Tag: Indigenous Languages

Abstract

Background

This paper investigates the perceptions of medical interns regarding the usefulness of non-mother tongue communication skills taught during the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2003, the university decided to incorporate Afrikaans and IsiXhosa communication skills into the new MBChB curriculum in order to meet the Faculty of Health Sciences goals to promote quality and equity in healthcare, and to prepare graduating health practitioners for multilingual communities where they would be serving. Despite annual internal evaluations and reviews of the languages courses, the usefulness, if any, of the additional languages in the working clinical environment had not been determined.

Methods

Data were collected during the second year of medical internship across a five-year period through survey questionnaires, as well as focus group interviews conducted in the Western Cape, South Africa. Surveys were conducted from 2009 to 2013.

Results

The study shows that the usefulness of each of the probed categories was not consistent across both languages. The interns expressed a need for an overall improvement of the isiXhosa course offering, while the outcomes for the Afrikaans language were more positive across all categories except for cultural understanding.

Conclusion

The study indicates a positive trend amongst the interns towards developing usefulness in communication skills in Afrikaans and isiXhosa to communicate with their patients.

Abstract

In this essay, we address an important problem in the ethics of cultural engagement: the problem of giving a systematic account of when and why outsider use of insider cultural material is permissible or impermissible. We argue that many scholars rely on a problematic notion of collective ownership even when they claim to be disavowing it. After making this case, we motivate an alternative framework for thinking about cultural exchange, which we call the core interests framework. We conclude with some reflections on how this framework helps to raise interesting questions about the most promising accounts of wrongful cultural appropriation.

Abstract

The literature on indigenous health and health disparities primarily focuses on Western countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Nonetheless, an emerging but dispersed corpus of research exists on the determinants of health and health disparities among indigenous populations in Taiwan, a developed nation with sizable indigenous communities. Despite these developments, an understanding of current scholarship on the determinants of indigenous health and health disparities remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we systematically searched PubMed/Medline, Web of Science databases, and the Airiti Library, the most comprehensive Chinese database in Taiwan. By December 31, 2022, we identified 54 relevant studies, including 48 peer-reviewed articles in English and 6 in Chinese. These studies reveal significant disparities in mortality rates and the burden of infectious and chronic diseases between indigenous and non-indigenous populations. Factors contributing to the comparatively poorer health of indigenous communities include genetic predispositions, sociodemographic marginalization, and lifestyle choices. The studies employ diverse methodologies, ranging from small convenience samples to nationally representative data. Our analysis identified four paradigms (biomedical, epidemiological, anthropological, and historical/critical), with most focusing on biomedical and epidemiological perspectives. This review also underscores the scarcity of social-behavioral health research dedicated to indigenous health in Taiwan, highlighting the need for future studies to develop robust conceptual models, collect longitudinal data, and focus more on mental health and psychological well-being. These efforts are crucial for gaining a clearer understanding of indigenous health complexities in Taiwan and informing effective policies.

Abstract

Background

COVID-19 pandemic widely disrupted health services provision, especially during the lockdown period, with females disproportionately affected. Very little is known about alternative healthcare sources used by women when access to conventional health services became challenging. This study examined the experiences of women and adolescent girls regarding access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services during the COVID-19 lockdown in Nigeria and their choices of alternative healthcare sources.

Methods

The study sites were two northern states, two southern states, and the Federal Capital Territory. Qualitative data were obtained through 10 focus group discussion sessions held with married adolescents, unmarried adolescents, and older women of reproductive age. The data were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a thematic approach and with the aid of Atlas ti software.

Results

Women reported that access to family planning services was the most affected SRH services during the COVID-19 lockdown. Several barriers to accessing SRH services during COVID-19 lockdown were reported, including restriction of vehicular movement, harassment by law enforcement officers, fear of contracting COVID-19 from health facilities, and fear of undergoing compulsory COVID-19 tests when seeking care in health facilities. In the face of constrained access to SRH services in public sector facilities during the COVID-19 lockdown, women sought care from several alternative sources, mostly locally available and informal services, including medicine vendors, traditional birth attendants, and neighbours with some health experience. Women also widely engaged in self-medication, using both orthodox drugs and non-orthodox preparations like herbs. The lockdown negatively impacted on women’s SRH, with increased incidence of sexual- and gender-based violence, unplanned pregnancy resulting from lack of access to contraceptives, and early marriage involving adolescents with unplanned pregnancies.

Conclusion

COVID-19 negatively impacted access to SRH services and forced women to utilise mostly informal service outlets and home remedies as alternatives to conventional health services. There is a need to ensure the continuity of essential SRH services during future lockdowns occasioned by disease outbreaks. Also, community systems strengthening that ensures effective community-based health services, empowered community resource persons, and health-literate populations are imperative for overcoming barriers to healthcare access during future lockdowns.

