Multiple Texts Research Articles

Water Aways Means Something:

I present the outline of and possibilities for a high school English unit examining writers’ symbolic use of water. Water typically symbolizes life, change, or cleansing. I suggest multiple possible texts in varying genres, as well as climate connections, for each of those meanings. I offer a student assessment prompt, “What water means to me,” which students can write to at the beginning of the unit and revisit at the end. I provide a link to a Google folder with references, more resources, customizable activities, and a Spotify playlist.

Comparing the effectiveness of multiple text reading and rereading on knowledge retention and metacognitive accuracy

AbstractAlthough learning approaches are designed to enhance individuals' ability to store and retrieve information, not all of them are considered effective. The goal of the present study was to experimentally compare the test performance as well as the accuracy of metacognitive judgements of a multiple text reading group, rereading group, and single reading group in a one-day vs. one-week delayed test (3 × 2 between subject design). A total of 186 psychology students (Mage = 20.76) participated in the experiment focused on reading comprehension, accuracy of metacognitive judgments and knowledge retention. Results of the knowledge test indicate that in the one-day delayed test, multiple text reading and rereading yield similar results: both deliver slightly better results than single reading. In the one-week delayed test, though, multiple text reading yields better results than rereading, and both these reading approaches outperform single reading. Moreover, multiple text reading results in fairly robust knowledge retention with only a slight decrease in scores between the one-day delayed and one-week delayed test. Regarding metacognitive monitoring, judgements of learning in the multiple text reading group remained relatively stable after each reading and participants were underconfident about their knowledge. In the rereading group, judgements of learning increased after each reading and participants were overconfident about their knowledge, especially on the one-day delayed test. These findings have implications for educational practices aimed at enhancing learning outcomes and promoting effective learning.

Digital Screen Usage Amongst Doctors: Demographics, Patterns of Use and Effect of Health Parameters

Background: Advances in digital technology have led to widespread availability of digital devices and consequent increased usage amongst across the population including practising healthcare professionals. Increased ‘Digital Screen time’ and its effect on physical, psychological health, and sleep patterns has been predominantly evaluated in children, adolescents and adults from various walks of life. Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this survey was to evaluate the impact of Digital Screen usage (time and patterns) spent on portable and desktop digital devices amongst physicians, surgeons and radiologists. Material & Methods: An online cross-sectional survey of an 11-part questionnaire (multiple choice questions and free text box) was circulated amongst orthopaedic surgeons, radiologists and physicians in India and the UK, to evaluate demographics, speciality and place of practice; Digital platform usage reasons and time; effect on mental health, physical health, sleep time amongst practising healthcare professionals. Results: There was an even spread amongst the various age groups. Smartphones were the commonest device utilised for digital screening in 90 (67.7%) doctors with 29 (38.5%) of doctors reporting more than five hours of daily screen time. Sixty-three (47%) of doctors used this for academic purposes, whereas 43 (32%) used it for entertainment more than for academic purposes. Thirty-nine doctors (29%) were unaware of whether screen usage affected mental health. Seventy-two (53%) were of the opinion that screen usage was having a negative effect on their physical health whilst 81 (60%) thought that it was having an adverse effect on their sleeping time respectively. Conclusion: A significant proportion of doctors appear to be using digital devices beyond the recommended ‘Digital Screen time’ by various national or international healthcare organisations. There is an emerging need to highlight the deleterious effect of excessive ‘Digital Screen time’ on various health parameters and be part of a global health narrative to mitigate ill-effects and a sustainable lifestyle.

