Sheila A. Boamah, Hoda Herati, Farzana Akter
et al.
ObjectiveIn Canada, over 7.8 million individuals provide care, with nearly one-quarter aged 65 or older. As essential partners in aging, caregivers bridge formal care systems and the broader care economy. With caregiving demands expected to double over the next 30 years, identifying and addressing caregivers’ evolving support needs is critical to sustaining compassionate, connected care. This systematic review aims to document caregivers’ self-identified support needs in delivering quality care.MethodsA systematic search of bibliographic databases and grey literature was conducted in line with PRISMA guidelines and supplemented by reference mining. Eligible studies were peer-reviewed, published in English between 2020 and 2025; reviews and grey literature were excluded. Selection was managed using Covidence, and methodological quality was assessed independent by two reviewers utilizing Joanna Briggs Institute tools.ResultsOf 3,629 records, 83 studies were included: 59 qualitative, 17 quantitative, and 7 mixed-methods. Five key themes with twelve sub-themes emerged, reflecting caregivers’ needs related to system navigation, inclusive technologies, coordinated care system, emotional and practical, and financial/workplace resources.ConclusionCaregivers’ insights highlight priority areas to inform caregiver-centred policies, services, and research that enhance caregiver wellbeing and care quality for older adults.
Abstract Objectives To review the literature and provide an updated summary on the role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in male infertility. Methods A review of PubMed, Cochrane review, and Web of Science databases for full-text English-language articles published between 1943 and 2017 was performed, focusing on the aetiology of ROS, physiological role of ROS on spermatic function, pathological role of ROS in infertility, evaluation of ROS, and role of antioxidants in oxidative stress. Results ROS play a role in spermatic function and fertilisation. The literature describes both a physiological and a pathological role of ROS in fertility. A delicate balance between ROS necessary for physiological activity and antioxidants to protect from cellular oxidative injury is essential for fertility. Conclusion Although elevated levels of ROS are implicated as a cause of infertility, there is no consensus on selecting patients to test for ROS, which test to perform, or if treatment for ROS can have a positive impact on infertility rates and pregnancy.
Background:
Oral health plays a crucial role in maintaining the general health of an individual. Parkinson disease (PD) has known to disrupt the oral functions. Prosthetic rehabilitation can be done in these patients. However, there is scarcity of literature to assess the effectiveness or impact of rehabilitation with prosthesis either fixed or removable on various oral functions and quality of life (QoL) or satisfaction of PD patients. The purpose of this systematic study was to assess the effectiveness of prosthodontic rehabilitation in patients with PD.
Materials and Methods:
The literature search was conducted in the PubMed and CINAHL database for the articles till 2024 in English language. An exploration of gray literature was also included through Google Scholar. Manual search in the references of the selected articles was also done for relevant articles. The methodological quality assessment of cohort studies was done using Newcastle–Ottawa quality assessment form for Cohort Studies (NOS). Assessment of cross-sectional studies was done using the Appraisal tool for Cross-Sectional Studies (tool) and aassessment of case series was done using JBI critical appraisal tool for case series.
Results:
A total of 6 articles were selected from PubMed, 1 from CINAHL, and 2 from Google Scholar. Four articles studied the masticatory efficiency. Oral perception and motor ability were analyzed in two articles. Oral Health QoL was assessed in four articles. One article studied the electromyographic activity.
Conclusion:
Based on this systematic review, it can be suggested that prosthetic rehabilitation using fixed or removable prosthesis offer potential benefits in PD patients improving the oral functions and QoL. However, there is a dearth of long-term research on evaluation of impact of prosthetic rehabilitation in improving the oral function and QoL of PD patients.
PROSPERO Registration: CRD42024570296.
Maria Petrova, Maria Ponomareva, Alexandra Ivoylova
The paper is devoted to the creation of the semantic sketches for English verbs. The pilot corpus consists of the English-Russian sketch pairs and is aimed to show what kind of contrastive studies the sketches help to conduct. Special attention is paid to the cross-language differences between the sketches with similar semantics. Moreover, we discuss the process of building a semantic sketch, and analyse the mistakes that could give insight to the linguistic nature of sketches.
