title: Cycling on the Verge? Exploring the Place of Utility Cycling in Contemporary New Zealand Transport Policy

authors: Smith, Megan

subjects: discourse analysis

abstract: Efforts to increase cycling as a mode of transport (utility cycling) occur at central, regional and local levels of government through a range of supportive strategies, research, and guidelines.  Despite these efforts, utility cycling levels in New Zealand have remained persistently low.  This thesis examines the apparent disparity between policy intent and policy result, using a discourse analytical approach. It examines how cycling is positioned in contemporary New Zealand transport policy documents, and explores whose priorities are shaping transport policy with what implications for utility cycling.  
This study uses a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to analyse the land transport documents from across the institutions of government.  The CDA approach, grounded in the work of van Dijk and Fairclough, draws on ideas from the interpretive tradition of discourse analysis, inspired by Foucault’s concepts of knowledge and power.  This approach reveals the position of utility cycling by exposing the framing, dominant discourses, and discursive strategies that privilege certain transport objectives and activities over others.
The findings show transport is promoted almost exclusively by central government as an activity to facilitate economic growth and efficiency, despite its potential (and actual) impacts on health and well-being, social justice, and environmental sustainability.  The discursive practices of the government privilege private motor vehicle use, helping to both legitimate and maintain that privilege at all levels of government, while positioning utility cycling as a marginalised mode of transport.  
This thesis contributes to scholarship on utility cycling and land transport policy in New Zealand by identifying how the discursive strategies of government control the position of utility cycling in New Zealand.  This study underscores the need for a central government-led, long-term strategic vision for a genuinely integrated, multi-modal transport system, in order for the benefits of utility cycling to be fully maximised.

text: Cycling on the Verge? Exploring the Place of Utility Cycling in Contemporary New Zealand Transport Policy Efforts to increase cycling as a mode of transport (utility cycling) occur at central, regional and local levels of government through a range of supportive strategies, research, and guidelines.  Despite these efforts, utility cycling levels in New Zealand have remained persistently low.  This thesis examines the apparent disparity between policy intent and policy result, using a discourse analytical approach. It examines how cycling is positioned in contemporary New Zealand transport policy documents, and explores whose priorities are shaping transport policy with what implications for utility cycling.  
This study uses a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to analyse the land transport documents from across the institutions of government.  The CDA approach, grounded in the work of van Dijk and Fairclough, draws on ideas from the interpretive tradition of discourse analysis, inspired by Foucault’s concepts of knowledge and power.  This approach reveals the position of utility cycling by exposing the framing, dominant discourses, and discursive strategies that privilege certain transport objectives and activities over others.
The findings show transport is promoted almost exclusively by central government as an activity to facilitate economic growth and efficiency, despite its potential (and actual) impacts on health and well-being, social justice, and environmental sustainability.  The discursive practices of the government privilege private motor vehicle use, helping to both legitimate and maintain that privilege at all levels of government, while positioning utility cycling as a marginalised mode of transport.  
This thesis contributes to scholarship on utility cycling and land transport policy in New Zealand by identifying how the discursive strategies of government control the position of utility cycling in New Zealand.  This study underscores the need for a central government-led, long-term strategic vision for a genuinely integrated, multi-modal transport system, in order for the benefits of utility cycling to be fully maximised.

year: 2014

title: Enhancing consumer health question answering systems through rhetorical structure theory-guided large language model

authors: Liu, Chen

abstract: Consumer Health Question Answering (CHQA) systems have traditionally been designed around isolated capabilities—either factual medical correctness or empathetic support—rather than delivering integrated, multi-dimensional assistance. This separation fails to reflect the reality of consumer health consultations, where individuals typically express intertwined medical concerns, personal circumstances, and emotional distress within a single query. Existing CHQA architectures, often optimised for short, single-intent inputs, prioritise answer generation over question understanding and lack explicit mechanisms to jointly interpret informational and emotional support needs. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced the state of medical QA, most LLM-based systems still struggle to reconcile clinical reliability with context-sensitive empathy in complex consumer health questions.

To address this gap, this study adopts a Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm and introduces Joint Medical–Emotional Question Answering (JMEQA) as a new task that jointly understand and response medical informational needs and emotional support needs in Consumer Health Questions (CHQs). Grounded in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy (AFCE), the research proposes the Med-Emo CHQA architecture, a neural-symbolic unified, LLM-based system that augments answer generation with explicit question understanding. The architecture integrates hierarchical modules for question understanding and answer generation, unifying symbolic knowledge (an RST-based discourse structure tree that encodes intents, contexts, and rhetorical relations during the question-understanding stage) with neural network (LLM) via supervised fine-tuning and structured prompting.

