VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Write like a scientist. The effects of Systemic Functional Linguistics-informed teaching on science writing outcomes in secondary school EAL learners. A randomised trial.

The aim of this research was to discover the effects of applying a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) based approach to the teaching of explanatory science writing. The research was conducted in a co-educational, independent secondary school in the UK with 19 EAL learners from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, France, Spain and the Netherlands, who were aged between 13 and 18.
A randomised control trial design was used to explore causal relationships between the SFL teaching approach and writing outcomes: schematic structural stages, use of logical relations, lexical density, and amount of technical vocabulary. A comparison group received ‘business as usual’ writing instruction. A pre/post-test model was used, and a final delayed post-test was administered five weeks after the end of the treatment to identify any lasting impact.
The means for the SFL and the usual practice groups were analysed through independent samples t-tests in order to look for statistically significant differences between groups. No significant difference was found between groups, but the SFL group made slightly more improvement compared to the usual practice group.

Keywords: Quantitive research
Systemic Functional Linguistics
English as an additional language, EAL
UK secondary school
ALLT
ALLT2021
Randomised control trial
Advisor: Chalmers, H
How MFL subjects are perceived by international pupils in Italy

This school-based study used mixed methods to investigate pupil perceptions of Modern Foreign Language (MFL) subjects. These were widely defined so as to include the language of societal context, Italian. The focus was on perceived enjoyment and importance of the subjects, as well as overall linguistic self-concept in the form of pupils’ self-rating as ‘good at languages.’ The school was an English medium British international school in Italy and the N=158 participants were in Key Stage 3.
The study was conducted in two stages, with a short questionnaire being administered in the first stage. Follow-up group interviews were then held with 46 pupils, who were invited due to their language backgrounds and/or a particularly high or low self-rating.
Perceptions of mandatory Italian lessons were compared, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, to perceptions of pupil-selected ‘second’ MFL lessons. Particular focus was placed on comparing perceptions by pupil language background (monolingual, bilingual and multilingual as well as whether Italian was spoken at home). In addition, the data were analysed by MFL subject choice.
No statistical effects were found in respect of either enjoyment of importance ratings for (non-Italian) MFL subjects. However, statistically significant effects were found for Italian as a subject, whereby those who speak Italian at home rated it more enjoyable and important as a school subject. In addition, speaking Italian at home and having a multilingual home language background both correlated positively with overall linguistic self-concept.
Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the group interview data showed qualitative differences between the interest and enjoyment of the MFL subjects by language background.
It is suggested that, in some international contexts, proficiency in the language of society may be of greater salience in deciding overall linguistic self-concept than proficiency in (multiple) other languages, even if the language of society is not used much in daily life.

Keywords: International education
ALLT
ALLT2021
Modern foreign language learning
Multilingualism
Group interviews
Foreign language enjoyment
Mixed methods research
Questionnaire
Motivational frameworks
Advisor: Chalmers, H
The role of epithelial cells in COPD

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a complex disease of the airways that results in the decline of lung function with patients having emphysema or chronic bronchitis pathologies and is responsible for 7% of global deaths per year. Smoking is the largest risk factor for causing COPD and COPD patients can experience exacerbations which is defined as worsening of the symptoms which often leads to hospitalizations. The strongest risk factors for exacerbations are bacterial or viral infections. Non-typeable haemophilus Influenzae (NTHi) and Rhinovirus (RV) in particular are associated with up to half of COPD exacerbations. The epithelium is the first line of defense against pathogens and responsible for keeping the microbiome in check. COPD patients have been shown to have a dysfunctional epithelium.
In this thesis, I investigate the role of bronchial epithelial cells in healthy, smokers, and COPD patients to assess any difference in host immune responses and barrier integrity. They are examined under the context of an infection by the common pathogens that are found, NTHi and RV. In particular, I study type I and type III Interferon (IFN) production as well as the production of alarmins and pro-inflammatory cytokines. In addition, I assess the expression and spatial changes of Tight Junction (TJ) proteins Claudin (CLDN)-3, CLDN-4, and Junctional Adhesion Molecule A (JAM-A) in HBECs post-infection as well as barrier integrity. Finally, HBECs from basal and differentiated HBECs are infected and sequenced to capture gene expression of HBECs and assess for any differences.
COPD human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs) immune and anti-viral responses are dysregulated as well as TJ protein expression compared to healthy HBECs post-infection with either NTHi or RV16. NTHi infected COPD HBECs had significantly higher concentrations of IFNλ1 and an significant increase in TNFα but did not upregulate TJ molecules during infection unlike in healthy HBECs. Smoker and COPD HBECs however had significantly higher levels of all TJ proteins measured at basal levels compared to health HBECs. My RNA-seq data demonstrated that COPD HBECs express significantly higher amounts of inflammatory genes post-infection with NTHi compared to healthy HBECs and smoker HBECs upregulate anti-viral genes post-infection with NTHi in basal cultures. Together, the data shows that COPD HBECs behave differently than heathy HBECs and are dysfunctional as well as smoker HBECs post-infection in certain contexts.

