English-language news articles are no longer necessarily the best source of information. The Web allows information to spread more quickly and travel farther: first-person accounts of breaking news events pop up on social media, and foreign-language news articles are accessible to, if not immediately understandable by, English-speaking users. This thesis focuses on developing automatic summarization techniques for these new sources of information. We focus on summarizing two specific new sources of information: personal narratives, first-person accounts of exciting or unusual events that are readily found in blog entries and other social media posts, and non-English documents, which must first be translated into English, often introducing translation errors that complicate the summarization process. Personal narratives are a very new area of interest in natural language processing research, and they present two key challenges for summarization. First, unlike many news articles, whose lead sentences serve as summaries of the most important ideas in the articles, personal narratives provide no such shortcuts for determining where important information occurs in within them; second, personal narratives are written informally and colloquially, and unlike news articles, they are rarely edited, so they require heavier editing and rewriting during the summarization process. Non-English documents, whether news or narrative, present yet another source of difficulty on top of any challenges inherent to their genre: they must be translated into English, potentially introducing translation errors and disfluencies that must be identified and corrected during summarization. The bulk of this thesis is dedicated to addressing the challenges of summarizing personal narratives found on the Web. We develop a two-stage summarization system for personal narrative that first extracts sentences containing important content and then rewrites those sentences into summary-appropriate forms. Our content extraction system is inspired by contextualist narrative theory, using changes in writing style throughout a narrative to detect sentences containing important information; it outperforms both graph-based and neural network approaches to sentence extraction for this genre. Our paraphrasing system rewrites the extracted sentences into shorter, standalone summary sentences, learning to mimic the paraphrasing choices of human summarizers more closely than can traditional lexicon- or translation-based paraphrasing approaches. We conclude with a chapter dedicated to summarizing non-English documents written in low-resource languages – documents that would otherwise be unreadable for English-speaking users. We develop a cross-lingual summarization system that performs even heavier editing and rewriting than does our personal narrative paraphrasing system; we create and train on large amounts of synthetic errorful translations of foreign-language documents. Our approach produces fluent English summaries from disdisfluent translations of non-English documents, and it generalizes across languages.

[Abstract]: This research responded to calls in the literature for more studies into subjective components of student stress as well as for innovative studies of appropriate counselling interventions. An innovative, individualised, body-mind intervention was offered to university students experiencing emotional stress overwhelm. Integral to the intervention was an extensive list of feelings, representing the approach-avoidance structure of the motivational system. Feelings qualitatively differentiate emotional experiences, and the list was found to be useful for identifying the feelings around emotional experiences. It was proposed that how one thinks about feelings is a key to resolving emotional stress and would facilitate the flourishing of life.There have been recent calls for development of first-person methodologies for investigating experiences, and, since the intervention was individualised, analysis of the unique data set took a narrative interpretive approach. Narrative data, evoked by the feelings list, were interpreted to formulate students’ “stories of stress” then analysed to study their stressful emotional experiences.This study demonstrates an innovative method for resolving emotional stress. Feelings were identified clearly, prompting students to think differently about emotional experiences. The study also demonstrates a method for researching those experiences of emotion. Analyses of consultants’ notes highlighted inter-connections and relationships between feelings and experiences throughout clients’ life-stories. Analyses of the data demonstrated a way of making sense of “emotional stress” and how the use of the feelings list could facilitate an individual’s thinking differently about experiences and resolving personal issues. For the participants of this study, feelings of grief and guilt were identified more than feelings of fear of loss for the issues discussed, suggesting that student's behaviours were motivated more by guilt than by fear. The study concludes with a discussion of how the research contributes to the counselling field and with suggestions for continuing research.

