Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
Description
The objective of this research is to determine an approach for automating the learning of the initial lexicon used in translating natural language sentences to their formal knowledge representations based on lambda-calculus expressions. Using a universal knowledge representation and its associated parser, this research attempts to use word alignment techniques to align natural language sentences to the linearized parses of their associated knowledge representations in order to learn the meanings of individual words. The work includes proposing and analyzing an approach that can be used to learn some of the initial lexicon.
ContributorsBaldwin, Amy Lynn (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis director) / Vo, Nguyen (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This project creates a possible framework for the application of music therapy to reduce test anxiety in students. Although music therapy has grown in recent years as a treatment method for a variety of mental health and wellness problems, it has yet to be comprehensively applied to the specific issue of test anxiety. Some studies have examined the use of music in testing situations in order to reduce anxiety or improve academic performance. However, more in-depth music therapy interventions are a promising, largely untried treatment possibility for students suffering from this type of anxiety.
ContributorsCowan, Sarah Elizabeth (Author) / Crowe, Barbara (Thesis director) / Rio, Robin (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
This theoretical inquiry is a response to the apparent need for resources on providing music therapy for LGBTQ adolescents, a population facing systematic oppression in their respective homes and communities. Since there are no published research studies on actual clinical work with this population, I investigated the literature of queer theory, an interdisciplinary field that destabilizes sexual categories and challenges the concept of normal and fixed identities, and applied its theoretical concepts to develop music therapy interventions. I was especially influenced by the ideas of foundational queer theorists Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, among others. Their perspectives can advance how music therapists currently approach working with this population and interpret music therapy experiences with LGBTQ clients. The theoretical insights of these fields can be applied to impact the LGBTQ movement for social justice by empowering queer youth using music within a therapeutic environment. This interdisciplinary project incorporates queer theory with music therapy theory to develop evidence-based interventions and open up new perspectives in music therapy practice with LGBTQ clients.
ContributorsBain, Candice Lanell (Author) / Crowe, Barbara (Thesis director) / Grzanka, Patrick (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
The face of computing is constantly changing. Wearable computers in the form of glasses or watches are becoming more and more common. These devices have very small screens (measured in millimeters), and users often interact with them through voice input and audio feedback. Weather is one of the most regularly checked app category on smart devices, but weather results on these devices are often limited to raw data, canned responses, or sentence templates with numbers plugged in. The goal for this project was to build a system that could generate weather forecast text, which could then be read to a user through text-to-speech. By using methods in language generation, the system can generate weather forecast text in millions of different ways. This is all computed locally, and it covers every possible weather case. In order to generate natural weather forecast texts, the system retrieved raw weather data from a weather API and created the text through six methods: content determination, document structuring, sentence aggregation, lexical choice, referring expression generation, and text realization. Content determination is the process of deciding on what information to include in a computer generated text. The document structuring phase deals with the order and structure of the information. Sentence aggregation is the merging of similar sentences to improve readability and to reduce redundancy. Lexical choice is the process of putting words to concepts. Referring expression generation is the process of identifying objects, regions, time periods, and locations within a text. Finally text realization involves creating sentences with proper syntax, morphology, and orthography. Through these six stages, a system was developed that could generate unique weather forecast text from raw data accurately and efficiently. It was built for iOS devices with Apple's new programming language, Swift, and it will be ported to the Apple Watch when the API is fully opened to developers.
ContributorsJorgensen, Jacob Paul (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis director) / Faucon, Christophe (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05