Information is one the essential elements of science. It is an imperative condition that researchers review antecedent works as they advance and create new knowledge. Knowledge creation in science is a process of adding and refining new pieces of data, information, and knowledge to what has already been accomplished by others. Few scientific communities have unlimited access to scientific information sources. Most communities’ access to information is limited by economic, social, cultural, and technological conditions. This study investigates information seeking behavior and information dissemination practices of the Venezuelan scientific community. A model of scholarly communication in a context of dependency emerges from the following major themes: persisting interpersonal communication with the international scientific community; publication in international journals; prestige and name recognition; and contacting the authors to access full-text journal articles. A qualitative approach is used to illuminate the information seeking behavior of scientists in Venezuela, to discover the barriers experienced by the Venezuelan scientific community when accessing scientific information, and to explore their scientific information dissemination practices. Interviews were conducted in July 2009 with thirteen Venezuelan scientists from the fields of biology, chemistry, or physics. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in Spanish. Coding, categories, data analysis, and theory building followed a general inductive approach.

The number of men and women suffering from alcohol dependency is increasing.Today there are shortcomings in knowledge about the lived experiences of being a woman or a man with alcohol dependency; knowledge which might be of importance for meeting these individual’s specific care needs. The overall aim of the study was to obtain a deeper understanding of women and men's experience of living with alcohol dependency and being professionally cared for. The qualitative investigation design was exploratory and founded in a life world perspective. Data were collected from fourteen women and fifteen men with alcohol dependency by means of open in-depth interviews and subjected to a phenomenological-hermeneutic analysis. It was found that living with alcohol dependency encompasses a complex but limited life situation in which both women and men strive for social acceptance and adjustment. Women turned out to live a more introverted life than men and presented false facades. Men turned out to live a life in action, risk taking and control. Professional caring was shown to mean availability and confirmation of needs. For men with alcohol dependency professional caring meant support and gentle guidance in their active struggle against their alcohol dependency. For women, professional caring meant having an active caregiver who cherished them and enabled them to rest. Professional caring reduced senses of shame in both women and men. It may be concluded that in order to offer care for men and women with alcohol dependency professional carers have to consider gender specific needs of support and guidance. In addition, in order to alleviate suffering, professional caregivers have to be accessible, supportive and directed toward the alcohol dependent women's and men’s everyday world.

In recent years, a number of reforms have been made regarding the provision of care to people experiencing psychiatric disabilities. The aim of these reforms was to enable these people to participate in society and to ”live as others”. This political ambition, as well as research on recovery, stands to a certain extent in contrast to the message conveyed in the media, where the mentally ill/disabled to a great extent are represented as dangerous and incurable. The aim of the thesis is to analyse if, and how a group of people experiencing psychiatric disabilities create a sense of being like others, and to relate the analysis to the historical emergence of the contemporary conception of mental illness/psychiatric disability. This thesis employs the method of interviews. I highlight the informants encounter with the historically based stereotype that defines the persons as unreasonable, irrational and incapable of taking care of themselves. When the informants face the stereotype, they act to reduce the negative consequences. The informants’ actions can be interpreted in terms of approaches and in this perspective the informants appear as strong actors, who, contrary to the stereotype, are capable of take care of themselves. Three approaches are described: expertise, adaptation, and distancing. In situations where the stereotype is not present, the informants can create a feeling of being like anyone else. Their stories show that the feeling of being like others is individual. The development taking place in the field is “path-dependent”, meaning that the initial activity, the differentiation of persons with mental illness and the subsequent events is a development following a pattern which could explain the failure of the good political intentions. It has progressed from closed institutions to an institutionalized care service.

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Syftet med denna studie var att få en ökad kunskap och förståelse för betydelsen av andliga upplevelser för att kunna bryta ett beroende, samt vad andliga upplevelser betyder för att lyckas hålla sig drogfri. Den frågeställning som studien utgick ifrån var: Hur beskriver ett mindre urval av intervjupersoner sina erfarenheter av andliga upplevelser för att kunna bryta ett beroende, samt för att kunna kvarstå i drogfrihet? Datainsamlingen bestod av fyra djupintervjuer med personer med egna erfarenheter på området andlighet och beroende. Studien följde således en kvalitativ design och utgick från en hermeneutisk vetenskapsfilosofisk position. De viktigaste resultaten visade på att erfarenheten av andliga upplevelser hos intervjupersonerna har haft stor betydelse för att kunna bryta ett beroende samt att kunna kvarstå i drogfrihet. En slutsats som kan dras är att det är viktigt att beakta den andliga dimensionen vid beroendeproblematik. Studiens resultat ligger i linje med vad tidigare forskning visat.