Industry 4.0 is a current trend of automation and digitalization of industries. The impacts and importance of Industry 4.0 are reflected in all aspects of our lives. The purpose of this article is to analyze the literatures based on a scoping review method. A lack of digital culture, training, knowledge, and language are also challenges faced by Industry 4.0 while implementing its operations. Digital English and Education 4.0 are also employee competencies of Industry 4.0. The authors have reviewed the literature related to Digital English, Education 4.0, and Industry 4.0 from various resources. Astonishingly, the results show that the studies conducted in these areas are so specific focusing only one of the above-mentioned areas; no research article was identified that detailed the interconnections among these areas. From the scoping review, the study has identified the gaps in the literature. Thus, the study concludes that filling up the gaps and conducting research in these areas are useful to sort out a few of the challenges of Industry 4.0 and it recommends that in future, researchers conduct studies based on the interconnections of Digital English and Education 4.0 for Industry 4.0.
Barlian Kristanto, Diannike Putri, Le Huang Dung
et al.
Vocabulary mastery is crucial for nursing students to effectively communicate in English. This study aimed to develop and validate a tailored computer-assisted vocabulary learning (CAVL) intervention to improve nursing students' retention of English lexicon, which is essential for healthcare communications. The CAVL program was designed using the Moodle platform and focused on four thematic units that targeted essential nursing vocabulary. The learning process followed research-based principles of vocabulary instruction, including multimodal introduction, reinforced retrieval, and contextual repetition. This study utilized a research and development methodology to conduct iterative needs analyses, design refinement, and rigorous evaluation protocols. Expert reviews, prototype testing, post-intervention vocabulary tests, and delayed assessments were used to gather data and make data-driven improvements. Quantitative analysis evaluated the effectiveness of this approach for 100 Indonesian nursing students. Vocabulary assessments were administered before, immediately after, and two weeks after the intervention, revealing significant improvements in terminology knowledge following the implementation of CAVL. Importantly, scores remained stable during the delayed assessment, demonstrating durable retention. These results are consistent with previous literature on the benefits of contextual and multimodal vocabulary learning. The CAVL prototype facilitated learning and effectively improved vocabulary retention outside of the classroom. This research provides an adaptable framework for technologically-assisted language mastery, which is essential for the next generation of nursing education. Further studies can explore the application of this framework in allied healthcare fields and the transition to practice in nursing education.
Special aspects of education, Language and Literature
Paramita Das, Amartya Roy, Ritabrata Chakraborty
et al.
Although Wikipedia is the largest multilingual encyclopedia, it remains inherently incomplete. There is a significant disparity in the quality of content between high-resource languages (HRLs, e.g., English) and low-resource languages (LRLs, e.g., Hindi), with many LRL articles lacking adequate information. To bridge these content gaps, we propose a lightweight framework to enhance knowledge equity between English and Hindi. In case the English Wikipedia page is not up-to-date, our framework extracts relevant information from external resources readily available (such as English books) and adapts it to align with Wikipedia's distinctive style, including its \textit{neutral point of view} (NPOV) policy, using in-context learning capabilities of large language models. The adapted content is then machine-translated into Hindi for integration into the corresponding Wikipedia articles. On the other hand, if the English version is comprehensive and up-to-date, the framework directly transfers knowledge from English to Hindi. Our framework effectively generates new content for Hindi Wikipedia sections, enhancing Hindi Wikipedia articles respectively by 65% and 62% according to automatic and human judgment-based evaluations.
Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety. Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning. We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback. This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through a preliminary user study.
Silvia García Méndez, Milagros Fernández Gavilanes, Enrique Costa Montenegro
et al.
