This thesis explores the nature of voice in Malagasy, a language spoken in Madagascar. In chapter 2, it is claimed that different passives promote arguments from different structural positions. Evidence is provided for a particular position, [Spec, v2P], where a certain class of elements ("displaced themes") may be generated. One particular passive, the a-prefix, promotes to subject elements in this position. In chapter 3, arguments are presented in favour of a structural analysis of circumstantial topic (CT). CT morphology licenses all arguments of the verb. Due to a requirement that all clauses have a subject (the Extended Projection Principle), some element other than a DP structurally Case marked by the verb must raise to subject. Finally, chapter 4 addresses the left periphery in the Malagasy clause, in particular the structural positions of topic and focus.

Trisdešimtųjų kartos poetų Martinaičio ir Juškaičio kūrybos semantinį ir idėjinį įprasminimą padeda suprasti šventumo topikos horizontas. Šventumo prasmių sklaida jų poezijoje atliepia individualiai ir tuo pačiu bendrai suvokto šventumo poetinę paradigmą. Šventumo apraiškas aktualizuojantys poetiniai motyvai, įvaizdžiai, gyvenimo modeliai reprezentuoja religinę ir filosofinę senosios valstietiškos kultūros tradiciją bei jos hermeneutinę situaciją modernaus poetinio diskurso kontekste. Šventojo laiko, kraštovaizdžio, dieviškos esmės suvokimo bruožai tampa parankia semantine ir idėjine orientacija, leidžiančia atskleisti Martinaičio ir Juškaičio vertybines prasmes jų gyvenimo ir kūrybos tradicijoje. Šio darbo objektas – dviejų XX amžiaus 30-ųjų kartos poetų (J. Juškaičio ir M.Martinaičio) kūryba šventumo topikos kontekste. Minėtų poetų kūryboje šventumo topika išryškėja kaip individualų kūrybinį braižą implikuojanti prasmė ir tuo pačiu bendrą šventumo suvokimą to meto istoriniame kontekste išryškinanti vertybė. Šio darbo tiriamoji problema – kaip sakralybės nuvertinimo ir socialinių kataklizmų metu gimusioje poezijoje kuriama moderni šventumo prasmė, kokie panašūs ir skirtingi archetipai išryškėja perkuriant krikščioniškas ir indoeuropietiškas šventumo paradigmos prasmes. / The horizon of sanctity topics helps to perceive semantic and ideological implication of the poets Martinaitis and Juškaitis of the generation of thirties. The dispersion of sanctity meanings in their poetry is appealing individually and at the same time helps to conceive the poetical paradigm of sanctity. The motives, which actualize the manifestations of sanctity, images and life models, represent religious and philosophical tradition of the old peasantry culture and its hermeutic situation in the context of modern poetical discourse. The features of sacred conception, landscape and divine essence become a handy semantic and ideological orientation, which allows revealing valuable senses of Martinaitis and Juškaitis in the tradition of their life and creation. The object of the present work is creation of 2 generation poets of thirties of XX century (J.Juškaitis and M.Martinaitis) in the context of sanctity topics. The topics of the mentioned poets’ sanctity reveals itself as the sense, which implies the individual creational script and the value, which at the same time highlights the general conception of sanctity in the historical context. The research problem of the present work is how in the poetry, born during sanctity depreciation and social cataclysms, the sense of sanctity is created, what similar and different archetypes are revealed by recreating the senses of Christian and indo-European sanctity paradigm.

Within a theoretical framework that combines generative X-bar syntax (Chomsky 1986), a compositional interpretive semantics and elements of Aristotelian logic, this thesis studies the nature of the syntactic and semantic constituents involved in the subject-predicate relations of elementary sentences containing 'be'. Interpretation is characterized in terms of the entities of various types that speakers intend to refer to and the various ontological types that the referents are said to belong to. 'Be' is analyzed as a single lexical item. This analysis unifies all syntactic functions (e.g., auxiliary, copula, main verb) and all "senses" of 'be' (e.g., definitional, equative, predicative, etc.). Conceptually, 'be' in English is an explicit sign of attribution. The propositional content of simple sentences of the form (NP be XP) is the attribution of a certain ontological type or types to the referent(s) of the subject NP. Although the value of postulating a single ontological category to account for all the entities that speakers can refer to and talk about (such as an Aristotelian substance) is questionable, nevertheless, such categories and types seem pertinent for linguistic analysis. With respect to linguistic inference, pronominalization, and question words, an analysis based on ontological types is shown to be more explanatory than one based on the assignment of a fixed set of thematic relations to arguments.

