This dissertation explores North/South partnerships in higher education, shedding light on their practices and underlying logics. Recognizing the growing importance of these collaborations in addressing global challenges, universities are actively working to strengthen these ties. However, concerns about the potential replication of imperialistic…

Dialogue systems, commonly called as Chatbots, have gained escalating popularity in recent times due to their wide-spread applications in carrying out chit-chat conversations with users and accomplishing tasks as personal assistants. These systems are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with handcrafted rules and often, use…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

"Natural language understanding" (NLU) of text is a fundamental challenge in AI, and it has received significant attention throughout the history of NLP research. This primary goal has been studied under different tasks, such as Question Answering (QA) and Textual Entailment (TE). In this thesis, we investigate the NLU problem through…

Standards of academic writing are documented in style guides adopted by academic disciplines, style guides such as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and Scientific Style and Format." Some of the standards in these style guides are expressed as prescriptive or proscriptive rules that provide academic…

Child language data are notoriously noisy. Children may produce several phonetic variants for a given word or use the same forms for several different words. As such, child data are characterized by little apparent systematicity. Competing theories have arisen to account for a range of problematic phenomena, but each has struggled to relate child…

This dissertation explores, analyzes, and compares the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses. I observe that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, they depart from the common assumption that…

Advancements in technology have greatly influenced how students write, the ways they interact with readers, and the genres they create. In order to reflect real-world writing behaviors in the assessment setting and to be able to generalize test-takers' performance from the assessment to their true writing ability, the current study investigated…

This work approaches the concept of social media engagement through a lens of participation theory. Following the work of Goffman (1981) and others, this dissertation uses the concepts of the participation framework and the participant role to explore engagement as a function of participation in interaction. The purposes of this dissertation are…

Increased interest by political leaders and parents in educating linguistically competent U.S. students to compete in the global society has emphasized the need for early foreign language learning for all students. Language education researchers have identified core elements of sustainable long-term successful programs that begin in elementary…

This research examines advertising discourse in Russian and English as acts of communicative exchange and interpersonal relationship between advertising discourse participants. The purpose was to identify and describe the way that viewers process information contained in television commercials and how they become consumers moving from getting…

This study examines how Islamists are socially, discursively and linguistically represented in the Egyptian newspaper "al-Ahram." The main question of this study is what would the Egyptian government do to halt the Brothers' political growth and potential threat? To answer this question, the study uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)…

Language plays a very important role in understanding the culture and mindset of people. Given the abundance of electronic multilingual data, it is interesting to see what insight can be gained by automatic analysis of text. This in turn calls for text analysis which is focused on non-topical information such as emotions being expressed that is in…

The relationship between pre-school teachers and the children in their classrooms directly influences the degree of success the children experience in school and in life. The emphasis on quality pre-K education in the U.S. has resulted in an increased need for highly qualified teachers who are capable of engaging in meaningful interactions with…

The purpose of this study was to identify, examine, and compare the way globalization was perceived by 4 international school associations, 4 non-profit (corporate managed) charter high schools, and 4 independent (individually managed) charter high schools from Southern California. Selected school associations, non-profit, and independent charter…