the sequence data. One often overlooked process involves investigating an organism’s codon usage. Degeneracy in the genetic code leads to multiple codons coding for the same amino acids. Organism’s often preferentially utilize specific codons when coding for an amino acid. This biased codon usage can be a useful trait when predicting a gene’s expressivity or whether the gene originated from horizontal transfer. There can be multiple biases at play in a genome causing errors in the predictive process. For this …

A Semantic Future For Ai, Rudi Studer, Anupriya Ankolekar, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In our modern information society, people need to manage ever-increasing numbers of personal devices and conduct more of their work and activities online, often making use of heterogeneous services. The amount of information to be processed by each individual is constantly growing, making it increasingly difficult to control, channel, share and make constructive use of it. To mitigate this, computing needs to become much more human-centered, e.g. by presenting personalised information to users and by respecting personal preferences in controlling multiple devices or invoking various services. Appropriate representation of the semantics of the information and functionality of devices and services …

Creativity, Free Expression, And Professionalism: Value Conflicts In U.S. Community Radio, Michael Huntsberger

Faculty Publications

This study investigates how the values of free expression and professionalism provide the basis for interpersonal and organizational conflict in U.S. community radio stations, and shape divergent approaches to audience service. Using qualitative methods, the project examines the motivations, expressions, and behaviors of producers and managers to establish how their values contribute to cooperation and dissention within these organizations. The study illustrates the delicate balance that exists between content-centered and audience-centered objectives, concluding that these core values have a pervasive effect on community radio’s capacity to reach audiences and promote social change through the media.

The Use Of Scholarly Monographs In The Journal Literature Of Latin American History, Meiyolet Mendez, Karen Chapman

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This study explores the use of the monograph in the journal literature of Latin American history through a reference study of Hispanic American Historical Review for the years 1985, 1995 and 2005. The authors found that the use of monographs as secondary sources increased over time. Monographs in Spanish and Portuguese were heavily used, although English was the predominant language. Distribution of publication dates varied somewhat over the period, with less use of works from the previous five years in 2005. The most frequently-cited publishers were university presses. The authors concluded that the monograph continues to play a vital …

Exploring The Lsu Libraries’ Virtual Reference Transcripts: An Analysis, Jenna Ryan, Alice L. Daugherty, Emily C. Mauldin

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

Virtual reference is an important service provided by the Louisiana State University Libraries. A subcommittee within the Reference Department of Middleton Library decided to quantitatively and qualitatively review virtual reference transcripts for the 2005-2006 school year in order to assess and evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the services provided. The transcript analysis provides information reflecting how our patrons are using virtual reference and how our librarians are performing in the virtual environment.

Tiered Reference: The New Landscape Of The Frontlines, Susan Gardner

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Introduction

When one walks into a typical academic library today, he or she is hard-pressed to see a reference librarian in plain view working at a public services desk. The well marked “reference desk” of yore, staffed by a smiling librarian and once a staple of every traditional academic library, has evolved into a less visible, more amorphous facility. Most libraries now use a new service strategy called “tiered reference,” whereby the initial reference contact point is with trained students or paraprofessionals at a general service desk. These non-librarians field all manner of questions, including directional, computing, and occasionally reference. …

Subject Librarians In The Changing Academic Library, Louise Feldman

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This article overviews the literature and key topics surrounding the role of subject librarianship in the evolving environment of academic libraries. Subject librarians are looked at in the context of the broad trends affecting librarianship and in the context of the traditional roles they have held in collection development, instruction, and reference. The author opened a discussion on this topic entitled, “Subject Librarians: Viable or Vanishing?” for the RUSA-CODES Dual Assignments Discussion Group at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio, Texas in January of 2006.

Assessing Library Collections Using Brief Test Methodology, Jennifer Benedetto Beals

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

The brief test methodology was developed by Howard White as an assessment tool to determine or verify the existing strength of a library collection. The relatively quick and inexpensive procedure utilizes the Research Libraries Group’s Conspectus levels, subject expertise, and cataloging records in WorldCat. In support of the University of Tennessee Libraries’ continuing efforts to encourage resource sharing with Information Alliance partners, I developed a project with art counterparts at the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University. Using brief tests, I completed an assessment of each institution’s collection in the subject area of African art. The results enabled us …

Conceptualizing And Measuring White House Staff Influence On Presidential Rhetoric, Justin Vaughn, José Villalobos

Departmental Papers (PS)

Scholars have debated extensively the impact of presidential rhetoric on public opinion and congressional behavior, but have largely ignored the determinants of what the president actually says. This inattention is partly the result of the difficulty of acquiring systematic observations of presidential speech crafting. We devise a method of quantifying White House staff influence over the composition of rhetoric that captures the multistage negotiations between the president's speechwriters and his policy advisors and provides a framework for future studies on the determinants of presidential rhetoric. We employ our method to study influence over the writing of President George H. W. …

Gender And The Digital Economy: Perspectives From The Developing World, Margaretha Geertsema Sligh

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Editors Cecilia Ng and Swasti Mitter address an important and timely topic in their new book. The book sets out to do exactly what the title says; the authors interrogate the participation of women in the Information and Communication Technologys (ICTs) industry, particularly in developing countries. As the editors point out in the introduction, there are concerns that globalization will increase inequalities and asymmetrical power relationships between the rich and the poor. Yet, they are quite optimistic about the potential enabling power of new technologies.

