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Sofroniou, Sofronis A. "Structural semantics of Byzantine Greek /." Nicosia : Kykkos research centre, 1989. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37492422s.
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Jackson, Stuart Andrew. "Representation grounding : investigating a connectionist procedural semantics for structural analogues." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.332929.
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Staton, Samuel. "Name-passing process calculi : operational models and structural operational semantics." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.613115.
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Coleman, Joseph William. "Constructing a tractable reasoning framework upon a fine-grained structural operational semantics." Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/898.
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The primary focus of this thesis is the semantic gap between a fine-grained structural operational semantics and a set of rely/guarantee-style development rules. The semantic gap is bridged by considering the development rules to be a part of the same logical framework as the operational semantics, and a set of soundness proofs show that the development rules, though making development easier for a developer, do not add any extra power to the logical framework as a whole. The soundness proofs given are constructed to take advantage of the structural nature of the language and its semantics; this allows for the addition of new development rules in a modular fashion. The particular language semantics allows for very fine-grained concurrency. The language itself includes a construct for nested parallel execution of statements, and the semantics is written so that statements can interfere with each other between individual variable reads. The language also includes an atomic block construct for which the semantics is an embodiment of a form of software transactional memory. The inclusion of the atomic construct helps illustrate the inherent expressive weakness present in the rely/guarantee rules with respect to termination properties. As such, two development rules are proposed for the atomic construct, one of which has serious restrictions in its application, and another for which the termination property does not hold.
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Da, Silva Fabio. "Correctness proofs of compilers and debuggers : an approach based on structural operational semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/13542.
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In this thesis we study the use of semantics-based formal methods in the specification and proof of correctness of compilers and debuggers. We use a Structural Operational Semantics as the basis for the specification of compilers and propose a notion of correctness based on an observational equivalence relation. We define program evaluation and a notion of evaluation step based on a Structural Operational Semantics and use these definitions as the basis for the specification of debuggers. Debugger correctness is then defined by an equivalence relation between a specification and an implementation of the debugger based on the bisimulation concept. The main results of this thesis are: a definition of a variant of Structural Operational Semantics, called Relational Semantics, which is the underlying formalism of this thesis; the definition of a notion of Observational Equivalence between Relational Semantics Specifications; a formulation of the problem of compiler correctness using Observational Equivalence; an evaluation model for programming languages and a definition of an evaluation step; an abstract definition of Interpreter-debuggers; a specification notation for the formal specification of debuggers, called DSL; a notion of equivalence between debuggers using bisimulation; a study on Compiler-debuggers and the problems involved in their definition. These results form a theory for the formal specification and proofs of correctness of compilers and debuggers. Our starting point is that the use of this theory helps in building better compilers and debuggers. It is our goal to provide theoretical foundations and tools to show that our methods are achievable.
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Toro-Bermudez, Mauricio. "Structured interactive scores : from a structural description of a multimedia scenario to a real-time capable implementation with formal semantics." Thesis, Bordeaux 1, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012BOR14588/document.
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La plupart des scénarios multimédia interactifs sont basés sur des spécifications informelles, il n'est donc pas possible de vérifier formellement des propriétés de ces systèmes. Nous préconisons la nécessité d'un modèle général et formel. Partitions interactives est un formalisme pour décrire des scénarios multimédia interactifs. Nous proposons une nouvelle sémantique pour les partitions interactives basée sur les structures d'événements temporisés. Avec une telle sémantique, nous pouvons spécifier des propriétés pour le système, en particulier, des propriétés sur les traces, qui sont difficiles à préciser avec la programmation par contraintes. Nous présentons également une sémantique opérationnelle des partitions interactives basée sur le calcul non-déterministe, temporisé, concurrent, par contraintes (ntcc) et nous rapportons la sémantique operationelle à la semantique en structures d'événements temporisés. Avec la sémantique opérationnelle, nous pouvons décrire formellement le comportement d'un scenario dont les durées des objets temporels peuvent être des intervalles d'entiers arbitraires. La sémantique opérationnelle est obtenue à partir de la sémantique en structures d'événements temporisés de la partition interactive. Pour fournir une telle traduction, nous avons d'abord défini la forme normale d'une structure d'événements temporisés, dans laquel les événements liés avec une durée zéro sont regroupés en un seul. Nous avons également défini la notion de structures d'événements temporisés répartissables, de telle sorte que son graphe de contraintes peut être expédié en se fondant uniquementsur la propagation locale. Nous croyons que la sémantique opérationnelle basée sur ntcc offre certains avantages par rapport à la sémantique des partitions interactives basée sur des réseaux de Petri; par exemple, les durées des objets temporels peuvent être des intervalles d'entiers arbitraires, tandis que dans la plupart des modèles de partitions interactives, les intervalles ne peut être utilisés que pour représenterles relations telles que l'égalité et les inégalités. Nos modèles ntcc de partitions interactives sont exécutés en utilisant Ntccrt, un interprète temps réel pour ntcc. Nos modèles peuvent également être vérifiés automatiquement en utilisant ntccMC, un vérificateur pour ntcc, de temps borné, basée sur les automates finis, que nous introduisons dans cette thèse. En utilisant ntccMC, nous pouvons vérifier des propriétés de logique de temps linéaire avec des contrantes (CLTL). Dans cette thèse, nous introduisons deux extensions du formalisme de partitions interactives:(1) l'une pour gérer le traitement audio en utilisant le langage de programmation français Faustet (2) l'autre pour traiter des condition et des branchements, permettant de spécifier des choix et des boucles. Pour la première extension, nous présentons une sémantique basée sur les structures d'événements temporisés et des idées sur la façon de définir une sémantique opérationnelle. Pour la deuxième extension, nous présentons une mise en oeuvre et la comparaison des résultats du jitter relative moyenne d'une implémentation d'un arpège base sur l'algorithme de Karplus-Strong par rapport aux implémentations existants écrits dans Pure Data. Nous définissons aussi un format de sauvegarde XML pour les partitions interactives et pour la extension avec branchement conditionnel. Un format de sauvegarde est crucial pour assurer la persistance des partitionsTechnology has shaped the way on which we compose and produce music. Notably, the invention of microphones and computers pushed the development of new music styles in the 20th century. In fact, several artistic domains have been benefiting from such technology developments ; for instance, Experimental music, non-linear multimedia, Electroacoustic music, and interactive multimedia. In this dissertation, we focus on interactive multimedia.Interactive multimedia deals with the design of scenarios where multimedia content and interactive events are handled by computer programs. Examples of such scenarios are multimedia art installations, interactive museum exhibitions, some Electroacoustic music pieces, and some Experimental music pieces. Unfortunately, most interactive multimedia scenarios are based on informal specifications, thus it is not possible to formally verify properties of such systems. We advocate the need of a general and formal model. Interactive scores is a formalism to describe interactive multimedia scenarios. We propose new semantics for interactive scores based on timed eventstructures. With such a semantics, we can specify properties for the system, in particular, properties about traces, which are difficult to specify as constraints. In fact, constraints are an important part of the semantic model of interactive scores because the formalism is based on temporal constraints among the objects of the scenario. We also present an operational semantics of interactive scores based on the non-deterministic timed concurrent constraint (ntcc) calculus and we relate such a semantics to the timed event structures semantics. With the operational semantics, we formally describe the behavior of a score whose temporal object durations can be arbitrary integer intervals. The operational semantics is obtained from the timed event structures semantics of the score. To provide such a translation, we first define the normal form of a timed event structure in which events related with zero-duration delays are collapsed into a single one. We also define the notion of dispatchable timed event structures. Event structures such that its constraint graph can be dispatched by relying only on local propagation.We believe that operational semantics in ntcc offers some advantages over existing Petri nets semantics for interactive scores; for instance, the duration of the temporal objects can be arbitrary integer intervals, whereas inprevious models of interactive scores, such durations can only be intervals to represent equalities and inequalities. In this dissertation, we also introduce two extensions of the formalism of interactive scores : (1) one to handle audio processing using the Fast AUdio Stream (Faust) languageand (2) another one to handle conditional branching, allowing designers to specify choices and loops. For the first extension, we present a timed event structures semantics and ideas on how to define operational semantics. For the second extension, we present an implementation and results comparing the average relative jitter of an implementation ofan arpeggio based on Karplus-Strong with respect to existing implementations of Karplus written in Pure Data. We also define a XML file format for interactive scores and for the conditional branching extension. A file format is crucial to assure the persistence of the scores. Ntcc models of interactive scores are executed using Ntccrt, a real-time capable interpreter for ntcc. They can also be verified automatically using ntccMC, a bounded-time automata based model checker for ntcc which we introduce in this dissertation. Using ntccMC, we can verify properties expressed on constraint linear-time logic. Ntcc has been used in the past, not only for multimedia interaction models, but alsofor system biology, security protocols and robots
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Sarkar, Arkopaul. "Semantic Data Integration in Manufacturing Design with a Case Study of Structural Analysis." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1407492780.
