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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Word semantics'
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Dolena, Alexis Lynn. "Uncovering the "slow mapping" process of word learning through word definition and word association tasks." Click here for download, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1212794661&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Shebani, Zubaida Soliman. "Semantic word category processing." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610751.
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Lau, Ka-po Natalie, and 劉家寶. "Semantic interference of Chinese words in the picture-word interference task." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B45007597.
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Grover, Ishaan. "A semantics based computational model for word learning." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120694.
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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 73-77).
Studies have shown that children's early literacy skills can impact their ability to achieve academic success, attain higher education and secure employment later in life. However, lack of resources and limited access to educational content causes a "knowledge gap" between children that come from different socio-economic backgrounds. To solve this problem, there has been a recent surge in the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to provide learning benefits to children. However, before providing new content, an ITS must assess a child's existing knowledge. Several studies have shown that children learn new words by forming semantic relationships with words they already know. Human tutors often implicitly use semantics to assess a tutee's word knowledge from partial and noisy data. In this thesis, I present a cognitively inspired model that uses word semantics (semantics-based model) to make inferences about a child's vocabulary from partial information about their existing vocabulary. Using data from a one-to-one learning intervention between a robotic tutor and 59 children, I show that the proposed semantics-based model outperforms (on average) models that do not use word semantics (semantics-free models). A subject level analysis of results reveals that different models perform well for different children, thus motivating the need to combine predictions. To this end, I present two methods to combine predictions from semantics-based and semantics-free models and show that these methods yield better predictions of a child's vocabulary knowledge. Finally, I present an application of the semantics-based model to evaluate if a learning intervention was successful in teaching children new words while enhancing their semantic understanding. More concretely, I show that a personalized word learning intervention with a robotic tutor is better suited to enhance children's vocabulary when compared to a non-personalized intervention. These results motivate the use of semantics-based models to assess children's knowledge and build ITS that maximize children's semantic understanding of words.
"This research was supported by NSF IIP-1717362 and NSF IIS-1523118"--Page 10.
by Ishaan Grover.
S.M.
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Taylor, Maureen Deirdre. "Word grammar and the semantics of compound nouns." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1987. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28840/.
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This investigation is a mentalistic inquiry into the study of semantic structure for compound nouns in English. The phenomenon of compounding entails competence in both semantic and pragmatic aspects of knowledge. These two aspects of language are generally described by separate grammatical models with the result that traditional analyses have been unable to provide a descriptively adequate account of the meanings of English compound nouns. This inquiry adopts the grammatical model of Word Grammar which incorporates a systematic representation of grammatical competence within a model of performance. The underlying hypothesis of this model is that all prepositional content of language is organised in relation to the word. Therefore, no unit larger than the word itself is required to describe the production and comprehension of compound constituency. The inclusion of pragmatic competence into the framework introduces an indeterminate feature in terms of experiential knowledge but this is offset by knowledge of the word as a common denominator with which all knowledge is projected. It is shown that Word Grammar's mentalistic framework provides an observationally adequate description of speaker competence for the meanings of compound nouns and an alternative approach that offers a credible description of the interrelation between semantic and pragmatic knowledge exploited in the comprehension of compound noun meaning.
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Burton, Marilyn Elizabeth. "Semantics of glory : a cognitive, corpus-based approach to Hebrew word meaning." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/9573.
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The concept of ‘glory’ is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God’s self-disclosure in biblical revelation. Yet, while the concept has received theological treatment, and while various relevant Hebrew roots have individually benefited from linguistic survey, the group of lexemes surrounding this concept is as yet untouched by a comprehensive semantic study. Through indepth semantic study this thesis offers a clearer understanding of the interrelations and differences between the Classical Hebrew lexemes centring around the concept of ‘glory’. The first chapter opens with a critical examination of both structuralist and cognitivist approaches to semantic research, focussing particularly on their historical use and current applicability to the study of ancient languages. It outlines the superior claims of cognitive semantics accurately to model patterns of language usage, addressing the challenges inherent in the application of such an approach to ancient language. The proposed methodology is characterised as cognitive in nature, focussed on both lexical interrelations (relational) and the internal composition of lexemes (decompositional), exhaustive in relating lexemes to each other point by point, and based on the entirety of the Classical Hebrew corpus. Finally, this chapter discusses issues relating to the limited, diachronic and fragmentary nature of the Classical Hebrew corpus. The second chapter delineates the boundaries of the semantic domain of כבוד . It opens with a methodological discussion introducing parallel terms and word pairs as valuable tools in the objective identification of semantically related terms. Proposing the theory that members of a semantic domain will regularly co-occur, it systematically analyses firstly the extant word associations of כבוד itself and secondly of those lexemes recurring in association with it, accepting or rejecting each as a member of its semantic domain on the basis of word associations. This process results in the identification of eleven lexemes as members of the semantic domain of The concept of ‘glory’ is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God’s self-disclosure in biblical revelation. Yet, while the concept has received theological treatment, and while various relevant Hebrew roots have individually benefited from linguistic survey, the group of lexemes surrounding this concept is as yet untouched by a comprehensive semantic study. Through indepth