Keywords: Infection
Virus
Lungs
Epithelial
Respiratory
Bacteria
Immunology
COPD
Advisor: Bafadhel, M
Cane, J
Assessment of the availability and accessibility of rehabilitation services in a rural district of South Africa

This research examines the availability and accessibility of rehabilitation services in South Africa from a health policy and systems perspective and uses the Capability Approach as the theoretical framework for the whole study. The key components of this research are: 1) rehabilitation policies 2) rehabilitation service capacity and 3) perspectives from people with disabilities as users of the service. My study employs both quantitative and qualitative designs to address the research questions. The policy component qualitatively examines the extent to which South Africa's policies facilitate access to rehabilitation services in the public sector through a review of policies for the period 1994-2019. The rehabilitation service capacity complements the policy review by establishing the readiness of district hospitals in a rural district of South Africa to provide these services using an adapted health facility assessment tool. The health facility assessment includes a quantitative descriptive assessment of the infrastructural accessibility of the health facility, and the availability of assistive devices, equipment, and the rehabilitation workforce. The combined findings from the policy review and the service capacity then inform a qualitative description of the implementation gap. In order to understand the contributing factors to this implementation gap, interviews with health facility rehabilitation managers were conducted to explore these further. Finally, interviews with people with physical disabilities uncover the barriers and facilitators to accessing the rehabilitation services in the included district hospitals. The findings point to important gaps in rehabilitation services in the district across all components of the services. Further, these supply-side gaps reinforce each other and interact with prevailing demand-side barriers to constrain access to rehabilitation services for people with physical disabilities. My study makes a theoretical contribution by expanding the Capability Framework, and then concludes with key recommendations.

Keywords: disability
accessibility
health policy and systems research
priority setting and resource allocation
rehabilitation
capability framework
Advisor: Ariana, P
Polack, S
'A terrible war of defence' - examining the role of dehumanisation in genocidal mobilisation

This thesis provides an account of the role played by discourses of dehumanisation in mobilising genocidal violence. While scholars of ethnic conflict, social psychology, and genocide have extensively studied dehumanisation, this has focused on it as a phenomenon that reduces moral restraints on violence. Other forms of dehumanisation, however, do something different, designating target populations as an existentially threatening, monstrous, or contaminating threat, and thus a valid target for ‘defensive’ violence. What literature has addressed this latter understanding has been limited by its lack of (political, historical, and societal) contextualisation of these discourses – where were they articulated? By whom? To what audiences? – as well as limited examination of their internal logics.
To address this, I engage in an extended archival examination of three main case studies (Germany, Rwanda, and Serbia), followed by several smaller cases to demonstrate the broader applicability of my model. By building an extensive corpus of examples of dehumanisation, locating them in their historical and social contexts, and tracing their spread and impact, I develop a clearer account of the role of dehumanisation in genocidal violence.
I find that this form of securitising, threat-designating dehumanisation was remarkably consistent across a wide range of cases, and played a significant role in shaping violence. Distinctive views of the enemy – portraying them as diseases and vermin, existentially threatening to the body politic but also easily destroyed or ‘cured’ – were repeated across all three cases, and linked with distinctive violent responses. Based on the correlation between the incidence of dehumanisation and the forms of genocidal violence, as well as relevant social psychology scholarship, I argue that it was effective in promoting campaigns of mass extermination. I conclude by considering how these findings might contribute to genocide early warning regimes, by providing an account of a common precursor to genocide.

