Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann et al. 1988), a popular approach for analyzing discourse coherence, suggests that coherent text can be placed into a hierarchical organization of clauses. Identification of a texts rhetorical structure through automatic discourse analysis is a crucial element for many of todays Natural Language Processing tasks, but no sufficient tool is available. The current state-of -the-art discourse parser, SPADE (Soricut et al. 2003), is limited to parsing discourse within a single sentence. HILDA (Hernault et al. 2010) extends the parsing abilities of SPADE to the document level, but with a decrease in performance. This study achieved document-level discourse parsing without sacrificing performance. Provided text was already segmented into elementary discourse units, the task of discourse parsing was separated into three steps: structuring, nuclearity labeling, and relation labeling. An algorithm was developed for classifying relation existence, nuclearity, and relation label that improved upon previous methods. New features were explored for all three steps to maintain state-of-the-art performance when parsing at the document-level.

We are still feeling the effects of the Second World War sixty-seven years after its conclusion. Much of post-war thinking has attempted to sort through the roots of the totalitarian ideology that developed in Europe and caused such massive destruction. Marxist and Frankfurt School critics have demonstrated that the roots of Fascism go deeper in the West than the twentieth century and are part and parcel of the Wests combination of technology and myth. Additionally, Post-Colonial critics have pointed out that the horrors of this war were also perpetrated throughout Europes colonial endeavors and have undertaken the task of deconstructing the ideology of European colonial powers. However, such criticism is both accurate and incomplete. Western civilization is not simply built upon ideology but also contains a long tradition of rational philosophy and self-criticism. In the West, Plato helped formulate an early poetics that was used in education to form and shape the soul and thus the community. In the twentieth century, the Germany philosopher Martin Heidegger modified Platos vision, showing how a people is formed through their culture and given their destiny. Plato and Heideggers poetics can be applied to the work of the Roman poet Virgil. Through his Aeneid, Virgil establishes a tradition of forming an exemplum of empire. In his exemplum of empire, Virgil presents a hero, prophecies that support the empire, and a sympathic but nonetheless demonized Other. Following Virgils lead, Dante Alighieri, Edmund Spenser, and Ezra Pound have sculpted their epics as imperial exempla. Each of these poets includes the Virgilian formula of a hero, prophecies, and an Other. At the same time, each poet develops a work that is not bound by imperialism but transcends its prejudice.

ABSTRACT Between 1969 and 2011, Libya experienced an oppressive dictatorship that paralyzed the country`s political, economical, and social growth. Libya`s literary identity was oppressed due to the policy of censorship and authors were unable to express their opinions freely. In fear of punishment, most Libyan writers criticized the regime and discussed their struggles in the society only implicitly. Censorship has led Libyan writers to adopt different literary styles to reflect on society. In this paper, I will shed light on one of the writers` techniques by examining six Libyan short stories using a stylistics analysis approach. I analyze the lexical feature of the language focusing on adjectives. I investigate how Libyan authors discuss socio-economic and political issues through the use of adjectives. I put the adjectives into different categories: adjectives of color, physical adjectives, personal adjectives, emotional adjectives, adjectives of nationality, etc. I look at how the denotative and connotative meanings of the adjectives reflect cultural concepts in Libyan society and the authors` perspectives. Data reveal that Libyan authors rely heavily on adjectives to help represent positive and negative images, as well as empowering and dis-empowering characters in the stories. Data analysis also reveals certain patterns in style such as the use of the colors black & white to create negative and positive atmospheres and to demonize and romanticize characters.

Microalgal harvesting strategies for biodiesel production have been a major setback in the industry with high energy estimates of $3400/ton biomass by centrifugation. The present study utilized effective mass and energy balances to reduce these large operating costs. The energy for Stage 1 centrifugation was reduced by 82% when harvesting 28.5% of biomass at 18 L/min as opposed to 95% harvesting at 1 L/min. This strategy was further confirmed using electrocoagulation (EC) with Nannochloris and Dunaliella algae with perforated aluminum and iron electrodes at low (< 6 mg/L) metal ion concentrations. Despite 20% lower harvesting efficiencies, the iron electrodes were more energy and cost efficient with operating costs less than $0.03/L oil when flocculating and settling Nannochloris and Dunaliella cultures. Furthermore, a continuous multistage algae harvester using EC and dissolved air flotation (DAF) for Stage 1 harvesting and centrifugation for Stage 2 dewatering was designed. It was determined throughout the testing that greater EC costs for improved harvesting efficiencies were necessary to offset the large energy requirements of the DAF. The multistage system dewatered a low density (100 mg/L) Nannochloris to 20% solids for a final energy requirement of 1.536 kWh/kg algae ($138/ton). Using the data collected from this research and existing literature, a life cycle analysis was assembled to judge the sustainability of microalgal biofuels in Louisiana. High and low energy estimates for culturing (mixing, CO2, nutrients), harvesting, lipid extraction and energy conversion were compared with the current research. Scaling the EC/DAF system for a full size facility was expected to reduce the harvesting costs to 1.133 kWh/kg algae, resulting as $0.44/L oil for a culture with 20% lipids. Despite this improvement in harvesting costs, the production of algal for the sole purpose of biodiesel was not economically viable. Considering a system with a growth rate of 15 g/m2/day and lipid content of 20%, the energy inputs exceeded the outputs from biodiesel production by 36% under the most ideal conditions. However, incorporating additional revenue through wastewater treatment and biogas production from residual biomass could improve sustainability and profitability of algal biodiesel to an 18.5% energy surplus at its current state.