An Appalled Ghost Guiding Readers Across Semiotic Fault Lines: The Contribution of Literature to the Appreciation of Legal Change

Abstract What are the conditions for meaning-making in intertextuality? The article explores what the relational dynamics of (legal) transtextuality can reveal about the semiotic hierarchies that govern them. The interest in these relational dynamics goes beyond the specific relations between texts captured by the hypo-/hyper-text relation. Rather, it embraces the inner conditions of meaning-making in transtextuality across multiple texts. Shifts in the underlying semiotic hierarchies can be tracked within each (legal) field, but the article turns to literature to explore the potential of intertextuality in exposing the transformative dynamics of various legal fields underneath the shifting semiotic hierarchies. Legal studies have variously investigated these shifting semiotic hierarchies, often resorting to the spectrum imposition/prestige (Sacco 1991) the article thus looks into the intertextuality of a literary text and what it can contribute to the analysis, beyond the spectrum. Egypt in the 19th century witnessed major legal transformations (Fahmy 2018; Hilāl 2011; Peters 2020). Just as major, however, were the transformations in legal discourse to accommodate a new vocabulary of ‘modern’ law, often drawing from Islamic law (Parolin 2016). The dynamic relations between alternative legal discourses and their semiotic hierarchies almost imperceptibly transformed over the course of the century, but by the end of the century these hierarchies were nearly entirely redrawn, and Islamic legal discourse had to be characterised or adjectivised as ‘Islamic’ (Parolin 2015). The article thus considers one of the canonical works of late 19th century Egyptian literature, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s What ʿĪsá bin Hishām Told Us (1898–1901). In it, the author describes with irony the shock and tribulations of the ghost of a mid-19th century personality in his encounter with late 19th century Egypt. Al-Muwayliḥī’s is however a brilliant fictional device to stage al-Muwayliḥī’s own shock and the shock of late 19th century Egyptians at the transformations of the country in a few decades. His humourous account precisely begins with changes in law and its enforcement agencies. Not only does legal discourse often capture the enormity of these legal transformations, but also how other elements of legal semiotics witness to far-reaching transformations that cause the ghost much tribulation, on top of the shock.

Career Advancement Insights from Certified Pharmacy Technicians: Enhanced Opportunities for the Pharmacy Technician Workforce

Sustainable career advancement opportunities for pharmacy technicians will be a critical part of patient-centered community pharmacy environments as the role of the pharmacist provider expands. (1) To determine the impact of a Pharmacy Technician Certification Board pharmacy (PTCB) certification on career advancement and professional growth metrics; (2) To assess technicians' role in advanced pharmacy services before and after certification; and (3) To identify changes in pharmacist services when a certified pharmacy technician (CPhT) was added to the provider team. A 73-question web-based survey was distributed to all PTCB certified pharmacy technicians (CPhT) in the United States, Washing D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. The survey was distributed by PTCB in April 2021 with a 28-day collection period. The survey included multiple choice, rating scale, and free text questions centered on five domains: Practice experience, Career aspirations, Compensation, Pharmacy practice motivations, and Impact of COVID-19 pandemic. 23,007 CPhTs completed the survey. Respondents were primarily female (85.5%), age 30-39 (32.8%), and ≥ 10 years CPhT experience (42.8%). The majority of respondents cited improvement of patient health (77.4%), career advancement opportunities (53.5%), the ability to expand their role during emergencies (e.g., COVID-19) (52.6%), and future career advancement opportunities (51.7%) as benefits of CPhT certification. Increases in job responsibility after certification included changes occurring in roles related to clinical pharmacy services, patient education, preventive health services, provider communication, and staff training. Respondents agreed that PTCB-certification allowed for the expansion of pharmacists' services where they practiced, including clinical services (18.5%), patient education (18.3%), and preventive health services (18.1%). CPhT's value certification for its benefits on career advancement, personal growth, and salary enhancement. Affirmation of skill and training through certification is also recognized to positively influence patient care and the pharmacy's ability to provide advanced patient care and services.

