Learning to write programs is hard, but many fail to even learn basic program reading skills, such as mentally tracing a program to predict its behavior. This dissertation argues a new theory of programming language knowledge that includes mappings from syntax to semantics and their nested combinations can serve as the basis for more granular…

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to…

A construction project requires collaboration of different organizations such as owner, designer, contractor, and resource suppliers. These organizations need to exchange information to improve their teamwork. Understanding the information created in other organizations requires specialized human resources. Construction cost estimating is one of…

This dissertation uses a corpus of tokens retrieved from broadcast news stories and print news articles to examine the array of constructions used to encode stative predications in Modern Standard Arabic. A state is defined as a situation that includes its reference time, whether that time is encoding time or another time of orientation. A range…

Data integration is a critical component of enterprise system integration, and XML data validation is the foundation for sound data integration of XML-based information systems. Since B2B e-commerce relies on data validation as one of the critical components for enterprise integration, it is imperative for financial industries and e-commerce…

Today's organizations face continuous and unprecedented changes in their business environment. Traditional process design tools tend to be inflexible and can only support rigidly defined processes (e.g., order processing in the supply chain). This considerably restricts their real-world applications value, especially in the dynamic and…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…

In the current millennium, extensive use of computers and the internet caused an exponential increase in information. Few research areas are as important as information extraction, which primarily involves extracting concepts and the relations between them from free text. Limitations in the size of training data, lack of lexicons and lack of…

For over 30 years, reference resolution, the process of determining what a noun phrase including a pronoun refers to in written and spoken language, has been an important and on-going area of research. Most existing pronominal reference resolution algorithms and systems are designed to use syntactic information and surface features (e.g. number…

One of the problems associated with automatic thesaurus construction is with determining the semantic relationship between word pairs. Quasi-synonyms provide a type of equivalence relationship: words are similar only for purposes of information retrieval. Determining such relationships in a thesaurus is hard to achieve automatically. The term…

Commenting source code has long been a common practice in software development. This thesis, consisting of three pieces of work, made novel use of the code comments written in natural language to improve software reliability. Our solution combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, Statistics, and Program Analysis techniques to…

The researcher examined the effects of two alternative instructional methods, Programmed Learning Sequenced (PLS) and Interactive Whiteboard (IWB), on the mathematics achievement and attitude of eighth graders. The relationship between specific Dunn & Dunn learning-style elements and the posttest scores after instruction with the PLS and IWB…