Keywords: discourse analysis
securitisation
dehumanisation
genocide
Advisor: Maynard, J
Ruggeri, A
Training curricula and structured representations in human and machine learning

Humans display a remarkable ability to learn from previous experience. Far from being passively received, however, the training experiences we encounter in modern life are often chosen by ourselves or other people. Existing work shows that some training schedules (“curricula”) work better than others in specific situations, but our understanding of when and why these curricula work is limited, making it difficult to predict curriculum success in novel settings. Compounding this issue, the curricula that subjectively feel most effective are not always optimal for promoting long-term retention or generalization. The main aim of this thesis is to contribute towards the development of computationally-informed theories of curriculum efficacy and mechanism. For this purpose, we make use of behavioral experiments, neural recordings and supervised neural network models.
A key focus of the thesis is on curricula that “start small” by constraining the information that is initially available to the learner. This premise is evaluated in three distinct learning domains. For continuous discriminations such as parametric category structures, initially limiting training to prototypical examples helps. We show that this is at least in part because human internal representations are inherently noisy, and prototypicality acts as a buffer against noise-induced distortions. In tasks that require integrating information from multiple cues, the cue properties emphasized by the training curriculum predict the type of decision rule that human learners use. In a compositional rule learning setting, human learners, but not artificial neural networks, benefit from training on individual rules one at a time. A second aspect of study relates to the fact that in most settings, it is not memorization of training examples, but generalization and transfer to novel problems that are most crucial to adaptive behavior. In this regard, we revive an old idea in cognitive science, that human thought and action are fundamentally compositional. Evaluating models with an explicitly modular structure on the same compositional rule learning task as humans, we establish several correspondences. These include sensitivity to training curriculum, and generalization patterns exhibited by humans, but not by traditional artificial neural networks. Taken together, it is hoped that the work presented in this thesis provides a small step forward in understanding the training schedules that facilitate successful learning.

Keywords: compositionality
learning
curriculum learning
neural network
representation learning
computational modeling
Advisor: Summerfield, C
Sceriff, G
Short- and long-term memory: effects of ageing and genetic risk and resilience to Alzheimer's disease

Healthy memory processes are essential for leading a normal life. In particular, this thesis will focus on short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). STM is our ability to store limited amounts of information over short periods of time, while LTM refers to our capacity to retain near-unlimited amounts of information over prolonged periods of time. Traditionally, these two types of memory have been studied independently. As a result, our knowledge of the relationship between them has remained limited. In this thesis, I develop well-controlled tasks to compare STM and LTM for the same type of information, formed during equivalent encoding circumstances, and reported in similar ways. Results show that STM and LTM for the same type of information are indeed related. Furthermore, by studying both STM and LTM in cognitively healthy young, middle-aged and older adults, I show that the relationship between these two memory functions remains stable across normal ageing, suggesting some degree of overlap in the underlying neural mechanisms. I also attempt to characterise this relationship in individuals who are at an increased genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, namely, carriers of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE) ε4 allele, although limited sample size hinders the interpretation of findings. In Chapter 1 of this thesis, I review the literature that supports STM-LTM dichotomy, in addition to studies that suggest similarities between these memory functions. I also provide an overview of the effects of healthy ageing on STM and LTM, and how these memory functions change in the presence of different APOE alleles. In Chapters 2 and 3, I focus on healthy ageing and its effects on STM and LTM. In Chapter 2, these effects are studied in APOE ε2 carriers and non-carriers. In Chapter 3, I introduce two novel continuous-report tasks that enable analogous probing of both types of memory in order to measure the relationship between them. This task is employed in Chapter 4 to assess memory performance in middle-aged APOE ε4 carriers and non-carriers, with an aim to use similar tasks to characterise the effects of this allele on memory in the future. In Chapter 5, I discuss the implications of my findings and the areas in which this research could be extended and improved.

Keywords: ageing
short-term memory
long-term memory
apolipoprotein E
APOE
Advisor: Nobre, A
Zokaei, N
Stem cell modelling of ⍺-synuclein aggregation and its pathology