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NESTOR, Paulo Henrique do Espírito Santo. "Historiografia-linguística da semântica estrutural de Greimas." Universidade Federal de Goiás, 2012. http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tde/2405.
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Previous issue date: 2012-02-24The studies of meaning brought many internal and external controversies to the Linguistics, since the early thoughts from Plato and Aristotle in the old Greece. In the twentieth century, such discussions were intensified and built a polarization, in which there were the ones who defended the relevance of the studies on meaning, and the ones who believed to be impossible to develop those researches. In addition, the Linguistic Historiography is the approach developed in this thesis, in order to interpret the work Structural Semantics` theoretical productivity from the author Algirdas Julien Greimas, one of the linguists who defended vehemently the importance and legitimacy of the meaning analysis. Moreover, this guideline is justified due to the pertinence of this work in the linguistics setting, highlighted in different texts that deal with it as a watershed in the language studies. The Strcutural Semantics was published for the first time in French (1966), and it portrays surprisingly many aspects concerning the existing ideas in that period related to the meaning. Perhaps, Greimas lived in the most productive moment for the language studies of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it was in this period that Course in General Linguistics (Ferdinad de Saussure), Prolegomena a Theory to Language (Louis Hjelmslev), Morphology of the Folktale (Vladimir Propp) etc were published. Besides, Greimas lived for a long time in France, the epicenter of many theoretical discussions concerning both, language (langue) and language (langage). Though, his writings were not only read in this country, but also in many others, such as, Brazil where the Structural Semantics started to be part of many articles, dissertations and thesis` references. The respective work made changes in the research contexts of meaning that went beyond the linguistic semantic field, not only about the object, but also to the meaning and no longer to the sign, concerning the method that was completely different from the ones used so far in the Linguistics
Os estudos da significação suscitaram várias controvérsias, internas e externas à linguística, desde as reflexões iniciais de Platão e Aristóteles na Grécia Antiga. No século XX, tais discussões se intensificaram e contruíram uma polarização, na qual havia os que defendiam a importância dos estudos da significação e os que acreditavam serem impossíveis tais pesquisas. Esta dissertação realiza uma abordagem historiográfico-linguistica que busca interpretar a produtividade teórica da obra Semântica estrutural, escrita por Algirdas Julien Greimas, um dos linguisticas que defenderam com maior veemência a relevância e a legitimidade do exame acerca da significação. Tal diretriz se justifica graças à pertinência dessa obra no cenário da linguística, evidenciada nos vários textos que a tratam como um divisor de águas nos estudos da linguagem. A semântica estrutural foi publicada pela primeira em francês (1966), trata-se de um texto revelador de vários aspectos concernentes às idéias existentes nesse período relacionadas à significação. Greimas viveu durante o período que, talvez, tenha sido o mais produtivo para os estudos da linguagem no século XX. Basta lembrar que nesse intervalo foram publicadas as obras: Cursos de linguistica geral (Ferdinand de Saussure), Prolegômenos a uma teoria da linguagem (Louis Hjelmslev), muito tempo na França, epicentro da ebulição de várias discussões teóricas relativas à linguagem e à língua. Porém, seus escritos não circularam apenas nesse país, chegaram a vários outros, inclusive no Brasil, onde a Semântica estrutural passou a fazer parte de muitas bibliografias de artigos, dissertações e teses. A respectiva obra causou alterações no contexto das pesquisas acerca da significação que repercutiram além do âmbito próprio da semântica linguística, tanto no que se diz respeito ao objeto a significação e não mais o signo, quanto no que se refere ao médico, que se diferenciava drasticamente dos utilizados, até entaõ, em linguística.
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Alvares, Cláudia Assad. "O discurso paradoxal de Vieira no \'Sermão pelo bom sucesso das Armas de Portugal contra as de Holanda\'." Universidade de São Paulo, 2007. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8142/tde-26022008-140441/.
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Nesta tese, discutem-se, dentre outros, os conceitos de \"auditório universal\", de Perelman (2000); o de \"contrato de comunicação\", de Charaudeau (1992); os conceitos de duplo vínculo e enquadres, propostos por Bateson (1972), e abre-se também espaço para os principais tipos de paradoxos. Nela apresentase ainda a teoria dos semas e de sua combinatória, segundo Langendoen (1971), e, finalmente, analisa-se o sermão pelo Bom sucesso das armas de Portugal contra as de Holanda. O trabalho tem por objetivo evidenciar que o discurso religioso do Padre Antônio Vieira, no Sermão Pelo bom sucesso das armas de Portugal contra as de Holanda, é um discurso paradoxal porque desconstrói a si próprio. Para atingir tal propósito, confrontam-se os argumentos de que Vieira faz uso para dirigir-se a Deus, no referido sermão, com os textos das Sagradas Escrituras; analisa-se a argumentatividade das formas nominais do verbo, com ênfase particular na estrutura do gerúndio, enquanto ato ilocucional, a partir do Sermão da Sexagésima, e descreve-se um tipo de paradoxo pragmático: a roda argumentativa.In this thesis, among others, the concepts of \"universal auditorium\", from Perelman (2000); \"communication contract\", from Charaudeau (1992); the concepts of double bind and frames, proposed by Bateson (1972) are discussed, and room is opened for the main types of paradox. In this one, the theory of semantic traits and its combinatory, according to Langedoen (1971) is also presented and, finally, the sermon For the good success of Portugal\'s weapons against Holland\'s is analyzed. The work has as a scope to evidence that the religious speech from Father Antônio Vieira, at the sermon For the good success of Portugal\'s weapons against Holland\'s, is a paradoxal speech for it unbuilds itself. To reach such purpose, the arguments Vieira uses to address God are confronted, at the referred sermon, with the Holy Scriptures\' texts; the argumentativity of the nominal forms of the verbs is analyzed, with particular emphasis on the structure of the gerund, as an illocutionary act, starting from Sermon of the Sixtieth, and a kind of pragmatic paradox is created: the argumentative round.
