A teaching model to improve nursing assistants’ knowledge of aphasia and communication strategies

It is common for people with aphasia, whether in the hospital, a nursing facility, or at home, to rely on nursing assistants for their health and personal care. This study presents results from a unique program to teach nursing assistant students about aphasia and communication strategies that is co-instructed by a person with aphasia and an SLP. Comparison of pre- and posttest results from 168 participating students indicates that nursing assistant students improved their knowledge of aphasia after participating in this 75-minute module. This has implications for both nursing assistants and people with aphasia

Script training and its application to everyday life observed in an aphasia center

Script training focuses on improved production of personally relevant monologues and dialogues through intensive practice. Commonly reported components of script training include use of personally relevant or functional scripts, a structured cueing hierarchy, and intensive rehearsal of scripted lines to promote automaticity (Youmans, Holland, Munoz, & Bourgeois, 2005; Lee, Kaye, & Cherney, 2009; Youmans, Youmans, & Hancock, 2011; Goldberg, Haley, & Jacks, 2012; Fridriksson et al., 2012). Fridriksson et al. (2012) also trained a series of common scripts to study neurophysiological changes that result from such training. This proposal presents results from four persons with aphasia (PWA) who received script training in an aphasia center, where there is opportunity to observe the effect of that training on everyday life. A secondary goal is to examine what, if any, individual, intervention, or environmental factors might affect a PWA’s ability to benefit from such training

Cuts and partitions: solving, counting, and enumerating

Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-12-04 without embargo termsThe student, Calvin Beideman, accepted the attached license on 2023-06-26 at 16:58.The student, Calvin Beideman, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-06-26 at 17:09.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-06-27 at 15:26.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19465 on 2023-12-04 at 17:00:12The problem of finding a global minimum cut in an undirected graph is fundamental to combinatorial optimization. It has numerous applications including network reliability, clustering, and the Travelling Salesman Problem. In addition to this computational problem, structural and enumerative aspects of minimum cuts are also foundational to representation and algorithmic results. The number of constant-approximate global minimum cuts in a connected graph is polynomial in the number of vertices. This structural result has applications in constructing cut sparsifiers, sketching and streaming algorithms, and approximation algorithms for TSP. In this thesis we consider various generalizations of the minimum cut problem. We focus on solving these variants and on counting and enumerating optimum solutions. Our results include: - A new and faster algorithm for computing connectivity in hypergraphs, - The first deterministic polynomial time algorithm for enumerating hypergraph min-$k$-cut-sets, - The first polynomial bound on the number of Multiobjective Min-cuts for a constant number of cost functions as well as the first polynomial time algorithm for enumerating all of them, and - Inapproximability results for representing symmetric submodular functions using hypergraph cut functions

Counting and enumerating optimum cut sets for hypergraph kk-partitioning problems for fixed kk

We consider the problem of enumerating optimal solutions for two hypergraph $k$-partitioning problems -- namely, Hypergraph-$k$-Cut and Minmax-Hypergraph-$k$-Partition. The input in hypergraph $k$-partitioning problems is a hypergraph $G=(V, E)$ with positive hyperedge costs along with a fixed positive integer $k$. The goal is to find a partition of $V$ into $k$ non-empty parts $(V_1, V_2, \ldots, V_k)$ -- known as a $k$-partition -- so as to minimize an objective of interest. 1. If the objective of interest is the maximum cut value of the parts, then the problem is known as Minmax-Hypergraph-$k$-Partition. A subset of hyperedges is a minmax-$k$-cut-set if it is the subset of hyperedges crossing an optimum $k$-partition for Minmax-Hypergraph-$k$-Partition. 2. If the objective of interest is the total cost of hyperedges crossing the $k$-partition, then the problem is known as Hypergraph-$k$-Cut. A subset of hyperedges is a min-$k$-cut-set if it is the subset of hyperedges crossing an optimum $k$-partition for Hypergraph-$k$-Cut. We give the first polynomial bound on the number of minmax-$k$-cut-sets and a polynomial-time algorithm to enumerate all of them in hypergraphs for every fixed $k$. Our technique is strong enough to also enable an $n^{O(k)}p$-time deterministic algorithm to enumerate all min-$k$-cut-sets in hypergraphs, thus improving on the previously known $n^{O(k^2)}p$-time deterministic algorithm, where $n$ is the number of vertices and $p$ is the size of the hypergraph. The correctness analysis of our enumeration approach relies on a structural result that is a strong and unifying generalization of known structural results for Hypergraph-$k$-Cut and Minmax-Hypergraph-$k$-Partition. We believe that our structural result is likely to be of independent interest in the theory of hypergraphs (and graphs).Comment: Accepted to ICALP'22. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2110.1481

Treatment for Inference Impairment: A Case Study

Damage to either cerebral hemisphere may result in difficulty making inferences. Although suggestions for treatment exist in the literature, there are few, if any, outcome reports of such treatment. This case study reports the results of applying a treatment based on guided inference generation to a person with aphasia and inference impairment. The participant’s ability to produce accurate inferences about picture sequence stimuli improved, and this improvement generalized to probe stimuli. Discussion of this preliminary evidence includes the relationship of the outcome to potential sources of inference impairment and aspects of experimental control