<p>The Swedish school law says that students who need special education should have all the support they need to reach the qualification that is set up. The arrangements have to be written down in an Individual education plan (IEP). Before the IEP is set up there has to be an investigation about what kind of support and measures the student needs to reach the qualification that is set up. The aim of this study is to examine student’s participation in school and in the progress with their own IEP.</p><p>I have accomplished a qualitative study by interviewing eight students during the letter part in the nine-year school. Each student has an IEP. My study has been accomplished in a first person perspective where I have rendered the student’s own stories as I understood them. The result shows that the student’s participation varies between active and passive participation independent of whether the participation is social or task-orientated. The main reason for the students to come to school is to join their friends. The result also shows that the students describe that they are participating in school and in the progress with their IEP even if their participation often is described as a passive involvement. Connecting to earlier researches shows that participation is more often recognised when the respondents are adults in school than if the respondents are students.</p><p>My conclusion of this study is that students have to participate earlier and more often in the junior school. That will lead to more engagement and motivation and the students will take more responsibility for learning in school. In that way they will get more knowledge according to our curriculum which is necessary for the examination in the ninth year.</p> / <p>I skolans styrdokument står att elever i behov av särskilt stöd ska få det stöd som krävs för att de ska ha möjlighet att nå målen. Detta stöd ska dokumenteras i ett åtgärdsprogram där mål och åtgärder ska beskrivas. Innan själva åtgärdsprogrammet upprättas ska det göras en kartläggning av vilket behov av stöd som krävs för att eleven ska ges möjlighet att nå målen. I denna studie vill jag undersöka hur några elever i grundskolans senare år upplever skolan och då med särskilt fokus på hur de ser på sin delaktighet i skolan och i arbetet med sitt åtgärdsprogram..</p><p>Jag har genomfört en kvalitativ studie genom att intervjua åtta elever i grundskolans senare år med upprättade åtgärdsprogram. Studien har genomförts ur ett elevperspektiv där jag har återgett elevernas beskrivningar så som jag har uppfattat dem. Resultatet visar att elevernas delaktighet varierar mellan aktiv och passiv delaktighet oberoende av om delaktigheten är social eller uppgiftsorienterad. Aktiv delaktighet kräver motivation och engagemang. Med passiv delaktighet avser jag ett deltagande utan engagemang eller motivation. Resultatet visar också att eleverna i första hand kommer till skolan för att träffa och umgås med kamrater. När det gäller delaktighet i skolan och i arbetet med sitt åtgärdsprogram visar studien att eleverna anser att de varit delaktiga även om delaktighet ofta beskrivs som ett passivt deltagande. Vid jämförelser med tidigare forskning framkommer att elevers delaktighet beskrivs större i de studier som genomförts med skolpersonal som informanter än i de studier som genomförts med elever som informanter.</p><p>Min slutsats av denna studie blir att elever behöver göras delaktiga oftare och tidigare i skolåren för att eleverna ska känna motivation och engagemang för sitt lärande. Därmed får eleverna den kunskap som är nödvändig för att efter nionde skolåret nå de mål som beskrivs i läroplan och kursplaner.</p>

The Swedish school law says that students who need special education should have all the support they need to reach the qualification that is set up. The arrangements have to be written down in an Individual education plan (IEP). Before the IEP is set up there has to be an investigation about what kind of support and measures the student needs to reach the qualification that is set up. The aim of this study is to examine student’s participation in school and in the progress with their own IEP. I have accomplished a qualitative study by interviewing eight students during the letter part in the nine-year school. Each student has an IEP. My study has been accomplished in a first person perspective where I have rendered the student’s own stories as I understood them. The result shows that the student’s participation varies between active and passive participation independent of whether the participation is social or task-orientated. The main reason for the students to come to school is to join their friends. The result also shows that the students describe that they are participating in school and in the progress with their IEP even if their participation often is described as a passive involvement. Connecting to earlier researches shows that participation is more often recognised when the respondents are adults in school than if the respondents are students. My conclusion of this study is that students have to participate earlier and more often in the junior school. That will lead to more engagement and motivation and the students will take more responsibility for learning in school. In that way they will get more knowledge according to our curriculum which is necessary for the examination in the ninth year. / I skolans styrdokument står att elever i behov av särskilt stöd ska få det stöd som krävs för att de ska ha möjlighet att nå målen. Detta stöd ska dokumenteras i ett åtgärdsprogram där mål och åtgärder ska beskrivas. Innan själva åtgärdsprogrammet upprättas ska det göras en kartläggning av vilket behov av stöd som krävs för att eleven ska ges möjlighet att nå målen. I denna studie vill jag undersöka hur några elever i grundskolans senare år upplever skolan och då med särskilt fokus på hur de ser på sin delaktighet i skolan och i arbetet med sitt åtgärdsprogram.. Jag har genomfört en kvalitativ studie genom att intervjua åtta elever i grundskolans senare år med upprättade åtgärdsprogram. Studien har genomförts ur ett elevperspektiv där jag har återgett elevernas beskrivningar så som jag har uppfattat dem. Resultatet visar att elevernas delaktighet varierar mellan aktiv och passiv delaktighet oberoende av om delaktigheten är social eller uppgiftsorienterad. Aktiv delaktighet kräver motivation och engagemang. Med passiv delaktighet avser jag ett deltagande utan engagemang eller motivation. Resultatet visar också att eleverna i första hand kommer till skolan för att träffa och umgås med kamrater. När det gäller delaktighet i skolan och i arbetet med sitt åtgärdsprogram visar studien att eleverna anser att de varit delaktiga även om delaktighet ofta beskrivs som ett passivt deltagande. Vid jämförelser med tidigare forskning framkommer att elevers delaktighet beskrivs större i de studier som genomförts med skolpersonal som informanter än i de studier som genomförts med elever som informanter. Min slutsats av denna studie blir att elever behöver göras delaktiga oftare och tidigare i skolåren för att eleverna ska känna motivation och engagemang för sitt lärande. Därmed får eleverna den kunskap som är nödvändig för att efter nionde skolåret nå de mål som beskrivs i läroplan och kursplaner.