semantic study this thesis offers a clearer understanding of the interrelations and differences between the Classical Hebrew lexemes centring around the concept of ‘glory’. The first chapter opens with a critical examination of both structuralist and cognitivist approaches to semantic research, focussing particularly on their historical use and current applicability to the study of ancient languages. It outlines the superior claims of cognitive semantics accurately to model patterns of language usage, addressing the challenges inherent in the application of such an approach to ancient language. The proposed methodology is characterised as cognitive in nature, focussed on both lexical interrelations (relational) and the internal composition of lexemes (decompositional), exhaustive in relating lexemes to each other point by point, and based on the entirety of the Classical Hebrew corpus. Finally, this chapter discusses issues relating to the limited, diachronic and fragmentary nature of the Classical Hebrew corpus. The second chapter delineates the boundaries of the semantic domain of כבוד . It opens with a methodological discussion introducing parallel terms and word pairs as valuable tools in the objective identification of semantically related terms. Proposing the theory that members of a semantic domain will regularly co-occur, it systematically analyses firstly the extant word associations of כבוד itself and secondly of those lexemes recurring in association with it, accepting or rejecting each as a member of its semantic domain on the basis of word associations. This process results in the identification of eleven lexemes as members of the semantic domain of The concept of ‘glory’ is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God’s self-disclosure in biblical revelation. Yet, while the concept has received theological treatment, and while various relevant Hebrew roots have individually benefited from linguistic survey, the group of lexemes surrounding this concept is as yet untouched by a comprehensive semantic study. Through indepth semantic study this thesis offers a clearer understanding of the interrelations and differences between the Classical Hebrew lexemes centring around the concept of ‘glory’. The first chapter opens with a critical examination of both structuralist and cognitivist approaches to semantic research, focussing particularly on their historical use and current applicability to the study of ancient languages. It outlines the superior claims of cognitive semantics accurately to model patterns of language usage, addressing the challenges inherent in the application of such an approach to ancient language. The proposed methodology is characterised as cognitive in nature, focussed on both lexical interrelations (relational) and the internal composition of lexemes (decompositional), exhaustive in relating lexemes to each other point by point, and based on the entirety of the Classical Hebrew corpus. Finally, this chapter discusses issues relating to the limited, diachronic and fragmentary nature of the Classical Hebrew corpus. The second chapter delineates the boundaries of the semantic domain of כבוד . It opens with a methodological discussion introducing parallel terms and word pairs as valuable tools in the objective identification of semantically related terms. Proposing the theory that members of a semantic domain will regularly co-occur, it systematically analyses firstly the extant word associations of כבוד itself and secondly of those lexemes recurring in association with it, accepting or rejecting each as a member of its semantic domain on the basis of word associations. This process results in the identification of eleven lexemes as members of the semantic domain of כבוד.
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Bose, Sougata. "On decision problems on word transducers with origin semantics." Thesis, Bordeaux, 2021. http://www.theses.fr/2021BORD0073.
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La sémantique d'origine pour les transducteurs de mots a été introduite par Bojańczyk en 2014 afin d'obtenir une caractérisation indépendante de la machine pour les fonctions mot à mot définies par les transducteurs. Notre objectif principal était d'étudier certains problèmes de décision classiques pour les transducteurs dans la sémantique d'origine, tels que le problème d'inclusion et d'équivalence. Nous avons montré que ces problèmes deviennent décidables dans la sémantique d'origine, même si la version classique est indécidable.Motivé par l'observation que la sémantique d'origine est plus fine que la sémantique classique, nous avons défini les resynchroniseurs comme un moyen de décrire les distorsions d'origine et d'étudier les problèmes ci-dessus de manière relaxée. Nous avons étendu le modèle des resynchroniseurs rationnels, introduit par Filiot et al. pour les transducteurs unidirectionnels, aux resynchroniseurs réguliers, qui fonctionnent pour des classes de transducteurs plus grandes.Nous avons étudié les deux variantes du problème d’inclusion relative à une resynchronisation, qui demande si un transducteur est contenu dans un autre jusqu'à une distorsion spécifiée par un resynchroniseur. Nous avons montré que le problème peut être résolu lorsque le resynchroniseur fait partie de l'entrée. Lorsque le resynchroniseur n'est pas spécifié dans l'entrée, nous avons cherché à synthétiser un tel resynchroniseur, chaque fois que cela était possible. Nous appelons cela le problème de synthèse pour les resynchroniseurs et nous montrons qu'il est indécidable en général. Nous avons identifié quelques cas restreints où le problème devient décidable. Nous avons également étudié le problème de resynchronisabilité unidirectionnelle, qui demande si un transducteur bidirectionnel donné est resynchronisable dans un transducteur unidirectionnel, et nous avons montré que ce problème est également décidableThe origin semantics for word transducers was introduced by Bojańczyk in 2014 in order to obtain a machine-independent characterization for word-to-word functions defined by transducers. Our primary goal was to study some classical decision problems for transducers in the origin semantics, such as the containment and the equivalence problem. We showed that these problems become decidable in the origin semantics, even though the classical version is undecidable.Motivated by the observation that the origin semantics is more fine-grained than classical semantics, we defined resynchronizers as a way to describe distortions of origins, and to study the above problems in a more relaxed way. We extended the model of rational resynchronizers, introduced by Filiot et al. for one-way transducers, to regular resynchronizers, which work for larger classes of transducers.We studied the two variants of the containment up to resynchronizer problem, which asks if a transducer is contained in another up to a distortion specified by a resynchronizer. We showed that the problem is decidable when the resynchronizer is given as part of the input. When the resynchronizer is not specified in the input, we aimed to synthesize such a resynchronizer, whenever possible. We call this the synthesis problem for resynchronizers and show that it is undecidable in general. We identified some restricted cases when the problem becomes decidable. We also studied the one-way resynchronizability problem, which asks whether a given two-way transducer is resynchronizable in a one-way transducer, and showed that this problem is decidable as well
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Forse, Jessica Amy. "The conceptual semantics of word formation : a romance perspective." Thesis, Swansea University, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678457.
