(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2019) King, Henry William; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Clemente Izurieta
The current communication of flood risk by government agencies and the scientific community to the citizens living in the floodplain is ineffective. Using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), this communication can be enhanced through the use of Hero, Victim, and Victim to Hero character-based narratives. This thesis describes the methods used to inform users of the NPF to construct and test narratives using computational methods. Four natural language processing tasks are described; topic modeling, sentiment analysis, classification, and term frequencies. It was found that using the difference of transformed relative term frequencies produced an adequate vocabulary for each style of narrative. The narratives constructed from these vocabularies were used in work that sought to formalize the narrative construction process and in focus group studies which found that narrative-based scientific messages increased affective response versus traditional scientific messaging.