La notion d’altérité circule avec insistance dans la conscience collective contemporaine, mais, à ma connaissance, il n’y a pas d’ouvrage critique qui aborde simultanément la spécificité de différentes sortes d’altérité dans la fiction pour en saisir les formes, la signification et les enjeux, surtout à partir de la perspective de l’Autre. Ce travail organise l’étude de la représentation de trois formes d’altérité dans six romans contemporains français, québécois et francophones dans lesquels l’Autre est le sujet du discours : 1. L’étranger : La dot de Sara (Agnant, 1995) et Un aller simple (van Cauwelaert, 1994) ; 2. La folie : Moha le fou Moha le sage (Ben Jelloun, 1978) et La chaise au fond de l’œil (Aude, [1979] 1997) ; 3. La pauvreté : L’exil aux portes du paradis (Dahan, 1993) et Conte d’asphalte (Calife, 2007). Mon objectif principal est de cerner la représentation textuelle de ces formes d’altérité ainsi que leur rôle et leur signification quand la diégèse adopte la perspective d’un personnage qui exprime lui-même sa dissemblance et son aliénation potentielle. Quand l’Autre prend la parole, son statut est entièrement bouleversé, car il ne s’agit plus d’une représentation « traduite » de son expérience ou d’une appréhension de ce personnage par un tiers. Mon travail révèle selon la perspective du marginalisé soit une transformation dans la signification de l’altérité soit un brouillage des frontières entre la marge et le centre qui remet en question, dans certains cas, l’existence même de l’altérité. Cette étude dégage également les caractéristiques discursives communes et distinctives des formes de l’altérité. En outre, elle met en lumière l’instabilité du statut Autre dans le texte romanesque : ce statut peut évoluer, se transformer et parfois même disparaître alors que, dans d’autres circonstances, il peut être un facteur identitaire incontournable et immuable. La multiplicité de ces variations illustre la complexité de chaque manifestation d’altérité et la flexibilité de la notion que le roman d’expression française utilise de façon centrale et critique. Cette thèse contribue ainsi à l’enrichissement de notre compréhension de l’exploitation littéraire des formes de l’altérité, phénomène qui marque de manière importante la littérature contemporaine.

