The Limited English Proficiency (LEP) population in the United States requires interpreters in order to receive appropriate medical care. However, interpreters are not used consistently in clinical encounters. This study aims to identify the barriers that interfere with providing this service, as well as to propose some possible ways of overcoming these barriers. A systematic review of the literature was conducted using Medline, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), and PsycINFO. Twenty articles that presented barriers to interpreter use were identified. These barriers referred to either professional interpreters or ad hoc interpreters, or were general barriers. The barriers to professional interpreter use most frequently identified related to cost. Most of the cost-related barrier citations were found in studies conducted in the U.S. The barriers to ad hoc interpreter use most frequently identified related to concern about the interpreters ability to interpret. I determined that appropriate provision of interpreters to the LEP community would require four elements: 1) The consistent use of professional interpreters, and the elimination of ad hoc interpreter use. 2) Research into the possible financial benefits that may arise from increased interpreter use, and how the cost of providing interpreters may be offset by the widespread benefits of using them. 3) Professionalization of interpreter services, with quality assurance and standardized training and evaluation of interpreters. 4) Increased education and training for patients and providers about the language services that are available and how to access them, and about how to work with an interpreter efficiently and effectively. One possible solution that would allow the implementation of all of the above elements is a national interpretation service.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-111).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-112).

Digital media collections hold an unprecedented source of knowledge and data about the world. Yet, even at current scales, the data exceeds by many orders of magnitude the amount a single user could browse through in an entire lifetime. Making use of such data requires computational tools that can index, search over, and organize media documents in ways that are meaningful to human users, based on the meaning of their content. This dissertation develops an automated approach to analyzing digital media content based on topic models. Its primary contribution, the Infinite-Word Topic Model (IWTM), helps extend topic modeling to digital media domains by removing model assumptions that do not make sense for them -- in particular, the assumption that documents are composed of discrete, mutually-exclusive words from a fixed-size vocabulary. While conventional topic models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) require that media documents be converted into bags of words, IWTM incorporates clustering into its probabilistic model and treats the vocabulary size as a random quantity to be inferred based on the data. Among its other benefits, IWTM achieves better performance than LDA while automating the selection of the vocabulary size. This dissertation contributes fast, scalable variational inference methods for IWTM that allow the model to be applied to large datasets. Furthermore, it introduces a new method, Incremental Variational Inference (IVI), for training IWTM and other Bayesian non-parametric models efficiently on growing datasets. IVI allows such models to grow in complexity as the dataset grows, as their priors state that they should. Finally, building on IVI, an active learning method for topic models is developed that intelligently samples new data, resulting in models that train faster, achieve higher performance, and use smaller amounts of labeled data. / text

This study discusses topic and focus constructions in spoken Korean within the framework of information structure. Information structure is a part of grammar that deals with the relation between linguistic forms and the mental states of speakers and hearers. Since the different formal realizations of topic and focus constructions in Korean are due to differences in speakers' assumptions about the mental states of hearers, research on Korean topic and focus constructions falls under the proper domain of information structure. Five different topic constructions in Korean are reviewed and their discourse contexts are analyzed; zero pronouns, bare NPs, and right-dislocated NPs are generally used for discourse-active topic referents, and the maliya-construction and nun-marked NPs are generally used for topic referents that are not discourse-active. Sometimes, active topic referents are also marked with --nun when the topic referents have more salient topics already established in the discourse or speakers are considering potential alternatives to the active topic referents. Topics are divided into ratified and ungratified topics according to whether their status as topics is assumed to be taken for granted by hearers. Among the five topic constructions in Korean, zero pronouns, bare NPs and right-dislocated NPs express ratified topics, while the maliya-construction and nunmarked topics express unratified topics. The marker --ka, which has been long regarded as a subject indicator, is reanalyzed, and it is suggested that --ka marks not only the subject but also argument focus and sentence focus. Accessible or active referents can sometimes be marked with --ka, constituting sentence-focus constructions. In those constructions, the propositional content of the sentences expresses some unexpected or surprising event. Also, frequent occurrences of the maker --ka in presupposed subordinate clauses are examined, and it is suggested that --ka can be used as a mere subject indicator, losing its function of indicating focus in presupposed clauses with topic-comment construals, in which there is no actual focus. / text