Vicarious Liability And The Private University Student Press, Nancy Whitmore

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Once described as a quintessential marketplace of ideas by the Supreme Court of the United States, the academic marketplace has been criticized recently for institutionalizing a left-leaning ideology within its curriculum and academic discourse. As a result, national activists and organizations have been calling on state legislatures and university administrators to adopt policies and report on steps taken to encourage intellectual diversity and protect political and cultural minorities from faculty bias and academic retribution in the classroom and other university settings. But who would win a constitutional showdown between the academy and those seeking to infuse academic discourse with alternative …

Infants’ Perception Of Rhythmic Patterns, Tonya R. Bergeson, Sandra E. Trehub

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

We explored 9-month-old infants perception of auditory temporal sequences in a series of three experiments. In Experiment 1, we presented some infants with tone sequences that were expected to induce a strongly metric framework and others with a sequence that was expected to induce a weakly metric framework or no such framework. Infants detected a change in the context of the former sequences but not in the latter sequence. In Experiment 2, infants listened to a tone sequence with temporal cues to duple or triple meter. Infants detected a change in the pattern with duple meter but not in the …

Overcoming Cultural And Linguistic Barriers In Providing Adequate Speech-Language Pathology Services To U.S. Latinos, Allison Carolan

Presidential Scholars Theses (1990 – 2006)

While these problems in health care and education are seemingly innumerable and heavily debated in every branch of American politics today, this review will focus primarily on the smaller realm of Speech-Language Pathology, and how Latinos are affected by America's inadequacies in this increasingly imperative discipline that lies beneath the umbrellas of health and education.

The President Over The Public: The Plebiscitary Presidency At Center Stage, Lori Cox Han

Political Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"In this chapter, I will address the question of the usefulness of the public presidency in the current political environment (that is, can a president’s communication strategy make a difference in terms of what he achieves), as well as the constitutional danger, if any, posed by a president’s attempt at public leadership. Has the public presidency, and its focus on the public aspects of the office, thrown the constitutional balance of power between the three branches out of balance? Does the president really gain political power within the constitutional framework of our government if he is a skilled and effective …

Cyberactivism : Public Relations In A Wired World, Shane Newton

Theses : Honours

Computer-mediated communication has revolutionised the way activist groups influence the opinion of corporations, governments and the community. It has never been so cheap or convenient to publish high-quality material to push a specific issue or cause. Activists are no longer restricted to satisfy the news values of media corporations to reach wide publics. Nor do these businesses (or governments) have any apparent advantage, despite their more economically sustainable and highly-resourced positions. Current literature is able to examine and explore how the Internet is used and the problems involved, yet much research fails to examine how these constraints and opportunities are …

New Strategies For An Old Medium: The Weekly Radio Addresses Of Reagan And Clinton, Lori Cox Han

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

"While a rich literature exists on presidential communications (including the public/rhetorical presidency and the presidential/press relationship), only recently have presidential scholars begun to analyze weekly radio addresses as an important primary unit of analysis (Rowland and Jones 2002; Sigelman and Whissell 2002a, 2002b). This article analyzes how the use of radio has fit into the overall development of White House communication strategies during the television age, and takes an in-depth look at how Reagan and Clinton used weekly radio addresses to communicate with both the American public and the news media. Specifically, the issues considered here include the strategy development …

Alumnews, Winter 2006, Alumni Association, Wright State University

AlumNews

Eight page issue of the AlumNews newsletter. This newsletter focuses on news about programs, events, and activities for alumni from Wright State University.

Wright State University Men's Soccer Media Guide 2006, Wright State University Athletics

Athletics Publications

A media guide for Wright State University's 2006 Men's Soccer team. This guide includes photographs, player stats, game results, and records.

Wright State University Women's Soccer Media Guide 2006, Wright State University Athletics

Athletics Publications

A media guide for Wright State University's 2006 Women's Soccer team. This guide includes photographs, player stats, game results, and records.

Predicting Domain Specific Entities With Limited Background Knowledge, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper proposes a framework for automatic recognition of domain-specific entities from text, given limited background knowledge, e.g. in form of an ontology. The algorithm exploits several lightweight natural language processing techniques, such as tokenization and stemming, as well as statistical techniques, such as singular value decomposition (SVD) to suggest domain relatedness of unknown entities.