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Bazhar, Youness. "Extension des systèmes de métamodélisation persistant avec la sémantique comportementale." Phd thesis, ISAE-ENSMA Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d'Aérotechique - Poitiers, 2013. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00939900.
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L'Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles (IDM) a suscité un grand intérêt grâce aux avantages qu'elle offre. Enparticulier, l'IDM vise à accélérer le processus de développement et à faciliter la maintenance des logiciels. Mais avecl'augmentation permanente de la taille des modèles et de leurs instances, l'exploitation des modèles et de leurs instances,en utilisant des outils classiques présente des insuffisances liées au passage à l'échelle. L'utilisation des bases de donnéesest une des solutions proposées pour répondre à ce problème. Dans ce contexte, deux approches ont été proposées. Lapremière consiste à équiper les outils de modélisation avec des bases de données dédiées au stockage de modèles,appelées model repositories (p. ex. EMFStore). Ces bases de données sont équipées de langages d'exploitation limitésseulement à l'interrogation des modèles et des instances. Par conséquent, ces langages n'offrent aucune capacité poureffectuer des opérations avancées sur les modèles telles que la transformation de modèles ou la génération de code. Ladeuxième approche, que nous suivons dans notre travail, consiste à définir des environnements persistants en base dedonnées dédiés à la méta-modélisation. Ces environnements sont appelés systèmes de méta-modélisation persistants(PMMS). Un PMMS consiste en (i) une base de données dédiée au stockage des méta-modèles, des modèles et de leursinstances, et (ii) un langage d'exploitation associé possédant des capacités de méta-modélisation et d'exploitation desmodèles. Plusieurs PMMS ont été proposés tels que ConceptBase ou OntoDB/OntoQL. Ces PMMS supportentprincipalement la définition de la sémantique structurelle et descriptive des méta-modèles et des modèles en terme de(méta-)classes, (méta-)attributs, etc. Par contre, ces PMMS fournissent des mécanismes limités pour définir la sémantiquecomportementale nécessaire à l'exploitation des modèles et des instances. En effet, la sémantique comportementalepourrait être utile pour calculer des concepts dérivés, effectuer des transformations de modèles, générer du code source,etc. Ainsi, nous proposons dans notre travail d'étendre les PMMS avec la possibilité d'introduire dynamiquement desopérations qui peuvent être implémentées en utilisant des mécanismes hétérogènes. Ces opérations peuvent ainsi utiliserdes mécanismes internes au système de gestion de base de données (p. ex. les procédures stockées) tout comme desmécanismes externes tels que les services web ou les programmes externes (p. ex. Java, C++). Cette extension permetd'améliorer les PMMS en leur donnant une plus large couverture de fonctionnalités et une plus grande flexibilité. Pourvalider notre proposition, elle a été implémentée sur le prototype OntoDB/OntoQ et a été mise en oeuvre dans troiscontextes différents : (1) pour calculer les concepts dérivés dans les bases de données à base ontologique, (2) pouraméliorer une méthodologie de conception de base de données à base ontologique et finalement (3) pour faire de latransformation et de l'analyse des modèles des systèmes embarqués temps réel.
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Avery, Thomas Charles. "Structure and semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29517.
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Algebraic theories describe mathematical structures that are defined in terms of operations and equations, and are extremely important throughout mathematics. Many generalisations of the classical notion of an algebraic theory have sprung up for use in different mathematical contexts; some examples include Lawvere theories, monads, PROPs and operads. The first central notion of this thesis is a common generalisation of these, which we call a proto-theory. The purpose of an algebraic theory is to describe its models, which are structures in which each of the abstract operations of the theory is given a concrete interpretation such that the equations of the theory hold. The process of going from a theory to its models is called semantics, and is encapsulated in a semantics functor. In order to define a model of a theory in a given category, it is necessary to have some structure that relates the arities of the operations in the theory with the objects of the category. This leads to the second central notion of this thesis, that of an interpretation of arities, or aritation for short. We show that any aritation gives rise to a semantics functor from the appropriate category of proto-theories, and that this functor has a left adjoint called the structure functor, giving rise to a structure{semantics adjunction. Furthermore, we show that the usual semantics for many existing notions of algebraic theory arises in this way by choosing an appropriate aritation. Another aim of this thesis is to find a convenient category of monads in the following sense. Every right adjoint into a category gives rise to a monad on that category, and in fact some functors that are not right adjoints do too, namely their codensity monads. This is the structure part of the structure{semantics adjunction for monads. However, the fact that not every functor has a codensity monad means that the structure functor is not defined on the category of all functors into the base category, but only on a full subcategory of it. This deficiency is solved when passing to general proto-theories with a canonical choice of aritation whose structure{semantics adjunction restricts to the usual one for monads. However, this comes at a cost: the semantics functor for general proto-theories is not full and faithful, unlike the one for monads. The condition that a semantics functor be full and faithful can be thought of as a kind of completeness theorem | it says that no information is lost when passing from a theory to its models. It is therefore desirable to retain this property of the semantics of monads if possible. The goal then, is to find a notion of algebraic theory that generalises monads for which the semantics functor is full and faithful with a left adjoint; equivalently the semantics functor should exhibit the category of theories as a re ective subcategory of the category of all functors into the base category. We achieve this (for well-behaved base categories) with a special kind of proto-theory enriched in topological spaces, which we call a complete topological proto-theory. We also pursue an analogy between the theory of proto-theories and that of groups. Under this analogy, monads correspond to finite groups, and complete topological proto-theories correspond to profinite groups. We give several characterisations of complete topological proto-theories in terms of monads, mirroring characterisations of profinite groups in terms of finite groups.
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Harik, Ralph 1979. "Structural and semantic information extraction." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87407.
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Naess, Åshild. "Transitivity : from semantics to structure /." [S.l. : s.n], 2003. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb401008852.
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Kamareddine, Fairouz Dib. "Semantics in a Frege structure." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19002.
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Flieger, Johannes C. "Gradable adjectives and the semantics of locatives." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3995.
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This dissertation develops a semantic model of gradable adjectives such as ‘tall’, ‘good’, ‘big’, ‘heavy’, etc., within a formal semantic theory of locatives we call Locative Structure Semantics (LSS). Our central hypothesis is that gradable adjectives are, semantically, a species of locative expression. The view of gradable adjectives as locatives is inspired by the vector-based semantic models of Vector Space Semantics (VSS), as well as the notion of perspective or point of view, as found in Leonard Talmy’s research on spatial expressions (Talmy [153]) and the tradition of Situation Semantics (cf. Barwise and Perry [9, p. 39]). Following Barwise and Seligman [11], we construe the contextual variability that characterises gradable adjectives in terms of shifts in cognitive perspective. We argue that perspectives are a formal part of a semantic representational structure that is shared by expressions from several different domains, which we refer to as a locative structure (L-structure). The notion of an L-structure is influenced by Reichenbach’s notion of tense, and can be thought of as a generalisation of the Reichenbachian notion of tense to the realm of concepts. Reichenbach [134] proposed that each temporal expression is associated with three time points: a speech point, S, an event point, E, and reference point, R, where E refers to the time point corresponding to the event described by the tensed clause, S is (usually) taken to be the speaker’s time of utterance, and R is a temporal reference point relevant to the utterance. In LSS we extend this tripartite scheme to locative expressions in general, to which we assign a ternary structure comprising a Perspective, a Figure, and a Ground, represented symbolically as P, F, and G, and which are generalisations of the Reichenbachian S, E, and R, respectively. We show that a formal semantics based on L-structures enables us to capture important crosscategorial similarities between gradable adjectives, tenses, and spatial prepositions.
