Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Collocations in a Flemish Learner Corpus: an approximation to the concept from a pedagogical perspective and its language teaching implications" "Kris Buyse" "Leuven Language Institute (ILT)" "This thesis proposal is aimed at studying collocations employed by Flemish learners of Spanish as a foreign language (FL). The main purpose is to analyse how Spanish collocations are produced by undergraduate Ll Flemish learners and which collocations they produce accurately or cause them difficulties. I will rely upon a learner corpus created at KU Leuven called Aprescrilov (Aprender a escribir en Lovaina), as a result of the ElektraRed project. The corpus has been compiled at KU Leuven between 2005 and 2011 (Buyse and Gonzalez, 2013) in order to analyse the command and production of collocations by Flemish students. At present, there is a lack of research in Spanish which deals with collocations from these sources. In this way, Learner Corpora also provides an opportunity to continue investigating in fields such as error analysis (EA), which does not base its results on the comparison of two different languages, but focuses on real productions written by L2 learners considering errors a mandatory step on the learning process as a mean to achieve a proper linguistic command in their foreign language (Fernandez, 1997).Moreover, the results obtained are expected to contribute to the creation of new pedagogical material and to provide useful guidelines to deal with collocations in Spanish language teaching (Nesselhauf, 2004, 2005; Perez-Avila, 2006; Cruz, 2012)." "Stem Cell and Stromal Vascular Fraction Treatment for Penile Tunica Albuginea and Urethral Fibrosis" "Maarten Albersen, Dirk De Ridder" "Woman and Child" "Fibrosis is a wound healing disorder and it is defined by the excessive accumulation of fibrous connective tissue, such as collagen and fibronectin, in and around inflamed or damaged tissue. Although collagen and fibronectin deposition is an indispensable and, typically, reversible part of wound healing, normal tissue repair can evolve into a progressively irreversible fibrotic response if the tissue injury is severe or repetitive or if the wound-healing response itself becomes deregulated (1).Fibrosis represents the final, common pathological outcome of many chronic inflammatory diseases. Fibrosis can be promoted by different events and it can lead to permanent scarring and dysfunction in different organs as seen in end-stage liver disease, kidney disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and heart failure (1).Regardless of the initiating events and target organ, a common feature to all fibrotic diseases is the fibroblast-to-myofibroblast differentiation, which are the key mediators of fibrotic tissue remodelling (1). Interesting, it is now clear that many elements of the innate and adaptive immune response participate in the differentiation and activation of fibroblasts. From this point of view, fibrosis could be considered as the result of a severe or repetitive injury and an altered host response to injury itself (1).Despite the knowledge of the fibrotic process, there is not an efficacious treatment available in the clinical setting. For this reason the research of new treatments was improved in the last decades. There is now increasing evidence for the role of Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs) as potential treatment strategy to alleviate fibrosis (2). MSCs have been described as being able to give rise to several, quite different cell phenotypes. However, the ability to differentiate is not the only characteristic that makes these cells attractive for therapeutic purposes (3). The secretion of a broad range of bioactive molecules by MSCs, such as growth factors, cytokines and chemokines, constitutes their most biologically significant role under injury condition (4). The exact mechanisms of the antifibrotic effects of MSCs remain to be elucidated (2). Most preclinical studies suggest that MSC work through immunomodulation, thereby limiting the host response to injury and preventing the onset of fibrosis (3). Another proposed mechanism is the induction of phenotypical changes in resident fibroblast illustrated by reduced collagen and increased hyaluronic acid production in fibroblasts co-cultured with MSC. Furthermore, the direct interaction of MSC with the extracellular matrix has been proposed based on their ability to secrete high numbers of matrix metalloproteinase and other matrix-modulating enzymes (3).MSCs are adult stem cells traditionally found in the bone marrow. However, mesenchymal stem cells can also be isolated from other tissues including cord blood, peripheral blood, fallopian tube, fetal liver, lung and adipose tissue. Adipose tissue is a multifunctional organ that contains various cellular types, such as mature adipocytes and the stromal vascular fraction (SVF) (5). The adipose SVF provides a rich source of adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) and can easily be isolated from human adipose tissue, representing a viable alternative to bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (5). The SVF can be easily isolated through enzymatic digestion of aspirated adipose tissue and it does not need to be cultured. From a clinical standpoint, however, it would be more advantageous to use freshly isolated, whole SVF than to use isolated and expanded ADSCs because isolating and culturing