La notion d’altérité circule avec insistance dans la conscience collective contemporaine, mais, à ma connaissance, il n’y a pas d’ouvrage critique qui aborde simultanément la spécificité de différentes sortes d’altérité dans la fiction pour en saisir les formes, la signification et les enjeux, surtout à partir de la perspective de l’Autre. Ce travail organise l’étude de la représentation de trois formes d’altérité dans six romans contemporains français, québécois et francophones dans lesquels l’Autre est le sujet du discours : 1. L’étranger : La dot de Sara (Agnant, 1995) et Un aller simple (van Cauwelaert, 1994) ; 2. La folie : Moha le fou Moha le sage (Ben Jelloun, 1978) et La chaise au fond de l’œil (Aude, [1979] 1997) ; 3. La pauvreté : L’exil aux portes du paradis (Dahan, 1993) et Conte d’asphalte (Calife, 2007). Mon objectif principal est de cerner la représentation textuelle de ces formes d’altérité ainsi que leur rôle et leur signification quand la diégèse adopte la perspective d’un personnage qui exprime lui-même sa dissemblance et son aliénation potentielle. Quand l’Autre prend la parole, son statut est entièrement bouleversé, car il ne s’agit plus d’une représentation « traduite » de son expérience ou d’une appréhension de ce personnage par un tiers. Mon travail révèle selon la perspective du marginalisé soit une transformation dans la signification de l’altérité soit un brouillage des frontières entre la marge et le centre qui remet en question, dans certains cas, l’existence même de l’altérité. Cette étude dégage également les caractéristiques discursives communes et distinctives des formes de l’altérité. En outre, elle met en lumière l’instabilité du statut Autre dans le texte romanesque : ce statut peut évoluer, se transformer et parfois même disparaître alors que, dans d’autres circonstances, il peut être un facteur identitaire incontournable et immuable. La multiplicité de ces variations illustre la complexité de chaque manifestation d’altérité et la flexibilité de la notion que le roman d’expression française utilise de façon centrale et critique. Cette thèse contribue ainsi à l’enrichissement de notre compréhension de l’exploitation littéraire des formes de l’altérité, phénomène qui marque de manière importante la littérature contemporaine.

This dissertation examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality as they are negotiated through a variety of (new) media contexts. The dissertation demonstrates that media technologies in general, and videogames in particular, serve an existential or “death denying” function, which insulates individuals from the terror of mortality. The dissertation also discusses the hero as a rhetorical trope, and suggests that its relationship with immortality makes it a particularly powerful persuasive device. Chapter one provides a historical overview of the hero figure and its relationship with immortality, particularly within the context of ancient Greece. Chapter two examines the material means by which media technologies serve a death denying function, via “symbolic immortality” (inscription), and the McLuhanian concept of extension. Chapter three examines the prevalence of the hero and villain figures in propaganda, with particular attention paid to the use of visual propaganda in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter four situates the videogame as an inherently heroic, death denying medium; videogames can extend the player’s sense of self, provide quantifiable victory criteria, and allow players to participate in “heroic” events. Chapter five examines the soldier-as-hero motif as it appears in two popular genres, the First Person Shooter, and Role-Playing Game. Particular attention is paid to the Call of Duty series and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Chapter six outlines an “epistemological exercise,” which attempts to empirically test the claims made in the previous chapters via Terror Management Theory, an experimental paradigm which examines the relationship between mortality, self-esteem, and ideology. The conclusion discusses how videogames can contest prevailing views of the heroic, and calls for a departure from contemporary game design practices.

This dissertation examines how commercially successful military-themed video games produced after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are crafted, marketed, and played with the goal of understanding the interlocking technological, cultural, and social practices that contribute to their interactive pleasures. The systematic inquiry into the production and experience of media pleasure carries with it vexing questions about how such affect is created and how it is situated within broader cultural fields. This interdisciplinary project accordingly utilizes multiple methods including close textual readings of seminal games, a critical discourse analysis of marketing materials, and an ethnography and focus group of a war gaming fan community to track how these sites of practice give post-9/11 military-themed gameplay its distinctive experiential character and cultural import. The case studies examined herein reveal that the affective dimensions of militarized gameplay are intimately linked to the political and cultural forces undergirding their production, marketing, and reception, and that the games industry mobilizes anxieties about terrorism to entice gamers into virtually striking back against foreign aggressors. / text

