Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2010, Organizational Behavior

This study examines the influence of US Arab-Jewish dialogue-encounter groups on shifts in the attitudes of members. Four literature streams inform the study: the contact hypothesis, social identity theory, the literature on dialogue and conversational learning and the literature on the phenomenon of attitude shift. Using a combination of comparative case study and phenomenological methodologies, three separate sustained Arab-Jewish dialogue groups meeting in the US for at least a year were observed and 28 individual one-on-one interviews with Arab and Jewish members of six different groups were conducted. The research goals were to obtain a richly-descriptive picture of the context and conversation in the three groups, and to apply phenomenological analysis of the interviews to identify examples of individual shifts or transformation. Findings from the research showed that the dimensions of dialogue were present in two out of the three groups. In the two groups where dialogue occurred, 72% and 99% respectively of the participants reported a shift in attitude. In the third group just 25% of participants reported a shift in attitude. The dimensions of dialogue identified in the literature are: active listening; suspension of assumptions; establishing psychological safety; expansion (or embracing ambiguity) and finding shared meaning through cognitive and affective dynamics. As a result of this study two other dimensions of dialogue were identified: personal storytelling and the importance of affect as well as cognition in finding shared meaning. Thus the definition of dialogue expands to include emotional as well as cognitive meaning-making. Implications for practice point to the importance of setting guidelines and establishing effective leadership and facilitation to allow members to share personal stories. This soon leads to a sense of trust and psychological safety in the group which permits the expression of affect and the building of relationships thus creat (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2023, Computer Science and Engineering

Creating conversational systems for niche domains is a challenging task, further exacerbated by lack of quality datasets. In this work, we have created a data generation pipeline that can be adapted to new domains to generate a minimum viable dataset to bootstrap a semantic parser. We experimented with methods for automatic paraphrasing and tested the ability of language models to answer questions that require temporal reasoning. Based on our findings, large language models with emergent capabilities (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) present a viable alternative to crowd sourced paraphrasing. We determined that conversational systems that rely upon language models' ability to do temporal reasoning struggle to provide accurate responses. Our proposed system outperforms such language models by performing temporal reasoning based on an intermediate representation of the user query.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2022, Higher Education Administration

Intergroup dialogue outcomes at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) are complex as some facilitator practices lead to dialogic engagement and others do not. Brooks' (2017) critical theory of love was used to identify loving facilitator practices that affirm and/or validate dialogue participant experiences while also pushing them to explore the social, historical, and political forces that shape these experiences. This dissertation study explored facilitators' perceptions and experiences navigating dialogic incidents to discover loving practices that create space for critical dialogic engagement at PWIs. I used a critical qualitative research methodology to explore the ways IGD facilitators guide participants through dialogic learning at PWIs, relying primarily on semi-structured interviews with intergroup dialogue facilitators. Creating a space for dialogue, navigating self-identity when engaging students, and facilitating within predominantly white institutional contexts were the key themes of this study. These themes are discussed, along with their implications for educational practice and policy.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Art Education

This research aims to explore the potential of reflective teaching in higher education during a time of great uncertainty. This research also examines the possibilities of critical dialogue in a spatially disconnected classroom. Even though the pandemic of 2020-2021 has thrown the entire world into an extended period of crises, education has not stopped. When classrooms become sites of hidden vulnerabilities, undecidedness and disconnection, how can a teacher continue to focus on facilitating critical pedagogy and meaningful education? Through an investigation that utilizes teacher reflective participatory action research questions and solutions that bridge theories of critical dialogue with a higher education classroom in the pandemic is shared.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Computer Science and Engineering

We introduce a virtual patient question-answering dialogue system, used for training medical students to interview real patients, which presents many unique opportunities for research in linguistics, speech, and dialogue. Among the most challenging research topics at this point in the system's development are issues relating to scarcity of training data. We address three main problems. The first challenge is that many questions are very rarely asked of the virtual patient, which leaves little data to learn adequate models of these questions. We validate one approach to this problem, which is to combine a statistical question classification model with a rule-based system, by deploying it in an experiment with live users. Additional work further improves rare question performance by utilizing a recurrent neural network model with a multi-headed self-attention mechanism. We contribute an analysis of the reasons for this improved performance, highlighting specialization and overlapping concerns in independent components of the model. Another data scarcity problem for the virtual patient project is the challenge of adequately characterizing questions that are deemed out-of-scope. By definition, these types of questions are infinite, so this problem is particularly challenging. We contribute a characterization of the problem as it manifests in our domain, as well as a baseline approach to handling the issue, and an analysis of the corresponding improvement in performance. Finally, we contribute a method for improving performance of domain-specific tasks such as ours, which use off-the-shelf speech recognition as inputs, when no in-domain speech data is available. This method augments text training data for the downstream task with inferred phonetic representations, to make the downstream task tolerant of speech recognition errors. We also see performance improvements from sampling simulated errors to replace the text inputs during training. Future enhancements to (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2014, Leadership and Change