the ADSCs requires facilities and personnel, and possesses a risk of patient exposure to foreign serum and undefined proteins (5).MSCs have been shown to play a role in decreasing fibrosis in animal models of idiopathic lung fibrosis, liver fibrosis, kidney fibrosis and heart ischemia. Also to date, approximately 79 clinical trials are on-going evaluating the effectiveness of the MCS on various forms of fibrosis i.e. liver fibrosis, fibrosis in Crohn disease, cardiac fibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis (http://clinicaltrials.gov)..Peyronie’s disease (PD) and the urethral stricture represent localized connective tissue disorders characterized by changes in collagen composition of the tunica albuginea of the corpus cavernosum and of the urethral corpus spongiosum (6-9). The consequences of these conditions can enormously impair the patient’s quality of life by causing micturition disturbances (urethral strictures) or impairment of erectile function and erection-related pain (PD) (6-9). While various surgical options are currently being explored, for both diseases, with limited success-rates, conservative therapies are generally lacking efficacy (6-9) ObjectiveGeneral aim: To evaluate the efficacy local injection of human ADSCs (hADSCs) and autologous SVF as a treatment of urethral stricture and PD using a rat animal model of the diseases;Specific aim 1: To establish and validate a new model of urethral stricture in rat. Specific aim 2: To study the efficacy of hADSCs local injection in the development of urethral fibrosis in a rat model of urethral stricture;Specific aim 3: To study the efficacy of hADSCs periurethral injection in preventing bladder dysfunction in a rat model of urethral stricture development;Specific aim 4: To study the efficacy of hADSCs local injection in the development of tunica albuginea fibrosis in a rat model of PD;Specific aim 5: To study the efficacy of hADSCs local injection in established tunica albuginea fibrosis in a rat model of PD;Specific aim 6: To study the efficacy of autologous SVF local injection in the development of tunica albuginea fibrosis in a rat model of PD;Specific aim 7: To study the efficacy of autologous SVF local injection in established tunica albuginea fibrosis in a rat model of PD;Reference  Wynn TA, Ramalingam TR. Mechanisms of fibrosis: therapeutic translation for fibrotic disease. Nat Med. 2012 Jul 6;18(7):1028-40. doi: 10.1038/nm.2807. Review.Jackson WM, Nesti LJ, Tuan RS. Mesenchymal stem cell therapy for attenuation of scar formation during wound healing. Stem Cell Res Ther. 2012 May 31;3(3):20.Meirelles Lda S, Fontes AM, Covas DT, Caplan AI. Mechanisms involved in the therapeutic properties of mesenchymal stem cells. Cytokine Growth Factor Rev. 2009 Oct-Dec;20(5-6):419-27.Dimarino AM, Caplan AI, Bonfield TL. Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Tissue Repair. Front Immunol. 2013 Sep 4;4:201. eCollection 2013. Review.Gentile P, Orlandi A, Scioli MG, Di Pasquali C, Bocchini I, Cervelli V. Concise review: adipose-derived stromal vascular fraction cells and platelet-rich plasma: basic and clinical implications for tissue engineering therapies in regenerative surgery. Stem Cells Transl Med. 2012 Mar;1(3):230-6.Albersen M, Kendirci M, Van der Aa F, Hellstrom WJ, Lue TF, Spees JL. Multipotent stromal cell therapy for cavernous nerve injury-induced erectile dysfunction. J Sex Med. 2012 Feb;9(2):385-403.Levine LA, Burnett AL. Standard operating procedures for Peyronie's disease. JSex Med. 2013 Jan;10(1):230-44. doi: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.03003.x. Epub 2012 Dec 4.Lee YJ, Kim SW. Current Management of Urethral Stricture. Korean J Urol. 2013 Sep;54(9):561-569. Epub 2013 Sep 10. Review.Baskin LS, Constantinescu SC, Howard PS et al. Biochemical characterisation and quantification of the collagenous components of urethral stricture tissue. J Urol 1993; 150: 642–7" "Provoking Diversity in Media using the Diversity Checker" "Bettina Berendt" "Informatics Section" "This thesis describes the genesis of the Diversity Checker, a tool meant to provoke journalists into producing more diverse content in an intelligent fashion. Diversity in media is a very broad topic, and the project that this thesis is a part of is similarly broad in its scope. The multidisciplinary nature of the project enables the various disciplines to influence each other positively, and in particular it gives the work presented here a solid grounding in theoretical insights from text mining, corpus and computational linguistics, as well as other relevant fields such as media studies. The work performed in this thesis focuses specifically on the computer science side of diversity, operationalizing and implementing ideas arrived at in cooperation with the other project members. We start out with a thorough review of the literature on automatic text analysis to produce an overview of what is possible. We find in particular that there is a lot of existing research that focuses on English language text, but relatively little that focuses on other languages and as a result, there is a paucity of good data and corpuses available that would suit our purposes. We apply some selected methods from the background research mentioned above to a data set of Flemish news articles that we augment ourselves in a workshop on viewpoint, bias and framing detection. We also gather requirements and based on them implement a first prototype of the Diversity