ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Creators: Ahn, Gail-Joon
- Creators: Shen, Wei
- Creators: Gelderen, Elly van
Description
This study is about Thai English (ThaiE), a variety of World Englishes that is presently spoken in Thailand, as the result of the spread of English and the recent Thai government policies towards English communication in Thailand. In the study, I examined the linguistic data of spoken ThaiE, collected from multiple sources both in the U.S.A. and Thailand. The study made use of a qualitative approach in examining the data, which were from (i) English interviews and questionnaires with 12 highly educated Thai speakers of English during my fieldwork in the Southwestern U.S.A., Central Thailand, and Northeastern Thailand, (ii) English speech samples from the media in Thailand, i.e. television programs, a news report, and a talk radio program, and (iii) the research articles on English used by Thai speakers of English. This study describes the typology of ThaiE in terms of its morpho-syntax, phonology, and sociolinguistics, with the main focus being placed on the structural characteristics of ThaiE. Based on the data, the results show that some of the ThaiE features are similar to the World Englishes features, but some are unique to ThaiE. Therefore, I argue that ThaiE is structurally considered a new variety of World Englishes at the present time. The findings also showed an interesting result, regarding the notion of ThaiE by the fieldwork interview participants. The majority of these participants (n=6) denied the existence of ThaiE, while the minority of the participants (n=5) believed ThaiE existed, and one participant was reluctant to give the answer. The study suggested that the participants' academic backgrounds, the unfamiliar notion of ThaiE, and the level of the participants' social interaction with everyday persons may have influenced their answers to the main research question.
ContributorsRogers, Uthairat (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Mailhammer, Robert (Committee member) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Despite the vast research on language carried out by the generative linguistics of Noam Chomsky and his followers since the 1950s, for theoretical reasons (mainly their attention to the mental abstraction of language structure rather than language as a performed product), historical linguistics from the start lay outside their research interest. This study is an attempt to bridge the gap between the formalism and theoretical constructs introduced by generative grammar, whose ultimate goal is to provide not only a description but also an explanation to linguistic phenomena, and historical linguistics, which studies the evolution of language over time. This main objective is met by providing a formal account of the changes hwæðer undergoes throughout the Old English (OE) period. This seemingly inconspicuous word presents itself as a case of particular investigative interest in that it reflects the different stages proclaimed by the theoretical assumptions implemented in the study, namely the economy principles responsible for what has become known as the CP cycle: the Head Preference Principle and the Late Merge Principle, whereby pronominal hwæðer would raise to the specifier position for topicalization purposes, then after frequent use in that position, it would be base-generated there under Late Merge, until later reanalysis as the head of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) under Head Preference. Thus, I set out to classify the diverse functions of OE hwæðer by identifying and analyzing all instances as recorded in the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data have rendered the following results: 1) a fully satisfactory functional and chronological classification has been obtained by analyzing the data under investigation following a formal theoretical approach; and 2) a step-by-step historical analysis proves to be indispensable for understanding how language works at the abstract level from a historical point of view. This project is part of a growing body of research on language change which attempts to describe and explain the evolution of certain words as these change in form and function.
ContributorsParra-Guinaldo, Víctor (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Bjork, Robert (Committee member) / Nilsen, Don L. F. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling language in order to enhance expressivity, such as incorporating aggregates and interfaces with ontologies. Also, in order to overcome the grounding bottleneck of computation in ASP, there are increasing interests in integrating ASP with other computing paradigms, such as Constraint Programming (CP) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). Due to the non-monotonic nature of the ASP semantics, such enhancements turned out to be non-trivial and the existing extensions are not fully satisfactory. We observe that one main reason for the difficulties rooted in the propositional semantics of ASP, which is limited in handling first-order constructs (such as aggregates and ontologies) and functions (such as constraint variables in CP and SMT) in natural ways. This dissertation presents a unifying view on these extensions by viewing them as instances of formulas with generalized quantifiers and intensional functions. We extend the first-order stable model semantics by by Ferraris, Lee, and Lifschitz to allow generalized quantifiers, which cover aggregate, DL-atoms, constraints and SMT theory atoms as special cases. Using this unifying framework, we study and relate different extensions of ASP. We also present a tight integration of ASP with SMT, based on which we enhance action language C+ to handle reasoning about continuous changes. Our framework yields a systematic approach to study and extend non-monotonic languages.
