In an explorative approach, this thesis draws upon the benefits of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for analysing text with Topic Modelling in an attempt to measure populism in Swedish news. This project breaks new ground in the field of media and communication studies by including 15 200 000 words from Swedish news articles published between 2012 and 2022 and steps into the next generation of news analysis that incorporates data driven methods to unload the burden of quantitative content analysis. By extracting the most salient aspects of populism and feeding them to the Top2Vec algorithm, keywords related to populism is measured over time and space and a new value describing to what degree news agencies is complicit in media populism is developed. Some of the most noticeable findings include, identifying keywords related to populism, Aftonbladet’s elevated degree of media populism and that the focus of Swedish media populism shifts over time, from the “People” to the “Anti-Elite” aspects of populism.

<p>Efficient topic modeling is needed to support applications that aim at identifying main themes from a collection of documents. In this thesis, a reduced vector embedding representation and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are combined to develop a topic modeling strategy that is able to identify representative themes from a large collection of documents. Documents are encoded using a reduced, contextual vector embedding from a general-purpose pre-trained language model (sBERT). A modified PSO algorithm (pPSO) that tracks particle fitness on a dimension-by-dimension basis is then applied to these embeddings to create clusters of related documents. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on three datasets across different domains. The first dataset consists of posts from the online health forum r/Cancer. The second dataset is a collection of NY Times abstracts and is used to compare</p> <p>the proposed model to LDA. The third is a standard benchmark dataset for topic modeling which consists of a collection of messages posted to 20 different news groups. It is used to compare state-of-the-art generative document models (i.e., ETM and NVDM) to pPSO. The results show that pPSO is able to produce interpretable clusters. Moreover, pPSO is able to capture both common topics as well as emergent topics. The topic coherence of pPSO is comparable to that of ETM and its topic diversity is comparable to NVDM. The assignment parity of pPSO on a document completion task exceeded 90% for the 20News-Groups dataset. This rate drops to approximately 30% when pPSO is applied to the same Skip-Gram embedding derived from a limited, corpus specific vocabulary which is used by ETM and NVDM.</p>

In the past decades, networking researchers experienced great changes. Being familiar with the development of networking researches is the first step for most scholars to start their work. The targeted areas, useful documents, and active institutions are helpful to set up the new research. This project is focused on developing an assistant tool based on public accessed papers and information on the Internet that allows researchers to view most cited papers in networking conferences and journals. NLP tools are implemented over crawled full-text in order to classify the papers and extract the keywords. Papers are located based on authors to show the most active countries around the world that are working in this area. References are analyzed to view the most cited topics and detailed paper information. We draw some interesting conclusions from our system, showing that some topics attract more attention in the past decades. / Under de senaste decennierna upplevde nätverksundersökningar stora förändringar. Att känna till utvecklingen av nätverksundersökningar är det första steget för de flesta forskare att starta sitt arbete. De riktade områdena, användbara dokument och aktiva institutioner är användbara för att skapa den nya forskningen. Projektet fokuserade på att utveckla ett assistentverktyg baserat på offentliga åtkomstpapper och information via internet. Som gör det möjligt för forskare att se de mest citerade artiklarna i nätverkskonferenser och tidskrifter. NLP- verktyg implementeras över genomsökt fulltext för att klassificera papperet och extrahera nyckelorden. Artiklar är baserade på författare för att visa de mest aktiva länderna runt om i världen som arbetar inom detta område. Hänvisningar analyseras för att se det mest citerade ämnet och detaljerad pappersinformation. Vi drar några intressanta slutsatser från vårt system och visar att något ämne inte lockar till sig mer under de senaste decennierna.

Understanding the complex nature of social-ecological cascades, or chain reactions of events that lead to widespread change in a system, is crucial for navigating the challenges they present. Emerging pests and pathogens, such as the fall armyworm, provide an opportunity to study these cascades in greater detail. I use topic modeling of digital news articles to investigate the potential social-ecological cascades associated with the ongoing fall armyworm invasion of multiple geographic regions. My findings reveal regional thematic shifts in the popular news media discourse surrounding the fall armyworm invasion. Notably, in the discourse surrounding Oceania, I observed a pronounced focus on invasion preparation, a theme significantly more emphasized compared to regions like Africa and Asia. These regional variations shed light on some of the localized priorities in addressing this invasive species. By highlighting the significance of employing comprehensive case studies of emerging pests and pathogens, this research underscores the need for more in- depth analyses of social-ecological cascades to better manage and mitigate their impacts.

<p>The present study aims to examine the grammar of Spanish heritage children in relation to the syntax-discourse interface by analyzing the distribution of subject pronouns in focus and topic contexts. Focus and topic are related to the information structure of a clause, the former refers to new information of the sentence and the latter indicates old or known information (Lozano-Pozo, 2003). Studies exploring this phenomenon in various combinations of languages and L2 populations have found a clear overextension and overuse of overt subject pronouns in topic contexts in pro-drop languages, where the preferred option is the null pronoun, due to cross-linguistic influence from the L1 (Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1999; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006; Belletti et al., 2007; Sorace et al., 2009). Considering the results of previous research, this study examines the extent to which Spanish heritage speakers exhibit knowledge of subject pronoun distribution in focus and topic contexts by comparing them to their monolingual counterparts.</p> <p>Thirteen child heritage speakers of Spanish and twenty-seven monolingual children completed a structured elicitation task which consisted of a story followed by a question asking about an embedded subject (Focus condition) or an embedded direct object (Topic condition). Results revealed no overextension of overt subject pronouns in topic contexts due to cross-linguistic influence from English. However, differences were found in the focus condition. Heritage children diverged from the monolingual group since they produced considerably fewer instances of overt subject pronouns. It is hypothesized that heritage children are opting for the null pronoun option as the default option, which suggests they are prolonging the Null Subject Stage (Hyams, 1986). This finding points to protracted development due to a lack of activation of the language. Further findings are discussed taking into consideration current approaches that examine the effects of language dominance, exposure, and use.</p>

