Topic Shifts Research Articles

Near-Peer Learning During the Surgical Clerkship: A Way to Facilitate Learning After a 15-Month Preclinical Curriculum

To investigate the performance and perspectives of third-year medical students (MS3s) participating in near-peer learning (NPL) sessions during their core surgical clerkship following a 15-month preclerkship curriculum. An evaluation study of 7 NPL sessions developed and implemented by fourth-year medical students (MS4s) held from March 2019 to February 2020. MS4s taught 1-2 sessions per rotation that included test taking strategies, illness script development, radiology review, case-based multiple-choice questions, and rapid review. Participants completed a questionnaire with 11 seven-point Likert and open-ended questions after each session. Analyses included quantitative comparison of shelf score averages between NPL participants and nonparticipants and qualitative content analysis for open-ended questions. Surgical clerkship at the University of California, San Francisco. Forty-eight (32%) MS3s participated, with an average attendance of 10 students per rotation. Thirty-three (69%) participants completed the questionnaire. MS3s enjoyed the session (6.9 ± 0.4), improved their knowledge (6.8 ± 0.5), and felt more prepared for the surgery shelf examination (6.5 ± 0.6). MS4 leaders found that MS3s always wanted radiology review, and their interest in test taking strategies and illness script development declined across the clerkship year. Participants had lower shelf exam scores compared to nonparticipants (68.1 vs 71.4, respectively; p = 0.04, ES = 0.03). Shelf exam scores increased over time in both cohorts. Each group had 2 shelf exam failures. Qualitative analysis suggests that MS3s appreciated the NPL's tailored approach and exam demystification, with a desire for increased NPL integration into the clerkship. Students participating in NPL were satisfied with the sessions. Participants may have been students who struggled as indicated by shelf exam scores and appreciated the support. The shift in preferred topics across the blocks reflects the students' development during clerkships. Near-peer teachers should adjust sessions over time to fit students' evolving needs.

A Geometry of Innovation

We use methods from Natural Language Processing to characterize the innovative content of patents. We develop several metrics that compare inventions to existing and future innovations. The intuition guiding us is that patents dissimilar to past inventions and similar to future ones may have anticipated or started shifts in innovation topics. We find evidence that such patents have higher citations and the firms owning them grow faster and are more profitable relative to other firms. Analysis of trends suggests that innovative ideas may have gotten harder to find over time in high-innovation fields.

Revealing key topics shifts in thermal barrier coatings (TBC) as indicators of technological developments for aerospace engines

Thermal barrier coating (TBC) systems reduce the temperature of the metallic substrate of aerospace engines, resulting in improved component durability, better fuel economy and performance. Scientific research and innovation on TBC systems evolves rapidly and diversely over the years. Hence, an understanding of the research and innovation pathways on TBC systems is extremely important for the future development of aerospace engines. This study examines research publications and patents on TBC during 1980–2019. While USA led the TBC publication output from 1980 to 2010, China takes the lead after 2011 and India too is emerging noticeably on TBC research. The citation impact of publications reveal key topic shifts. Distinct peaks identified for (1) materials sciences during 1998–2003; (2) energy during 2001–2007, and (3) chemical engineering during 2009–2018. The visual mappings of author keywords of the publications reveal the progress of TBC technology. Results show shifts in deposition techniques for TBC coating preparation, and thermal management in the engines. The journal papers cited by patents have low correlation to the highly cited papers. This paper introduced an innovation relevance indicator to gauge the relevance of an institution’s scientific research to technological innovation. This novel indicator reveals the industry relevant work among the active institutions and companies with patents in TBC technologies. Universities with significant number TBC patents fall into two broad categories, (1) those who have high (> 70%) collaborations on patents filed, and (2) those that filed patents without existing external collaborations.