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Beadle, Lawrence. "Semantic and structural analysis of genetic programming." Thesis, University of Kent, 2009. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.509628.
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Genetic programming (GP) is a subset of evolutionary computation where candidate solutions are evaluated through execution or interpreted execution. The candidate solutions generated by GP are in the form of computer programs, which are evolved to achieve a stated objective. Darwinian evolutionary theory inspires the processes that make up GP which include crossover, mutation and selection. During a GP run, crossover, mutation and selection are performed iteratively until a program that satisfies the stated objectives is produced or a certain number of time steps have elapsed. The objectives of this thesis are to empirically analyse three different aspects of these evolved programs. These three aspects are diversity, efficient representation and the changing structure of programs during evolution. In addition to these analyses, novel algorithms are presented in order to test theories, improve the overall performance of GP and reduce program size. This thesis makes three contributions to the field of GP. Firstly, a detailed analysis is performed of the process of initialisation (generating random programs to start evolution) using four novel algorithms to empirically evaluate specific traits of starting populations of programs. It is shown how two factors simultaneously effect how strong the performance of starting population will be after a GP run. Secondly, semantically based operators are applied during evolution to encourage behavioural diversity and reduce the size of programs by removing inefficient segments of code during evolution. It is demonstrated how these specialist operators can be effective individually and when combined in a series of experiments. Finally, the role of the structure of programs is considered during evolution under different evolutionary parameters considering different problem domains. This analysis reveals some interesting effects of evolution on program structure as well as offering evidence to support the success of the specialist operators.
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Chaves, Rui Pedro. "Coordinate structures constraint-based syntax-semantics processing." [S.l. : [Groningen : s.n.] ; University Library Groningen] [Host], 2007. http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/306318679.
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Oita, Marilena. "Deriving Semantic Objects from the Structured Web (Inférer des Objects Sémantiques du Web Structuré)." Phd thesis, Telecom ParisTech, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00922459.
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This thesis focuses on the extraction and analysis of Web data objects, investigated from different points of view: temporal, structural, semantic. We first survey different strategies and best practices for deriving temporal aspects of Web pages, together with a more in-depth study on Web feeds for this particular purpose. Next, in the context of dynamically-generated Web pages by content management systems, we present two keyword-based techniques that perform article extraction from such pages. Keywords, either automatically acquired through a Tf−Idf analysis, or extracted from Web feeds, guide the process of object identification, either at the level of a single Web page (SIGFEED algorithm), or across different pages sharing the same template (FOREST algorithm). We finally present, in the context of the deep Web, a generic framework which aims at discovering the semantic model of a Web object (here, data record) by, first, using FOREST for the extraction of objects, and second, by representing the implicit rdf:type similarities between the object attributes and the entity of the Web interface as relationships that, together with the instances extracted from the objects, form a labeled graph. This graph is further aligned to a generic ontology like YAGO for the discovery of the graph's unknown types and relations.
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McNeill, Allan. "Semantic structure of personal information." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2002. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/840/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2002.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 2002. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Bloom, Paul 1963. "Semantic structure and language development." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/13686.
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Samoškaitė, Laura. "21st century political euphemisms: semantic and structural study." Master's thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2011. http://vddb.laba.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2011~D_20110711_110339-59355.
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The purpose of this study was to explore the political euphemisms that are used in the English newspapers of the 21st century and analyse their semantic and structural features. First of all, different views on euphemisms were presented to demonstrate attitudes of various scholars towards the same phenomenon. Euphemisms were approached from semantic, structural, and pragmatic points of view. The research question was to be answered in the study was as follows: what are typical political euphemisms used in the current English newspapers and what are their underlying semantic and structural features? The material for the analysis was taken from the online English newspaper The Guardian. This newspaper was selected on the basis of its popularity and accessibility to the readers. The methods used in this study were descriptive method and content analysis. The research emerged from the qualitative perspective as the analysis focused on the meaning found in certain situations.
In the study political euphemisms were divided into nine semantic groups depending on the semantic topics of articles they appeared in and examined from semantic and structural points of view. The former approach dealt with semantic transformations while the latter focused on types of word-building presented in Warren‘s model.
The research proved that the usage of euphemisms was characteristic of political texts but their number was relatively limited. One and the same political euphemism were found in... [to full text]Šio darbo tikslas yra ištirti politinius eufemizmus, kurie yra naudojami 21-ojo amžiaus angliškuose laikraščiuose ir išanalizuoti jų semantinius bei struktūrinius bruožus. Tikslui pasiekti iškelti šie uždaviniai: ištirti teorijas ir mokslinius darbus, aprašančius eufemizmo sąvoką ir bruožus, identifikuoti politinius eufemizmus naudojamus šiandienos angliškuose laikraščiuose, sugrupuoti juos į klases pagal semantines temas bei išanalizuoti politinių eufemizmų struktūrinius ir semantinius bruožus. Atliekant tyrimą buvo naudojami aprašomasis metodas bei turinio analizė. Tyrimo metu nagrinėti 70 politinių eufemizmų, kurie buvo rasti paskutinių trijų metų internetiniame laikraštyje The Guardian. Tyrimo rezultatai parodė, kad: • politinų eufemizmų naudojimas yra būdingas politiniams tekstams, o tai reiškia, kad politikai slepia tikrąją politinių įvykių esmę ir klaidina visuomenę vartodami gražiai skambančius žodžius. Visgi eufemizų skaičius buvo santykinai mažas. Vienas ir tas pats eufemizmas buvo rastas skirtingų semantinių temų straipsniuose. • Daugiausia politinių eufemizmų buvo rasta straipsniuose apie politines partijas, o mažiausiai- straipsniuose apie civilinių ir viešųjų paslaugų politiką. Tai rodo, kad politikai yra linkę vartoti eufemistinę kalbą diskutuodami įvairiomis temomis politinėse partijose ir sakydami kalbas, o kalbėdami apie civilines ir viešąsias paslaugas politikai eufemizuoja rečiau. • Eufemizmai atlieka penkias pragmatines funkcijas: mandagumo, tabu... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]
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May, Robert B. "Semantic and Structural Influences on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1532454314282973.
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Ramchand, Gillian. "Aspect and predication : the semantics of argument structure /." Oxford : New York : Clarendon press ; Oxford university press, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37510857k.
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Geojo, Amy Celine. "Breaking and Entering: Verb Semantics and Event Structure." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467171.