Abstract

Natural language inference (NLI), also known as textual entailment recognition (TER), is a crucial task in natural language processing that combines many fundamental aspects of language understanding. Despite the recent significant advancement in NLI, primarily driven by the development of diverse large-scale datasets, most of the progress has been confined to English. This is attributed to the scarcity of human-annotated corpora for most other languages, notably Arabic. In this paper, we present an Arabic NLI dataset called ArEntail, consisting of 6000 sentence pairs collected from news headlines and manually labeled to indicate whether an entailment relationship links the sentences or not without resorting to machine translation from English datasets. To our knowledge, this is the largest yet human-crafted NLI dataset for the Arabic language. We offer various data analyses and establish baseline results using state-of-the-art pre-trained models for Arabic, in addition to a human-based evaluation. Our findings revealed that AraBERT-base v2, the best-performing model, achieves an accuracy of 93%, revealing a gap of 2.6% compared to human performance and presenting a valuable opportunity for further advancements in modeling techniques in future research. Besides, the “hypothesis-only” baseline performance baseline closely resembles a random guesser’s, indicating the rarity of annotation artifacts compared to prior NLI English benchmarks. We also evaluated GPT-3.5-turbo in zero-shot and few-shot Arabic NLI learning scenarios and observed promising outcomes with a cautious approach, awaiting strong clues for predicting the presence of the entailment relationship.

Abstract

Objectives

This manuscript aims to understand the association between self-rated health and ethnic-racial characteristics (i.e., skin color, self-ascription, and Indigenous language) in the context of the Mexican population.

Design

Logistic regression analyses, using the 2019 PRODER (N = 7187)—a representative survey at the national level. We centered the analysis on two measures of skin color: the interviewer assessment of color skin (that has been used in previous studies), and the ITA scale, a measure constructed from optical digital colorimeter readings (a novel method in ethnoraciality studies in Mexico, included in the PRODER survey).

Results

In comparison to the interviewer’s assessment of skin color, the ITA score shows a significant association with self-rated health, even in the presence of individual conditions, sociodemographic traits, and life-course events. In contrast, ethnic-racial self-ascriptions and speaking of an Indigenous language do not show any statistical associations.

Conclusion

Contrary to previous research, our results suggest a positive association between skin color and self-rated health, when the former is assessed with the colorimeter readings; it means that those with lighter color skin are more prone to report a better health perception. It has methodological implications in the way skin color is observed.

Abstract

Studies have shown that speakers of New Englishes borrow interjections and other linguistic forms from their indigenous languages to express what they feel, think, want, believe or know at a particular moment. In this paper, the use and pragmatic functions of four of such local interjections, ei, ehe, eh and eish, in Ghanaian English on online platforms are examined. The data analysed were obtained from Global Web-Based English corpus (GLoWbE). The findings of the study show that these four interjections from indigenous Ghanaian languages are used in various contexts for a variety of reasons which include expressing pain, surprise, fear, concern about something, or a sudden recall of information. Also, the findings establish that the interjections may have varied spellings characterised by letter repetitions aimed at highlighting the intensity of the emotions expressed by users.

Abstract

This study explores the impact of inclusive education on the educational outcomes of students without Special Educational Needs (non-SEN) in Peru, utilizing official Ministry of Education data and implementing cross-sectional regression analyses. Inclusive education is a complex issue that, without appropriate adaptations and comprehensive understanding, can present substantial challenges to the educational community. While prior research from developed nations offers diverse perspectives on the effects of inclusive education on non-SEN students, limited evidence exists regarding its impact in developing countries. Our study addresses this gap by examining inclusive education in Peru and its influence on non-SEN students, thereby contributing to the existing literature. Our findings reveal that, on average, the presence of SEN students in regular classrooms does not significantly affect their non-SEN counterparts. However, we uncover heterogeneous results contingent on the specific type of SEN and students’ academic placement. These results emphasize the importance of targeted resources and parental involvement in facilitating successful inclusive education, particularly for specific SEN types. In summary, this study underscores the need for tailored strategies and additional resources to foster the success of inclusive education and calls for further research in this field to expand our understanding and enhance educational policy.

Abstract

Movies have been important in our lives for many years. Movies provide entertainment, inspire, educate, and offer an escape from reality. Movie reviews help us choose better movies, but reading them all can be time-consuming and overwhelming. To make it easier, sentiment analysis can classify movie reviews into positive and negative categories. Opinion mining (OP), called sentiment analysis (SA), uses natural language processing to identify and extract opinions expressed through text. Naive Bayes, a supervised learning algorithm, offers simplicity, efficiency, and strong performance in classification tasks due to its feature independence assumption. This study evaluates the performance of four Naïve Bayes variations using two vectorization techniques, Count Vectorizer and Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF), on two movie review datasets: IMDb Movie Reviews Dataset and Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews. Bernoulli Naive Bayes achieved the highest accuracy using Count Vectorizer on the IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes datasets. Multinomial Naive Bayes, on the other hand, achieved better accuracy on the IMDB dataset with TF–IDF. During preprocessing, we implemented different techniques to enhance the quality of our datasets. These included data cleaning, spelling correction, fixing chat words, lemmatization, and removing stop words. Additionally, we fine-tuned our models through hyperparameter tuning to achieve optimal results. Using TF–IDF, we observed a slight performance improvement compared to using the count vectorizer. The experiment highlights the significant role of sentiment analysis in understanding the attitudes and emotions expressed in movie reviews. By predicting the sentiments of each review and calculating the average sentiment of all reviews, it becomes possible to make an accurate prediction about a movie’s overall performance.