ContributorsMeng, Yunsong (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Linguistic subjectivity and subjectification are fields of research that are relatively new to those working in English linguistics. After a discussion of linguistic subjectivity and subjectification as they relate to English, I investigate the subjectification of a specific English adjective, and how its usage has changed over time. Subjectivity is held by many linguists of today to be the major governing factor behind the ordering of English prenominal adjectives. Through the use of a questionnaire, I investigate the effect of subjectivity on English prenominal adjective order from the perspective of the native English speaker. I then discuss the results of the questionnaire, what they mean in relation to how subjectivity affects that order, and a few of the patterns that emerged as I analyzed the data.
ContributorsSkarstedt, Luke (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Bjork, Robert (Committee member) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
With the growth of IT products and sophisticated software in various operating systems, I observe that security risks in systems are skyrocketing constantly. Consequently, Security Assessment is now considered as one of primary security mechanisms to measure assurance of systems since systems that are not compliant with security requirements may lead adversaries to access critical information by circumventing security practices. In order to ensure security, considerable efforts have been spent to develop security regulations by facilitating security best-practices. Applying shared security standards to the system is critical to understand vulnerabilities and prevent well-known threats from exploiting vulnerabilities. However, many end users tend to change configurations of their systems without paying attention to the security. Hence, it is not straightforward to protect systems from being changed by unconscious users in a timely manner. Detecting the installation of harmful applications is not sufficient since attackers may exploit risky software as well as commonly used software. In addition, checking the assurance of security configurations periodically is disadvantageous in terms of time and cost due to zero-day attacks and the timing attacks that can leverage the window between each security checks. Therefore, event-driven monitoring approach is critical to continuously assess security of a target system without ignoring a particular window between security checks and lessen the burden of exhausted task to inspect the entire configurations in the system. Furthermore, the system should be able to generate a vulnerability report for any change initiated by a user if such changes refer to the requirements in the standards and turn out to be vulnerable. Assessing various systems in distributed environments also requires to consistently applying standards to each environment. Such a uniformed consistent assessment is important because the way of assessment approach for detecting security vulnerabilities may vary across applications and operating systems. In this thesis, I introduce an automated event-driven security assessment framework to overcome and accommodate the aforementioned issues. I also discuss the implementation details that are based on the commercial-off-the-self technologies and testbed being established to evaluate approach. Besides, I describe evaluation results that demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the approaches.
ContributorsSeo, Jeong-Jin (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Access control is necessary for information assurance in many of today's applications such as banking and electronic health record. Access control breaches are critical security problems that can result from unintended and improper implementation of security policies. Security testing can help identify security vulnerabilities early and avoid unexpected expensive cost in handling breaches for security architects and security engineers. The process of security testing which involves creating tests that effectively examine vulnerabilities is a challenging task. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has been widely adopted to support fine-grained access control. However, in practice, due to its complexity including role management, role hierarchy with hundreds of roles, and their associated privileges and users, systematically testing RBAC systems is crucial to ensure the security in various domains ranging from cyber-infrastructure to mission-critical applications. In this thesis, we introduce i) a security testing technique for RBAC systems considering the principle of maximum privileges, the structure of the role hierarchy, and a new security test coverage criterion; ii) a MTBDD (Multi-Terminal Binary Decision Diagram) based representation of RBAC security policy including RHMTBDD (Role Hierarchy MTBDD) to efficiently generate effective positive and negative security test cases; and iii) a security testing framework which takes an XACML-based RBAC security policy as an input, parses it into a RHMTBDD representation and then generates positive and negative test cases. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through case studies.