The research explored the interactions and experiences of participants and facilitators in civic deliberative dialogue and how they worked through tension and conflict. The dissertation question asked: What is the lived experience of participants and facilitators of civic deliberative dialogue and how do group members collectively move beyond tensions and disagreements that surface during dialogue processes? The study analyzed the joint influences of tension and disagreement within the context of seven deliberative dialogues convened on the topics of race, race relations and racism. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyze qualitative research data collected from participant volunteers and facilitators. A constructivist approach, grounded theory allowed for evaluation of the interactions of participants derived from informal observations of the deliberative dialogue process and from research data gathered through semi-structured interviews, open and axial coding, and constant comparison. Using dimensional analysis, theoretical propositions emerged which convey new understanding about the ways deliberative dialogue participants confronted the difficult topics of race and racism, their shifts in perspective, and new understanding and insights generated during the process. Civic deliberative dialogue puts everyday people at the center of local problem solving. As a form of local engagement, it arms civic groups with an approach and practice for tackling difficult issues through authentic conversations that build relationships and offers a means for peeling back divergent thoughts, opinions, and interests. The civic dialogue literature includes little about confrontation and opposition during deliberative dialogue. The research produced three theoretical propositions ("creating space to move from tension to healing"; "heart stories, hurt stories—hearing and understanding differently"; and "sustaining the conversation, bridging the divide"), adds to the body (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Higher Education Administration

This study examined the experiences of eleven students who engaged in conversations across religious difference during an intergroup dialogue course. Phenomenology was utilized in order to best discover the essence of the shared dialogue experience of these participants. Two, semi-structured interviews lasting approximately 60 minutes in length were conducted with each participant. Individual case profiles were then created and later aggregated to determine the findings for this research study. The participants in this study came from varying religious backgrounds and had prior experience talking about religious doctrine and practices with family and friends. These earlier conversations did not necessarily help or hinder these students as they engaged one another in conversation during the dialogue course but they did serve as a type of foundation for talking about religion with others. Throughout the semester, students shared their ideas, perspectives, and beliefs about religion as course facilitators introduced such controversial topics as abortion, interfaith dating and marriage, and religious dress. As these discussions among classmates were occurring, students were learning how to ask questions of others, to be less judgmental, to challenge the stereotypes associated with varying religions, and to further identify with their own religion. As we encourage administrators and faculty to facilitate student engagement across differences, we need to look at additional avenues that assist students in exploring their religious beliefs and interacting with religious difference. Additionally, we need to continue to examine the introduction of trending and controversial topics to determine if this approach is an effective method for encouraging dialogue. Further research related to religious dialogue ought to include examining whether prior experiences with religious dialogue helps or hinders students with engaging their peers in conversation, as well as the lon (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, English

The rhetoric of cultural identity generally goes in two potential directions: One a universal line that insists on an overall pattern of integration and harmony among all peoples regardless of their differences, and the other a line which suggests that various cultures are so specific and different that they will eventually enter into clash, violence and war. Drawing upon Derrida's concept of differance, I will point out that such rhetoric as examples of current political discourses fail to open the concept of cultural identity through redefining its relationship with otherness. This will be accompanied by poetry of Rumi and Whitman to suggest that their literary language through its non-dialectic characteristics is familiar with the problematic of identity and has the ability to form a cross-cultural dialogue. Sufism And Transcendentalism: A Poststructuralist Dialogue envisages the possibility of dialogue against the background of political conflict. It is a comparative study of Rumi and Whitman in which the parallelism of poetic style and content goes further to find common ground in challenging the conventional definitions of self and other.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2012, Communication Studies