We present an automatic text expansion system to generate English sentences, which performs automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) by combining linguistic rules with statistical approaches. Here, "automatic" means that the system can generate coherent and correct sentences from a minimum set of words. From its inception, the design is modular and adaptable to other languages. This adaptability is one of its greatest advantages. For English, we have created the highly precise aLexiE lexicon with wide coverage, which represents a contribution on its own. We have evaluated the resulting NLG library in an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) proof of concept, both directly (by regenerating corpus sentences) and manually (from annotations) using a popular corpus in the NLG field. We performed a second analysis by comparing the quality of text expansion in English to Spanish, using an ad-hoc Spanish-English parallel corpus. The system might also be applied to other domains such as report and news generation.
Proficiency in English language depends on the knowledge of its vocabulary possessed by the second and foreign language learners and even the native speakers. Though developing the vocabulary is vital, it poses several problems, especially, to non-native students of English. Students with a low vocabulary knowledge show weak academic performance in different courses related to the language skills, linguistics, literature, and translation at the university level of education. This study, in particular, aims to investigate the problems faced by English majors in learning the vocabulary at Prince Stattam bin Abdulaziz University (PSAU) in Saudi Arabia. It also puts forward some vocabulary-learning strategies to minimize the potential problems. The data consist of the responses of 100 student-participants (undergraduates) randomly picked up from five different levels (four, five, six, seven, and eight) of 4-Year BA English Program at PSAU. This quantitative study uses an online questionnaire, as an instrument, to collect the data. The results reveal that the English majors at PSAU face several problems in learning the vocabulary such as knowing the meanings of new words, pronouncing new words, using new words correctly, memorizing and spelling new vocabulary and so on. To its contribution, this study emphasizes the importance of learning the English vocabulary, draws students’ attention towards it, highlights the problems encountered by students, and raises their awareness of the vocabulary. Future research may explore teachers’ perspectives on students’ vocabulary-learning problems and instructional methods implemented to teach the vocabulary in English language classrooms.
English is an international language and in demand today. English is by far the most widely used language around the world. However, English language writing has always been a challenge for second language students to master. Developing students’ ability in writing is one of the major challenges faced by the ESL teachers in most schools nowadays. Nevertheless, writing has always been a major difficulty faced by students in English language learning, especially in elementary schools. Not only that, teachers are also facing some challenges in teaching writing skills for students in elementary schools. Thus, this study aims to explore the challenges faced by both the students and teachers in learning as well as teaching writing skills in elementary schools.
Justin D Smith, Brian Mustanski, Virginia McKay
et al.
Introduction Despite decreased rates of new infections, HIV/AIDS continues to impact certain US populations. In order to achieve the goals laid out in the Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) in the US initiative, implementation science is needed to expand the sustained use of effective prevention and treatment interventions, particularly among priority populations at risk for and living with HIV/AIDS. Over 200 HIV-related implementation studies have been funded by the US National Institutes of Health. Therefore, a comprehensive review of the literature identifying implementation determinants (barriers and facilitators) and categorising implementation strategies across the continuum of HIV prevention and care in the USA is appropriate and needed to enhance current knowledge and help achieve the goals laid out in the EHE national strategic plan.Methods and analysis This systematic review protocol follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Between November 2020 and January 2022, a broad database search strategy of Ovid MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Web of Science was conducted to capture implementation-related studies along the HIV prevention and care continuum. Articles were eligible for inclusion if they were: conducted in the USA, published after the year 2000, written in English, related to HIV/AIDS, focused on outcomes related to dissemination and implementation (ie, did not test/evaluate/explore implementation determinants or strategies) and were behavioural studies (ie, not basic science). We plan to conduct three systematic reviews to identify and categorise determinants and strategies associated with three HIV focus areas: pre-exposure prophylaxis, testing/diagnosing and linkage to care, and treatment. Determinants will be coded according to an adapted Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research 2.0. Implementation strategies and outcomes will be categorised in accordance with existing taxonomies and frameworks.Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval is not applicable. No original data will be collected. Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations and via online tools.PROSPERO registration number CRD42021233089.
