Specification – Master Thesis D 2x20p

“SASB“

Background

The SASB-model (Structural Analysis of Social Behavior) is a model based on interpersonal theory and used to describe and analyse how the personality is formed in interaction with others. This model is used in research at the Department of Psychology at the University of Umeå. Some important concepts are focus (how one acts-reacts) and complementarity (how actions and reactions are linked together). Based on these concepts it is possible to formulate certain principles of how personality and relations interact. There are different tests in which a person estimates his/her self-image in accordance to the SASB-model. These tests are used at different institutions within the county and city councils both nationally and internationally. The results can, among other things, be used to decide what kind of treatment an individual should receive or to diagnose someone. There is a computerised version of the SASB-model at the Department of Psychology and it is implemented in Access.

Goal

The purpose of this master thesis is to transfer the SASB-system from Access to SQL-server and make it available through the Internet. Except for the functionality of the old system the new one should have the following features:

• different interfaces for different users
• administrating users – monitoring licenses, handling security and integrity
• ability to upload and download data in different formats like spreadsheets and data from other types of databases
• the possibility for the public to take the test and immediately receive a “personality-description” in natural language 

Aspects to be considered:

• Security
• Data transfer
• Handling of users 
• Administration of the system
• Web interfaces
• Scalability

In-depth-study

Our in-depth-study will consist of creating a natural language generation system. We will study research within the area and different techniques for creating such a system. Our goal is to produce natural language text from the internal data representation of the input from the SASB-test. The following text is an example of a “personality-description”:

“Det verkar som att du har lite svårt att beskriva dig själv. Men när du ändå gör det så ser man att du tycker om och tar hand om dig själv men att du även har lätt att klandra dig själv. Det finns också tendens till att du förstör och försummar dig själv. Sammantaget så betyder det här att du håller koll på dig själv för att de negativa dragen inte ska få för stort utrymme.”    

Planning

The work can roughly be divided into the following phases:

Phase 1: Research – 4 weeks

Phase 2: Design – 6 weeks

Phase 3: In-depth-study - 4 weeks

Phase 4: Implementation – 5 weeks

Phase 5: Documentation – 1 week

Included in every phase is the work of writing the report. The work will be carried out in Umeå in collaboration with the Department of Psychology at the University of Umeå.