The success of on-line review websites has led to an overwhelming number of on-line consumer reviews. These reviews have become an important tool for consumers when making a decision to purchase a product. This growth has led to the need for applications that enable this information to be presented in a way that is meaningful. These applications often rely on domain specific semantic lexicons which are both expensive and time consuming to make. The following thesis proposes an unsupervised approach for product aspect discovery in on-line consumer reviews. We apply a two step hierarchical clustering process in which we first cluster based on the semantic similarity of the contexts of terms and then on the similarity of the hypernyms of the cluster members. The method also includes a process for assigning class labels to each of the clusters. Finally an experiment showing how the proposed methods can be used to measure aspect based sentiment is performed. The methods proposed in this thesis are evaluated on a set of 157,865 reviews from a major commercial website and found that the two-step clustering process increases cluster F-scores over a single round of clustering. Finally, the proposed methods are compared to a state of the art topic modelling approach by Titov and McDonald (2008).

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This study draws on a psychophysical scaling technique to assess prisoners' perceptions of the severity of various penal measures. The data used in this study was gathered from face-to-face interviews with 159 male prisoners randomly selected from three separate Canadian federal correctional facilities between August 1993 and May 1994. A punishment severity scale was developed based on respondents' perceptions of various legal sanctions. Subgroups of the overall sample were examined and differences in severity ratings were observed based on a number of socio-demographic variables and variations in one's relationship and experience with the criminal justice system. This research also provides a comparison to studies which examined sentence severity among various court officials, the public and students. Possible explanations for variations among respondents are considered as well as the implications of the findings.

国立情報学研究所で電子化したコンテンツを使用している。

国立情報学研究所で電子化したコンテンツを使用している。

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-179). / vii, ii, ii-iii, 193 leaves, bound ill., map 29 cm

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 176-185). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (M. Env. Sc.)--University of Adelaide, Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, 1996. / Two col. maps in pocket on back end-paper. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-135).

Thesis (B.A.(Hons.)) -- Dept. of History, University of Adelaide, 1970.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2007. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts. Includes bibliographical references (v.2, leaves 107-127).