TeachText: CrossModal text-video retrieval through generalized distillation

In recent years, considerable progress on the task of text-video retrieval has been achieved by leveraging large-scale pretraining on visual and audio datasets to construct powerful video encoders. By contrast, despite the natural symmetry, the design of effective algorithms for exploiting large-scale language pretraining remains under-explored. In this work, we investigate the design of such algorithms and propose a novel generalized distillation method, TeachText, which leverages complementary cues from multiple text encoders to provide an enhanced supervisory signal to the retrieval model. TeachText yields significant gains on a number of video retrieval benchmarks without incurring additional computational overhead during inference and was used to produce the winning entry in the Condensed Movie Challenge at ICCV 2021. We show how TeachText can be extended to include multiple video modalities, reducing computational cost at inference without compromising performance. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our method to the task of removing noisy descriptions from the training partitions of retrieval datasets to improve performance. Code and data can be found at https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/teachtext/.

Résultats d’un pré-test visant à évaluer l’efficacité d’une communication administrative gouvernementale (note de recherche)

This research note presents partial results of a user test assessing the “communicative effectiveness” (Clerc & Beaudet, 2008) of a written communication aimed at citizens penalized for driving under the influence. The doctoral candidate is interested in the users interaction with an informational ecosystem composed of multiple sources of information. She compares the effectiveness of three ecosystems by checking their effects on users' comprehension, appreciation, and mental workload. These objectives require expanding the usual scope of the “communicative effectiveness” concept and exploring aspects related to reading/using multiple texts in an administrative context. The tests were conducted with 15 French-speaking adults without a high school diploma. An adapted version of the NASA-TLX questionnaire (Hart & Staveland, 1988) was used to measure mental workload. The data suggest that when faced with a letter of a high informational density, users with low literacy levels focus their attention on peripheral details at the expense of the main ideas. No correlation was observed between comprehension and mental workload. The data are now considered a "pre-test" used to refine the research design for a second wave of interviews.

Using Latin Square Methodology to Test Vocabulary through Story Reading

Recognizing the need for objectivity when assessing readers' comprehension across multiple iterations and texts, the study explores how the traditional Latin Square design can be refined to accommodate such requirements. This paper delves into the application and adaptation of Latin Square methodology in vocabulary testing through multiple readings of stories. By examining the challenges and opportunities presented by multi-pass reading materials, the paper proposes strategies to enhance the validity and reliability of vocabulary assessments, ensuring that readers' performance is accurately captured and analyzed

A survey of speech-language pathology service delivery in Australian schools

Purpose Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work in Australian schools yet, little is documented about their service delivery practices. This study therefore explores Australian speech-language pathology service delivery in schools, inclusive of work activities, caseloads, and assessment and intervention practices. Method An online survey comprising multiple choice, constant sum, Likert scale, and open text questions was completed by 105 SLPs. Quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics while open-text responses were analysed using content analysis. Result Participants were predominantly government education department employees working in multiple schools, and caseloads ranged from 10 to 240 students for full-time SLPs. While responses varied considerably, some general trends emerged. Most time was spent on intervention, followed by non-contact tasks, and assessments, with differences across employment sectors. Language was the most common student need, followed by literacy and speech. Frequently reported factors contributing to client complexity and intervention frequency were co-occurring presentations, severity of student needs, caseload size, and impact on learning. Caseload manageability was a concern for participants who reported larger caseloads, spent more time in assessment or less time in therapy than others, and worked in education departments. Conclusion Findings have implications for policy makers, professional bodies and employers, and provide direction for future systematic data collection.

Attendance to notable terms promotes narrative frame analysis when students read multiple expository texts

Narrative frames refer to the ways in which information in media is relayed, organized, and contextualized, in order to provide learners with a structure and a frame of reference for new content. Narrative frames are pervasive and have been found to have an effect on individuals’ attitudes and understandings of various social issues. However, students’ abilities to identify and analyze narrative frames during reading have rarely been examined in prior work. In this study, we examine whether two experimental manipulations are able to increase students’ attendance to and analysis of narrative frames when reading four texts addressing a contemporary social issue (i.e., a proposed new housing development). An experimental design was used. Students (N = 141) were randomly assigned to receive a definition of narrative frames, or not, prior to reading and asked to identify notable terms during reading or not. Then, students were asked to read four texts, offering various contrasting perspectives on the construction of a new affordable housing development. Finally, students completed open-ended questions tapping overt and covert narrative frame identification and analysis and multiple text integration. Although providing students with an explicit definition of narrative frames did not improve performance, asking students to attend to notable terms during reading improved overt narrative frame analysis scores. Additionally, students identifying more notable terms during reading was associated with higher overt and covert narrative frame analysis performance. Attending to notable terms during reading may be one means of fostering students’ analysis of overt and covert narrative frames.