Background: The world of today is immensely interconnected. Over the past decades, national economies have been de-bordered and the promoting of the flows of goods, people, capital and services across the borders is evident, as opposed to when flows only moved within national economies. Former vertical structures of old nations have been replaced by a horizontal flow structure in a complex and intertwined global economy. Attracting flows is essential for the growth and survival of cities. Hubs functions as important connection points for these flows and are therefore highly important. Research procedure: The purpose of this thesis is to describe how city regions function from a hub perspective by mapping the most important hubs in the Oresund Region, and investigating the connectivity and collaboration between these hubs. This study has a qualitative and inductive approach with a case study design and the empirical findings is based on twelve interviews with representatives of different fields. Results: The most important hubs were divided into three categories: transport, economic and infrastructure hubs, illustrated in the hub categorization model. The results indicate that there is a interconnectivity issue with interdependencies between the different hubs in the Oresund Region. This is illustrated through the hub relationship model. Collaboration seems to take place mostly within sectors and through the municipalities..

Denna doktorsavhandling undersöker olika aspekter av automatisk syntaktisk analys av texter på naturligt språk. En parser eller syntaktisk analysator, som vi definierar den i denna avhandling, har till uppgift att skapa en syntaktisk analys för varje mening i en text på naturligt språk. Vår metod är datadriven, vilket innebär att den bygger på maskininlärning från uppmärkta datamängder av naturligt språk, s.k. korpusar. Vår metod är också dependensbaserad, vilket innebär att parsning är en process som bygger en dependensgraf för varje mening, bestående av binära relationer mellan ord. Dessutom introducerar avhandlingen en ny metod för att koda frasstrukturer, en annan syntaktisk representationsform, som dependensgrafer vilka kan avkodas utan att information i frasstrukturen går förlorad. Denna metod möjliggör att en dependensbaserad parser kan användas för att syntaktiskt analysera frasstrukturer. Avhandlingen är baserad på fem artiklar, varav tre artiklar utforskar olika aspekter av maskininlärning för datadriven dependensparsning och två artiklar undersöker metoden för dependensbaserad frasstrukturparsning. Den första artikeln presenterar vår första storskaliga empiriska studie av parsning av naturligt språk (i detta fall svenska) med dependensrepresentationer. En transitionsbaserad deterministisk parsningsalgoritm skapar en dependensgraf för varje mening genom att härleda en sekvens av transitioner, och minnesbaserad inlärning (MBL) används för att förutsäga transitionssekvensen. Den andra artikeln undersöker ytterligare hur maskininlärning kan användas för att vägleda en transitionsbaserad dependensparser. Den empiriska studien jämför två metoder för maskininlärning med fem särdragsmodeller för tre språk (kinesiska, engelska och svenska), och studien visar att supportvektormaskiner (SVM) med lexikaliserade särdragsmodeller är bättre lämpade än MBL för att vägleda en transitionsbaserad dependensparser. Den tredje artikeln sammanfattar vår erfarenhet av att optimera MaltParser, vår implementation av transitionsbaserad dependensparsning, för ett stort antal språk. MaltParser har använts för att analysera över tjugo olika språk och var bland de främsta systemen i CoNLLs utvärdering 2006 och 2007. Den fjärde artikeln är vår första undersökning av dependensbaserad frastrukturparsning med konkurrenskraftiga resultat för parsning av tyska. Den femte och sista artikeln introducerar en förbättrad algoritm för att transformera frasstrukturer till dependensgrafer och tillbaka, vilket gör det möjligt att parsa kontinuerliga och diskontinuerliga frasstrukturer utökade med grammatiska funktioner. / Hall, Johan, 2008. Transition-Based Natural Language Parsing with Dependency and Constituency Representations, Acta Wexionensia No 152/2008. ISSN: 1404-4307, ISBN: 978-91-7636-625-7. Written in English. This thesis investigates different aspects of transition-based syntactic parsing of natural language text, where we view syntactic parsing as the process of mapping sentences in unrestricted text to their syntactic representations. Our parsing approach is data-driven, which means that it relies on machine learning from annotated linguistic corpora. Our parsing approach is also dependency-based, which means that the parsing process builds a dependency graph for each sentence consisting of lexical nodes linked by binary relations called dependencies. However, the output of the parsing process is not restricted to dependency-based representations, and the thesis presents a new method for encoding phrase structure representations as dependency representations that enable an inverse transformation without loss of information. The thesis is based on five papers, where three papers explore different ways of using machine learning to guide a transition-based dependency parser and two papers investigate the method for dependency-based phrase structure parsing. The first paper presents our first large-scale empirical study of parsing a natural language (in this case Swedish) with labeled dependency representations using a transition-based deterministic parsing algorithm, where the dependency graph for each sentence is constructed by a sequence of transitions and memory-based learning (MBL) is used to predict the transition sequence. The second paper further investigates how machine learning can be used for guiding a transition-based dependency parser. The empirical study compares two machine learning methods with five feature models for three languages (Chinese, English and Swedish), and the study shows that support vector machines (SVM) with lexicalized feature models are better suited than MBL for guiding a transition-based dependency parser. The third paper summarizes our experience of optimizing and tuning MaltParser, our implementation of transition-based parsing, for a wide range of languages. MaltParser has been applied to over twenty languages and was one of the top-performing systems in the CoNLL shared tasks of 2006 and 2007. The fourth paper is our first investigation of dependency-based phrase structure parsing with competitive results for parsing German. The fifth paper presents an improved encoding method for transforming phrase structure representations into dependency graphs and back. With this method it is possible to parse continuous and discontinuous phrase structure extended with grammatical functions.

