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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/6
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Publication Open Access Evolutionary multiobjective feature selection for sentiment analysis(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2021) Pelin Angın; Deniz, Ayça; Department of International Relations; Angın, Merih; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 308500Sentiment analysis is one of the prominent research areas in data mining and knowledge discovery, which has proven to be an effective technique for monitoring public opinion. The big data era with a high volume of data generated by a variety of sources has provided enhanced opportunities for utilizing sentiment analysis in various domains. In order to take best advantage of the high volume of data for accurate sentiment analysis, it is essential to clean the data before the analysis, as irrelevant or redundant data will hinder extracting valuable information. In this paper, we propose a hybrid feature selection algorithm to improve the performance of sentiment analysis tasks. Our proposed sentiment analysis approach builds a binary classification model based on two feature selection techniques: an entropy-based metric and an evolutionary algorithm. We have performed comprehensive experiments in two different domains using a benchmark dataset, Stanford Sentiment Treebank, and a real-world dataset we have created based on World Health Organization (WHO) public speeches regarding COVID-19. The proposed feature selection model is shown to achieve significant performance improvements in both datasets, increasing classification accuracy for all utilized machine learning and text representation technique combinations. Moreover, it achieves over 70% reduction in feature size, which provides efficiency in computation time and space.Publication Open Access Parliamentary elections and the prospect for political pluralism in North Africa(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2000) Department of International Relations; Dillman, Bradford L.; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and EconomicsPublication Open Access Turkey and the Arab revolutions: boundaries of regional power influence in a turbulent Middle East(Taylor _ Francis, 2014) Department of International Relations; Öniş, Ziya; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 7715The recent Turkish involvement in the Middle East constitutes an important test case for establishing the boundaries of regional power influence in a changing global context. The AKP government in Turkey has become a major supporter of political change and democratization in the era of the Arab revolutions. Accumulating empirical evidence suggests, however, that the highly assertive and pro-active foreign policy of the AKP government in recent years has not been effective in terms of facilitating reform or regime change in Syria or helping to influence the direction of political change in Egypt towards a durable pluralistic order. Indeed, the policy might have been counter-productive in terms of undermining Turkey's image of a benign regional power, by drawing it to sectarian conflicts and over-engagement in the domestic politics of key Arab states. Turkey has the potential to play an important role model in the highly uncertain world of the Arab revolutions. Its ability to perform this role, however, requires an improvement in its own democratic credentials, rather than being excessively involved in the domestic politics of individual states.Publication Open Access Turkey-US relations in an age of regional and global turmoil: challenges and prospects introduction(Routledge, 2013) Department of International Relations; Öniş, Ziya; Yılmaz, Şuhnaz Özbağcı; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 7715; 46805Publication Open Access The operationalization of democracy and the strength of the democratic peace: a test of the relative utility of scalar and dichotomous measures(Sage, 2010) Bernhard, Michael; Department of International Relations; Bayer, Reşat; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 51395The idea that democracies are less apt to engage in conflict with each other is a central finding in international relations. Yet the operationalization of democracy in this literature has been relatively unreflective. Since the mid-1990s the majority of studies have used Polity. In this paper we raise substantial concerns about its use, notably that there is a mismatch between conceptualization of democracy as a regime type and using an interval scale to measure it. If our contention is correct, we would expect to find that models that use a dichotomous coding should either pro-vide different results from Polity or at minimum fit the data better. We then test this contention by comparing the results of tests of the democratic peace using Polity in its interval scalar form and several common dichotomous codings of democracy. The tests are supportive of the contention that dichotomous coding better captures the notion of “democracy.” At minimum we believe that findings using Polity should be verified for robustness using a dichotomous coding.Publication Open Access Ethnicity and religiosity-based prejudice in Turkey: evidence from a survey experiment(Sage, 2017) Department of International Relations; Aytaç, Selim Erdem; Çarkoğlu, Ali; Faculty Member; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 224278; 125588Threat perceptions and prejudice underlie a large number of intergroup conflicts. In this article we explore prejudicial attitudes in Turkey regarding ethnic Kurdish and devout Muslim religious identities as opposed to Turkish and less observant, secular identities. Utilizing a population-based survey experiment, we use vignettes about a hypothetical family as a neighbour, with randomized ethnicity and religiosity-related cues. We find evidence for prejudice against Kurdish ethnicity, especially among older, lowly-educated and economically dissatisfied individuals. The level of prejudice against Kurds does not seem to be related to the relative size of the Kurdish population in the local population. We do not observe prejudice against devout Muslim or less observant, secular identities. Our findings indicate that prejudice