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Neff, Kathryn Joan Eggers. "Neural net models of word representation : a connectionist approach to word meaning and lexical relations." Virtual Press, 1991. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/832999.
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This study examines the use of the neural net paradigm as a modeling tool to represent word meanings. The neural net paradigm, also called "connectionism" and "parallel distributed processing," provides a new metaphor and vocabulary for representing the structure of the mental lexicon. As a research method applied to the componential analysis of word meanings, the neural net approach has one primary advantage over the traditional introspective method: freedom from the investigator's personal biases.The connectionist method is illustrated in this thesis with an extensive examination of the meanings of the words "cup" and "mug." These words have been studied previously by Labov (1973), Wierzbicka (1985), Andersen (1975), and Kempton (1978), using very different methods.The neural net models developed in this study are based on empirical data acquired through interviews with nine informants who classified 37 objects, 37 photographs, and 37 line drawings as "cups," "mugs," or "neither." These responses were combined with a data file representing the coded attributes of each object, to construct neural net models which reflect each informant's classification process.In the neural net models, the "cup" and "mug" features are interconnected with positive and negative weights that represent the association strengths of the features. When the connection weights are set so that they reflect the informants' responses, the neural net models can account for the extreme discrepancies in object-naming among informants, and the models can also account for the inconsistent classifications of each individual informant with respect to the mode of presentation (drawing, photograph, or actual object). Further, the neural net modelscan predict classifications for novel objects with an accuracy varying from 82% to 100%.By examining the connection weight patterns within the neural net model, it is possible to discover the "cup" and "mug" features which are most salient for each informant, and for the informants collectively. This analysis shows that each informant has acquired internal meanings for the words "cup" and "mug" which are unique to the individual, although there is considerable overlap with respect to the most salient features.Department of English
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Sinha, Ravi Som Mihalcea Rada F. "Graph-based centrality algorithms for unsupervised word sense disambiguation." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2008. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-9736.
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Cohen, Shai. "On the semantics of too and only distinctness and subsumption /." Amherst, Mass. : University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3379949/.
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Shibahara, Naoki. "Access to the adjectival meanings in the left and right cerebral hemispheres." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313983.
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Morena, Luca. "Word or object? : a study of disagreement in ontology /." Milano : Albo versorio, 2007. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=016234905&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.
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Sorhagen, Nicole. "Exploring social class differences in the development of elaborated word meanings." Click here for download, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com.ps2.villanova.edu/pqdweb?did=1930212961&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Sinha, Ravi Som. "Graph-based Centrality Algorithms for Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2008. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc9736/.
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This thesis introduces an innovative methodology of combining some traditional dictionary based approaches to word sense disambiguation (semantic similarity measures and overlap of word glosses, both based on WordNet) with some graph-based centrality methods, namely the degree of the vertices, Pagerank, closeness, and betweenness. The approach is completely unsupervised, and is based on creating graphs for the words to be disambiguated. We experiment with several possible combinations of the semantic similarity measures as the first stage in our experiments. The next stage attempts to score individual vertices in the graphs previously created based on several graph connectivity measures. During the final stage, several voting schemes are applied on the results obtained from the different centrality algorithms. The most important contributions of this work are not only that it is a novel approach and it works well, but also that it has great potential in overcoming the new-knowledge-acquisition bottleneck which has apparently brought research in supervised WSD as an explicit application to a plateau. The type of research reported in this thesis, which does not require manually annotated data, holds promise of a lot of new and interesting things, and our work is one of the first steps, despite being a small one, in this direction. The complete system is built and tested on standard benchmarks, and is comparable with work done on graph-based word sense disambiguation as well as lexical chains. The evaluation indicates that the right combination of the above mentioned metrics can be used to develop an unsupervised disambiguation engine as powerful as the state-of-the-art in WSD.
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McGregor, Stephen. "Geometric methods for context sensitive distributional semantics." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2018. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/36691.