Microparametric variation in the syntax of Spanish and Greek pronominal subjects

The present research aims to investigate the interface phenomenon of third-person subject distribution in two prototypical null subject (NS) languages, Greek and Spanish focusing on Chilean Spanish, in adult monolingual speakers. The data were obtained from oral production of narratives (Study 1) and anaphora resolution (AR) (Study 2). All elicited data were submitted to statistical analyses while the production data were as well qualitatively scrutinised. Greek and Spanish were directly compared in order to discover differences between them, which were expected to emerge in the scope of the overt subject pronoun (OSP). The two languages were largely similar, sharing analogous clause structures and displaying generally similar properties on the distribution of subject forms, i.e. NS, OSP, as well as lexical subjects (LS) in oral production. The findings, confirming the predictions, showed crosslinguistic differences in the scope of OSP in topic shift (TS) between the languages due to deictic distinctions, with Greek OSP carrying deictic properties, which are less pronounced in its Spanish counterpart. This evidences the fact that NS languages may not be identical regarding subject distribution. Another key aspect, which emerged in the oral production data in both Greek and Spanish, was the felicitous use of NS in TS contexts. NS were also found to be flexible or ambiguous in AR in both languages, thereby displaying a more variable distribution than sometimes assumed.

Les sujets disloqués en trévisan

This paper looks at the discursive function of left-dislocated subjects in an understudied Romance variety, namely Trevigiano. In the interest of comparison, we also consider Ashby’s (1988) corpus on left dislocations in French. We argue that left dislocated subjects in Trevigiano, just like their French counterparts, are topics which serve to activate a new file card in the sense of Heim (1982), and we show that the majority of left-dislocated subjects in Trevigiano introduce a topic shift at the level of the sentence, rather than at the level of the discourse. We then provide examples of how speakers exploit this flexible tool in order to develop and manipulate the different levels of discourse.

Measuring the Direction of Innovation: Frontier Tools in Unassisted Machine Learning

Understanding the factors affecting the direction of innovation is a central aim of research in the economics and strategic management of innovation. Progress on this topic has been inhibited by difficulties in measuring the location and movement of innovation in ideas space. To date, most efforts at measuring the direction of innovation rely on curated taxonomies, such as technology classes and keyword approaches, which either adapt slowly or are subject to gaming, and early generations of text analysis, which provide information on the similarity of sets of words, but not on the number of paths or direction of change. Relative to these, recent advances in machine learning offer promising paths forward. In this paper, we introduce and explore a particular approach based on an unassisted machine learning technique, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), that flexibly generates categories from a corpus of text and enables calculations of the distance across knowledge categories and movement in ideas space. We apply our algorithm to the corpus of USPTO patent abstracts from the period 2000-2018 and demonstrate that, relative to the USPTO taxonomy of patent classes, our algorithm provides a leading indicator of shift in innovation topics and enables a more precise analysis of movement in ideas space. Working with such measures is important because it enables more accurate estimates of the direction of innovation and, hence, of economic actors’ responses to competitive environments and public policies. We share our algorithm, which can be applied to other innovation text corpora, as well as the patent data and measures we develop, with the aim of facilitating additional inquiries regarding the direction of innovation.

Problems following topic shift in interactions with repaired cleft children

Children with a history of cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) can experience a range of difficulties such as sound articulation errors and reduced psychosocial functioning. This causes interaction with them to contain more frequent communication breakdowns than non-cleft children. The present study shows evidence of such breakdowns involving topic shifts in the interaction between parents and their repaired CL/P children. Interactional data were obtained through a series of recordings of three parent-child sets. The process is guided by the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA) while coding of topic shift adopts Crow’s typology (1983). Findings show that topic shift during interaction can indeed cause problems for children with a history of cleft, especially involving palatal cleft. Specifically, through the children’s repair initiations, the problems are manifest when a topic is introduced once the previous topic concludes, when a topic is extended and when a topic is revisited. This study shows that topic shift can potentially be a source of problems to CL/P children. Findings are useful for speech therapists, parents and teachers.