This paper explores “difference” as locus for changing power relations in Jane Austen’s major novel Emma. While Austen’s pre-occupation with courtships has been under scholarly investigations, it has not been properly considered as tool of resistance: one that strives to displace power from physical force to a discursive one. This displacement is a strategic struggle of middle-class ascendency over aristocracy in a changing English milieu. The study examines courtships within two Foucauldian frameworks. The first one is disciplinary that aims to regulate sexual practices like panopticon---an apparatus of power, producing normative/heterosexual identity through surveillance. Embedded in the first is the second approach that examines the very assumptions of the panoptic discourse through ‘micro techniques of power’. It is the ability of her characters (especially the female) to reject not only undesirable sexual advances but desirable proposals as well that transform their otherwise passive and docile bodies into subjects to be reckoned with. In doing so, Austen does transform signs of class and rank into forms of expression as pre-requisite for any exchange. This paper is an attempt to look into the power dynamics in the novel from a different angle---the angle of difference impacted by power/knowledge and discourse. Two sites of contestation are analyzed: the first played between Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightly, and the second between Mrs. Elton and Jane Fairfax. This transformation can explicitly be viewed in her novel Emma. Foucauldian insights are certainly innovative to a well-read Austen.
English literature, Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar
Information visualization and natural language are intricately linked. However, the majority of research and relevant work in information and data visualization (and human-computer interaction) involve English-speaking populations as both researchers and participants, are published in English, and are presented predominantly at English-speaking venues. Although several solutions can be proposed such as translating English texts in visualization to other languages, there is little research that looks at the intersection of data visualization and different languages, and the implications that current visualization practices have on non-English speaking communities. In this position paper, we argue that linguistically diverse communities abound beyond the English-speaking world and offer a richness of experiences for the visualization research community to engage with. Through a case study of how two non-English languages interplay with data visualization reasoning in Madagascar, we describe how monolingualism in data visualization impacts the experiences of underrepresented populations and emphasize potential harm to these communities. Lastly, we raise several questions towards advocating for more inclusive visualization practices that center the diverse experiences of linguistically underrepresented populations.
The front-end is a critical component of English text-to-speech (TTS) systems, responsible for extracting linguistic features that are essential for a text-to-speech model to synthesize speech, such as prosodies and phonemes. The English TTS front-end typically consists of a text normalization (TN) module, a prosody word prosody phrase (PWPP) module, and a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) module. However, current research on the English TTS front-end focuses solely on individual modules, neglecting the interdependence between them and resulting in sub-optimal performance for each module. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified front-end framework that captures the dependencies among the English TTS front-end modules. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in all modules.
Eshant English, Matthias Kirchler, Christoph Lippert
Normalising flows are generative models that transform a complex density into a simpler density through the use of bijective transformations enabling both density estimation and data generation from a single model. %However, the requirement for bijectivity imposes the use of specialised architectures. In the context of image modelling, the predominant choice has been the Glow-based architecture, whereas alternative architectures remain largely unexplored in the research community. In this work, we propose a novel architecture called MixerFlow, based on the MLP-Mixer architecture, further unifying the generative and discriminative modelling architectures. MixerFlow offers an efficient mechanism for weight sharing for flow-based models. Our results demonstrate comparative or superior density estimation on image datasets and good scaling as the image resolution increases, making MixerFlow a simple yet powerful alternative to the Glow-based architectures. We also show that MixerFlow provides more informative embeddings than Glow-based architectures and can integrate many structured transformations such as splines or Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks.
Human cannot communicate with one another without language. Good language will affect the effectiveness of the information delivery. Using a good adverb clause is one of effective sentence example. However, the continuous use of adverb clauses will also create redundancies in the delivery of information. Therefore, it is necessary to have a variety of uses of adverb clauses, one of which is the use of reducing adverb clauses. This research provides a description of what elements that can be reduced in the Reduced Adverbial Clause and what changes that occurs in Reduced Adverbial Clause after the reduction process is carried out. The data of this research is collected from corpus with note-taking technique. This study uses qualitative methods with interactive techniques. Interactive technique covers three components, namely data reduction, data presentation and conclusion drawing. This research found that adverbial clause can be reduces as long as it has the same subject. Elements that can be reduced in adverbial clause are subject, subject and auxiliary, and conjunction. The changes of reduced clause can be in the form of present participle, past participle, and clause without subject and auxiliaries. Keywords: Reduced Adverbial Clause, Language, Adverbial Clause
Andy Wai Kan Yeung, Anela Tosevska, Elisabeth Klager
et al.