In recent years the universities have changed from pre-enlightenment "protectors" of societal knowledge to typically modern "business" orientated bureaucracies. It is argued that as a consequence, their status has also changed from one of independent "observer" into that of "product producer"; driven particularly by their newly adopted managerialistic principles, aimed at making them more "business" orientated. This has been fuelled by the domination of a scientistic (Positivist) epistemology throughout the university sector, which emerged from an important philosophical debate, in the sixties, between Kuhn and Popper. Establishing facticity, based upon scientistic methodology, in research as supreme; it allowed for a marriage of convenience between the managerialistic ambitions of the new elite and the worldly theory it purported, as a self-fulfilling justification and prophecy of their actions. Debate in this area has been centred upon the practicalities of managing such a change and its consequences in terms of organisation and management efficiencies. Discussion regarding longer-term effects of whether such a change in the universities, driven in particular by their business schools and senior management, might have a more fundamental impact upon the way we theorise and think about ourselves, is rarely covered. It is contended that such omission is misplaced. The universities' traditional role in society as guardians of our ontological theorectics is being downgraded by increasing demands for them, from government bodies and the like, to behave akin to profit making organisations. This thesis is contending, therefore, that as a consequence of university management search for greater efficiencies, the epistemological frameworks for research, and subsequent theorectics, in the universities have become politicised. It is argued that eventually this will affect society's ontological frameworks and hence change the way we, as individuals, regard our reality. Central to this, is the premise that given the dominant scientistic method, alluded to above, is tainted by political intrusion, it would be inappropriate to use it as a method of analysis. However, it is also contended that constructivist ethnomedology is similarly, and ultimately, dependent upon rationo-factual research and therefore is inappropriate. With the use of a negative dialectic, instituted by early Frankfurt School discussion, this work, therefore, seeks to establish a new facticity independent, universal theorectic based upon proto-epistemological states. The aim is to lay bare the corruptible nature of the relationship between politicised epistemology and its consequential ontological state and thus demonstrate the potentiality of the danger facing our universities and society.

Understanding influence in behavioral data has become increasingly important in analyzing the cause and effect of human behaviors under various scenarios. Influence modeling enables us to learn not only how human behaviors drive the diffusion of memes spread in different kinds of networks, but also the chain reactions evolve in the sequential behaviors of people. In this thesis, I propose to investigate into appropriate probabilistic models for efficiently and effectively modeling influence, and the applications and extensions of the proposed models to analyze behavioral data in computational sustainability and information search. One fundamental problem in influence modeling is the learning of the degree of influence between individuals, which we called social infectivity. In the first part of this work, we study how to efficient and effective learn social infectivity in diffusion phenomenon in social networks and other applications. We replace the pairwise infectivity in the multidimensional Hawkes processes with linear combinations of those time-varying features, and optimize the associated coefficients with lasso regularization on coefficients. In the second part of this work, we investigate the modeling of influence between marked events in the application of energy consumption, which tracks the diffusion of mixed daily routines of household members. Specifically, we leverage temporal and energy consumption information recorded by smart meters in households for influence modeling, through a novel probabilistic model that combines marked point processes with topic models. The learned influence is supposed to reveal the sequential appliance usage pattern of household members, and thereby helps address the problem of energy disaggregation. In the third part of this work, we investigate a complex influence modeling scenario which requires simultaneous learning of both infectivity and influence existence. Specifically, we study the modeling of influence in search behaviors, where the influence tracks the diffusion of mixed search intents of search engine users in information search. We leverage temporal and textual information in query logs for influence modeling, through a novel probabilistic model that combines point processes with topic models. The learned influence is supposed to link queries that serve for the same formation need, and thereby helps address the problem of search task identification. The modeling of influence with the Markov property also help us to understand the chain reaction in the interaction of search engine users with query auto-completion (QAC) engine within each query session. The fourth part of this work studies how a user's present interaction with a QAC engine influences his/her interaction in the next step. We propose a novel probabilistic model based on Markov processes, which leverage such influence in the prediction of users' click choices of suggested queries of QAC engines, and accordingly improve the suggestions to better satisfy users' search intents. In the fifth part of this work, we study the mutual influence between users' behaviors on query auto-completion (QAC) logs and normal click logs across different query sessions. We propose a probabilistic model to explore the correlation between user' behavior patterns on QAC and click logs, and expect to capture the mutual influence between users' behaviors in QAC and click sessions.