Even though the management of large projects has been studied for many years, the track record is still poor, especially for those projects developing complex systems. This thesis studies projects such as these and attempts to find clues as to why some succeed while others do not. Among the challenges, is the specific yet basic need to create a shared understanding in a group of hundreds engineering specialists with their own ideas (biases) of how things actually work. Further, complex development projects are likely to change, especially those projects involved with new technologies that should be state of the art when they hit the market after several years of development time. Thus, there is a need for a tool that can be used to adapt to changes. An important part of this thesis is the evaluation of different diagram systems that have been used in different development projects. These diagrams function as a device to create a shared understanding of the project and enable those involved to maneuver the project through changes. The evaluation focuses on what the diagrams can express and how easy it is to understand their content. In terms of expressiveness, one of the three evaluated models: the Anatomy Model, answers the largest number of questions relevant to the total project manager. In terms of ease of use, the evaluation shows that the Anatomy did not only answer more questions relevant to the total project manager, but was also easier to maneuver through compared to the alternative models. The thesis concludes that when working with complex development projects, a model like the anatomy provides the project manager with a simple tool that can be used to maneuver through changes and create a communal understanding. Such a simplified model addresses more questions that are relevant to the project manager and is easier to update than the traditional tools that are suggested in most literature. / QC 20100519

Ht 2007

Consistent, accurate and timely data are essential to the functioning of a modern organization. Managing the integrity of an organization’s data assets in a systematic manner is a challenging task in the face of continuous update, transformation and processing to support business operations. Classic approaches to constraint-based integrity focus on logical consistency within a database and reject any transaction that violates consistency, but leave unresolved how to fix or manage violations. More ad hoc approaches focus on the accuracy of the data and attempt to clean data assets after the fact, using queries to flag records with potential violations and using manual efforts to repair. Neither approach satisfactorily addresses the problem from an organizational point of view. In this thesis, we provide a conceptual model of constraint-based integrity management (CBIM) that flexibly combines both approaches in a systematic manner to provide improved integrity management. We perform a gap analysis that examines the criteria that are desirable for efficient management of data integrity. Our approach involves creating a Data Integrity Zone and an On Deck Zone in the database for separating the clean data from data that violates integrity constraints. We provide tool support for specifying constraints in a tabular form and generating triggers that flag violations of dependencies. We validate this by performing case studies on two systems used to manage healthcare data: PAL-IS and iMED-Learn. Our case studies show that using views to implement the zones does not cause any significant increase in the running time of a process.