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Approximately one in fifty US adults are currently under probation or parole supervision (Glaze & Kaeble, 2014). Given this prevalence, it is important to understand the correlates of probation and parole supervision arrangements and outcomes. One important outcome is supervision length adjustments, often made because of a violation revocation or discretionary supervision extension. A supervision length adjustment can result in shortened or extended supervision lengths relative to sentence expiration. Prior research has overlooked organizational and ecological correlates of many probation/parole outcomes, including supervision adjustments. This study contrasted potential supervision adjustments made four years from assignment for 12,320 male and female probationers and parolees sentenced from August 1, 2009 to July 31, 2010 in a local jurisdiction. Supervision adjustment types included on-time completion, shortened supervision, extended supervision, and ongoing or continuing supervision. This study also examined the number of additional supervision days when supervision extensions did occur. Findings showed that agency response to client behavior and organization shaped supervision length adjustments. Some differences in supervision length adjustments also emerged across subgroups of parolees and probationers, and between males and females. One important policy implication is the inequitable adjustments to supervision lengths across subgroups. Another implication is to consider how organizational structure affects adjustments to supervision lengths. Future probation and parole research should carefully consider organizational and social processes when addressing community supervision outcomes. / Criminal Justice

This thesis describes the implementation of a covering algorithm for semantic decomposition of sentences of technical patents. This research complements the ASPIN project that has a long term goal of providing an automated system for digital system synthesis from patents. In order to develop a prototype of the system explained in a patent, a natural language processor (sentence-interpreter) is required. These systems typically attempt to interpret a sentence by syntactic analysis (parsing) followed by semantic analysis. Quite often, the technical narrative contains grammatical errors, incomplete sentences, anaphoric references and typological errors that can cause the grammatical parse to fail. In such situations, an alternate method that uses a repository of pre-compiled, simple sentences (called frames) to analyze the sentences of the patent can be a useful back up. By semantically decomposing the sentences of patents to a set of frames whose meanings are fully understood, the meaning of the patent sentences can be interpreted. This thesis deals with the semantic decomposition of sentences using a branch and bound covering algorithm. The algorithm is implemented in C++. A number of experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of this algorithm. The covering algorithm uses a standard branch and bound algorithm to semantically decompose sentences. The algorithm is fast, flexible and can provide good (100 % coverage for some sentences) coverage results. The system covered 67.68 % of the sentence tokens using 3459 frames in the repository. 54.25% of the frames identified by the system in covers for sentences, were found to be semantically correct. The experiments suggest that the performance of the system can be improved by increasing the number of frames in the repository. / Master of Science

In today’s multicultural society it is increasingly important that information is made available in a way that allows it to reach as many people as possible. The present study investigates the readability of the information provided in English on a Swedish municipality’s website. While Umeå Municipality sets a good example when it comes to providing information in foreign languages, the question is how easy the information is to read. The methods used to measure the readability of the texts were three automated readability formulas as well as additional analyses focusing on sentence structure and the number of clauses per word. The results show that despite obvious efforts to follow the guidelines for providing public information, more attention needs to be given to the form of the texts themselves. The complexity of the texts as gauged by the reading formulas was in all cases greater than what is recommended for information written for the general public. Some of the texts would seem to require the reader to have a college degree to fully comprehend the information. The supplementary analyses, especially when it comes to the number of clauses per sentence, confirmed the complexity of the texts. The importance of ‘writing for your audience’ thus seems to have been neglected for parts of the analysed material, which implies that some readers may not fully understand their rights and responsibilities regarding the areas addressed on the municipality’s website.