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Any event can be construed from a variety of perspectives. While this flexibility is fundamental to human ingenuity, it poses a challenge for language learners who must discern which meanings are encoded in their language and by which forms. The papers in this dissertation focus on verbs encoding directed motion (e.g., a girl runs into a house) and caused change-of-state events (e.g., a boy blows out candles). Both classes of events can be expressed by verbs that lexicalize different components of the event, namely Manner-of-motion (e.g., run) or Path (e.g., enter), and Means (e.g., blow) or Effect (e.g., extinguish), respectively.
Papers 1 and 2 examine the representation of higher-order generalizations about the meanings of directed motion and novel caused change-of-state verbs. Both studies use a novel verb-learning paradigm to manipulate the meanings of novel verbs in the input and then assess how learners interpret subsequently encountered novel verbs (measure lexicalization bias). The results indicate that learners rapidly use semantic regularities to form higher-order generalizations about verb meaning.
In Paper 1, adults taught Manner verbs construed new directed motion verbs as lexicalizing Manner more often than those taught Path verbs. Moreover, changes in verb learning bias were accompanied by shifts in visual attention: Manner-verb learners fixated on Manner-related elements of visually-presented events more than Path-verb learners. These results indicate that previously observed cross-linguistic differences in verb lexicalization biases are unlikely to stem from the restructuring of semantic representations along language-specific lines and more likely reflect the operation of a flexible, inferential learning mechanism that monitors the input and updates beliefs accordingly.
Likewise, in Paper 2, adults taught Means verbs interpreted unknown verbs for caused change-of-state events as encoding the Means more often than those taught Effect verbs. Unlike directed motion verbs, the encoding of these events is not characterized by marked typological variation and the availability of Means and Effect verbs does not appear to vary appreciable within or across languages. Our results, then, suggest that the formation of higher-level generalizations about meaning is a fundamental property of the processes that undergird lexical acquisition.
Paper 3 focuses on the representation of the event concepts that underlie verb meanings. Specifically, we examine the possibility that Manner-of-motion and Means are actually instances of a broader semantic category, MANNER, whereas Path and Effect are instances of a different semantic category, RESULT. Adults were taught novel verbs for either directed motion or caused changes of state and subsequently presented with novel verbs from the other semantic class. The results revealed that adults transfer newly-learned higher-order generalizations about the meanings of directed motion verbs to caused change-of-state verbs (and vice versa), providing support for the psychological reality of superordinate event concepts.Psychology
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梁秉雄 and Ping-hung Karl Richard Leung. "Towards a semantics bridge between structured specifications and logicspecifications." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1992. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31210454.
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Chen, Raymond C. "Consistency control and memory semantics for persistent objects." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/8149.
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Alenezi, Mamdouh Khalaf. "A New Coupling Metric: Combining Structural and Semantic Relationships." Diss., North Dakota State University, 2014. https://hdl.handle.net/10365/27267.
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Maintaining object-oriented software is problematic and expensive. Earlier research has revealed that complex relationships among object-oriented software entities are key reasons that make maintenance costly. Therefore, measuring the strength of these relationships has become a requirement to develop proficient techniques for software maintenance. Coupling, a measure of the interdependence among software entities, is an important property for which many software metrics have been defined. It is widely agreed that the level of coupling in a software product has consequences for its maintenance. In order to understand which aspects of coupling affect quality or other external attributes of software, this dissertation introduces a new coupling metric for object-oriented software that combines structural and semantic relationships among methods and classes. The dissertation studies the usage of the new proposed coupling metric throughout change impact analysis, predicting fault-prone and maintainable classes. Three empirical studies were performed to evaluate the new coupling metric and established three results. Firstly, the new coupling metric can be effectively used to specify other classes that might potentially affected by a change to a given class. Secondly, a significant correlation between the new coupling metric and faults has been found. Finally, it has been found that the new metric shows a good promise in predicting maintainable classes. We expect that this new software metric contributes to the improvement of the design of incremental change of software and thus lead to increasing software quality and reducing software maintenance costs.
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Leung, Ping-hung Karl Richard. "Towards a semantics bridge between structured specifications and logic specifications /." [Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong], 1992. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B13212771.
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Mateu, Fontanals Jaume. "Argument structure: relational construal at the syntax-semantics interface." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/4828.
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Aquesta tesi tracta de les propietats relacionals de la sintaxi i la semàntica de l'estructura argumental. En especial, estudio la relació entre l'estructura argumental i la descomposició lèxica: defenso que una descomposició mínima dels elements lèxics (e.g., ensellar o trencar) és necessària si es vol donar compte de les seves estructures relacionals complexes. Al capítol primer s'hi proposa la hipòtesi teòrica principal segons la qual hi ha un homomorfisme important entre la sintaxi i la semàntica relacionals de l'estructura argumental. Demostro que a aquesta hipòtesi se li pot donar una base teòrica si i només si es fa la distinció langackeriana següent: el significat és una funció del contingut conceptual i de la construalitat semàntica. En introduir aquesta distinció en el paradigma generativista, argumento que només la construalitat semàntica es codifica de manera transparent a la sintaxi. Poso també especial èmfasi a fer veure que la meva aproximació a l'estudi de l'estructura argumental participa tant de la teoria sintàctica de Hale i Keyser (1998, 1999a) com de la teoria semàntica de Mateu (1999).
Al capítol segon s'hi analitzen les propietats relacionals de la sintaxi i la semàntica dels verbs inacusatius i inergatius. Exemplifico la meva anàlisi de la 'inacusativitat' amb l'estudi de dos casos diferents: en primer lloc, faig una explicació formal dels aspectes semàntics relacionals que determinen la selecció d'auxiliar en llengües com l'italià i el francès; en segon lloc, defenso que l'anàlisi de la construcció progressiva implica una estructura inacusativa locativa que domina l'estructura argumental que està lèxicament associada al predicat verbal.
Al capítol tercer s'hi estudien les propietats relacionals de la sintaxi i la semàntica de l'anomenada 'elasticitat del significat verbal' (Rappaport Hovav i Levin 1998). Es demostra que la variació lingüística que afecta aquest fenomen està relacionada amb la distinció tipològica de Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000) entre llengües d'emmarcament en el satèl·lit com l'anglès, l'alemany o el neerlandès, i llengües d'emmarcament en el verb com el català, l'espanyol o el francès. S'hi analitzen de manera detallada la sintaxi i la semàntica relacionals de dues construccions que són típiques de les llengües d'emmarcament en el satèl·lit: les construccions de moviment que inclouen un verb de manera de moviment i un trajecte fitat, i les construccions resultatives complexes. Poso especial èmfasi a demostrar per què en català no existeixen aquestes construccions. Faig veure també per què en català no existeixen determinats verbs denominals complexos ni certs casos d'alternances locatives, que són més aviat típics de llengües germàniques com l'alemany o el neerlandès.
Al capítol quart s'hi estudia l'anomenada 'restricció d'objecte directe' en les construccions resultatives de l'anglès. Tot i que s'ha posat en dubte aquesta restricció (e.g., vegeu Rappaport Hovav i Levin 2001), faig veure les raons per les quals cal recuperar la validesa d'aquesta restricció. En aquest capítol s'hi analitza també la sintaxi i la semàntica relacionals d'una construcció idiomàtica de l'anglès que té un correlat molt directe amb les construccions resultatives: i.e., la "way-construction". Demostro també per què aquesta construcció no transgredeix la 'restricció d'objecte directe', tot i que ho pugui semblar a primer cop d'ull.
