Coherence Analysis in the Brain Network of ASD Children using Connectivity Model and Graph Theory

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) belongs with the category of neuro-developmental disorders, which can be majorly categorized under decreased social relationships, communication and thought processes. Various studies in the field of biological networks prove that one of the defining features of ASD is altered brain connectivity. Hence, the understanding of the brain networks can pave the way to delve deeper into the underlying behaviour of the Autistic brains. Moreover, many studies also reveal that human brains exhibit small-world characteristics which are usually seen in simple model neural networks that emerge spontaneously upon adaptive rewiring according to the dynamical functional connectivity. Graph theory-based approaches are finding their way into the understanding of the altered connectivity in various neurological disorders. For that matter, the study focuses on implementing a graph theory-based approach to investigate on the small-world network of Autistic as well as typically developing brains and understand the behavioural changes for an Audio and Video Stimuli. The graphically generated data is then measured for functional connectivity using a symmetrical parameter known as the coherence measure

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

The Semantic Prosody of Natural Phenomena in the Qur’an: A Corpus-Based Study

This thesis explores the Semantic Prosody (SP) of natural phenomena in the Qur’an and five of its prominent English translations [Pickthall (1930), Yusuf Ali (1939/ revised edition 1987), Arberry (1957), Saheeh International (1997), and Abdel Haleem (2004)]. SP, scarcely explored in Qur’anic research, is defined as ‘a form of meaning established through the proximity of a consistent series of collocates’ (Louw 2000, p.50). Theoretically, it is both an evaluative prosody (i.e., lexical items collocating with semantic word classes that are positive, negative, or neutral) and a discourse prosody (i.e., having a communicative purpose). Given the stylistic uniqueness of the Qur’an and considering that SP can be examined empirically via corpora, the present study explores the SP of 154 words associated with nature referenced throughout the Qur’an using Corpus Linguistics techniques. Firstly, the Python-based Natural Language Toolkit was used for the following: to define nature terms via WordNet; to disambiguate their variant forms with Stemmers, and to compute their frequencies. Once frequencies were found, a quantitative analysis using Evert’s (2008) five-step statistical analysis was implemented on the 30 most frequent terms to investigate their collocations and SPs. Following this, a qualitative analysis was conducted as per the Extended Lexical Unit via concordance to analyse collocations and the Lexical-Functional Grammar to find the variation of meanings produced by lexico-grammatical patterns. Finally, the resulting datasets were aligned to evaluate their congruency with the Qur’an. Findings of this research confirm that words referring to nature in the Qur’an do have semantic prosody. For example, astronomical bodies are primed to occur in predominantly positive collocations referring to glorifying God, while weather phenomena in negative ones refer to Day of Judgment calamities. In addition, results show that Abdel-Haleem’s translation can be considered the most congruent. This research develops an approach to explore themes (e.g., nature) via SP analysis in texts and their translations and provides several linguistic resources that can be used for future corpus-based studies on the language of the Qur’an.

Against synchronic chain shifting

In a synchronic chain shift, some underlying form /A/ is realized on the surface as a distinct surface form [B]. Simultaneously, underlying instances of /B/ are realized as a further distinct form [C]. This has traditionally been viewed as problematic; if /B/ cannot surface faithfully, then underlying /A/ should map to [C]. I argue that the A --> B --> C nature of synchronic chain shifts is not genuinely problematic. There is nothing substantive uniting the class of processes that exhibit an A --> B --> C mapping. I begin by showing that whilst there are several theories that model synchronic chain shifting, there is no genuine consensus on how the term is to be defined. I compare chain shifts in synchrony to shifts in diachrony and acquisition, concluding that in both cases there are few genuine similarities. Next, I present a detailed survey of putative synchronic chain shifts. Building on a collection compiled by Elliott Moreton (2004a), I revise and update information on existing entries and add new examples. Using examples from the survey as case studies, I argue that there are no coherent groups of shifts above the level of the segment. Furthermore, whilst there are coherent classes of processes at the level of the segment, the forces that motivate them are indifferent to whether they result in a chain shift. Finally, I present the results of a pilot Artificial Grammar Learning experiment. The experiment gives no reason to suppose that chain shifts are any more or less learnable than similar, non-chain shift patterns. I conclude that there is nothing uniting the set of putative synchronic chain shifts. If we are to treat these effects as genuinely synchronic, effects featuring A --> B --> C mappings are better explained using more general principles of the phonological grammar