Traditional computer vision algorithms try to understand the world using visible light cameras. However, there are inherent limitations of this type of data source. First, visible light images are sensitive to illumination changes and background clutter. Second, the 3D structural information of the scene is lost when projecting the 3D world to 2D images. Recovering the 3D information from 2D images is a challenging problem. Range sensors have existed for over thirty years, which capture 3D characteristics of the scene. However, earlier range sensors were either too expensive, difficult to use in human environments, slow at acquiring data, or provided a poor estimation of distance. Recently, the easy access to the RGBD data at real-time frame rate is leading to a revolution in perception and inspired many new research using RGBD data. I propose algorithms to detect persons and understand the activities using RGBD data. I demonstrate the solutions to many computer vision problems may be improved with the added depth channel. The 3D structural information may give rise to algorithms with real-time and view-invariant properties in a faster and easier fashion. When both data sources are available, the features extracted from the depth channel may be combined with traditional features computed from RGB channels to generate more robust systems with enhanced recognition abilities, which may be able to deal with more challenging scenarios. As a starting point, the first problem is to find the persons of various poses in the scene, including moving or static persons. Localizing humans from RGB images is limited by the lighting conditions and background clutter. Depth image gives alternative ways to find the humans in the scene. In the past, detection of humans from range data is usually achieved by tracking, which does not work for indoor person detection. In this thesis, I propose a model based approach to detect the persons using the structural information embedded in the depth image. I propose a 2D head contour model and a 3D head surface model to look for the head-shoulder part of the person. Then, a segmentation scheme is proposed to segment the full human body from the background and extract the contour. I also give a tracking algorithm based on the detection result. I further research on recognizing human actions and activities. I propose two features for recognizing human activities. The first feature is drawn from the skeletal joint locations estimated from a depth image. It is a compact representation of the human posture called histograms of 3D joint locations (HOJ3D). This representation is view-invariant and the whole algorithm runs at real-time. This feature may benefit many applications to get a fast estimation of the posture and action of the human subject. The second feature is a spatio-temporal feature for depth video, which is called Depth Cuboid Similarity Feature (DCSF). The interest points are extracted using an algorithm that effectively suppresses the noise and finds salient human motions. DCSF is extracted centered on each interest point, which forms the description of the video contents. This descriptor can be used to recognize the activities with no dependence on skeleton information or pre-processing steps such as motion segmentation, tracking, or even image de-noising or hole-filling. It is more flexible and widely applicable to many scenarios. Finally, all the features herein developed are combined to solve a novel problem: first-person human activity recognition using RGBD data. Traditional activity recognition algorithms focus on recognizing activities from a third-person perspective. I propose to recognize activities from a first-person perspective with RGBD data. This task is very novel and extremely challenging due to the large amount of camera motion either due to self exploration or the response of the interaction. I extracted 3D optical flow features as the motion descriptor, 3D skeletal joints features as posture descriptors, spatio-temporal features as local appearance descriptors to describe the first-person videos. To address the ego-motion of the camera, I propose an attention mask to guide the recognition procedures and separate the features on the ego-motion region and independent-motion region. The 3D features are very useful at summarizing the discerning information of the activities. In addition, the combination of the 3D features with existing 2D features brings more robust recognition results and make the algorithm capable of dealing with more challenging cases. / text

This dissertation examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality as they are negotiated through a variety of (new) media contexts. The dissertation demonstrates that media technologies in general, and videogames in particular, serve an existential or “death denying” function, which insulates individuals from the terror of mortality. The dissertation also discusses the hero as a rhetorical trope, and suggests that its relationship with immortality makes it a particularly powerful persuasive device. Chapter one provides a historical overview of the hero figure and its relationship with immortality, particularly within the context of ancient Greece. Chapter two examines the material means by which media technologies serve a death denying function, via “symbolic immortality” (inscription), and the McLuhanian concept of extension. Chapter three examines the prevalence of the hero and villain figures in propaganda, with particular attention paid to the use of visual propaganda in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter four situates the videogame as an inherently heroic, death denying medium; videogames can extend the player’s sense of self, provide quantifiable victory criteria, and allow players to participate in “heroic” events. Chapter five examines the soldier-as-hero motif as it appears in two popular genres, the First Person Shooter, and Role-Playing Game. Particular attention is paid to the Call of Duty series and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Chapter six outlines an “epistemological exercise,” which attempts to empirically test the claims made in the previous chapters via Terror Management Theory, an experimental paradigm which examines the relationship between mortality, self-esteem, and ideology. The conclusion discusses how videogames can contest prevailing views of the heroic, and calls for a departure from contemporary game design practices.