Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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Description
Internet and social media devices created a new public space for debate on political
and social topics (Papacharissi 2002; Himelboim 2010). Hotly debated issues
span all spheres of human activity; from liberal vs. conservative politics, to radical
vs. counter-radical religious debate, to climate change debate in scientific community,
to globalization debate in economics, and to nuclear disarmament debate in
security. Many prominent ’camps’ have emerged within Internet debate rhetoric and
practice (Dahlberg, n.d.).
In this research I utilized feature extraction and model fitting techniques to process
the rhetoric found in the web sites of 23 Indonesian Islamic religious organizations,
later with 26 similar organizations from the United Kingdom to profile their
ideology and activity patterns along a hypothesized radical/counter-radical scale, and
presented an end-to-end system that is able to help researchers to visualize the data
in an interactive fashion on a time line. The subject data of this study is the articles
downloaded from the web sites of these organizations dating from 2001 to 2011,
and in 2013. I developed algorithms to rank these organizations by assigning them
to probable positions on the scale. I showed that the developed Rasch model fits
the data using Andersen’s LR-test (likelihood ratio). I created a gold standard of
the ranking of these organizations through an expertise elicitation tool. Then using
my system I computed expert-to-expert agreements, and then presented experimental
results comparing the performance of three baseline methods to show that the
Rasch model not only outperforms the baseline methods, but it was also the only
system that performs at expert-level accuracy.
I developed an end-to-end system that receives list of organizations from experts,
mines their web corpus, prepare discourse topic lists with expert support, and then
ranks them on scales with partial expert interaction, and finally presents them on an
easy to use web based analytic system.
and social topics (Papacharissi 2002; Himelboim 2010). Hotly debated issues
span all spheres of human activity; from liberal vs. conservative politics, to radical
vs. counter-radical religious debate, to climate change debate in scientific community,
to globalization debate in economics, and to nuclear disarmament debate in
security. Many prominent ’camps’ have emerged within Internet debate rhetoric and
practice (Dahlberg, n.d.).
In this research I utilized feature extraction and model fitting techniques to process
the rhetoric found in the web sites of 23 Indonesian Islamic religious organizations,
later with 26 similar organizations from the United Kingdom to profile their
ideology and activity patterns along a hypothesized radical/counter-radical scale, and
presented an end-to-end system that is able to help researchers to visualize the data
in an interactive fashion on a time line. The subject data of this study is the articles
downloaded from the web sites of these organizations dating from 2001 to 2011,
and in 2013. I developed algorithms to rank these organizations by assigning them
to probable positions on the scale. I showed that the developed Rasch model fits
the data using Andersen’s LR-test (likelihood ratio). I created a gold standard of
the ranking of these organizations through an expertise elicitation tool. Then using
my system I computed expert-to-expert agreements, and then presented experimental
results comparing the performance of three baseline methods to show that the
Rasch model not only outperforms the baseline methods, but it was also the only
system that performs at expert-level accuracy.
I developed an end-to-end system that receives list of organizations from experts,
mines their web corpus, prepare discourse topic lists with expert support, and then
ranks them on scales with partial expert interaction, and finally presents them on an
easy to use web based analytic system.
ContributorsTikves, Sukru (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Woodward, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
US Senate is the venue of political debates where the federal bills are formed and voted. Senators show their support/opposition along the bills with their votes. This information makes it possible to extract the polarity of the senators. Similarly, blogosphere plays an increasingly important role as a forum for public debate. Authors display sentiment toward issues, organizations or people using a natural language.
In this research, given a mixed set of senators/blogs debating on a set of political issues from opposing camps, I use signed bipartite graphs for modeling debates, and I propose an algorithm for partitioning both the opinion holders (senators or blogs) and the issues (bills or topics) comprising the debate into binary opposing camps. Simultaneously, my algorithm scales the entities on a univariate scale. Using this scale, a researcher can identify moderate and extreme senators/blogs within each camp, and polarizing versus unifying issues. Through performance evaluations I show that my proposed algorithm provides an effective solution to the problem, and performs much better than existing baseline algorithms adapted to solve this new problem. In my experiments, I used both real data from political blogosphere and US Congress records, as well as synthetic data which were obtained by varying polarization and degree distribution of the vertices of the graph to show the robustness of my algorithm.
I also applied my algorithm on all the terms of the US Senate to the date for longitudinal analysis and developed a web based interactive user interface www.PartisanScale.com to visualize the analysis.
US politics is most often polarized with respect to the left/right alignment of the entities. However, certain issues do not reflect the polarization due to political parties, but observe a split correlating to the demographics of the senators, or simply receive consensus. I propose a hierarchical clustering algorithm that identifies groups of bills that share the same polarization characteristics. I developed a web based interactive user interface www.ControversyAnalysis.com to visualize the clusters while providing a synopsis through distribution charts, word clouds, and heat maps.