To Re-present a Nobel Prize Winner. Interpreting a Public Literary Conversation

AbstractThis article examines the unfolding of interaction in a growing and, so far, scarcely examined social and cultural practice – interpreter-mediated public literary conversations. In this context, the activity of interpreters, although indispensable when authors and audiences do not share a common language, is sometimes regarded as a “necessary evil” that allegedly causes delays and information loss. Exploring an interpreter-mediated public literary conversation with Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich as a case in point, the focus of this article is rather on what the presence of an interpreter might add to the shared performance on stage. Attention is drawn to the temporal evolvement of the interlocutor’s communicative resources, evident within narrative sequences, drawing on prosody research and research on gestures. The study suggests that, apart from keeping the non-Russian speaking audience updated on content, the interpreter’s rhythmically calibrated performance adds an energizing asset to the event as a whole. The notion of the “coupled turn”, internally hosting gestural and prosodic coherence across topical boundaries and language frame shifts, emerges as a usable unit for the analysis.

Truthful but Misleading: Advanced Linguistic Strategies for Lying Among Children.

We explored whether children could apply linguistic strategies for lying, i.e., manipulating linguistic content of speech to mislead others. We announced a knowledge-test entailing prizes in the classrooms of a primary school and a middle school. Altogether 79 Chinese children (6–18 years) voluntarily participated in the test: listening to a series of animal sounds before guessing the names of the animals. Meanwhile, behind the participants, a video was playing images that ostensibly corresponded to the sounds being played. In fact, this was not necessarily the case, i.e., some items cannot be solved because the sounds played are not from any animal but machine-synthesized. Participants were instructed not to look back at the video. However, 51 children peeked at the video for the unsolvable items, although the peeking behavior decreased with age. Moreover, when explaining how they correctly guessed the unsolvable items, children as young as 6 years old were able to apply a linguistic strategy (i.e., “capability attribution”) for lying. Besides “capability attribution,” Children also applied “fortune attribution” and “topic shift” for lying. Finally, “fortune attribution” and “topic shift” increased with age. Therefore, educators need to be aware that children are able to apply verbal strategies for lying that could involve truthful statements (i.e., “topic shift”) or statements that are difficult to be proved as untruthful (i.e., “fortune attribution”).

Discourse topics and digressive markers

The article aims to clarify some of the theoretical orientations underlying the linguistic studies on topics of discourse and digressive markers. The notion of discourse topic (DT) introduced by van Dijk in the 1970s has no place in the models developed since the 1980s by Hobbs, Mann and Thompson, Asher and Lascarides and others. These models do without DT, for the reason that the rhetorical relations they advocate were sufficient to explain common sense intuitions on (dis)continuity and (in)coherence of discourse, although, at the same time, van Kuppevelt advocates model based solely on DT relations. With the development of systematic annotations of corpora, studies on discourse markers have increased, including markers of topic shifts. The last part of the paper deals with d'ailleurs and par ailleurs French adverbials, which are commonly used as a marker of digression. The analysis of these two DMs show that they are polyfunctional and involve both rhetorical relationships (addition, justification) that make the link with the previous utterances, and framing relationships indexing the incoming discourse (announcing of a topic shift, or a return to a previous DT).

How do academic topics shift across altmetric sources? A case study of the research area of Big Data

Taking the research area of Big Data as a case study, we propose an approach for exploring how academic topics shift through the interactions among audiences across different altmetric sources. Data used is obtained from Web of Science (WoS) and Altmetric.com, with a focus on Blog, News, Policy, Wikipedia, and Twitter. Author keywords from publications and terms from online events are extracted as the main topics of the publications and the online discussion of their audiences at Altmetric. Different measures are applied to determine the (dis)similarities between the topics put forward by the publication authors and those by the online audiences. Results show that overall there are substantial differences between the two sets of topics around Big Data scientific research. The main exception is Twitter, where high-frequency hashtags in tweets have a stronger concordance with the author keywords in publications. Among the online communities, Blogs and News show a strong similarity in the terms commonly used, while Policy documents and Wikipedia articles exhibit the strongest dissimilarity in considering and interpreting Big Data related research. Specifically, the audiences not only focus on more easy-to-understand academic topics related to social or general issues, but also extend them to a broader range of topics in their online discussions. This study lays the foundations for further investigations about the role of online audiences in the transformation of academic topics across altmetric sources, and the degree of concern and reception of scholarly contents by online communities.