This thesis investigates the rhythm and mean pitch of the English of Māori speakers. Recordings are analysed from speakers who have varying degrees of fluency and socialisation in Māori. The rhythm and mean pitch of their English language recordings are measured and analysed in order to address two questions. The first part addresses the question, ‘Has the distinctive syllable-timed rhythm of modern Māori English developed from the mora-timed rhythm of the Māori language?’ Changes in the rhythm of the English of Māori speakers are measured over time. The rhythm of these speakers is then compared with age-matched Pākehā English speakers. The results show that the distinctive syllable-timed rhythm has indeed developed from the mora-timed rhythm of the Māori language and the use of this rhythm is related to the degree of Māori identity felt by the speaker. The second part is also concerned with prosody and addresses the question, ‘Are rhythm and mean pitch influenced by topic?’ This is investigated by topic tagging the recordings and comparing the rhythm and mean pitch of each tagged section of speech. Two sets of topic tags are used; Set One has tags representing five categories (Subject, Referent, Location, Time and Attitude) and Set Two has only one tag per topic. The results suggest that mean pitch is not influenced by topic but is higher in sections of quoted speech than in regular speech. The subtle variations observed in rhythm are highly individualised and are influenced most strongly by the referent of the topic and the degree of affinity felt towards that referent.

A software Bug report contains information about the bug in the form of problem description and comments using natural language texts. Managing reported bugs is a significant challenge for a project manager when the number of bugs for a software project is large. Prior to the assignment of a newly reported bug to an appropriate developer, the triager (e.g., manager) attempts to categorize it into existing categories and looks for duplicate bugs. The goal is to reuse existing knowledge to fix or resolve the new bug, and she often spends a lot of time in reading a number of bug reports. When fixing or resolving a bug, a developer also consults with a series of relevant bug reports from the repository in order to maximize the knowledge required for the fixation. It is also preferable that developers new to a project first familiarize themselves with the project along with the reported bugs before actually working on the project. Because of the sheer numbers and size of the bug reports, manually analyzing a collection of bug reports is time-consuming and ineffective. One of the ways to mitigate the problem is to analyze summaries of the bug reports instead of analyzing full bug reports, and there have been a number of summarization techniques proposed in the literature. Most of these techniques generate extractive summaries of bug reports. However, it is not clear how useful those generated extractive summaries are, in particular when the developers do not have prior knowledge of the bug reports. In order to better understand the usefulness of the bug report summaries, in this thesis, we first reimplement a state of the art unsupervised summarization technique and evaluate it with a user study with nine participants. Although in our study, 70% of the time participants marked our developed summaries as a reliable means of comprehending the software bugs, the study also reports a practical problem with extractive summaries. An extractive summary is often created by choosing a certain number of statements from the bug report. The statements are extracted out of their contexts, and thus often lose their consistency, which makes it hard for a manager or a developer to comprehend the reported bug from the extractive summary. Based on the findings from the user study and in order to further assist the managers as well as the developers, we thus propose an interactive visualization for the bug reports that visualizes not only the extractive summaries but also the topic evolution of the bug reports. Topic evolution refers to the evolution of technical topics discussed in the bug reports of a software system over a certain time period. Our visualization technique interactively visualizes such information which can help in different project management activities. Our proposed visualization also highlights the summary statements within their contexts in the original report for easier comprehension of the reported bug. In order to validate the applicability of our proposed visualization technique, we implement the technique as a standalone tool, and conduct both a case study with 3914 bug reports and a user study with six participants. The experiments in the case study show that our topic analysis can reveal useful keywords or other insightful information about the bug reports for aiding the managers or triagers in different management activities. The findings from the user study also show that our proposed visualization technique is highly promising for easier comprehension of the bug reports.

This PhD study was designed to characterise the nature and role of the information behaviour of trainee solicitors in the context of knowledge development within a law firm environment. The characterisations drawn and the propositions offered provide a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of trainee solicitors, and, of the relationship between information behaviour, knowledge behaviour and knowledge development. A constructivist approach to inquiry was adopted, where the research design emerged through 'doing'. As emergent design is unusual within Library and Information Science (LIS) an in-depth discussion of how the design emerged is included within this thesis. Six trainees formed the sample for the final presentation of the findings. The adoption of a narrative technique for the gathering of data, and the presentation of the analysis, taking a cross-trainee and cross-theme approach, enabled holistic, in-depth characterisations to be drawn. The themes emerged through an iterative process of analysis and were followed up through a review of the literature. Undertaking a more comprehensive literature review after data collection is a characteristic of the constructivist inquiry but is a unique approach within LIS research. Through the consideration and interpretation of the characterisations that emerged from the findings this research posits a set of theoretical propositions and practical solutions pertaining to the knowledge behaviour (incorporating information behaviour) and knowledge development of the trainee solicitors. These propositions alongside the practical solutions offered are transferable in that they can be taken by other firms or organisations and considered in relation to their own setting. In addition, a model depicting the knowledge behaviour and its role in the knowledge development of trainee solicitors is presented.

