Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Arts

The republican government in China joined the Allies and declared war on Germany on 14 August1917. Many previous researches have focused mainly on what sort of assistance the Chinese government provided during the Great War, but few involved the process of how the leadership in China reached to the decision of joining the Allies. The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to investigate the reasons why the Chinese republican government would be willing to engage in a war involving various great powers in the world. In order to analyze the issue from both the perspectives of the republican government and the Allies, this research paper relies not only on Chinese official documents, but also on diplomatic correspondence from British and the U.S government. In addition, Chinese local newspapers, personal letters and memoirs of Chinese politicians and intellectuals are also examined so that local opinions in China would also be mentioned. In general, this research finds national interest of the republican government may not be the only explanation to China’s participation in the war, other factors such as the urgent need for China to expel German interest, invitation from the U.S government and Japan’s consent also played a vital role. The decision to declare war on Germany was not a move the Chinese republican government could make without consulting the western powers since the issue was highly sensitive and might easily inflict damage on the interest of both sides. The key to China’s participation in the war thus lies in the diplomatic negotiation and compromise between China and the Allied powers. / published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Current studies on the intellectual exchanges between the West and the Third World have tended to focus either on the phenomenon of the birth of the Third World in the post-War period or have concentrated instead on a political reading of these exchanges. The first group of studies has seen the emergence of the Third World in a manner that is unconnected to its political significance. The second group has been characterised by arguments that tend towards a negative reading of the role played by (mainly) European intellectuals in their relationship with movements of national liberation. These intellectuals, it is argued, imposed their idealistic visions of the potential for radical democracy on the new societies while alienating themselves from the societies of which they were part. Such is the standpoint of much of the literature that resorts to the notion of the' fellow traveller' . This thesis emphasises instead the common ground and mutual influence between the Third World as a historical formation in the Twentieth Century - itself partly the product of Western intellectual discourses - and the reaction its 'birth' provoked within certain sections of the European intelligentsia. The thesis argues that the intellectual commitment to the Third World characteristic of the 1960s and the dialogue that ensued can be interpreted as an attempt to define a universally valid concept of intellectual that was both and at the same time politically committed, yet independent. Focusing on one such case of Third World 'liberation' -the Cuban Revolution- and the role played by the New Left, this thesis employs Bourdieu's concept of 'intellectual field' in order to explore two main areas of concern. The first involves the identification of all the significant players in the process of crossfertilisation that took place between the Cuban Revolution and the European New Left and a detailed description of the part they played. This leads on to a consideration of the vociferous support lent to the Cuban Revolution by dominant intellectuals of the time but also to the importance that can be attached to a variety of intellectual groups in each of the countries concerned and to the role played by a number of publications such as New Left Review, Partisans or Pensamiento Critico as conduits of generic ideas that can be labelled as characteristic of the New Left field. The second main concern of this thesis lies in the analysis of some of the main ideas that circulated in the field. With regard to the concept of the Third World, it is argued that besides offering a commitment-conscious intelligentsia a useful symbolic element to partially fulfil their quest for self-definition, the concept was tied to Cuba's particular political transition in the 1960s. This transition went from a vision of Cuba as representative of a Third World that was presented as the space of 'neutrality and global peace' to one that saw it as the spark of 'global revolution'. Similarly, the notion of the intellectual underwent a mutation from a universalistlSartrean notion of the 'traditional' intellectual as an individual engaged with the times and representative of the conscience of society, to one that stressed the activist and revolutionary nature of the intellectual. The 'revolutionary' intellectual as a concept was re-discovered through a return to the orthodox language of a mythical golden Marxist past. In either case, the thesis argues, the language of communication and exchange between both sides of the Atlantic was dominated by a European New Left that was, on the whole, unable to marry the contradictory demands of power and intellect. The failure of this intellectual goal was further reinforced by the reality of a separation that became more acute after 1971.