⍺-Synuclein is a key player in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease and related disorders, yet it remains unclear how its aggregation triggers the degeneration of human dopaminergic neurons. In this study, I induced ⍺-synuclein aggregation in human iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons using ⍺-synuclein fibrils generated from de novo or amplified in the presence of post-mortem brain homogenates from either Parkinson’s disease or multiple system atrophy. Increased levels of ⍺-synuclein monomer promoted its seeded aggregation in a dose- and time-dependent manner, which was further associated with the induction of ⍺-synuclein gene expression. Progressive neuronal death was observed with exposure to brain-amplified ⍺- synuclein fibrils and reversed by the reduction of endogenous ⍺-synuclein abundance. Bulk RNA-Seq analysis of human dopaminergic neurons with aggregates at one- and two-weeks post-seeding identified progressive involvement of pathways implicated in organelle homeostasis. Using Gene Ontology, Unfolded Protein Response, endoplasmic reticulum stress, membrane proteolysis, and mitochondrial membrane protein insertion were upregulated. Biotin proximity labelling of ⍺-synuclein identified 56 differentially interacting proteins with aggregates templated by brain-amplified fibrils, including the evasion of Parkinson’s disease-associated deglycase, DJ-1. Ablation of DJ-1 enhanced fibril-induced aggregation and exacerbated neuronal death in iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons. Altogether, my results demonstrate that the toxicity of ⍺-synuclein strains is contingent upon aggregate burden, which is determined by endogenous monomer levels of ⍺-synuclein, and strain conformation, which dictates differential interactomes. This study underscores how Parkinson’s disease-associated genes influence the phenotypic manifestation of ⍺-synuclein strains in human neurons.

Advisor: Tofaris, G
D'Angiolella, V
The origins of subnational democracy: how colonial legacies and labor incorporation shaped regime heterogeneity within Latin American countries

Despite recent contributions, subnational democratic variation has received little systematic attention in comparative politics and continues to be a grave omission (Dahl 1971, 12) in the literature on democratization. Moreover, current explanations are at fault of ignoring the intricacies of time. Consequently, our understanding of the regime heterogeneity observed within countries has hitherto remained ahistorical. To overcome this and other limitations, using evidence from the largest federations of Latin America, I put forth the first comparative, and historically grounded explanation of the origins of subnational democracy.
The project tackles the following question: What explains subnational democratic variation across Latin America? In other words, why is it that some provinces within countries are more democratic than others? I contend that economic development is at the core of the puzzle. More specifically, building on the work of Mahoney (2010) and Collier and Collier (1991), I articulate a two-step argument contending that, across the region, the subnational unevenness observed today was configured by territorially distinct development trajectories which were triggered during colonization and that, once set, conditioned the timing of local labor incorporation.
My two-step, path-dependent argument is bound by a probabilistic notion of causality. Empirically, I adopt a mixed-methods approach. Weaving together quantitative and qualitative evidence, I present original data for all the subnational units of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. In addition, I track the experiences of Jalisco, Rio Grande do Sul, Guerrero, and Salta, as cases that illustrate the processes at play. I conclude this project by exploring the portability of my argument to the Indian case. My cross-national, longitudinal, and historical exploration of the origins of subnational democracy contributes to the discipline by contextualizing all other existing explanations of subnational regime variation.

Keywords: politics
democracy
Argentina
regime
democratization
subnational
Brazil
Latin America
Mexico
Advisor: Power, T
Entity comparison in knowledge graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) represent information in a simple, interlinked format and are used in a variety of applications. Besides the standard reasoning tasks such as query answering, there has been an increasing need for new types of analysis. One such fundamental analysis task is entity comparison, i.e., determining what two entities have in common and how they are different. The importance of such a task can be seen in various applications such as product comparisons, and explainable recommender systems. This thesis studies the problem of entity comparison over knowledge graphs and presents a novel framework that models comparisons via similarity and difference queries. It is the first declarative comparison framework for linked data that treats both similarities and differences as first-class citizens.
We first define the syntax and semantics of various types of comparison queries, motivating each type with examples and establishing important relations between different query types. Next, we study the complexity of the two fundamental decision problems over queries, namely the existence and verification problems, for basic comparison queries and for most specific similarity queries (MSSQs). We consider two underlying fragments of SPARQL, with and without arithmetic comparisons, and we show how they affect the complexity of the above problems, and which types of data they suit most. We then study practical aspects of computing the MSSQ. In particular, we establish an important uniqueness result for MSSQs and propose an efficient approximation algorithm. We implement an algorithm for computing acyclic similarity queries and evaluate its performance on large-scale KGs; our empirical results demonstrate the practical feasibility of our algorithm.

Keywords: RDF graphs
entity comparison
similarity queries
SPARQL
knowledge graphs
Advisor: Horrocks, I
Cuenca Grau, B
Kostylev, E