Other-initiations of repair by children with developmental language disorder in speech-language therapy and non-institutional play

ABSTRACT This study explores the use of other-initiations of repair by children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The data are children’s video-recorded language assessment sessions, speech-language therapy sessions and two kinds of non-institutional play sessions, parent–child and peer play. The videotapes were transcribed following CA conventions focusing on speech and relevant embodied actions. Other-initiations of repair were identified, collected and analyzed. The analysis focuses on open requests and candidate understandings which were the two most common types of other-initiation of repair in the data. The types of other-initiation of repair were similar to those found in adult interactions and by neurotypical children. Repair sequences were regularly short consisting only of three turns. Other-initiations of repair typically emerged in certain contexts: open requests were regularly used after sudden topical shifts, child’s inattention, or long and complex setting of language tasks in assessment and therapy, whereas candidate understandings were mostly used for confirming the children’s inferences of the meaning of unclear references or wider semantic content in free conversation. This indicates that the local sequential context influences the types of problems the children with DLD encounter, and the types of problems determine how the children other-initiate repair to solve these problems. Thus, the sequential context should be considered in a detailed manner when assessing children’s communication skills and studying other-initiations of repair.

In the Case of Theme: Topic Identifiers in English and Norwegian Academic Texts

Abstract This paper investigates the use of clause-initial constituents prefaced by topic-identifying expressions such as in terms of, in the case of and their Norwegian counterparts. The focus is on the nature, frequency and discourse functions of these in a corpus of published academic writing in English and Norwegian and across three disciplines. Such expressions are rather infrequent overall, but medicine uses them the least and linguistics the most in both languages. The functions of the construction can be compared either to those of left dislocation or to other types of clause-initial adverbials depending on the degree of coreference between the theme and some element in the rheme. The pattern with coreference is more common in Norwegian than in English. Generally, topic identifiers are used for announcing explicitly a theme that represents a topic shift or a contrast with the preceding discourse. The study contributes to contrastive pragmatics through its focus on the discourse-pragmatic functions of the expressions under study and the cross-linguistic comparison of this type of information structuring device across different disciplines of academic writing.

Turn-Initial Discourse Markers in L2 Spanish Conversations: Insights from Conversation Analysis

Turn beginnings are the place in conversation where the connection (or otherwise) between a prior and a next turn is displayed. This crucial interactional task is usually fulfilled by turn-initial particles, specifically those known as discourse markers. Although the use of discourse markers by second or foreign language speakers has actually been largely discussed in the previous literature on interlanguage pragmatics, studies that focus on turn-initial discourse markers and that are conducted from a conversation analytical perspective are still scarce. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it makes a case for the use of conversation analysis as a research methodology for the study of discourse markers in a second or foreign language. On the other hand, and as a practical elaboration, this paper investigates the use of the discourse markers “y” and “sí” in the turn-initial position by foreign language speakers of Spanish. The results show that both discourse markers are part of an overall concern of signalling continuity and affiliation even in topic shifts and in non-aligned turns.

Discourse Marker well and Functional Approach to its Translation into Russian in Film Subtitling and Dubbing

The article is concerned with pragmatic functions of the discourse marker well in film dialogues and the means of its functional translation into Russian in subtitles and dubbing. A number of linguistic and extralinguistic parameters are used for a thorough contextual analysis of each occurrence of well in 11 feature films made between 1997 and 2017. The analysis results in identifying the following textual: floor-gaining, arranging topic shifts, indicating dialogue frames, contraposition, justification, clarification, repair and quotation - and interpersonal functions of well: prompting, hesitation, evasion, emphasis and humility. The article continues with a qualitative and quantitative account of translation decisions for the discourse marker well in subtitles and dubbing. For every textual and interpersonal function of well, we establish functional equivalents and assess the proportion of marker omission and the proportion of functional losses. Finally, the subtitled and dubbed versions are compared in terms of the proportion of marker omission and the proportion of functional losses. The conclusion is drawn on the apparent correlation between the degree of functional equivalence achieved in translation of well, on the one hand, and technical and textual constraints of both subtitling and dubbing, on the other.