Al capítol cinquè s'hi fa un resum força extens de les tesis més rellevants que un hom pot extreure d'aquest treball. Aquestes tesis les exemplifico a partir de l'anàlisi de la sintaxi i la semàntica relacionals d'un dels meus casos d'estudi preferits: el verb climb. Cal advertir que aquest capítol està pensat per a aquell lector (cada vegada més freqüent!) que vol saber amb un cert detall de què tracta la tesi, però que no té temps per a llegir-se-la tota.
This thesis deals with the relational syntax and semantics of argument structure. Special attention is paid to the relation between argument structure and lexical decomposition: a minimal decomposition of lexical items like to saddle or to break is argued to be necessary in order to elucidate their complex relational structures.
In chapter 1 I put forward the hypothesis that there is a strong homomorphism between the relational syntax and semantics of argument structure. This hypothesis is shown to gain theoretical support iff a fundamental distinction is drawn: meaning is a function of both non-syntactically transparent conceptual content and syntactically transparent semantic construal. Accordingly, a syntactically transparent approach to semantic composition is adopted in the present framework, which partakes in both Hale & Keyser's (1998, 1999a) syntactic theory of the basic argument structure types and Mateu's (1999) semantic theory of argument structure, which assumes that certain meanings are associated to certain structures.
In chapter 2 I analyze the relational syntax and semantics of unaccusative and unergative verbs. The present analysis of unaccusativity is exemplified with two different case studies: Firstly, I provide a formal account of the relational semantic determinants of 'aux-selection' in languages like Italian and French. Secondly, I argue that the progressive construction can be analyzed as involving a locative unaccusative structure over that argument structure lexically associated to the verbal predicate.
In chapter 3 I put forward a relational syntactic and semantic account of the crosslinguistic variation involved in the so-called 'elasticity of verb meaning' (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998). Such a variation is argued to be related to Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological distinction between 'satellite-framed languages' and 'verb-framed languages'. In particular, I analyze two constructions that are typical of satellite-framed languages like English, Dutch or German: complex telic path of motion constructions and complex resultative constructions. I also show why these constructions are impossible in verb-framed languages like Catalan or Spanish. Moreover, I provide an explanation of why certain classes of complex denominal verbs and some cases of locative alternation are more productive in satellite-framed languages rather than in verb-framed ones.
In chapter 4 I argue my way to the conclusion that the so-called 'Direct Object Restriction' (DOR) on resultative constructions, which has been recently called into question by Rappaport Hovav & Levin (2001), must be regained. In this chapter I also put forward a relational syntactic and semantic analysis of the so-called way-construction, showing that, despite appearances, such an idiomatic construction does not violate the DOR either.
Chapter 5 provides an extensive recapitulation of some relevant theses worth being drawn from the present work. I exemplify them by providing a relational syntactic and semantic analysis of one of my favorite case studies: i.e., the verb climb.
CAVEAT: Chapter 5 is mainly intended for that reader who does not want to spend time reading a 300-pages work on lexical decomposition issues, but nonetheless wants a very detailed summary of it.
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Temme, Anne. "The peculiar nature of psych verbs and experiencer object structures." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/19889.
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Durch ihr besonderes Verhalten haben psychologische Verben, und Experiencer-Objekt-Verben im Besonderen, in der linguistischen Forschung Berühmtheit erlangt. In vielen Sprachen konnte beobachtet werden, dass das Verhalten dieser Verben oft von grammatischen Generalisierungen abweicht, die über Prädikate und Strukturen bis dahin gemacht wurden. Diese so genannten 'psych properties' (Psych-Eigenschaften) betreffen zentrale linguistische Phänomene sowie sprachspezifische Eigenschaften und sie geben Anlass anzunehmen, dass Verben wie 'frighten' ('fürchten'), 'appeal to' ('gefallen') und 'worry' ('beunruhigen') eine besondere Stellung im grammatischen System einnehmen. Sie stehen hier Verben gegenüber die nicht primär mentale oder emotionale Konzepte ausdrücken, wie zum Beispiel 'call' ('anrufen'), 'warn' ('warnen') or 'visit' ('besuchen'). Die vorliegende Arbeit nimmt diese Beobachtungen auf und untersucht die besonderen Eigenschaften der Psych-Prädikate.Psych verbs in general and experiencer object verbs in particular are exceptional because they often do not follow generalizations that have been made about verbs and structure types in the theory of grammar. Such so-called 'psych properties' can be observed in many languages and concern central linguistic but also language-specific phenomena. The existence of psych properties gives rise to the assumption that verbs such as 'frighten', 'appeal to' and 'worry' have a special position within the grammatical system as they stand in opposition to verbs that do not primarily express mental or emotional concepts, e.g., 'call', 'warn' or 'visit'. The present work addresses this divergence and investigates the characterizations of psych predicates.
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Chen, Harr. "Learning semantic structures from in-domain documents." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/63067.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-184).
Semantic analysis is a core area of natural language understanding that has typically focused on predicting domain-independent representations. However, such representations are unable to fully realize the rich diversity of technical content prevalent in a variety of specialized domains. Taking the standard supervised approach to domainspecific semantic analysis requires expensive annotation effort for each new domain of interest. In this thesis, we study how multiple granularities of semantic analysis can be learned from unlabeled documents within the same domain. By exploiting in-domain regularities in the expression of text at various layers of linguistic phenomena, including lexicography, syntax, and discourse, the statistical approaches we propose induce multiple kinds of structure: relations at the phrase and sentence level, content models at the paragraph and section level, and semantic properties at the document level. Each of our models is formulated in a hierarchical Bayesian framework with the target structure captured as latent variables, allowing them to seamlessly incorporate linguistically-motivated prior and posterior constraints, as well as multiple kinds of observations. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approaches can successfully extract hidden semantic structure over a variety of domains, outperforming multiple competitive baselines.
by Harr Chen.
Ph.D.
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Melchin, Paul. "The Semantic Basis for Selectional Restrictions." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/38831.
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In this thesis I investigate the relationship between the semantics of a verb and its selectional restrictions, which determine how many and what kind of arguments it must occur with in a clause. For most verbs, these restrictions are predictable from the semantics of the verb, but there are pairs of verbs with very similar semantics that differ in their argument restrictions. For example, both ask and wonder can take questions as their complements (John asked/wondered what time it was), but of the two, only ask can take a noun phrase complement with a question-like interpretation (John asked/*wondered the time). Similarly, while both eat and devour are verbs of consumption, the object can be omitted with eat but not devour (John ate/*devoured yesterday). Due to these and similar examples, many linguists have claimed that selectional restrictions are to some extent arbitrary and unpredictable from the semantics, and therefore must be learned as part of our knowledge of the relevant verbs. In this thesis I argue that these differences are not arbitrary; they recur across languages, and they can be predicted on the basis of lexical semantics, meaning they do not need to be learned on a word-by-word basis.