Inter-ethnic co-existence is critical for stability and democratic development of Macedonia, a country with European Union (EU) membership aspirations. This study examines discourses between the EU and Macedonia surrounding the concept of multiculturalism, which emerged from inter-ethnic conflict between Albanians, the largest ethnic minority in the nation, and Macedonians, the majority ethnic group. From the Ohrid Framework Agreement, which provides the main format for multiculturalism discourses, the study interrogates how multiculturalism is rhetorically constructed by EU representatives in their presentations to the Macedonia public, and by Albanian and Macedonian and officials of the Macedonian Government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Prime Ministers Office for European Affairs, and the Vice Prime Minister representing the Albanian political party in government. The study employs the ideographic analysis method of rhetorical criticism which is particularly constructive for interrogating concepts, such as multiculturalism, used by various parties engaged in negotiating conflict. As different ethnic groups in Macedonia have competing conceptualizations of multiculturalism, the study examines how the term is rhetorically constructed to the Macedonian public from outside the nation, and within by Macedonian and Albanian ethnic groups, particularly under conditions of warfare and EU and U.S. pressure. The study provides an understanding of how ideographs such as multiculturalism impact individual choices and ideological assumptions that shape patterns of cultural expression. It affords opportunities to identify hidden notions and possibilities in the constructions of multiculturalism while considering political, ethical, and social impacts on the people in Macedonia and their acceptance or rejection of this concept. The processes creating and sustaining ideology, and the interests represented in the ideology, must be discovered and understood in order to unc (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1904, Graduate School

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Automation is a term loosely thrown around within contemporary society, spoken to either spark hope for a better tomorrow or sow seeds of fear. For as long as mankind had the stability to stop and think, they have asked a simple question. Why? Is there any intrinsic purpose that might befit existence? The question has been asked thousands of different ways, and answered countless more. Our purpose is to seek leisure, to seek pleasure. To serve the common good, to praise god. Perhaps there is no purpose at all, and to act on carnal impulses would have no noticeable effect on the cosmic meat-grinder of our universe. The question has often been rhetorical, regardless of the answer people have for the most part continued the trudge forward out of implicit or explicit necessity. But for the first time in history, a plausible future where any personal exertion is superfluous has revealed itself. The recent exponential rise in artificial intelligence exposes just the tip of the iceberg in regards to what could be possible in the not-so-distant future. Impossible structures built by scores of tireless metal men, entire cities sprung from the ground without a single human raising their finger. The bounding box of science fiction is capsizing to expose an underbelly of truth. This paper, through notional conversations with architects, will follow in the tradition of iterating upon the oldest of questions. If man invented a machine that could do anything, would man have any reason to persist?

Ed.D., Antioch University, 2023, Education

This study used a qualitative action research approach to engage a group of secondary English teachers in a collective inquiry to determine the best model for transformative teacher reflexivity and dialogue. Through solution-focused conversation, the goal was to design a sustainable framework for professional development that fosters creative, just, and compassionate instruction. The primary question explored was: What is an effective structure for sustained reflective dialogue among teachers in a comprehensive public high school? The action research model provided the context for a cyclical process of reflection, discovery, and growth. Findings of this study will form both a blueprint for future professional development at the research site and a model for professional teacher dialogue that may be replicated at other sites. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2023, Theology

This dissertation is a contextualized and hermeneutical study of the relationship between dialogue and proclamation through the work of John C. H. Wu. Dialogue refers to the intercultural and interreligious dialogue between Christians and members of other faiths. Proclamation refers to the explicit proclamation of the Gospel of Christ among the nations. It begins by placing Wu back into his historical context in Chinese modernity from the 1840s to 1949. He is described as a humanist who takes a different approach than liberals and Communists to the relationship between China's past traditions and modernity, between China and the West. Wu's participation in dialogue is explored through his cosmopolitan journal, T'ien Hsia Monthly, and his explicit writings relating Christianity to the traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. His involvement in the proclamation of the Gospel is explored through his Christology, his translation of the New Testament, and his interpretation of Therese of Lisieux. The examination of his work yields three main findings. First, dialogue and proclamation in the Chinese context are inseparable. Second, Wu applies an existential hermeneutic of joy as his criterion of comparison, through which he can appreciate with continuity the gift of his native traditions and the gift of Christ. Third, he displays a dynamic and contextualized theology of religions that can be termed “transfigured harmony.” His contribution to Christian theology lies in his ability to hold opposites in creative tension as well as his literary, aesthetic, and sapiential theological imagination.

EDD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

This study explored the perceptions of educators and staff about the ways dialogue and self-reflection promoted thinking about being equitable and becoming more culturally responsive in their work. Education leaders and practitioners have desired to develop and support more culturally responsive educators and staff. In my role as Chief Diversity Officer, I developed an equity training program, called Foundational Equity Training, which was designed to support faculty and staff development in my urban school district. The training utilizes dialogue and self-reflection as tools to develop a common language and understanding of equity in the district, along with knowledge about culturally responsive education (CRE) practices. This study investigated how participants perceived the roles dialogue and self reflection played in furthering their knowledge and use of CRE practices. The following research questions guided this study: 1) How do educators and district staff perceive the roles of equity dialogues and self-reflection in an equity training program? 2) How do educators anticipate changing their practices as a result of dialogue and self-reflection? 3) How do educators perceive the role of dialogue and self-reflection in promoting culturally responsive practice for themselves and others? Adopting an interpretive qualitative research approach, I used surveys and interviews to explore participants' perspectives on the dialogues and self-reflection within the district's equity training program. Seven educators in diverse roles were interviewed for this study. These interviews along with 66 anonymous participant surveys were analyzed through inductive methods. Six themes were developed through my analysis: 1) Dialogue promoted perspective-taking, learning and understanding; 2) Self-reflection assisted participants in making connections to their work and understanding the needs of self and others; 3) Program content helped interview participants to better understa (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Computer Science (M.C.S.), University of Dayton, 2022, Computer Science