This study was conducted to investigate the disparity that seems to exist in students abilities to solve equations, solve word problems, and model word problems with algebraic equations. Over the course of fourteen-weeks, students enrolled in an advanced seventh grade mathematics course were given a series of algebra assignments, tasks, and surveys that focused on students abilities to solve and write algebraic equations. The results show that students are more competent in determining solutions for equations and simple word problems than modeling word problems with algebraic equations. Students were willing to exert substantial effort to use arithmetic procedures to find solutions, but were not as invested in writing the equations. This study also shows that students have difficulty relating known and unknown quantities algebraically. Our results suggests, classroom instruction should be focused on bridging the conceptual gaps that exist within solving equations, solving word problems, and modeling with algebraic equations.

This thesis discusses the results obtained upon the implementation of an online math remediation program, SuccessMaker, as a component of Response to Intervention (RTI). The objective was to increase the content knowledge of students struggling in math. Woodlawn Middle chose a targeted group of students considered at risk in hopes of preparing them for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP). Yearly gains in SuccessMaker were compared to achievement levels on the math section of the LEAP test. Results showed that the more time spent on Success Maker resulted in higher gains in grade level. The gains in SuccessMaker did not necessarily translate to increasing the passing rate on the math component of the LEAP test. In terms of an RTI component, SuccessMaker worked well as a remediation tool because teachers were able to meet the needs of multiple students at a time. The intervention raised the math skills and consequently, the grade levels of many students. Hence, suggestions to optimize the implementation of SuccessMaker are given in detail to Pearson, school administrators and teachers.

Coreference resolution is the task of resolving all expressions in a text that refer to the same entity. Such expressions are often used in writing and speech as shortcuts to avoid repetition. The most frequent form of coreference is the anaphor. To resolve anaphora not only grammatical and syntactical strategies are required, but also semantic approaches should be taken into consideration. This dissertation presents a framework for automatically resolving pronominal anaphora by integrating recent findings from the field of linguistics with new semantic features. Commonsense knowledge is the routine knowledge people have of the everyday world. Because such knowledge is widely used it is frequently omitted from social communications such as texts. It is understandable that without this knowledge computers will have difficulty making sense of textual information. In this dissertation a new set of computational and linguistic features are used in a supervised learning approach to resolve the pronominal anaphora in document. Commonsense knowledge sources such as ConceptNet and WordNet are used and similarity measures are extracted to uncover the elaborative information embedded in the words that can help in the process of anaphora resolution. The anaphoric system is tested on 350 Wall Street Journal articles from the BBN corpus. When compared with other systems available such as BART (Versley et al. 2008) and Charniak and Elsner 2009, our system performed better and also resolved a much wider range of anaphora. We were able to achieve a 92% F-measure on the BBN corpus and an average of 85% F-measure when tested on other genres of documents such as children stories and short stories selected from the web.

The purpose of this research is to uncover best practices to create competent proof writers. Studies have shown the best setting to do this is in the high school geometry classroom. Throughout a yearlong study of geometry, students were exposed to theorems and their demonstrations. Despite constant exposure, students were still unable to produce their own proof of propositions. The questions then became how can an educator provide critical feedback that encourages student reasoning and develops logical argumentation skills? With the goal in mind, twenty-five students enrolled in a geometry course at Baton Rouge High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were given the task of replicating certain proofs in their own words. More than the students performance, this research focuses on the teachers role as a feedback source of students proof-writing ability. Submitted are the efforts of one educator to establish norms in the construction of geometric proof writing, provide a method of feedback in the form of a student checklist and student teacher interviews, and adapt these efforts into an evaluation tool. The research will show students original writing, teacher feedback, final product, and the evaluation results in the hopes of establishing best practices to increase student performance on proof writing tasks.

Because students are often taught physics in a traditional, lecture-based classroom, the present study was undertaken to test whether the use of peer instruction, specifically concept questions embedded within a PowerPoint that allows for students to interact throughout the lecture, affects learner outcomes in a classroom setting. The outcomes from classes taught using peer instruction were compared to classes taught with traditional, lecture-based teaching strategies. Students in five different sections of a 9th grade Physical Science class were given pre-tests and post-tests to determine their learning gains on the topics of motion and forces. In the first unit of instruction, three of the five classes were given peer instruction throughout each class lecture while the other two classes received a traditional, lecture based approach to each class. In the second unit, classes that had not used peer instruction previously received the peer instruction treatment, while the other classes received traditional lecture. Overall, the peer instruction technique showed a significant positive effect on learning gains compared to traditional teaching methods when used in a ninth grade Physical Science classroom. In each of the sections of students examined individually, peer instruction was as or more effective than traditional lecturing in improving student learning.

This study was completed to determine if implementing demonstrations in specific chapters of a high school chemistry classroom would enhance students understanding of the topics the demonstrations represented. The study consisted of five sections of college preparatory high school chemistry. The sections were made up of both male and female students. The sections were randomly broken up into two groups. Each group acted as the experimental and control at different points in the study. Four chapters were used in the study. Each group represented the control group in two chapters and the experimental group in two chapters, flip flopping with each chapter tested. Both groups were given a pre-test at the start of the chapter to assess prior knowledge. The experimental group was provided with classroom demonstrations throughout the chapter along with a standard lecture on the topics tested in the pre-test. The control group was given a standard lecture but was not shown any demonstrations throughout the chapter. Both groups were given a post-test to evaluate understanding gained at the end of the chapter. No significant differences were observed between the control and experimental groups when comparing raw test scores. However, a consistent trend was observed suggesting that the demonstrations presented to the experimental group did have a positive effect on student understanding with those students obtaining higher learning gains than those without the demonstrations. In comparison of normalized learning gains between the control and experimental groups, a trend of increased normalized learning gain for the experimental groups was observed including statistical significance in two of the chapters tested. The data collected was also broken down by gender with-in each chapter. No statistical significance was found in the raw scores or normalized learning gain based on gender.