against Kurds in Turkey does not have a sui generis nature. The lack of prejudice across the religiosity dimension suggests that major socio-political cleavages do not necessarily affect intergroup attitudes.Publication Open Access Perception accuracy, biases and path dependency in longitudinal social networks(Public Library of Science, 2019) Siciliano, Michael D.; Yenigün, Deniz; Department of International Relations; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 219276Most studies on perceptions of social structures in organizations rely on cross-sectional evidence and lack a longitudinal perspective. In order to address this gap, we collected whole network perception data at three time points from a cohort of MBA students. First, we asked whether or not individuals become more accurate in their perception of the network over time. We found no significant increase in accuracy. Second, we examined one’s perception of his or her own direct ties and found a consistent tendency to inflate incoming friendship ties, confirming existing studies. However, we find that individuals were quite capable of recognizing the broader dynamics of social hierarchy (i.e., whether they were becoming more or less popular) even as they became no more accurate in understanding either the overall networks or their own ego-net. Third, we explored possible explanations for the persistence of perception errors and showed that most of the errors at time point two and time point three were due to a failure to update previous perception decisions. Finally, we shifted the analysis from accuracy at a given time point and considered the narrative arc of dyadic relations. Our findings suggest that stable dyads across time are more likely to be accurately perceived whereas other types of dyads are poorly tracked. We conclude by presenting possible research questions for future studies to further our understanding of the temporal aspects of network perception.Publication Open Access Politics of engagement: gender expertise and international governance(Wiley, 2020) Department of International Relations; Olcay, Özlem Altan; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and EconomicsThis article studies the experiences of gender experts in international institutions of governance and examines their interactions with multiple actors in the governance system as they negotiate their authority to act as experts. Moving beyond binaries, such as those on the inside of hegemonic institutions versus those on the outside, or co-optation versus activism, the analysis uses processes of instrumentalization as a vantage point to lay out the multiple paths emerging in these politics of engagement. The article frames politics of engagement in terms of micropolitical tensions, ambivalences and contradictions that unfold in these interactions. It first argues that the boundaries that exist between inside and outside institutions are not clear cut because actors circulate between them. The study shows how gender experts instrumentalize their own life and career trajectories, navigating between advocacy and governance, to enhance their power in current institutional settings. It then focuses on instrumentalist discourses and traces their emergence in unequal negotiations. It demonstrates how gender experts can become part of the processes that they also critique. Finally, the study analyses strategies in which experts instrumentalize institutional inequalities to their advantage to produce diverse political possibilities with open-ended outcomes.Publication Open Access The triumph of conservative globalism: the political economy of the AKP era(Taylor _ Francis, 2012) Department of International Relations; Öniş, Ziya; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 7715The Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), following its third successive electoral victory appears to be far more entrenched than its earlier center-right counterparts in Turkish politics. This article highlights the key political economy fundamentals that have rendered the AKP experience unique within the Turkish context. Accordingly, strong economic performance in context of ""regulatory neo-liberalism"" helped by a favorable global liquidity environment in the early parts of the decade was a key contributor to the party's continued electoral success. The party also made effective use of a variety of formal and informal redistributive mechanisms, which is referred as ""controlled neo-populism"" in this article, to enlarge its electoral coalition. Furthermore, the fact that Turkey did not suffer a typical old-style economic crisis in the context of the global turmoil of 2008-2009 was important for the AKP's electoral fortunes. Concomitantly, the AKP government was quite effective in managing the global financial crisis politically and it took advantage of its assertive ""new"" foreign policy approach. Finally, this study argues that the AKP also benefited from the fragmented opposition.Publication Open Access Politics of critique: understanding gender in contemporary Middle East(Elsevier, 2015) Department of International Relations; Olcay, Özlem Altan; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and EconomicsThis paper explores the implications of spatial production of academic knowledge on the Middle East, through the critiques of Orientalist discourses on the "Muslim woman." It begins with an examination of the success of postcolonial studies and scholarship on democratization in challenging racist perceptions and polities in the West. Then it reflects on the ways in which this knowledge production travels and is reconfigured in places where power inequalities are different. This requires a consideration of the regional consequences of either an over-emphasis on differences in agencies of "Muslim women" or a relative silence on issues of gender inequality. The paper's suggestion is to shift the focus from representation and discourse to the structural circumstances in which ordinary men and women's agencies play out; various political mechanisms which participate in the production of acceptable cultural practices; and patterns of resistance, which may defy arguments about culturally specific definitions of agency. This is a quest for making the "exotic" familiar, without exoticizing the familiar.