To support system training and evaluation, this study constructs CHQA-MedEmo, the first large-scale, multi-layer corpus of Chinese health consultation records. The corpus is annotated for both medical informational needs and emotional support needs, with explicit contextual spans and discourse relations. System performance is assessed through controlled experiments and an expert reader study using a human-centred evaluation framework that jointly measures accuracy, personalisation, and empathy, alongside latency. Experimental and reader-study results show that the proposed architecture outperforms baseline and ablated models in full medical-need coverage and empathetic alignment, while maintaining lower latency.

Overall, this study advances the design of CHQA systems by demonstrating how symbolic, discourse-aware question understanding can be embedded into LLM workflows to produce responses that are simultaneously medically reliable, personally tailored, and emotionally supportive. The findings contribute design knowledge for Neural-Symbolic Integration (NSI), LLM-based CHQA in online health consultation settings and offer a scalable architectural paradigm for building complex, human-centred AI systems that balance informational rigour with affective care.

text: Enhancing consumer health question answering systems through rhetorical structure theory-guided large language model Consumer Health Question Answering (CHQA) systems have traditionally been designed around isolated capabilities—either factual medical correctness or empathetic support—rather than delivering integrated, multi-dimensional assistance. This separation fails to reflect the reality of consumer health consultations, where individuals typically express intertwined medical concerns, personal circumstances, and emotional distress within a single query. Existing CHQA architectures, often optimised for short, single-intent inputs, prioritise answer generation over question understanding and lack explicit mechanisms to jointly interpret informational and emotional support needs. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced the state of medical QA, most LLM-based systems still struggle to reconcile clinical reliability with context-sensitive empathy in complex consumer health questions.

To address this gap, this study adopts a Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm and introduces Joint Medical–Emotional Question Answering (JMEQA) as a new task that jointly understand and response medical informational needs and emotional support needs in Consumer Health Questions (CHQs). Grounded in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy (AFCE), the research proposes the Med-Emo CHQA architecture, a neural-symbolic unified, LLM-based system that augments answer generation with explicit question understanding. The architecture integrates hierarchical modules for question understanding and answer generation, unifying symbolic knowledge (an RST-based discourse structure tree that encodes intents, contexts, and rhetorical relations during the question-understanding stage) with neural network (LLM) via supervised fine-tuning and structured prompting.

To support system training and evaluation, this study constructs CHQA-MedEmo, the first large-scale, multi-layer corpus of Chinese health consultation records. The corpus is annotated for both medical informational needs and emotional support needs, with explicit contextual spans and discourse relations. System performance is assessed through controlled experiments and an expert reader study using a human-centred evaluation framework that jointly measures accuracy, personalisation, and empathy, alongside latency. Experimental and reader-study results show that the proposed architecture outperforms baseline and ablated models in full medical-need coverage and empathetic alignment, while maintaining lower latency.

Overall, this study advances the design of CHQA systems by demonstrating how symbolic, discourse-aware question understanding can be embedded into LLM workflows to produce responses that are simultaneously medically reliable, personally tailored, and emotionally supportive. The findings contribute design knowledge for Neural-Symbolic Integration (NSI), LLM-based CHQA in online health consultation settings and offer a scalable architectural paradigm for building complex, human-centred AI systems that balance informational rigour with affective care.

year: 2026-03-23

title: Maori perspectives of the environment: A review of Environment Waikato information sources.

authors: Whangapirita, Laura

subjects: Maori

abstract: The Community and Economy Programme at Environment Waikato has developed a partnership with the Maori and Psychology Research Unit of the University of Waikato to further assist in strengthening its commitment to cultural research and information work. This relationship will facilitate the development of a number of significant research reports throughout 2003.  This initial report describes an internal review conducted by the Maori and Psychology Research Unit to identify what information Environment Waikato currently holds on Maori environmental perspectives.

text: Maori perspectives of the environment: A review of Environment Waikato information sources. The Community and Economy Programme at Environment Waikato has developed a partnership with the Maori and Psychology Research Unit of the University of Waikato to further assist in strengthening its commitment to cultural research and information work. This relationship will facilitate the development of a number of significant research reports throughout 2003.  This initial report describes an internal review conducted by the Maori and Psychology Research Unit to identify what information Environment Waikato currently holds on Maori environmental perspectives.

year: 2003-05