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This thesis describes a novel methodology, grounded in the distributional semantic paradigm, for building context sensitive models of word meaning, affording an empirical exploration of the relationship between words and concepts. Anchored in theoretical linguistic insight regarding the contextually specified nature of lexical semantics, the work presented here explores a range of techniques for the selection of subspaces of word co-occurrence dimensions based on a statistical analysis of input terms as observed within large-scale textual corpora. The relationships between word-vectors that emerge in the projected subspaces can be analysed in terms of a mapping between their geometric features and their semantic properties. The power of this modelling technique is its ability to generate ad hoc semantic relationships in response to an extemporaneous linguistic or conceptual situation. The product of this approach is a generalisable computational linguistic methodology, capable of taking input in various forms, including word groupings and sentential context, and dynamically generating output from a broad base model of word co-occurrence data. To demonstrate the versatility of the method, this thesis will present competitive empirical results on a range of established natural language tasks including word similarity and relatedness rating, metaphor and metonymy detection, and analogy completion. A range of techniques will be applied in order to explore the ways in which different aspects of projected geometries can be mapped to different semantic relationships, allowing for the discovery of a range of lexical and conceptual properties for any given input and providing a basis for an empirical exploration of distinctions between the semantic phenomena under analysis. The case made here is that the flexibility of these models and their ability to extend output to evaluations of unattested linguistic relationships constitutes the groundwork for a method for the extrapolation of dynamic conceptual relationships from large-scale textual corpora. This method is presented as a complement and a counterpoint to established distributional methods for generating lexically productive word-vectors. Where contemporary vector space models of distributional semantics have almost universally involved either the factorisation of co-occurrence matrices or the incremental learning of abstract representations using neural networks, the approach described in this thesis preserves the connection between the individual dimensions of word-vectors and statistics pertaining to observations in a textual corpus. The hypothesis tested here is that the maintenance of actual, interpretable information about underlying linguistic data allows for the contextual selection of non-normalised subspaces with more nuanced geometric features. In addition to presenting competitive results for various computational linguistic targets, the thesis will suggest that the transparency of its representations indicates scope for the application of this model to various real-world problems where an interpretable relationship between data and output is highly desirable. This, finally, demonstrates a way towards the productive application of the theory and philosophy of language to computational linguistic practice.
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鄭佩芳 and Pui-fong Cheng. "A study on parts of speech, word formation, and the change of word meaning in modern Chinese." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31234124.
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Silvey, Catriona Anne. "Communicative emergence and cultural evolution of word meanings." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/16462.
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The question of how language evolved has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Compared to seemingly more complex phenomena such as syntax, word meanings are usually seen as relatively easy to explain. Mainstream accounts in psycholinguistics and evolutionary linguistics assume that word meanings correspond to stable concepts which are prior to language and derive straightforwardly from human perception of structure in the world. Taking a cognitive linguistic approach based on psycholinguistic evidence, I argue instead that word meanings are conventions, grounded, learned and used in the context of communication. The meaning of a word is the sum of its contexts of use, with particular features of these contexts made more or less salient by mechanisms of attentional learning and communicative inference. Evolutionarily, word meanings arise as an emergent product of humans’ adapted tendency to infer each other’s intentions using contextual cues. They are then shaped over cultural evolution by the need to be learnable and useful for communication. This thesis presents a series of experiments that test the effect of these pressures on the origins and development of word meanings. Experiment 1 investigates the origins of strong tendencies for words to specify features on particular dimensions (such as the shape bias). The results show that these tendencies arise via attentional learning effects amplified by iterated learning. Dimensions which are less salient in contexts of learning and use drop out of word meanings as they are passed down a chain of learners. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 investigate the structure of word meanings produced during either paired communication games or individual labelling of images by similarity. While communication alone leads to word meanings that are unstructured and poorly aligned within pairs, communication plus iterated learning leads to word meanings that increase in structure and alignment over generations. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates the interaction of event structure and developing conventions in shaping word meanings. The structure of events in an artificial world is shown to influence lexicalisation patterns in the languages conventionalised by communicating pairs. Event features that are less predictable across communicative contexts tend to be more strongly associated with the conventions in the language. Overall, the experiments show that rather than straightforwardly reflecting pre-linguistic conceptualisation, word meanings are also dynamically shaped by learning and communication. In addition, these processes are constrained by the conventions that already exist within a language. This illuminates the mixture of convergence and diversity we see in word meanings in natural languages, and gives insight into their evolutionary origins.
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Jager, Bernadet. "Processing lexical ambiguity : the effects of meaning relatedness, word frequency, concreteness, and level of processing." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2012. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=185856.
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This thesis explores the processing of lexical ambiguity: words with several unrelated meanings (homonymy) or many related senses (polysemy). Chapter I provides a literature overview of studies investigating this topic. Chapters 2 and 3 pursue a first goal: to investigate whether effects are influenced by the methodology of defining lexical ambiguity. The results support the hypothesis (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen- Wilson, 2002) that studies using questionnaires to define lexical ambiguity (e.g. Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970) found a polysemy advantage rather than a homonymy advantage. Questionnaire-based ambiguity classifications are more similar to dictionary-defined polysemy than to homonymy (Experiment 1). Moreover, earlier findings (e.g. Rodd et al., 2002) of a polysemy advantage and homonymy disadvantage are replicated, and the questionnaire-based classifications result in effects more similar to the former than to the latter (Experiments 2 to 4). Chapters 4 to 6 pursue a second goal: to explore the effects of polysemy and homonymy with new stimuli. Chapters 4 and 5 indicate that polysemy effects are sensitive to concreteness (Experiments 5 & 6), frequency (Experiment 7), and level of processing (Experiment 8). Furthermore, polysemy effects seem to take place relatively late (Experiment 9). In contrast, Chapter 6 does not find any effects of homonymy (Experiments 10 to 12). Chapter 7 pursues a third goal: to test whether the relationship between senses plays a role in word processing. Sense relationship influences word recognition (Experiments 13 & 16), but not semantic categorization (Experiment 14). The temporal locus of the lexical decision effect cannot be determined (Experiment 15). Finally, Chapter 8 shows that the current findings fit reasonably well within an account by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen- Wilson (2004), and suggests possible directions for further research.