Boycotting the Knowledge Makers: How Reddit Demonstrates the Rise of Media Blacklists and Source Rejection in Online Communities

Background: In this article, we address the use of metatags as a form of community knowledge formation and gatekeeping within digital platforms. Situating the case: The subReddit KotakuInAction is a well-known hub of the GamerGate community on Reddit, but one that has avoided the bans common to other aggressive subReddits and GamerGate communities on platforms such as 4chan and GitHub. We contextualize the aggressive nature of the subReddit and the reasons why participants' uses of metatags are meaningful for understanding subReddit culture and moderation practices. Methodology: To better understand the destructive behavioral patterns of KotakuInAction, we coded for the frequency of certain behaviors, such as linking and tagging, as well as the shift in certain keywords and vocabularies between the front facing or predetermined tags and the user-customized or admin-altered tags. We also examined how tags shifted over time and whether certain users dominated particular tags. About the case: What we found was a hybrid culture on KiA that applied Chan culture values and flaming, but increasingly localized the behavior to KiA rather than direct readers out of the site. We also found key shifts in topics away from gaming and activism toward broader complaints about social justice. In addition, we found that a tiny core group of nine influencers (out of tens of thousands of users) accounted for 20% of the top conversations. Conclusions: We suggest a closer examination of how communities self-organize around meta naming structures. Knowledge of this activity can help with predicting and engaging with aggressive and hostile communities by describing how topics shift over time, how they adapt to platform moderation, and who the influencers within a community might be.

'To my brother'

Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.

SECTOR: A Neural Model for Coherent Topic Segmentation and Classification

When searching for information, a human reader first glances over a document, spots relevant sections, and then focuses on a few sentences for resolving her intention. However, the high variance of document structure complicates the identification of the salient topic of a given section at a glance. To tackle this challenge, we present SECTOR, a model to support machine reading systems by segmenting documents into coherent sections and assigning topic labels to each section. Our deep neural network architecture learns a latent topic embedding over the course of a document. This can be leveraged to classify local topics from plain text and segment a document at topic shifts. In addition, we contribute WikiSection, a publicly available data set with 242k labeled sections in English and German from two distinct domains: diseases and cities. From our extensive evaluation of 20 architectures, we report a highest score of 71.6% F1 for the segmentation and classification of 30 topics from the English city domain, scored by our SECTOR long short-term memory model with Bloom filter embeddings and bidirectional segmentation. This is a significant improvement of 29.5 points F1 over state-of-the-art CNN classifiers with baseline segmentation.

Frame Markers in Master Thesis Abstracts Written in English and Turkish

This corpus-based research aims to identify frame markers (FMs) in master thesis abstracts written in English by English native and non-native postgraduate students and in Turkish by Turkish native students in terms of frequency and functions. To this end, 60 master thesis abstracts were compiled in a corpus. Data were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively via AntConc.3.2.4 based on Hyland (2005)’s taxonomy of functions (sequencing, labelling stage, topic shift and announcing goal). Findings of the study yielded significant variation among three groups. Non-native English abstracts included the highest numbers of FMs and most diverse types whereas native English abstracts included the least numbers and very few types. Considering FM categories, items used to announce the goal of the writer abounded in number and types in all groups whereas items for indicating topic shifts almost did not occur. Only native speakers of Turkish employed FMs for the function of labelling stages to indicate the discourse act at the end paragraph of their abstracts. These findings are hoped to create awareness among native and non-native postgraduate students in thesis abstract organization via FMs and incorporating FM teaching into academic writing courses to help students structure their discourse better.

Topic shifts in contrast: Ways to change the subject in French and German

We investigate discourse markers signaling topic shifts in French and German. With a parallel corpus study, we analyze c.8,000 occurrences of three English DMs and their equivalents in French and German. We thus identify a series of (typical and less typical) topic shifters in French and in German.