In order for selectional features to be eliminated from the grammar, and replaced with semantic generalizations, two things must be shown. First, it must be demonstrated that the elements being selected for can be defined in terms of their semantics, rather than their syntactic properties. If not, the selectional properties could not be considered to be fully predictable based on the semantics of the selecting and selected items. Second, it must be shown that the selectional restrictions of a predicate are predictable from components of the selecting predicate’s meaning. In other words, the semantics of both the selected and the selecting elements must be accounted for. I focus mainly on the semantics of selected elements in Chapter 2, and on selecting elements in Chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 2 provides a brief review of the literature on selectional features, and argues that the elements being selected need not be defined in terms of their syntactic category and features. Instead, what are selected for are the semantic properties of the selected items. While the relationship between syntactic and semantic categories and properties is often systematic, it is not always, which can make it difficult in certain cases to determine the semantic basis for predicting what elements will be selected. Specifically, I argue that what appears to be selection for clausal categories (CPs or TPs) is in fact selection for propositional entities (including questions, assertions, facts, and so on); apparent selection for bare verb phrases (vPs) is selection for eventualities (events or states); and apparent selection for nominals (DPs) is selection for objects or things. Only properties of the nearest semantic entity (i.e., excluding elements embedded therein) can be selected for. In this way, I account for the selectional asymmetries between clausal and nominal complements noted by Bruening (2009) and Bruening et al. (2018): predicates selecting clausal complements can only select for (semantic) properties of the upper portion of the clause (in the CP domain), not for the lower portion (the vP domain), while predicates taking nominal complements can select for any properties of the nominal rather than being restricted to the upper portion. Since all syntactic properties of items are encoded as features, on a syntactic account it is expected that all features should be involved in selectional restrictions, contrary to fact; the semantic approach taken here allows for a principled explanation of what can and cannot be selected for.
In Chapters 3 and 4 I turn to the lexical semantics of selecting elements, showing that these too are involved in determining selectional restrictions. I start in Chapter 3 by looking at c-selection (i.e., syntactic selection), specifically the case of eat versus devour. As mentioned above, their selectional properties of these two verbs differ in that the complement of eat is optional, while that of devour is obligatory, despite the two verbs having similar meanings. I show that this is due to the aspectual properties of these verbs: devour denotes an event where the complement necessarily undergoes a complete scalar change (i.e., it must be fully devoured by the end of the event), which means that the complement must be syntactically realized (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001; Rappaport Hovav 2008). Eat, on the other hand, does not entail a complete change of state in its complement, and so the complement is optional. I show that the correlation between scalar change entailments and obligatory argument realization holds for a wider group of verbs as well. Thus, the c-selectional properties of eat, devour, and similar verbs need not be stipulated in their lexical entries.
In Chapter 4 I turn to the selection of complements headed by a particular lexical item, as with rely, which requires a PP complement headed by on, a phenomenon commonly referred to as l-selection. I show that the sets of verbs and prepositions involved in l-selection, and the observed verb-preposition combinations, are not fully random but can instead be (partially) predicted based on the thematic properties of the items in question. Furthermore, I show that there are different kinds of l-selecting predicates, and one kind is systematically present in satellite-framed languages (like English) and absent in verb-framed languages (like French), based on the Framing Typology of Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000). I account for this difference by analyzing l-selection as an instance of complex predicate formation, and showing that a certain kind of complex predicate (exemplified by rely on) is possible in satellite-framed languages but not in verb-framed languages.
Thus, I show that the features that get selected for are semantic features, and that the problematic cases of eat versus devour and l-selection have semantic correlates, and need not be stipulated in the lexicon. While this leaves many instances of selectional features unaccounted for, it provides proposals for some components of lexical semantics that are relevant to selection, and demonstrates that a research program directed toward eliminating the remaining cases is plausibly viable.
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Hughes, Richard Sylvester. "The conceptual structure of product semantic models." Thesis, Brunel University, 1999. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/4969.
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The study is concerned with the conceptual structure and content of the framework for characterising user-product interaction, proposed under the title – ‘Product Semantics’. The sources for the critique of design, from which the framework is derived, are identified and analysed, and the substantive theoretical and methodological content given initial consideration in terms of the deployment of the central concept of ‘meaning’, and the principal theoretical approaches adopted in the analysis of meaning and semantic concepts generally. The commitment to a cognitive and experiential approach to user-interaction is established and the concepts central to the framework, and requiring more detailed analysis, are identified. The core of the study consists in an analysis of the sequence of concepts and contexts that are chiefly used in the theoretical articulation of the framework, including - function, affordance, categorisation, artefacts, meaning and expression - of which the concept of affordance is central to the structure. On the basis of the initial consideration of the structure and content of the scheme, and in the light of the analysis of concepts, the explanatory structure of the framework is established. It is argued that the core commitment to an experiential and cognitive account, and the form of the explanatory structure, are jointly incompatible with the conceptual content of the framework, particularly in respect of the pivotal role of the concept of affordance. Proposals are advanced for an alternative interpretation which addresses the central issues of consistency and coherence, and which suggests an alternative approach to the conceptual characterisation of the framework and the form of the explanatory hierarchy. The implications of the framework, and the proposed alternative interpretation, are considered in respect of their application in shaping approaches to the development of design theory and methodology, and the experiential aspect of semantics and cognition.
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Stroud, Clare Margaret Anne. "Structural and semantic selectivity in the electrophysiology of sentence comprehension." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/8893.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2008.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Linguistics. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Mankowitz, Poppy. "Quantifier expressions and information structure." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17137.
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Linguists and philosophers of language have shown increasing interest in the expressions that refer to quantifiers: determiners like 'every' and 'many', in addition to determiner phrases like 'some king' and 'no cat'. This thesis addresses several puzzles where the way we understand quantifier expressions depends on features that go beyond standard truth conditional semantic meaning. One puzzle concerns the fact that it is often natural to understand 'Every king is in the yard' as being true if (say) all of the kings at the party are in the yard, even though the standard truth conditions predict it to be true if and only if every king in the universe is in the yard. Another puzzle emerges from the observation that 'Every American king is in the yard' sounds odd relative to contexts where there are no American kings, even though the standard truth conditions predict it to be trivially true. These puzzles have been widely discussed within linguistics and philosophy of language, and have implications for topics as diverse as the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and the ontological commitments of ordinary individuals. Yet few attempts have been made to incorporate discussions from the linguistics literature into the philosophical literature. This thesis argues that attending to the linguistics literature helps to address these puzzles. In particular, my solutions to these puzzles rely on notions from work on information structure, an often overlooked area of linguistics. I will use these notions to develop a new theory of the pragmatics of ordinary discourse, in the process of resolving the puzzles. In the first two chapters, I provide accessible overviews of key notions from the literature on quantifier expressions and information structure. In the third chapter, I discuss the problem of contextual domain restriction. In the fourth chapter, I consider the problems posed by empty restrictors. In the final chapter, I tackle the issue of category mistakes.
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Wong, Ping-wai, and 黃炳蔚. "Semantic annotation of Chinese texts with message structures based on HowNet." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B38212389.
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Burnett, Luke A. "Extracting Information From Subroutines using Static Analysis Semantics." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1588637637290094.
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Martínez-Mascarúa, Carlos Mario. "Syntactic and semantic structures in cocolog logic control." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34757.