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Moss, Adam. "Detecting Lexical Semantic Change Using Probabilistic Gaussian Word Embeddings." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik och filologi, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-412539.
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In this work, we test two novel methods of using word embeddings to detect lexical semantic change, attempting to overcome limitations associated with conventional approaches to this problem. Using a diachronic corpus spanning over a hundred years, we generate word embeddings for each decade with the intention of evaluating how meaning changes are represented in embeddings for the same word across time. Our approach differs from previous works in this field in that we encode words as probabilistic Gaussian distributions and bimodal probabilistic Gaussian mixtures, rather than conventional word vectors. We provide a discussion and analysis of our results, comparing the approaches we implemented with those used in previous works. We also conducted further analysis on whether additional information regarding the nature of semantic change could be discerned from particular qualities of the embeddings we generated for our experiments. In our results, we find that encoding words as probabilistic Gaussian embeddings can provide an enhanced degree of reliability with regard to detecting lexical semantic change. Furthermore, we are able to represent additional information regarding the nature of such changes through the variance of these embeddings. Encoding words as bimodal Gaussian mixtures however is generally unsuccessful for this task, proving to be not reliable enough at distinguishing between discrete senses to effectively detect and measure such changes. We provide potential explanations for the results we observe, and propose improvements that can be made to our approach to potentially improve performance.
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Faruque, Md Ehsanul. "A Minimally Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm Using Syntactic Dependencies and Semantic Generalizations." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2005. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4969/.
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Natural language is inherently ambiguous. For example, the word "bank" can mean a financial institution or a river shore. Finding the correct meaning of a word in a particular context is a task known as word sense disambiguation (WSD), which is essential for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and others. While most current WSD methods try to disambiguate a small number of words for which enough annotated examples are available, the method proposed in this thesis attempts to address all words in unrestricted text. The method is based on constraints imposed by syntactic dependencies and concept generalizations drawn from an external dictionary. The method was tested on standard benchmarks as used during the SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-3 WSD international evaluation exercises, and was found to be competitive.
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Zens, Naomi Katharina. "Facilitating Word-Learning Abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Communication Disorders, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/2698.
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Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) often present with difficulties in learning new words compared to age-matched children with typical language development. These difficulties may affect the acquisition, storage, or retrieval of new words. Word-learning deficits impact on children’s vocabulary development and impede their language and literacy development. Findings from a wide range of studies investigating word-learning in children with SLI demonstrated that semantic and phonological knowledge are crucial to the word-learning process. However, intervention studies designed to improve the word-learning abilities in children with SLI are sparse. The experiments described in this thesis addressed this need to understand the effects of interventions on word-learning abilities. Further, the thesis describes the first investigation of word-learning abilities of New Zealand school-aged children with SLI. Specifically, the following three broad questions are asked: 1. What are the word-learning skills of New Zealand school-aged children with SLI compared to children with typical language development and which underlying language skills influence word-learning? 2. What are the immediate and longer term effects of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning and language skills in children with SLI? 3. What are the error patterns of children with SLI compared to children with typical language development when learning to produce new words and do these patterns change following phonological awareness and semantic intervention? The first experiment compared the word-learning abilities of 19 school-aged children with SLI (aged 6;2 to 8;3) to age-matched children with typical language development and revealed that children with SLI presented with significant difficulties to produce and to comprehend new words. After repeated exposure, children with SLI caught up to the performances of children with typical language development in learning to comprehend new words, but not on production of new words. Correlation analyses demonstrated that there were no correlations between the word-learning skills and other language measures for children with SLI, whereas the word-learning abilities of children with typical language development were correlated to their phonological awareness, semantic, and general language skills. In the second experiment, it was investigated whether there were also qualitative differences during word-learning between children with and without SLI additionally to the quantitative differences as revealed in the first experiment. Children’s erroneous responses during the word-learning tasks were categorised into phonological, semantic, substitution or random errors. A comparison of the children’s error patterns revealed that children with SLI presented with a different error pattern and made significantly more random errors than children with typical language development. However, after repeated exposure, children with SLI demonstrated a similar error pattern as children without SLI. Furthermore, it was examined whether a specific combination of phonological and semantic cues facilitated children’s learning of new words or whether there were word-specific features that facilitated children’s word-learning. No facilitative word-specific features could be identified. Analysis revealed that there were no significant effects of cueing on learning new words, but specific patterns could be derived for children with SLI. Children with SLI learned to comprehend more words that were presented with two semantic cues or one phonological and one semantic cue and learned to produce more words that were presented with two phonological cues. In the third experiment, the effectiveness of a combined phonological awareness and semantic intervention to advance children’s word-learning abilities was examined. Nineteen children with SLI (same participants as in experiment 1) participated in this intervention study that implemented an alternating treatment group design with random assignment of the participants. Children in group A received phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention, whereas children in group B received the same interventions in the reverse order. Children’s word-learning abilities were assessed at pre-test, prior to the intervention, at mid-test after intervention phase 1, and at post-test, immediately following the completion of the second intervention phase. Each intervention itself was effective in significantly improving children’s fast mapping skills, however, gains in children’s word-learning abilities were only found for children in group A for production of new words. Extending the findings of the intervention effectiveness of phonological awareness and semantic intervention on word-learning as reported in experiment 3, it was investigated in experiment 4, whether the implemented