Checker. This prototype is presented to a panel of journalists, and based on their feedback a next version is developed. In the meantime we continue our research on computational enhancement of diversity, which is reported on in papers that form chapters in this thesis but also incorporated into the Diversity Checker. Ultimately we have another round of review with journalists and evaluate how they experience the tool developed, what works well and what could be improved." "Exploring the dialectic relation between narrative and context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective: The case of World War II-testimonies" "Dorien Van De Mieroop" "Multimodality, Interaction and Discourse, Leuven" "This project scrutinizes the relation between the way narrators construct their stories and identities in relation to the dominant discourses circulating in the global context. Only recently have interactional sociolinguists increasingly examined this dialectic relation between the local interactional level of narrative and the surrounding socio-cultural context and its ‘big D’-discourses (Gee 1999). This is also thanks to positioning analysis (Bamberg 1997a), which links ‘local’ levels 1 and 2 – the storyworld and storytelling world – to a more ‘globally’ oriented level 3 – the construction of the narrator’s’ identities in respect to ‘big D’-discourses. Thus, level 3 is concerned with the interplay between ‘little d’- and ‘big D’-discourses (Gee 1999), but has not yet been fully theoretically elaborated. The theoretical elaboration of positioning level 3 is at the core of this study. In line with research by De Fina (2013) and Georgakopoulou (2013), I will explore narratives from various members of a community in order to discern repeated patterns in their stories and the identities they construct. To this end, a dataset of testimonies will be compiled about a historically relevant and complicated topic, namely World War II (WW II). The memory of WW II offers a myriad of dominant discourses, since the Belgian state failed to create one homogeneous patriotic narrative in the post-War period. Instead, fragmented master narratives emerged and these were quite diversified in the Flemish versus the Walloon language communities on the one hand and the group of Jewish survivors versus former political prisoner groups on the other hand. A selection of 40 testimonies (in Dutch and French) will be made, consisting of pairs of testimonies. Each pair will contain one oral and one written testimony, by the same narrator. Since the narratives were repeated at different times, they are also situated in and related to different global contexts and allow us to tap into the way changing dominant discourses influence – and are influenced by – the local construction of stories and identities. Thematic foci (e.g. the narrator’s arrest and deportation) will be selected, since the dataset is rather large to carry out a qualitative, micro-analysis. The selected narratives will then be analysed on the three levels of positioning. For level 1 and 2 the method proposed by Deppermann (2013) was applied. To study positioning level 3, I will draw on Bamberg’s description of this level as the construction of ‘a (local) answer to the question: ‘Who am I?’ ‘(Bamberg 1997b: 337). Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) and the principle of indexicality will be used to carry out discursive analyses of the narrators’ identity work. A new approach will also be added to the existing research methods, by firstly hypothesizing that choosing a topic other disciplines have studied extensively, like WW II, the sociolinguistic researcher can use  those studies to gain insight in the potential dominant discourses that circulate about this topic (Van De Mieroop 2011). For this reason, an extensive historical literature review will be conducted, to use as a critical touchstone for the sociolinguistic analyses. Secondly, it was hypothesized that by integrating comparative dimensions into the corpus, a deeper insight into the multi-layeredness of the interaction between text and context will be provided. Hence, the ‘repeated narratives’ will be subjected to analysis on a mode of narrating dimension, a social group dimension and a diachronic dimension. In conclusion, the project aims to gain insight into new ways of scrutinizing the dialectic relation between the discursive construction of stories and of identities on the one hand, and ‘big D’-discourses on the other hand.  References Bamberg, M. (1997a) 'Positioning between structure and performance', Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7: 335-342.– – (1997b) 'Language, concepts and emotions: the role of language in the construction of emotions', Language sciences, 19(4): 309-340.De Fina, A. (2013) 'Positioning level 3: Connecting local identity displays to macro social processes', Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 40-61.Deppermann, A. (2013) 'Editorial: Positioning in narrative interaction', Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 1-15.Gee, J.P. (1999) An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method, London / New York: Routledge.Georgakopoulou, A. (2013) 'Building iterativity into positioning analysis: A practice-based approach to small stories and self', Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 89-110.Van De Mieroop, D. (2011) 'Identity negotiations in narrative accounts about poverty', Discourse & Society, 22(5): 565-591."