https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/13902 Wed, 13 May 2026 07:57:18 GMT 2026-05-13T07:57:18Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/145885 Title: How to write up interdisciplinary research in line with its theoretical underpinnings Authors: Schembri, Natalie Abstract: This guide aims to equip readers with practical advice on how to write up an interdisciplinary study in line with the theoretical underpinnings of interdisciplinary research. It will focus on how to write your text, explaining areas where it is important to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of your study. There are critical points in an IMRAD (Introduction, Methodology, Results, and Discussion) structure where this must be justified, highlighted, and brought to bear on your research problem. This guide will provide examples from relevant published research to illustrate how you can do this. It will also give you a basic understanding of the theory behind these textual practices. Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/145885 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/145884 Title: Critical events in bachelor's and taught master's dissertation writing : a case study and model Authors: Schembri, Natalie; Jahić Jašić, Alma Abstract: Dissertation writing at bachelor’s and master’s levels is a process presenting challenges that must be overcome for the successful completion of the degree programmes. Factors such as unclear expectations and the assumption of competence can generate situations jeopardising successful dissertation outcomes. This study applies an instrumental case study approach to chart the lived experience of one student’s dissertation writing journeys at undergraduate and taught master’s levels. It uses interviews, journey plots and email correspondence to provide insights identifying factors that feed into critical event scenarios during the writing process. Following thematic analysis, the themes Supervision, Feedback and University Regulations were identified and discussed in relation to the emotions in the journey plots of the two dissertations. A categorisation of critical event factors is provided and used for a tentative model of a critical event scenario in an attempt to contribute useful insights into dissertation writing pedagogy and related institutional policies.; Waqt il-proċess tal-kitba ta’ dissertazzjonijiet fuq livell ta’ Baċellerat jew Masters, l-istudenti jaffaċċjaw sfidi li jridu jissuperaw biex jispiċċaw il-kors. Jista’ jkollhom problemi serji biex ilestu l-kitba tad-dissertazzjoni u jgħaddu mill-kors jekk l-aspettazzjonijiet tagħna ma jkunux ċari jew jekk nassumu li l-istudenti diġà għandhom il-kapaċitajiet meħtieġa biex jagħmlu xogħolhom. Dan l-istudju juża l-ġrajjiet ta’ studenta li kitbet dissertazzjoni tal- Baċellerat u wara dissertazzjoni għall-kors ta’ taught masters biex jitfa’ dawl fuq il-proċess tal-kitba f’dawn il-livelli. Nużaw intervisti, plotts tal-proċess tal-kitba u korrispondenza bl-email biex nagħtu indikazzjonijiet ta’ ġrajjiet kritiċi waqt il-proċess tal-kitba. Analiżi tematika wriet li t-temi prinċipali li ħarġu mill-istudju kienu dawk tas-Superviżjoni, Feedback u r-Regolamenti tal-Università. Dawn iddiskutejniehom flimkien mal-emozzjonijiet li dehru fil-plotts talproċess tal-kitba. Ġbarna f’kategoriji l-fatturi li jagħtu xi ħjiel li jista’ jkun ta’ siwi għall-pedagoġija tal-kitba tad-dissertazzjonijiet u l-policies istituzzjonali relatati u ħloqna mudell tentattiv ta’ ġrajja kritika. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/145884 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/145275 Title: Do hand gestures increase perceived prominence in naturally produced utterances? Authors: Paggio, Patrizia; Mitterer, Holger; Attard, Greta; Vella, Alexandra Abstract: This study investigates the effect of visually perceived gestures on the overall (multimodal) prominence of naturally occurring stimuli extracted from a multimodal corpus of Maltese conversations. Experiment participants were required to rate the prominence of target words in sentences presented to them as audiovisual and audio-only stimuli. In half of the stimuli, the target word was accompanied by a co-speech hand gesture. The results of the experiment show (i) that words produced with a co-speech gesture were rated as more prominent than words that were produced without one and (ii) that this was the case independently of whether raters could see those gestures (audiovisual condition) or not (audio-only condition). An acoustic analysis of the data shows that the presence of a co-occurring gesture has a significant effect on the pitch of the target vowel. The study suggests that gestures may provide the listener with an additional but not necessary cue to perceiving prominence. Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/145275 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/142795 Title: Interpreting vision and language generative models with semantic visual priors Authors: Cafagna, Michele; Rojas-Barahona, Lina M.; van Deemter, Kees; Gatt, Albert Abstract: When applied to Image-to-text models, explainability methods have two challenges. First, they often provide token-by-token explanations namely, they compute a visual explanation for each token of the generated sequence. This makes explanations expensive to compute and unable to comprehensively explain the model’s output. Second, for models with visual inputs, explainability methods such as SHAP typically consider superpixels as features. Since superpixels do not correspond to semantically meaningful regions of an image, this makes explanations harder to interpret. We develop a framework based on SHAP, that allows for generating comprehensive, meaningful explanations leveraging the meaning representation of the output sequence as a whole. Moreover, by exploiting semantic priors in the visual backbone, we extract an arbitrary number of features that allows the efficient computation of Shapley values on large-scale models, generating at the same time highly meaningful visual explanations. We demonstrate that our method generates semantically more expressive explanations than traditional methods at a lower compute cost and that it can be generalized to a large family of vision-language models. Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/142795 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z