Rens Krijgsman: <i>Early Chinese Manuscript Collections: Sayings, Memory, Verse, and Knowledge. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts</i>

The book under review is a study of manuscript texts from Warring States and early imperial China (approximately the 5th to 2nd centuries BCE); its specific topic is “manuscript collections,” that is, “single manuscripts containing multiple (originally) distinct texts”. In this book, Rens Krijgsman explores what happened when multiple texts came to be combined on the same material carrier: How were texts selected, organized, and integrated into individual collections? What relationships obtained among these different texts? And how did collections affect reception, including interpretation and perceptions of genre? Cautious not to overstep the evidence, Krijgsman acknowledges that certain basic information about production and use of early manuscript collections is wanting: we do not (and cannot) know who collected the texts and produced the manuscripts, nor can we know who used collections. Wielding impressive command of the technical aspects of early manuscripts and of a broad range of texts, he seeks to extract as much information as possible through a careful yet comprehensive analysis of the material aspects of manuscript collections, their content, and their organization.

Combining Multiple Text Representations for Improved Automatic Evaluation of Indonesian Essay Answers

multiple-choices, regarding students’ learning achievement. When the number of students in a class is huge, however, examinations using essay questions become hard to conduct and take a long evaluation time. Automatic essay evaluation has, therefore, become a potential approach in this situation. Various methods have been proposed, however, optimal solutions for such evaluation in the Indonesian language are less known. Furthermore, with the rapid development of machine learning approaches, in particular deep learning approaches, the investigation of such optimal solutions becomes more necessary. Method: To address the aforementioned issue, this study proposed the investigation of text representation approaches for optimal automatic evaluation of Indonesian essay answers. The investigation compared pre-trained word embedding methods such as Word2vec, GloVe, FastText, and RoBERTa, as well as compared text encoding methods such as long short-term memories (LSTMs) and transformers. LSTMs are able to capture temporal semantics by employing state variables, while transformers are able to capture long-term dependency between parts of their input sequences. Additionally, we investigated classification-based and similarity-based training to build text encoders. We expected that these training approaches allowed encoders to extract different views of information. We compared classification results produced by different text encoders and combinations of text encoders. Result: We evaluated various text representation approaches using the UKARA dataset. Our experiments showed that the FastText word embedding method outperformed the Word2vec, GloVe, and RoBERTa methods. The FastText method achieved an F1-score of 75.43% on validation sets, while the Word2vec, GloVe, and RoBERTa methods achieved F1-scores of 69.56%, 74.53%, and 72.87%, respectively. In addition, the experiments showed that combinations of text encoders outperformed individual encoders. The combination of the LSTM encoder, the transformer encoder, and the TF-IDF encoder obtained an F1-score of 77.22% in the best case, which is better than the best F1-scores of the individual LSTM encoders (75.35%), the best combination of transformer encoders (71.49%), and the individual TF-IDF encoder (76.69%). We observed that LSTM encoders produced better performance when they were built using classification-based training. Meanwhile, the transformer encoders obtained better performance when built using similarity-based training. Novelty: The novelty proposed in this research is the optimal combination of text encoders specifically constructed for the evaluation of essay answers in the Indonesian language. Our experiments showed that the combination of three encoders - namely the LSTM encoder built using classification-based training, the transformer encoder built using classification-based and similarity-based training, and the TF-IDF encoder - obtained the best classification performance.