Using Query-Specific Variance Estimates To Combine Bayesian Classifiers, Chi-Hoon Lee, Russell Greiner, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Many of today's best classification results are obtained by combining the responses of a set of base classifiers to produce an answer for the query. This paper explores a novel "query specific" combination rule: After learning a set of simple belief network classifiers, we produce an answer to each query by combining their individual responses, using weights based inversely on their respective variances around their responses. These variances are based on the uncertainty of the network parameters, which in turn depend on the training datasample. In essence, this variance quantifies the base classifier's confidence of its response to this query. …

Clustering Similarity Comparison Using Density Profiles, Eric Bae, James Bailey, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

The unsupervised nature of cluster analysis means that objects can be clustered in many ways, allowing different clustering algorithms to generate vastly different results. To address this, clustering comparison methods have traditionally been used to quantify the degree of similarity between alternative clusterings. However, existing techniques utilize only the point memberships to calculate the similarity, which can lead to unintuitive results. They also cannot be applied to analyze clusterings which only partially share points, which can be the case in stream clustering. In this paper we introduce a new measure named ADCO, which takes into account density profiles for each …

An Online Discriminative Approach To Background Subtraction, Li Cheng, Shaojun Wang, Terry Caelli

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a simple, principled approach to detecting foreground objects in video sequences in real-time. Our method is based on an on-line discriminative learning technique that is able to cope with illumination changes due to discontinuous switching, or illumination drifts caused by slower processes such as varying time of the day. Starting from a discriminative learning principle, we derive a training algorithm that, for each pixel, computes a weighted linear combination of selected past observations with time-decay. We present experimental results that show the proposed approach outperforms existing methods on both synthetic sequences and real video data.

Mormon Media History Timeline: 1827-2007, Sherry Baker

Faculty Publications

This timeline is a work in progress. It is posted currently as a PDF file in order to make it available in a timely manner to scholars who are working on Mormon media history, or any other scholarship for which it might be helpful and informative. It is anticipated that the timeline eventually will be reworked into media formats that will make it more accessible, and that will allow it to be updated, enhanced, and corrected over time. If you wish to comment upon this Mormon Media History Timeline, contact Sherry Baker at [email protected].

Importing Extended Producer Responsibility For Electronic Equipment Into The United States, Chad Raphael, Ted Smith

Communication

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that holds manufacturers accountable for the full costs of their products at every stage in their life cycle. EPR typically involves requiring that producers take back their products at the end of their useful lives, or pay a recycling contractor to do so, thereby internalizing the costs of recycling or disposal in a manufacturer’s bottom line. When companies know that they will bear the costs of product return and recycling, they are more likely to redesign their products for easier and safer handling at each step in the life cycle. This approach …

Letter From The Dean, Gregory J. Weidemann

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

No abstract provided.

Statewide Public Affairs Television: Expanding The C-Span Model To The State Level And Achieving Institutional Status In The Process, Karen M. Rowley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A study of 10 states that have statewide public affairs television networks finds that these systems have become an integral part of the state governmental process in the same way that C-SPAN has become an institution in Washington, D.C. That is, lawmakers, legislative staff members, lobbyists, and statehouse reporters ignore it at their peril. At the same time, the content produced by these state versions of C-SPAN has altered the way in which the members of these groups do their jobs by providing a monitoring capacity that makes it easier for them to be more productive. This study uses a …

Cinematic Scripture: The Structure And Usage Of The Lord Of The Rings As Equipment For Living, Brent Yergensen

Masters Theses

This project argues that film has the capacity to function as cinematic scripture for Christian audiences. Cinematic scripture means that films are authoritative for audiences the same way that written scripture is. In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, this new form of scripture works as equipment for living by encouraging Christian audiences to go to war against evil through the structure of the film's biblical themes of bifurcation, redemption, and millennialism. This culmination of the rhetorical vision of war comes from three fantasy themes that emerge when Christian Internet writers describe how they use the films: repentance, strength, …

College Students’ Responses To Antismoking Messages: Denial, Defiance, And Other Boomerang Effects, Joyce M. Wolburg

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Despite the success of antismoking campaigns that aim to prevent young teens from smoking, this qualitative study provides strong evidence that different initiatives are needed for college students, particularly those who already smoke. When asked for responses to current antismoking messages, nonsmokers generally championed the cause; however, smokers often responded with anger, defiance, denial, and other negative responses. Consumers who respond in this manner are not well served by existing strategies, and money used for such campaigns could be better spent. New strategies are offered in hopes that antismoking campaigns can communicate more effectively with one high-risk group—college student smokers.