BackgroundSocial media has been extensively used for the communication of health-related information and consecutively for the potential spread of medical misinformation. Conventional systematic reviews have been published on this topic to identify original articles and to summarize their methodological approaches and themes. A bibliometric study could complement their findings, for instance, by evaluating the geographical distribution of the publications and determining if they were well cited and disseminated in high-impact journals.
ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to perform a bibliometric analysis of the current literature to discover the prevalent trends and topics related to medical misinformation on social media.
MethodsThe Web of Science Core Collection electronic database was accessed to identify relevant papers with the following search string: ALL=(misinformati* OR “wrong informati*” OR disinformati* OR “misleading informati*” OR “fake news*”) AND ALL=(medic* OR illness* OR disease* OR health* OR pharma* OR drug* OR therap*) AND ALL=(“social media*” OR Facebook* OR Twitter* OR Instagram* OR YouTube* OR Weibo* OR Whatsapp* OR Reddit* OR TikTok* OR WeChat*). Full records were exported to a bibliometric software, VOSviewer, to link bibliographic information with citation data. Term and keyword maps were created to illustrate recurring terms and keywords.
ResultsBased on an analysis of 529 papers on medical and health-related misinformation on social media, we found that the most popularly investigated social media platforms were Twitter (n=90), YouTube (n=67), and Facebook (n=57). Articles targeting these 3 platforms had higher citations per paper (>13.7) than articles covering other social media platforms (Instagram, Weibo, WhatsApp, Reddit, and WeChat; citations per paper <8.7). Moreover, social media platform–specific papers accounted for 44.1% (233/529) of all identified publications. Investigations on these platforms had different foci. Twitter-based research explored cyberchondria and hypochondriasis, YouTube-based research explored tobacco smoking, and Facebook-based research studied vaccine hesitancy related to autism. COVID-19 was a common topic investigated across all platforms. Overall, the United States contributed to half of all identified papers, and 80% of the top 10 most productive institutions were based in this country. The identified papers were mostly published in journals of the categories public environmental and occupational health, communication, health care sciences services, medical informatics, and medicine general internal, with the top journal being the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
ConclusionsThere is a significant platform-specific topic preference for social media investigations on medical misinformation. With a large population of internet users from China, it may be reasonably expected that Weibo, WeChat, and TikTok (and its Chinese version Douyin) would be more investigated in future studies. Currently, these platforms present research gaps that leave their usage and information dissemination warranting further evaluation. Future studies should also include social platforms targeting non-English users to provide a wider global perspective.
Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics, Public aspects of medicine
Writing anxiety and academic procrastination are said to be interconnected and have a substantial impact on students’ thesis completion. Self-regulation, on the other hand, is what allows students to make progress while writing their thesis. The goal of this research is to find out how writing anxiety and academic procrastination influence students' thesis writing and how they self-regulate themselves to write their thesis. A quantitative study utilizing descriptive statistics was used to conduct this research. Twelve students in a thesis class expressed their consent to participate in the research. The data was gathered by keeping track of the students' thesis writing progress based on word count development on their research drafts, assigning them to write a standardized weekly journal, and delivering two adapted questionnaires from the self-regulation learning strategy survey. The results suggest that the students had a high level of anxiety, with a score of 65.25, with avoidance behaviour being the highest. They also procrastinate on academic revision and review. Goal planning and requesting help, on the other hand, involve their self-regulation the most, whereas task methods and time management engage in the least. Future researchers are urged to do a further in-depth study on this issue since it is worth researching. Lecturers are also urged to introduce students to different reading and writing techniques.