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This dissertation is an analysis, assuming the framework of Government and Binding Theory, of the syntactic derivation of comparative correlative constructions (hereafter CCs for short) in Mandarin Chinese. It attempts to evaluate the theoretical adequacy of extant treatments of CCs and propose an alternative analysis to the prevailing adjunct approach. CC constructions exist crosslinguistically. An English example is The more chocolate I eat, the happier I feel. In Chinese, a simplex CC sentence consists of two non-coordinated clauses; the lexical word yue, which indicates degree, is obligatory in both clauses, as illustrated in (1): (1) tianqi yue₁ re, dian-fei yue₂ gao. weather [ YUE₁ hot], electricity-fee [YUE₂ high] `The hotter the weather is, the higher the electricity fee is.' Unlike the English comparative phrase, which has been shown to undergo A-bar movement in earlier studies, the yue-constituent remains in situ. I argue that yue is generated in [Spec, DegP] and behaves as an indefinite in-situ degree element on a par with an in-situ wh-element (Li 1992; Tsai 1994; Cheng and Rooryck 2000; Cheng 2003a, 2003b). The yue-variable in each clause is unselectively bound (Lewis 1975, Heim 1982, Cheng and Huang 1996) by an implicit CORRELATIVITY OPERATOR and does not undergo A-bar movement. In addition to the idiosyncratic in-situ yue-phrase, another property of CCs is the syntactic interdependency between the constitutive clauses. Earlier studies (Dikken 2005, Taylor 2006, 2009, Tsao and Hsiao 2002) treat the preceding clause as an adjunct. However, an adjunct approach cannot account for the property of syntactic interdependency. As an alternative, I assume Rizzi's (1997) work on the Split CP Hypothesis, arguing that Chinese CCs implicate the information structure in the left periphery and that they are a type of Focus construction. A Chinese CC sentence like (1) is projected by a null functional head Foc⁰. The first clause is focused and base-generated in [Spec, FocP] and the second clause is the complement of the null Foc⁰. The [+focus]feature in Foc⁰ licenses the co-occurrence of yue₁ and yue₂. This alternative analysis can capture not only crosslinguistic commonalities but also the language-internal property of topic-prominence in Chinese.

This thesis is concerned with the syntactic properties of cleft constructions in Japanese within the Principles and Parameters framework with some consideration of the Minimalist Program. The constructions in question are divided syntactically into two sub-parts, a focus element and a presuppositional clause. This thesis claims that the focused element's position is not derived via a process of movement such as scrambling, but is instead base-generated in a predicate position occupied by a single constituent. Presuppositional clauses of clefts are argued to involve movement of a null operator, which is analyzed on a par with topicalization. This is supported by various syntactic parallelisms between cleft and topic constructions in this language. While the presuppositional clause is marked by a nominalizer, it is shown that it does not project a nominal category; in this sense, cleft constructions are analogous to head-internal relative clauses. Furthermore, one of the most interesting properties of the cleft construction, the syntactic phenomenon of 'connectivity', is closely examined. I propose that long-distance cleft constructions in Japanese have peculiar structures: a null operator originates adjoined to the highest complement clause, and its thematic position is occupied by pro. This analysis is supported by empirical facts which involve binding relations, weak crossover effects, interactions with another A'-dependency, and clefting adjunct PPs. It is shown that these types of resumptive A '-dependencies are observed across languages as well as in different constructions within the Japanese language. Finally, the discussion is extended to so-called sluicing in Japanese. This thesis observes similar syntactic behavior in sluicing and clefts, which leads to the argument that sluicing sentences are derived from cleft constructions.