intervention additionally influenced the error patterns of children with SLI. The erroneous responses of children with SLI on all word-learning probes at pre-, mid-, and post-test were categorised into the same error groups as described in the second experiment (semantic, phonological, substitution, and random errors). The error analyses revealed that children’s error profiles changed during the course of intervention and treatment specific effects on children’s erroneous responses were found. Post-intervention, children who received phonological awareness followed by semantic intervention displayed the same error patterns as children with typical language development, whereas children who received the same interventions in the reverse order maintained the same error pattern as displayed at pre-test. The final experiment examined the longer-term effects of the combined phonological awareness and semantic intervention reported in experiment 3 on the language and literacy development of children with SLI. Eighteen of the 19 children with SLI, who received the intervention reported in experiment 3, were available for re-assessment 6 months after the completion of the intervention. The children (aged 7;1 to 9;2 years) were re-assessed on a range of standardised and experimental measures. Data analysis revealed that 6 months post-intervention, all children were able to maintain their gains in phonological awareness, semantic, and decoding skills as displayed immediately after the intervention. Children’s general language and reading skills significantly improved following the intervention; however, children who received phonological awareness intervention followed by semantic intervention displayed significantly better reading outcomes than the children who received the same interventions in the reverse order. This thesis revealed that a combination of phonological awareness and semantic intervention can enhance the word-learning abilities of children with SLI. The combined intervention approach was also effective in additionally improving children’s general language skills and the reading of single non-words and real words, as well as connected text. The immediate and longer-term intervention effects provide evidence that advancing the semantic and phonological awareness skills is an effective intervention approach to support children with SLI in their word-learning and to furthermore promote their language and literacy development. However, the order of the implemented interventions played a significant role: Children in the current study profited most when they received phonological awareness intervention first, followed by semantic intervention.
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Norlund, Tobias. "The Use of Distributional Semantics in Text Classification Models : Comparative performance analysis of popular word embeddings." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Datorseende, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-127991.
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In the field of Natural Language Processing, supervised machine learning is commonly used to solve classification tasks such as sentiment analysis and text categorization. The classical way of representing the text has been to use the well known Bag-Of-Words representation. However lately low-dimensional dense word vectors have come to dominate the input to state-of-the-art models. While few studies have made a fair comparison of the models' sensibility to the text representation, this thesis tries to fill that gap. We especially seek insight in the impact various unsupervised pre-trained vectors have on the performance. In addition, we take a closer look at the Random Indexing representation and try to optimize it jointly with the classification task. The results show that while low-dimensional pre-trained representations often have computational benefits and have also reported state-of-the-art performance, they do not necessarily outperform the classical representations in all cases.
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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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Thomas, Joseph Denard. "A Role for Partial Awareness in the Modulation of Semantic Priming Effects." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/193467.
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The present study sought to investigate the extent to which masked semantic priming is an automatic process and whether its effects vary depending upon the type of stimuli used. Recent studies have shown that there is a differential priming effect for prime-target pairs with different types of semantic relationships. Here, using a semantic categorization task with masked priming, we compared the effects of synonym, antonym,and associatively related non-exemplar prime-target pairs when presented at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Participants took a prime visibility posttest in conjunction with the categorization task which served as a measure of "partial awareness" of the prime. The results here indicate that differences in perceptual awareness may produce differential semantic priming patterns across the semantic relationships and SOAs considered. Potential mechanisms for this divergence are proposed.
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Chan, Alexander Mark. "Extracting Spatiotemporal Word and Semantic Representations from Multiscale Neurophysiological Recordings in Humans." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10251.
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With the recent advent of neuroimaging techniques, the majority of the research studying the neural basis of language processing has focused on the localization of various lexical and semantic functions. Unfortunately, the limited time resolution of functional neuroimaging prevents a detailed analysis of the dynamics involved in word recognition, and the hemodynamic basis of these techniques prevents the study of the underlying neurophysiology. Compounding this problem, current techniques for the analysis of high-dimensional neural data are mainly sensitive to large effects in a small area, preventing a thorough study of the distributed processing involved for representing semantic knowledge. This thesis demonstrates the use of multivariate machine-learning techniques for the study of the neural representation of semantic and speech information in electro/magneto-physiological recordings with high temporal resolution. Support vector machines (SVMs) allow for the decoding of semantic category and word-specific information from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoenecephalography (MEG) and demonstrate the consistent, but spatially and temporally distributed nature of such information. Moreover, the anteroventral temporal lobe (avTL) may be important for coordinating these distributed representations, as supported by the presence of supramodal category-specific information in intracranial recordings from the avTL as early as 150ms after auditory or visual word presentation. Finally, to study the inputs to this lexico-semantic system, recordings from a high density microelectrode array in anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) are obtained, and the recorded spiking activity demonstrates the presence of single neurons that respond specifically to speech sounds. The successful decoding of word identity from this firing rate information suggests that the aSTG may be involved in the population coding of acousto-phonetic speech information that is likely on the pathway for mapping speech-sounds to meaning in the avTL. The feasibility of extracting semantic and phonological information from multichannel neural recordings using machine learning techniques provides a powerful method for studying language using large datasets and has potential implications for the development of fast and intuitive communication prostheses.Engineering and Applied Sciences
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Milajevs, Dmitrijs. "A study of model parameters for scaling up word to sentence similarity tasks in distributional semantics." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2018. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/36225.