In order to better identify and understand the differences between Japanese and English, the task of giving walking directions was used. Japanese and American public facilities (10 each) were randomly chosen from which to collect data over the phone in order to examine these differences based on the following five communication styles: 1) politeness, 2) indirectness, 3) self-effacement, 4) back-channel feedback (Aizuchi), 5) and other linguistic and cognitive differences in relation to space and giving directions. The study confirmed what the author reviewed in the literature: Japanese are more polite, English speakers tend to give directions simply and precisely, Japanese prefer pictorial information and most Americans prefer linguistic information, Japanese is a topic-oriented language and also an addressee-oriented language. The information revealed from this study will help Japanese learners develop important skills needed for developing proficiency in the target language and also teach important differences between the two languages.

Background: Non-fungible token (NFT) trade has grown drastically over recent years. While scholarship on the technical aspects and potential applications of NFTs has been steadily increasing, less attention has been directed to the human perception of or attitudes toward this new type of digital asset; in particular, about potential concerns that users may have around the use of NFTs.  Aim: The aim of this research is to investigate what concerns, if any, are expressed in relation to non-fungible tokens by those who engage with NFTs on social media platform Twitter, with special attention to possible concerns about crime, using NFT marketplaces, and market dynamics.  Methods: This research offers a mixed methods, largely qualitative, study. The method of data gathering is online non-participant observation of NFT-related posts and conversations on the social media platform Twitter. The methods of data analysis are topic modelling and thematic analysis, with additional attention to visual analysis of images and animated or video material associated with posts. Two datasets (with 18,373 and 36,354 individual tweet records respectively) were obtained for quantitative analysis; two smaller-scale datasets (both ca. 1000 records, with supplementary conversation details and visual material) were obtained for qualitative analysis.  Conclusion: This study proposes an interpretation of NFTs as functioning as ‘happy objects’ in NFT conversations on Twitter, wherein NFTs are represented as digital objects that hold a ‘promise’ of the happiness or fulfilment associated with financial gain. Concerns around NFTs as expressed on Twitter fall into broadly three categories: (1) concerns relating to not being to able to engage in, or being locked out of the possibility of, NFT trade; (2) concerns about the conditions, security and safety of engaging in NFT trade; and (3) concerns about whether any of the anticipated (financial) rewards or gains from engaging in NFTs will actually be obtained. Hence, many of the concerns that come up within NFT conversations on Twitter relate to conditions that may stand in the way of these happy object in fact bringing about their desired result. Overall, this study offers a better understanding of the expressions of attitudes of concern, uncertainty and possible experience of barriers associated with NFT trading. These findings contribute to theoretical insight, and can moreover function as a basis for developing practical (design or policy) interventions.

Distinguishing between information and disinformation is an ever growing issue. The dramatic structure of a conspiracy theory easily captures a large audience and with the advent of social media, this disinformation can spread at an ever growing rate. This is especially true with the infodemic following the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, where there was a drastic increase in Covid-19 related misinformation on social media. When misinformation replaces fact, some people will inevitably follow borderline dangerous advice. This could unfortunately be seen in the ivermection issue where people injected this substance in hope of preventing/curing a Covid-19 infection. This is why finding patterns in disinformation that distinguishes it from facts would allow us to take measures against the spread of conspiracy theories. We have found patterns in our dataset suggesting that there is a significant difference in the language patterns for terms relating to conspiracy theories, and non-conspiratorial terms. We find that the sentiment of conspiracy theories is very volatile when compared to that of non-conspiratorial terms which follow a more neutral pattern in terms of sentiment. Suggesting that the language usage in a post can be used as a factor when determining the credibility of its content. We also find that conspiracy theories tend to see a drastic increase in mentions when previously being relatively lowin mentions. The result of this thesis could therefore be used as a start for developing tools and processes which would seek to combat the spread of conspiracy theories and limit the potential harm that could come from them.

No description available.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine the association between baseline patient recovery expectations and outcomes following physical therapy care. METHODS: PubMed, CINAHL Complete, PEDro, SPORTDiscus, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and PsycINFO were searched from inception to February 2021. Concepts represented in the search included physical therapy, patient expectations, patient outcomes, and their relevant synonyms. Two reviewers independently screened studies of article abstracts and full texts. Eligibility criteria included English language studies that evaluated adults seeking physical therapist intervention for any health condition where both patient outcome (recovery) expectations and functional or other outcome measures were reported. Methodologic standards were assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Program criteria. Data were extracted using a custom template for this review with planned descriptive reporting of results. Vote counting was used to measure reported outcomes. RESULTS: Twenty-one studies were included in this review, representing 4879 individuals. Studies were most commonly prospective cohort studies or secondary analyses of controlled trials. Varied expectation, outcome, and statistical measures that generally link patient recovery expectations with self-reported outcomes in musculoskeletal practice were used. CONCLUSION: Patient recovery expectations are commonly associated with patient outcomes in musculoskeletal physical therapy. IMPACT: Evidence supports measuring baseline patient expectations as part of a holistic examination process.