The use of human-computer dialogue is playing an increasingly prominent role in interactions conducted at kiosks (e.g., withdrawing money from an ATM), on smart phones (e.g., booking a flight), and on the web (e.g., customer service chatbots). Some human-computer dialogues involve a lively exchange of system-initiated and user-initiated actions. These dialogues are called mixed-initiative dialogues and also sometimes involve the pursuit of multiple sub-dialogue threads at once, which are woven together in a manner akin to concurrently executing threads. However, existing dialogue specification languages have difficulty expressing these dialogues concisely. In this work, we improve the expressiveness of a dialogue authoring language based on programming language concepts (e.g., curried functions) by augmenting it with additional high-level abstractions to support concise specification of task-based, mixed-initiative dialogues that resemble concurrently executing threads. We also formalize the process of simplifying and staging such dialogues specified in the augmented language using notions from discrete mathematics. We demonstrate that dialogue specifications written in the original authoring language can be compressed by rewriting them using the new abstractions. We also operationalize the formally specified dialogue simplification and staging rules in a Haskell programming implementation. The augmented dialogue authoring language is evaluated from practical (i.e., case study), conceptual (i.e., comparisons to similar systems such as VoiceXML), and theoretical perspectives. The results indicate that the augmented language enables concise representation of dialogues composed of multiple concurrent sub-dialogues and improves the compression of dialogue expressions reported in prior research. The Haskell implementation of the simplification/staging rules provides a proof of concept that the formal semantics are sufficient to implement a dialogue system specified with (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2021, Leadership and Change

Womanism is a term curated by Alice Walker (2004) that centers Black women's lived experiences, past and present, encouraging Black women to no longer look to others for their liberation (Floyd-Thomas, 2006). Soul 2 Soul Sister's Facing Racism program is facilitated by Womanist instructors, who work with groups of mostly white people to address anti-Black racism. This qualitative study explored the experiences of white participants who took part in this program, Facing Racism, which holds Womanism as its central guiding principle. Although pre- and post-surveys were routinely conducted over the years about participants' experiences with Facing Racism, this study sought to take a deep dive using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis to understand how the white participants made sense of the Facing Racism experience and the longer-term outcomes it promoted in addressing and ending anti-Black racism. The interpretive phenomenological analysis explored the experiences of white people who completed the Facing Racism program. Eight white participants were interviewed using open-ended questions. The key findings of the study included: a) indications of the transforming impact of Womanist and intergroup dialogue in anti-racism work, b) revelations of the preconceptions and biases antithetical to ending anti-Black racism that participants brought with them, c) an affirmation of anti-racism work that works beyond the intellect and the importance of heart and gut/soul work, and d) the identification of racial justice work as life-long work. The key contributions include: a) the verification of a Womanist epistemology as an effective means to address anti-Black racism, b) the value of Womanist ethos in conducting anti-Black racism work centering Black women and Black experiences, c) the introduction and nomenclature of a love-based revolution to address and eradicate anti-Black racism, d) identification of ways for white people to dismantle white supremacy (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Computer Science and Engineering

Natural language provides a universal and efficient way for humans to express their intent and perceive the world. This inspires a surge of natural language interface (NLI) systems, which enable humans to acquire knowledge and solve problems using solely natural language. These include question answering systems such as the early BASEBALL system and IBM Watson, as well as virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana. Despite the remarkable progress, building NLIs that can reliably serve users in the long term has never been easy. In this dissertation, we characterize and study the three stages of the NLI life cycle: (1) Data Collection, where system developers collect training data to bootstrap the NLI system; (2) Model Development, where system developers design and implement the backend machine learning model, improving its capacity until its performance reaches the commercial grade. Note that both Data Collection and Model Development are before the system deployment. (3) User Interaction, where the NLI system is expected to interact with users and serve them reliably after its deployment. In this dissertation, we will first summarize the history and the status quo of the NLI study, as well as the challenges in each of the three stages. Following them, we will present our research achievements towards advancing NLIs in each stage. Specifically, in Part II, we will discuss solutions to improving the first two stages of the NLI construction (i.e., before deployment). We focus on constructing NLIs to code snippets, with applications in software engineering. Collecting training data for such specialized domains is typically expensive since domain expertise is needed from annotators. To address the problem, we explore training a machine learning model to automatically extract data from domain-specific online forums (e.g., Stack Overflow). Bootstrapped with a small amount of annotations, our model is trained and applied (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Educational Studies