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Representation of sentences that captures semantics is an essential part of natural language processing systems, such as information retrieval or machine translation. The representation of a sentence is commonly built by combining the representations of the words that the sentence consists of. Similarity between words is widely used as a proxy to evaluate semantic representations. Word similarity models are well-studied and are shown to positively correlate with human similarity judgements. Current evaluation of models of sentential similarity builds on the results obtained in lexical experiments. The main focus is how the lexical representations are used, rather than what they should be. It is often assumed that the optimal representations for word similarity are also optimal for sentence similarity. This work discards this assumption and systematically looks for lexical representations that are optimal for similarity measurement between sentences. We find that the best representation for word similarity is not always the best for sentence similarity and vice versa. The best models in word similarity tasks perform best with additive composition. However, the best result on compositional tasks is achieved with Kroneckerbased composition. There are representations that are equally good in both tasks when used with multiplicative composition. The systematic study of the parameters of similarity models reveals that the more information lexical representations contain, the more attention should be paid to noise. In particular, the word vectors in models with the feature size at the magnitude of the vocabulary size should be sparse, but if a small number of context features is used then the vectors should be dense. Given the right lexical representations, compositional operators achieve state-of-the-art performance, improving over models that use neural-word embeddings. To avoid overfitting, either several test datasets should be used or parameter selection should be based on parameters' average behaviours.
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Albert, Gandía Milagros. "On Word Definition in Children and Adults: Effects of Word Category and Level of Abstraction." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/400881.
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This is a thesis about word definition. Early developmental studies of word definition, tested nous rather than other morphological categories (adjectives, verbs). As some authors have pointed out (McKeown, 1991) a proper definition includes a superordinate term that denominates the category to which the word to be defined belongs, followed by definitional features of the word. This description has been frequently translated into the formula ‘X is a Y that Z’ (Nippold, 1995; Watson, 1995) which has lead developmental researchers to consider that a definition that includes a relative clause to express the differentiae (key features of the genus) as a paradigmatic example of formal definition. Developmental research present two limitations: the first one is that the effect of level of abstraction of the definiendum on the quality of word definition has been limited to nouns. The second one is that these developmental studies have been carried out, as a rule, in other languages than Spanish, mostly in English. The current thesis is aimed at overcoming these two limitations.
The general purpose of this thesis is to capture whether and how the syntactic and semantic features of verbal utterances produced by Spanish speakers for defining words vary as a function of morphological category and level of abstraction of the words. To address this general purpose, we undertake three studies. Study 1 portrays the initial state of definition as a metalinguistic activity in a group of 7-year-old children, an age considered as a milestone in the development of word definition. In study 2 we examine the same dimensions in the same task in a group of adults, and study 3 draws a comparison between children and adults’ definitional abilities. Participants in both studies were asked to define 20 concrete and abstract nouns, 5 concrete and abstract adjectives, and 7 concrete and abstract verbs. Word definitions were analysed for grammatical form and
use of semantic components (i.e. categorical term, specificity of the hyperonym, and semantic content of the definiens).
Findings for Study 1 indicated a generalized effect of the morphological category of the definiendum on the syntactic and semantic dimensions of the definition. Level of abstraction only explained significantly the differences in the components of the semantic dimension. The results offered in this study revealed that the characteristics of the students are more important than the characteristics of the words to explain the differences in the performance in the syntactic complexity of the definiens’ structure and in the categorical term of the definiens. However, the characteristics of the words were found to be more important to explain the differences in the specificity of the hyperonym and in the semantic content of the definiens.
Findings for Study 2 showed a generalized effect of the morphological category of the definiendum on the syntactic and the semantic dimension of the definition, except for the semantic content of the definiens. Level of abstraction only explained significantly the differences in the components of the semantic dimension. And the characteristics of the participants were found to be more relevant than the characteristics of the words in order to explain the differences in word definition performance of adults.