ContributorsGupta, Poonam (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The speech of non-native (L2) speakers of a language contains phonological rules that differentiate them from native speakers. These phonological rules characterize or distinguish accents in an L2. The Shibboleth program creates combinatorial rule-sets to describe the phonological pattern of these accents and classifies L2 speakers into their native language. The training and classification is done in Shibboleth by support vector machines using a Gaussian radial basis kernel. In one experiment run using Shibboleth, the program correctly identified the native language (L1) of a speaker of unknown origin 42% of the time when there were six possible L1s in which to classify the speaker. This rate is significantly better than the 17% chance classification rate. Chi-squared test (1, N=24) =10.800, p=.0010 In a second experiment, Shibboleth was not able to determine the native language family of a speaker of unknown origin at a rate better than chance (33-44%) when the L1 was not in the transcripts used for training the language family rule-set. Chi-squared test (1, N=18) =1.000, p=.3173 The 318 participants for both experiments were from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger, 2013), and ranged in age from 17 to 80 years old. Forty percent of the speakers were female and 60% were male. The factor that most influenced correct classification was higher age of onset for the L2. A higher number of years spent living in an English-speaking country did not have the expected positive effect on classification.
ContributorsFrost, Wende (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Perzanowski, Dennis (Committee member) / Gee, Elisabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The digital forensics community has neglected email forensics as a process, despite the fact that email remains an important tool in the commission of crime. Current forensic practices focus mostly on that of disk forensics, while email forensics is left as an analysis task stemming from that practice. As there is no well-defined process to be used for email forensics the comprehensiveness, extensibility of tools, uniformity of evidence, usefulness in collaborative/distributed environments, and consistency of investigations are hindered. At present, there exists little support for discovering, acquiring, and representing web-based email, despite its widespread use. To remedy this, a systematic process which includes discovering, acquiring, and representing web-based email for email forensics which is integrated into the normal forensic analysis workflow, and which accommodates the distinct characteristics of email evidence will be presented. This process focuses on detecting the presence of non-obvious artifacts related to email accounts, retrieving the data from the service provider, and representing email in a well-structured format based on existing standards. As a result, developers and organizations can collaboratively create and use analysis tools that can analyze email evidence from any source in the same fashion and the examiner can access additional data relevant to their forensic cases. Following, an extensible framework implementing this novel process-driven approach has been implemented in an attempt to address the problems of comprehensiveness, extensibility, uniformity, collaboration/distribution, and consistency within forensic investigations involving email evidence.
ContributorsPaglierani, Justin W (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu T (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) mechanisms have been attracting a lot of interest from the research community in recent times. This is especially because of the flexibility and extensibility it provides by using attributes assigned to subjects as the basis for access control. ABAC enables an administrator of a server to enforce access policies on the data, services and other such resources fairly easily. It also accommodates new policies and changes to existing policies gracefully, thereby making it a potentially good mechanism for implementing access control in large systems, particularly in today's age of Cloud Computing. However management of the attributes in ABAC environment is an area that has been little touched upon. Having a mechanism to allow multiple ABAC based systems to share data and resources can go a long way in making ABAC scalable. At the same time each system should be able to specify their own attribute sets independently. In the research presented in this document a new mechanism is proposed that would enable users to share resources and data in a cloud environment using ABAC techniques in a distributed manner. The focus is mainly on decentralizing the access policy specifications for the shared data so that each data owner can specify the access policy independent of others. The concept of ontologies and semantic web is introduced in the ABAC paradigm that would help in giving a scalable structure to the attributes and also allow systems having different sets of attributes to communicate and share resources.
ContributorsPrabhu Verleker, Ashwin Narayan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis addresses the ever increasing threat of botnets in the smartphone domain and focuses on the Android platform and the botnets using Online Social Networks (OSNs) as Command and Control (C&C;) medium. With any botnet, C&C; is one of the components on which the survival of botnet depends. Individual bots use the C&C; channel to receive commands and send the data. This thesis develops active host based approach for identifying the presence of bot based on the anomalies in the usage patterns of the user before and after the bot is installed on the user smartphone and alerting the user to the presence of the bot. A profile is constructed for each user based on the regular web usage patterns (achieved by intercepting the http(s) traffic) and implementing machine learning techniques to continuously learn the user's behavior and changes in the behavior and all the while looking for any anomalies in the user behavior above a threshold which will cause the user to be notified of the anomalous traffic. A prototype bot which uses OSN s as C&C; channel is constructed and used for testing. Users are given smartphones(Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus) running Application proxy which intercepts http(s) traffic and relay it to a server which uses the traffic and constructs the model for a particular user and look for any signs of anomalies. This approach lays the groundwork for the future host-based counter measures for smartphone botnets using OSN s as C&C; channel.
ContributorsKilari, Vishnu Teja (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013