This dissertation study was set within a collaborative, discussion-based classroom intervention called Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR). In this study, I aim to examine teacher scaffolding moves, or strategies used to support students' learning, in relationship with student equity in CSR discussions. Equity indicators analyzed include uptake, or use of a peer's idea in a subsequent turn of talk; relational invitations, a construct derived from the data and consisting of students inviting a peer to share; and conflicts for the floor, which occurred when one student prevented another from sharing their idea. This last factor indicates lower levels of equity, while the initial two indicate higher equity. Teacher scaffolding was analyzed with equity indicators at the turn-by-turn level using statistical discourse analysis and more holistically by examining the proportion of turns containing the variables of interest in repeated measures logistic regression analysis. The results showed that teacher scaffolding was negatively or not related to all equity indicators. This suggested that, in this context, teacher scaffolding was associated with reduced uptake and relational invitations, but also with reductions in conflicts for the floor. In turn, this suggests that teacher scaffolding improved participatory equity by reducing conflicts for the floor but was associated with reduced relational equity via uptake and relational invitations. The relationship with uptake was stronger and more consistent than the relationship with conflicts for the floor, suggesting that teachers' largest influence on equity is on relational, rather than participatory, equity.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, EDU Teaching and Learning

This case study examines the humanizing potential of dialogic, dramatic read-alouds, particularly of an anthropomorphic, multicultural text. A class of preschoolers and I read Julie Kim's (2017) Where's Halmoni? repeatedly over a year and a half in self-selected small groups. Drawing on ethnographic methods such as participant-observations, video and audio recordings, and interviews, I document how we employed dramatic inquiry techniques to get 'in role'; as the human and nonhuman characters from the narrative. I used a dual analytic process, relying on both content analysis of the focal text as well as discourse analysis of the empirical data. Three Bakhtinian concepts guided my analysis: dialogism, chronotopes, and answerability. I argue that Kim's (2017) graphic novel is a dialogic text that fostered dialogism among the children and me. I then offer a framework adapted from Marjanovic-Shane (2011) for considering three distinct chronotopes at work in a dramatic read-aloud: the Read-Aloud Chronotope, the Published Narrative Chronotope, and the Embodied Narrative Chronotope. As the preschoolers and I entered the Embodied Narrative Chronotope, we reflected and refracted each other's discourse, as well as that of the characters in the book. Our ongoing, co-authored alternate narratives were unfinalizable (Bakhtin, 1963/1984), and we continually revised our speech and actions in response to encountering each other in role. I highlight how questions pertaining to food/hunger allowed us to explore "shared inquiry into human questions" (Edmiston, 2008, p. 75), and I argue that our narrative revisions indicated a growing recognition of a character's subjecthood or consciousness (Bakhtin, 1963/1984). This research sheds light on an important subset of children's literature and provides an example of how content analysis and qualitative analysis can be complementary. The findings presented here also contribute to the growing body of work on dialogic and dramatic p (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Education, Miami University, 2020, Educational Leadership

The purpose of this study was to examine teacher-child interactions and dialogue to identify instructional practices that support and promote oral language skills in five and six-year-old children within a socio-cognitive constructivist paradigm. Through analysis of specific instructional practices within the social context of the classroom, this study examined the connections between creating intentional dialogue and interaction between teachers and children and the development of early literacy skills. The central research question was created to identify these instructional practices through participant observation and reflective dialogue. This qualitative, participant-observation study, using a qualitative, reflective inquiry approach to collect, reflect upon, and interpret the data, investigated the social interactions between teachers and students as they promote oral language development and ongoing literacy development that is impacted both culturally and linguistically. The study was conducted in the 2019-2020 school year at a suburban, public school district in kindergarten and first grade classrooms. The instructional strategies identified by this study were aimed at supporting the growth and development of oral language in five and six-year-olds. Four themes emerged: questioning, conversation, culture, and connection. These four themes, woven together, show specific and targeted instructional practices that teachers in early childhood classrooms use to develop oral language. Grounding the four themes were two theoretical underpinnings from the socio cognitive theoretical framework: modeling language and building on diverse strengths.