Predictors of Multiple-Document Comprehension Among Third-Grade Children With Reading Difficulties and Disabilities

Facility with learning from multiple text documents is critical for college and career readiness. However, children with reading difficulties and disabilities have been largely excluded from research on multiple document comprehension. Accordingly, little is known about how children with reading difficulties and disabilities perform on multiple-document tasks, the factors that predict their performance, and how best to foster their development of this skill. To begin to fill these gaps, we examined concurrent predictors of one dimension of multiple-document comprehension, intertextual integration (ie, the ability to integrate information presented across two or more text documents), among third-grade children with reading difficulties and disabilities ( N = 70). Correlational analyses revealed that children's intertextual integration performance was significantly and positively associated with single-document comprehension (SDC) but not with word-level reading (WLR) or passage-reading fluency (PRF). Multiple-regression analyses indicated that SDC significantly predicted intertextual integration but that WLR and PRF did not.

Multiple‐Text Comprehension and Evaluation: The Influence of Reading Goal, Belief Consistency, and Argument Type

ABSTRACTThe present study examined how argument type (science based vs. personal case based), belief consistency (belief consistent vs. inconsistent) and reading goals (read to evaluate vs. read to learn) influence comprehension and trustworthiness evaluations for claim‐conflicting multiple texts. Undergraduates read four conflicting texts about the effects of vegan nutrition and completed four corresponding single‐text comprehension and trustworthiness tasks before completing a multiple‐text comprehension task. The results indicated better memory for personal case‐based texts that capitalized on everyday life experiences and emotions than science‐based texts in the multiple‐text comprehension task. Reading to evaluate benefitted memory only for the belief‐inconsistent personal text and contributed to lower trustworthiness ratings for all texts in comparison to reading to learn. The present study's findings highlight the importance of factors pertaining to argument quality, namely argument type, in comprehension and trustworthiness judgments.

Readers’ awareness in the use of intertextual strategies when writing from multiple texts

Metacognitive reading awareness, involving cognitive process control and reading strategies, is linked to better comprehension and performance, but its relationship with intertextual integration strategies and the quality of argumentative essays remains unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the role of metacognition in employing integration strategies when reading conflicting texts. 69 undergraduate students participated in an online reading-writing activity, where they wrote argumentative essays based on conflicting texts about red meat consumption. We examined the students' use of intertextual integration strategies (refutation, weighing, synthesizing) and assessed their metacognitive awareness through their reflections on these strategies. The quality of the argumentative essays served as a measure of multiple text comprehension. The results indicated a lack of metacognitive awareness regarding integration strategies, with students overestimating their ability to employ these strategies. However, they demonstrated better understanding of refutational strategies based on the examples provided in their essays. Interestingly, students who were aware of and utilized these strategies in their essays performed better in the multiple-text comprehension task.

INCEPT: A Framework for Duplicate Posts Classification with Combined Text Representations

Dealing with many of the problems related to the quality of textual content online involves identifying similar content. Algorithmic solutions for duplicate content classification typically rely on text vector representation, which maps textual information into a set of features. Ideally, this representation would capture all aspects of the underlying text, including length, word frequencies, syntax, and semantics. While recent advancements in text representation have led to improved performance, a comprehensive approach that explicitly incorporates all text features has not yet been proposed. In this study, we present the INCEPT framework that utilizes multiple representation methods to detect duplicate text pairs, taking advantage of their individual strengths. The core of our approach involves using a stacking ensemble of pairwise vector distance measurements that are computed from multiple text representation methods. A stacking classifier then utilizes these distance scores as input and learns to identify duplicate posts. We assess the proposed framework’s effectiveness in identifying duplicate posts in an online Question and Answer platform. By combining several text representation methods, INCEPT performs well in the duplicate posts classification task. Our experiments demonstrate that specific framework configurations outperform the accuracy scores obtained from individual text representation methods. Therefore, we also infer that no single text representation method can independently capture a text’s features.