The article has been reviewed and accepted for publication in Knowledge Organization 33 (2006) / This is a preprint of a paper to be published in Knowledge Organization. The paper gives a short overview of the history of use of UDC in Internet subject gateways (SGs) with an English interface, from 1993 to 2006. There were in total, nine quality controlled SGs that were functional for shorter or longer periods of time. Their typology and functionality is described. Quality SGs have evolved and the role of classification has changed accordingly from supporting subject organization on the interface and automatic categorization of resources, towards supporting a semantic linking, control and vocabulary mapping between different indexing systems in subject hubs and federated SGs. In this period, many SGs ceased to exist and little information remains available regarding their status. SGs currently using UDC, for some part of their resource organization, do not use a UDC subject hierarchy at the interface and its role in resource indexing has become more difficult to observe. Since 2000, UDC has become more prevalent in East European SGs, portals and hubs, which are outside the scope of this research. This paper is an attempt to provide a record on this particular application of UDC and to offer some consideration of the changes in requirements when it comes to the use of library classification in resource discovery.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Research in information retrieval (IR) has advanced significantly in the past few decades. Many tasks, such as indexing and text categorization, can be performed automatically with minimal human effort. Machine learning has played an important role in such automation by learning various patterns such as document topics, text structures, and user interests from examples. In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to search for useful information on the World Wide Web because of its large size and unstructured nature. Useful information and resources are often hidden in the Web. While machine learning has been successfully applied to traditional IR systems, it poses some new challenges to apply these algorithms to the Web due to its large size, link structure, diversity in content and languages, and dynamic nature. On the other hand, such characteristics of the Web also provide interesting patterns and knowledge that do not present in traditional information retrieval systems.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Recommender systems are being widely applied in many application settings to suggest products, services, and information items to potential consumers. Collaborative filtering, the most successful recommendation approach, makes recommendations based on past transactions and feedback from consumers sharing similar interests. A major problem limiting the usefulness of collaborative filtering is the sparsity problem, which refers to a situation in which transactional or feedback data is sparse and insufficient to identify similarities in consumer interests. In this article, we propose to deal with this sparsity problem by applying an associative retrieval framework and related spreading activation algorithms to explore transitive associations among consumers through their past transactions and feedback. Such transitive associations are a valuable source of information to help infer consumer interests and can be explored to deal with the sparsity problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted an experimental study using a data set from an online bookstore. We experimented with three spreading activation algorithms including a constrained Leaky Capacitor algorithm, a branch-and-bound serial symbolic search algorithm, and a Hopfield net parallel relaxation search algorithm. These algorithms were compared with several collaborative filtering approaches that do not consider the transitive associations: a simple graph search approach, two variations of the user-based approach, and an item-based approach. Our experimental results indicate that spreading activation-based approaches significantly outperformed the other collaborative filtering methods as measured by recommendation precision, recall, the F-measure, and the rank score.We also observed the over-activation effect of the spreading activation approach, that is, incorporating transitive associations with past transactional data that is not sparse may “dilute” the data used to infer user preferences and lead to degradation in recommendation performance.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Areas related to nanotechnology, or nanoscale science and engineering (NSSE), have experienced tremendous growth over the past few years. While there are a large variety of useful resources available on the Web, such information are usually distributed and difficult to locate, resulting in the problem of information overload. To address the problem, we developed the NanoPort system, an integrated Web portal aiming to provide a one-stop shopping service to satisfy the information needs of researchers and practitioners in the field of NSSE [1]. We believe that the approaches taken also can be applied to other domains.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Search engines and data mining are two research areas that have experienced significant progress over the past few years. Overwhelming acceptance of the Internet as a primary medium for content delivery and business transactions has created unique opportunities and challenges for researchers. The richness of the webâ s multimedia content, the reach and timeliness of web-based publication, the proliferation of e-commerce activities and the potential for wireless web delivery have generated many interesting research problems. Technical, system, organizational and social research approaches are all needed to address these research problems. Many interesting webretrieval and mining research topics have emerged recently. These include, but are not limited to, the following: text and data mining on the web, web visualization, web intelligence and agents, web-based decision support and knowledge management, wireless web retrieval and visualization, web-based usability methodology, web-based analysis for eCommerce applications. This special issue consists of nine papers that report research in web retrieval and mining.