Bakgrund och problem: En av de konvergerade redovisningsstandarder som finns i IFRS och US GAAP är standarden om rörelseförvärv av bolag. Enligt regelverket får inte goodwillposten innehålla identifierbara materiella eller immateriella tillgångar och den ska endast utgöra en minoritet i förvärvsanalysen. Trots standardiseringar kvarstår skillnader mellan förvärv redovisas i Sverige och USA. Enligt tidigare forskning i Sverige utgör goodwill fortfarande en majoritet i köpeskillingen vilket går emot IFRS rekommendationer. En studie av bolag i USA görs för att jämföra med den svenska undersökningen. Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka fördelningen av köpeskillingen vid rörelseförvärv i amerikanska bolag under år 2013. Detta för att se hur fördelningen av köpeskillingen skiljer sig mellan de amerikanska bolagen och tidigare studie av svenska bolag. Metod: Studien utgår från en kvantitativ metod där 80 stycken bolag undersöks. Urval har gjorts från de bolagen med störst börsvärde på Nasdaq. Datan om rörelseförvärv kommer från årsredovisningar från kalenderåret 2013. En kvalitativ forskningsstrategi används sedan med komparativ inriktning för att besvara syftet med studien. Författarna ämnar att tolka och hitta ett mönster för hur fördelningen av köpeskilling skiljer sig. Resultat: Resultatet av undersökningen visar att vissa skillnader finns i fördelningen av köpeskillingen i länderna men skillnaderna är inte markanta. Bolag i USA har en högre andel av immateriella tillgångar än bolag i Sverige. Detta kan förklaras med den hårdare kontrollen från SEC i USA. Med 57 % i immateriella tillgångar och 46 % i goodwill av den totala köpeskillingen kan slutsatsen dras att amerikanska bolag följer rekommendationerna men det är fortfarande en ganska hög andel i goodwill.

§ For a researcher it is always important to increase his/her social capital and excel attheir research area. For this, conferences act as perfect medium where researchers meetand present their work. However, due to the structure of the conferences finding similarauthors or interesting talks is not obvious for the researchers. One of most importantobservation made from the conferences is, researchers tend to form communities withcertain research topics as the series of conferences progresses. These communitiesand their research topics could be used in helping researchers find their potentialcollaborators and in attending interesting talks. In this research we present the design and implementation of a recommender systemwhich is built to provide recommendation of authors and talks at the conferences.Various concepts like Social Network Analysis (SNA), context awareness, communityanalysis, and topic modeling are used to build the system. This system can beconsidered as an extension to the previous system CAMRS (Context Aware MobileRecommender System). CAMRS is a mobile application which serves the same purposeas the current system. However, CAMRS uses only SNA and context to providerecommendations. Current system, CAMRS-2, is also an Android application builtusing REST based architecture. The system is successfully is deployed, and as partof thesis the system is evaluated. The evaluation results proved CAMRS-2 providesbetter recommendations over its predecessor.

Seeking cancer information is key in coping with the feelings (e.g., fear, uncertainty) and other challenges (e.g., treatment decision-making) confronting individuals diagnosed with cancer. Despite recognition of a variation in why, when, how, and where individuals diagnosed with cancer seek information, few efforts have been made to systematically document patterns in information-seeking. Aim: To explore individuals' patterns of health information-seeking behaviors (HIS B) including the type, amount, and sources ofinforn1ation and the strategies used to process and/or manage cancer information. / La recherche d'information sur Ie cancer est d'une importance determinante pour les personnes atteintes de cette maladie dans Ie contexte OU elles ont gerer des emotions intenses (p. ex. : peur, incertitude) et font face plusieurs defis (p. ex. : processus de decision relatif au traitement). Des variations concernant la recherche d'information par les individus diagnostiques avec un cancer ont ete observees et reconnues notamment en termes des raisons qui motivent la recherche d'information et des moyens utilises pour obtenir l'infomlation desiree. Cependant, a ce jour, peu d'efforts ont ete deployes pour documenter de maniere systematique les differents types de comportements de recherche d'information.

The rapid growth in the number of documents available to various end users from around the world has led to a greatly increased need for machine understanding of their topics, as well as for automatic grouping of related documents. This constitutes one of the main current challenges in text mining. We introduce in this thesis a novel approach for identifying document topics. In this approach, we try to utilize human background knowledge to help us to automatically find the best matching topic for input documents. There are several applications for this task. For example, it can be used to improve the relevancy of search engine results by categorizing the search results according to their general topic. It can also give users the ability to choose the domain which is most relevant to their needs. It can also be used for an application like a news publisher, where we want to automatically assign each news article to one of the predefined news main topics. In order to achieve this, we need to extract background knowledge in a form appropriate to this task. The thesis contributions can be summarized into two main modules. In the first module, we introduce a new approach to extract background knowledge from a human knowledge source, in the form of a knowledge repository, and store it in a well-structured and organized form, namely an ontology. We define the methodology of identifying ontological concepts, as well as defining the relations between these concepts. We use the ontology to infer the semantic similarity between documents, as well as to identify their topics. We apply our proposed approach using perhaps the best-known of the knowledge repositories, namely Wikipedia. The second module of this dissertation defines the framework for automatic document topic identification (ADTI). We present a new approach that utilizes the knowledge stored in the created ontology to automatically find the best matching topics for input documents, without the need for a training process such as in document classification. We compare ADTI to other text mining tasks by conducting several experiments to compare the performance of ADTI and its competitors, namely document clustering and document classification. Results show that our document topic identification approach outperforms several document clustering techniques. They show also that while ADTI does not require training, it nevertheless shows competitive performance with one of the state-of-the-art methods for document classification.