In this research, given a mixed set of senators/blogs debating on a set of political issues from opposing camps, I use signed bipartite graphs for modeling debates, and I propose an algorithm for partitioning both the opinion holders (senators or blogs) and the issues (bills or topics) comprising the debate into binary opposing camps. Simultaneously, my algorithm scales the entities on a univariate scale. Using this scale, a researcher can identify moderate and extreme senators/blogs within each camp, and polarizing versus unifying issues. Through performance evaluations I show that my proposed algorithm provides an effective solution to the problem, and performs much better than existing baseline algorithms adapted to solve this new problem. In my experiments, I used both real data from political blogosphere and US Congress records, as well as synthetic data which were obtained by varying polarization and degree distribution of the vertices of the graph to show the robustness of my algorithm.
I also applied my algorithm on all the terms of the US Senate to the date for longitudinal analysis and developed a web based interactive user interface www.PartisanScale.com to visualize the analysis.
US politics is most often polarized with respect to the left/right alignment of the entities. However, certain issues do not reflect the polarization due to political parties, but observe a split correlating to the demographics of the senators, or simply receive consensus. I propose a hierarchical clustering algorithm that identifies groups of bills that share the same polarization characteristics. I developed a web based interactive user interface www.ControversyAnalysis.com to visualize the clusters while providing a synopsis through distribution charts, word clouds, and heat maps.
ContributorsGokalp, Sedat (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Woodward, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Writing instruction poses both cognitive and affective challenges, particularly for adolescents. American teens not only fall short of national writing standards, but also tend to lack motivation for school writing, claiming it is too challenging and that they have nothing interesting to write about. Yet, teens enthusiastically immerse themselves in informal writing via text messaging, email, and social media, regularly sharing their thoughts and experiences with a real audience. While these activities are, in fact, writing, research indicates that teens instead view them as simply "communication" or "being social." Accordingly, the aim of this work was to infuse formal classroom writing with naturally engaging elements of informal social media writing to positively impact writing quality and the motivation to write, resulting in the development and implementation of Sparkfolio, an online prewriting tool that: a) addresses affective challenges by allowing students to choose personally relevant topics using their own social media data; and b) provides cognitive support with a planner that helps develop and organize ideas in preparation for writing a first draft. This tool was evaluated in a study involving 46 eleventh-grade English students writing three personal narratives each, and including three experimental conditions: a) using self-authored social media post data while planning with Sparkfolio; b) using only data from posts authored by one's friends while planning with Sparkfolio; and c) a control group that did not use Sparkfolio. The dependent variables were the change in writing motivation and the change in writing quality that occurred before and after the intervention. A scaled pre/posttest measured writing motivation, and the first and third narratives were used as writing quality pre/posttests. A usability scale, logged Sparkfolio data, and qualitative measures were also analyzed. Results indicated that participants who used Sparkfolio had statistically significantly higher gains in writing quality than the control group, validating Sparkfolio as effective. Additionally, while nonsignificant, results suggested that planning with self-authored data provided more writing quality and motivational benefits than data authored by others. This work provides initial empirical evidence that leveraging students' own social media data (securely) holds potential in fostering meaningful personalized learning.
ContributorsSadauskas, John (Author) / Atkinson, Robert K (Thesis advisor) / Savenye, Wilhelmina (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Computer science education is an increasingly vital area of study with various challenges that increase the difficulty level for new students resulting in higher attrition rates. As part of an effort to resolve this issue, a new visual programming language environment was developed for this research, the Visual IoT and Robotics Programming Language Environment (VIPLE). VIPLE is based on computational thinking and flowchart, which reduces the needs of memorization of detailed syntax in text-based programming languages. VIPLE has been used at Arizona State University (ASU) in multiple years and sections of FSE100 as well as in universities worldwide. Another major issue with teaching large programming classes is the potential lack of qualified teaching assistants to grade and offer insight to a student’s programs at a level beyond output analysis.
In this dissertation, I propose a novel framework for performing semantic autograding, which analyzes student programs at a semantic level to help students learn with additional and systematic help. A general autograder is not practical for general programming languages, due to the flexibility of semantics. A practical autograder is possible in VIPLE, because of its simplified syntax and restricted options of semantics. The design of this autograder is based on the concept of theorem provers. To achieve this goal, I employ a modified version of Pi-Calculus to represent VIPLE programs and Hoare Logic to formalize program requirements. By building on the inference rules of Pi-Calculus and Hoare Logic, I am able to construct a theorem prover that can perform automated semantic analysis. Furthermore, building on this theorem prover enables me to develop a self-learning algorithm that can learn the conditions for a program’s correctness according to a given solution program.
In this dissertation, I propose a novel framework for performing semantic autograding, which analyzes student programs at a semantic level to help students learn with additional and systematic help. A general autograder is not practical for general programming languages, due to the flexibility of semantics. A practical autograder is possible in VIPLE, because of its simplified syntax and restricted options of semantics. The design of this autograder is based on the concept of theorem provers. To achieve this goal, I employ a modified version of Pi-Calculus to represent VIPLE programs and Hoare Logic to formalize program requirements. By building on the inference rules of Pi-Calculus and Hoare Logic, I am able to construct a theorem prover that can perform automated semantic analysis. Furthermore, building on this theorem prover enables me to develop a self-learning algorithm that can learn the conditions for a program’s correctness according to a given solution program.
ContributorsDe Luca, Gennaro (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020