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The research presented in this thesis is formulated within the Conditional Observer and Controller Logic (COCOLOG) framework. COCOLOG is a family of first order languages and associated theories for the design and implementation of controllers for discrete event systems (DESs).The opening part of this thesis presents a high level formulation of COCOLOG called Macro COCOLOG. First, we present the theory of Macro COCOLOG languages, a framework for the enhancement of the original COCOLOG language via definitional constructions. Second, we present the theory of Macro COCOLOG actions, a framework for the enhancement of COCOLOG allowing the utilisation of hierarchically aggregated control actions.
In this thesis Macro COCOLOG is applied to a pair of examples: the control of the motion of a mobile robot and the flow of water through a tank.
The next question addressed in the thesis is the possibility of expanding the original COCOLOG theories in various ways concerning the fundamental issues of the arithmetic system and the notion of reachability in DESs as expressed in COCOLOG. Specifically, the fundamental nature of the reachability predicate, Rbl(·,·,·), is explored, and found to be completely determined by notions axiomatised in subtheories of the original COCOLOG theory. This result effectively reduces the complexity of the proofs originally involving Rbl(·,·,·).
Following this line of thought, two sets of Macro languages and associated theories are developed which are shown to be as powerful (in terms of expressiveness and deductive scope) as the original COCOLOG theories and hence, necessarily, as powerful as Markovian fragment COCOLOG theories.
A final result along these lines is that the control law itself (originally expressed in a set of extra logical Conditional Control Rules) can be incorporated into the COCOLOG theories via function symbol definition.
The efficient implementation of COCOLOG controllers serves as a motivation for the final two chapters of the thesis. A basic result in this chapter is that a COCOLOG controller may itself be realized as a DES since, for any COCOLOG controller, it is shown that one may generate a finite state machine realizing that controller. This realization can then be used for real time (i.e. reactive) control. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Martinez-Mascarua, Carlos Mario. "Syntactic and semantic structures in COCOLOG logic control." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0017/NQ44512.pdf.
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Noble, Claire. "Early comprehension of argument structure and semantic roles." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.526846.
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McKenna, Pat. "The structure of semantic memory : a clinical perspective." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.441379.
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Chan, Wing Yi. "Visualizing the semantic structure in classical music works /." View abstract or full-text, 2009. http://library.ust.hk/cgi/db/thesis.pl?CSED%202009%20CHAN.
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Kolapalli, Pavani. "An analysis of structural and semantic validity in the data model." Click here for download, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1637583301&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Tsiplakou, Stavroula. "Focus in Greek : its structure and interpretation." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313433.
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Evans, James Barrie. "A non-coercing account of event structure in Pular." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.322078.
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Bhagavatula, Chandra Sekhar. "Adding Semantics to Unstructured and Semi-structured Data on the Web." Thesis, Northwestern University, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10117145.
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Acquiring vast bodies of knowledge in machine-understandable form is one of the main challenges in artificial intelligence. Information Extraction is the task of automatically extracting structured, machine-understandable information from unstructured or semi-structured data. Recent advances in information extraction and the massive scale of data on the Web present a unique opportunity for artificial intelligence systems for large-scale automatic knowledge acquisition. However, to realize the full potential of the automatically extracted information, it is essential to understand their semantics.
A key step in understanding the semantics of extracted information is entity linking: the task of mapping a phrase in text to its referent entity in a given knowledge base. In addition to identifying entities mentioned in text, an AI system can benefit significantly from the organization of entities in a taxonomy. While taxonomies are used in a variety of applications, including IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson system, they demand significant effort in their creation. They are either manually curated, or built using semi-supervised machine learning techniques.
This dissertation explores methods to automatically infer a taxonomy of entities, given the properties that are usually associated with them (e.g. as a City, Chicago is usually associated with properties like "population" and "area"). Our approach is based on the Property Inheritance hypothesis, which states that entities of a specific type in a taxonomy inherit properties from more general types. We apply this hypothesis to two distinct information extraction tasks — each of which is aimed at understanding the semantics of information mined from the Web. First, we describe the two systems (1) TABEL: a state-of-the art system that performs the task of entity linking on Web tables, and (2) SKEY: a system that extracts key phrases that summarize a document in a given corpus. We then apply topic models that encode our hypothesis in a probabilistic framework to automatically infer a taxonomy in each task.
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Kwiatkowski, Thomas Mieczyslaw. "Probabilistic grammar induction from sentences and structured meanings." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6190.
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The meanings of natural language sentences may be represented as compositional logical-forms. Each word or lexicalised multiword-element has an associated logicalform representing its meaning. Full sentential logical-forms are then composed from these word logical-forms via a syntactic parse of the sentence. This thesis develops two computational systems that learn both the word-meanings and parsing model required to map sentences onto logical-forms from an example corpus of (sentence, logical-form) pairs. One of these systems is designed to provide a general purpose method of inducing semantic parsers for multiple languages and logical meaning representations. Semantic parsers map sentences onto logical representations of their meanings and may form an important part of any computational task that needs to interpret the meanings of sentences. The other system is designed to model the way in which a child learns the semantics and syntax of their first language. Here, logical-forms are used to represent the potentially ambiguous context in which childdirected utterances are spoken and a psycholinguistically plausible training algorithm learns a probabilistic grammar that describes the target language. This computational modelling task is important as it can provide evidence for or against competing theories of how children learn their first language. Both of the systems presented here are based upon two working hypotheses. First, that the correct parse of any sentence in any language is contained in a set of possible parses defined in terms of the sentence itself, the sentence’s logical-form and a small set of combinatory rule schemata. The second working hypothesis is that, given a corpus of (sentence, logical-form) pairs that each support a large number of possible parses according to the schemata mentioned above, it is possible to learn a probabilistic parsing model that accurately describes the target language. The algorithm for semantic parser induction learns Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) lexicons and discriminative probabilistic parsing models from corpora of (sentence, logical-form) pairs. This system is shown to achieve at or near state of the art performance across multiple languages, logical meaning representations and domains. As the approach is not tied to any single natural or logical language, this system represents an important step towards widely applicable black-box methods for semantic parser induction. This thesis also develops an efficient representation of the CCG lexicon that separately stores language specific syntactic regularities and domain specific semantic knowledge. This factorised lexical representation improves the performance of CCG based semantic parsers in sparse domains and also provides a potential basis for lexical expansion and domain adaptation for semantic parsers. The algorithm for modelling child language acquisition learns a generative probabilistic model of CCG parses from sentences paired with a context set of potential logical-forms containing one correct entry and a number of distractors. The online learning algorithm used is intended to be psycholinguistically plausible and to assume as little information specific to the task of language learning as is possible. It is shown that this algorithm learns an accurate parsing model despite making very few initial assumptions. It is also shown that the manner in which both word-meanings and syntactic rules are learnt is in accordance with observations of both of these learning tasks in children, supporting a theory of language acquisition that builds upon the two working hypotheses stated above.
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Sailer, Manfred. "Combinatorial semantics and idiomatic expressions in head-driven phrase structure grammar." [S.l.] : [s.n.], 2003. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=968874738.
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Melzer, Sylvia [Verfasser]. "Semantic assets : latent structures for knowledge management / Sylvia Melzer." Lübeck : Zentrale Hochschulbibliothek Lübeck, 2019. http://d-nb.info/1174775092/34.
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Li, Kin-ling Michelle, and 李健靈. "On Cantonese causative constructions: iconicity, grammaticalization and semantic structures." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2002. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B42576519.
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