Patient Perception of Cough in Interstitial Lung Disease; Impact of Cough Hypersensitivity

IntroductionCough is common in interstitial lung disease (ILD) and is associated with disease progression, yet its mechanisms are understudied. We investigated cough hypersensitivity features and impact in ILD.MethodsParticipants with ILD and cough (n = 195) completed a multiple choice and free text questionnaire on cough sensations/triggers and impacts.ResultsThe majority of participants were male (54%), aged > 65 (64%), with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF, 75%). Common cough triggers were body position (74%), physical activity (72%), and talking (62%). Common laryngeal sensations were globus (43%), and itch/tickle (42%). Cough impacted everyday life in 55%, and all activities in 31%, causing exhaustion (59%), social embarrassment (70%), urinary incontinence (46% females), and syncope/pre-syncope (12%). The total number of cough-provoking sensations/triggers correlated with impacts; ρ = 0.73, p < 0.001.ConclusionCough hypersensitivity symptoms are prevalent in ILD and detrimentally affect quality of life. Further studies investigating mechanisms of cough hypersensitivity and targeted pharmacotherapy are warranted.

Text-guided distillation learning to diversify video embeddings for text-video retrieval

Conventional text-video retrieval methods typically match a video with a text on a one-to-one manner. However, a single video can contain diverse semantics, and text descriptions can vary significantly. Therefore, such methods fail to match a video with multiple texts simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackle this one-to-many correspondence problem in text-video retrieval. We devise diverse temporal aggregation and a multi-key memory to address temporal and semantic diversity, consequently constructing multiple video embedding paths from a single video. Additionally, we introduce text-guided distillation learning that enables each video path to acquire meaningful distinct competencies in representing varied semantics. Our video embedding approach is text-agnostic, allowing the prepared video embeddings to be used continuously for any new text query. Experiments show our method outperforms existing methods on four datasets. We further validate the effectiveness of our designs with ablation studies and analyses on diverse video embeddings.

The ‘pre-Shakespearean’ balcony and outdoor spaces from the European sources to Romeo and Juliet

This article shows how the balcony scene has been represented in Romeo and Juliet's narrative sources and how it has been treated by Shakespeare and on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stages. It focuses on the absence of any balcony in Shakespeare's play and on the actual presence of a balcony in one of the Italian indirect sources of the play, Luigi Da Porto's novella; it also explores how all the spatial, gender, and power connotations of the balcony have been ‘translated’ from the sources to Shakespeare, where they are conveyed by the use of a ‘window’ and an ‘orchard’. The article shows how, thanks to the SENS: Shakespeare's Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and their European Dissemination digital archive a comparison of multiple texts at a time, focusing on the words ‘balcony’, ‘window’, ‘garden’, and ‘orchard’, favours the investigation of the way in which these liminal spaces are represented.

Survey comparing the treatment of central retinal artery occlusion with hyperbaric oxygen in Australia and New Zealand with the recommended guidelines as outlined by the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society.

Central retinal artery occlusion (CRAO) presents suddenly causing painless loss of vision that is often significant. Meaningful improvement in vision occurs in only 8% of patients with spontaneous reperfusion. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment (HBOT) is considered to be of benefit if commenced before retinal infarction occurs. The Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) guidelines on the management of CRAO were last amended in 2019. This survey questioned Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) hyperbaric medicine units (HMUs) about the incidence of CRAO cases referred and compared their subsequent management against the UHMS guidelines. An anonymous survey via SurveyMonkey® was sent to all 12 ANZ HMUs that treat emergency indications, allowing for multiple choice and free text answers regarding their management of CRAO. One-hundred and forty-six cases of CRAO were treated in ANZ HMUs over the last five years. Most (101/146) cases (69%) were initially treated at a pressure of 284 kPa. This was the area of greatest difference noted in CRAO management between the UHMS guidelines and ANZ practice. Few ANZ HMUs strictly followed the UHMS guidelines. We suggest a more simplified management protocol as used by the majority of ANZ HMUs.