Findings for Study 3 revealed a generalized effect of age on the syntactic and semantic dimensions of word definition. Significant interactions were also found between age and morphological category for the syntactic dimension of the definition; and between age and morphological category, and age and level of abstraction of the definiendum for the semantic dimension of the definition. The differences observed between the definitional abilities of children and adults suggest (e.g., Snow, 1990) that the definition is a genre that needs time, practice and exposure in order to develop.Esta es una tesis sobre definición de palabras. Estudios de desarrollo iniciales de la definición de palabras investigaron la categoría morfológica nombre. Algunos autores han señalado que una definición que incluye una cláusula de relativo para expresar la differentiae (rasgos definitorios del genus) equivaldría al ejemplo paradigmático de definición formal. Los estudios sobre el desarrollo de la definición presentan dos limitaciones: la primera es que el estudio del efecto del nivel de abstracción del definiendum se ha limitado a los nombres; y la segunda es que estos estudios se han llevado a cabo, como norma general, en Inglés. Esta tesis pretende abordar estas dos limitaciones. El objetivo general de esta tesis es capturar si y como los componentes sintácticos y semánticos de las definiciones de palabras producidas por hablantes españoles varían en función de la categoría morfológica y del nivel de abstracción de las palabras. Para acometer este objetivo, llevamos a cabo tres estudios. El primero explora el estado inicial de la definición como actividad metalingüística en un grupo de niños de 7 años. El estudio 2 examina las mismas dimensiones en la misma tarea en un grupo de adultos; y el estudio 3 realiza una comparación entre las habilidades definicionales de los niños y los adultos. Los participantes definieron 20 nombres concretos y abstractos, 5 adjetivos concretos y abstractos, y 7 verbos concretos y abstractos. Las definiciones se analizaron de acuerdo a la estructura sintáctica y a los componentes semánticos que la forman. Los resultados del estudio 1 y 2 indican un efecto de la categoría morfológica en las dimensiones sintácticas y semánticas de la definición. El nivel de abstracción explica las diferencias en los componentes semánticos de la definición. Además, encontramos que, en el caso de los niños, las características de los estudiantes son más importantes que las de las palabras para explicar la diferencias en el desempeño en la complejidad sintáctica y en el término categorial; mientras que las características de las palabras resultan más importantes para explicar las diferencias en la especificidad del hiperónimo y en el contenido semántico. Sin embargo, las características de los participantes son más relevantes que las características de las palabras para explicar las diferencias en la definición de palabras de los adultos. Finalmente, las diferencias observadas entre las habilidades definicionales de los niños y de los adultos sugieren que la definición es un género que, como tal, requiere de tiempo, práctica y exposición para poder desarrollarse con éxito.
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Guthormsen, Amy. "Conceptual integration of mathematical and semantic knowledge /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/8995.
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Kaczorowski, Anna. "Is 'respect' a Feeling or a Behaviour? : -a study of the connection between word meaning and age for native and non-native speakers of English." Thesis, Mid Sweden University, Department of Humanities, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-9175.
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The aim of this study was to investigate if there is a connection between language and social identity in the perception of word meaning among second language learners in the same way as for native speakers, and if the sociolinguistic variable age is significant. This was done with an investigation of two generations of Swedish learners' perception of the meaning of the words 'respect', 'integrity' and 'communication'. The investigation showed that age is important to a certain extent regarding interpreting words and their meaning, but that it is not as important if the speaker has English as their mother tongue or as their second language.
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Mealing, Cathy. "German noun compounds and their role in text cohesion." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=64084.
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Whitsett, Mark D. "Semantic coherence theological conceptualization in Word of God communication, a discovery process in a confirmation class setting /." Online full text .pdf document, available to Fuller patrons only, 2003. http://www.tren.com.
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Jackson, Leolyn M. "The function of marked word order in Biblical Hebrew prose: An evaluation of existing theories in the light of 2 Kings." University of the Western Cape, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/8205.
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Magister Artium - MAThis thesis .investigates the function of a topicalized constituent .in the narrative non-direct speech texts .in 2 Kings. Many traditional BH grammarians described the :function of a topicalized constituent as "emphasis". Recent BH grammarians pointed out that extralinguistic factors like the total communicative context should also be considered in the description of a function for a topicalized constituent. The shift from the structural to a more pragmatic approach is illustrated in this study. The pragmatic approach proved to be not only possible, but also advantageous to the study of function in BH. The aim of this study was to test the viability and results of the various theories and categories of the BH linguists. This study also researched whether their linguistic approaches are indeed an improvement on the descriptions as defined by the traditional grammarians. In other words, to see whether and in which way more recent studies of BH could aid the understanding of the function of a topicalized constituent in BH word order. The methodology utilized in this study is briefly outlined as follows: 1. This study examined the description of word order in terms of the traditional and more recent approaches. The categories used to describe the function of a topicalized constituent were our main focus. At the end we compiled a theoretical frame of reference that we regard as representative of modem attempts to acquire a more refined comprehension of BH word order. A theoretical linguistic framework was formulated which could be used in our description of a sentence in BH in 2 · Kings. This attempt could be described as eclectic because it used the diverse perceptions from the various linguistic approaches. Richter's theoretical linguistic framework (with its limitations) together with contributions of Van der Merwe, Buth and Gross were used as a basis for the description of the sentences. 3. Sentences were analysed systematically and holistically at the different levels of description, namely morphology, morphosyntax, sentence syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Because of the difficulty in defining semantics and with pragmatics still in disarray, this study defined some semantic-pragmatic concepts it worked with. 4. In the description of sentences we incorporated and tested the viability of the different categories of various grammarians. By carefully considering the context of each sentence, this study posed the question: which, if any; of the categories could adequately describe the semantic-pragmatic function of a topicalized constituent in 2 Kings.
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Erikson, Jessie Alise. "Phonological Transfer during Word Learning: Evidence from Bilingual School-Age Spanish-English-Speaking Children." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/613100.
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Purpose: This study examines potential cross-linguistic effects on accuracy of codas in newly learned English-like nonwords produced by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children. Methods: Forty-two bilingual Spanish-English-speaking second-graders (age 7-9) were matched individually with monolingual peers on age (+/- 6 months), sex, and percentile score on the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation (GFTA-2; Goldman & Fristoe, 2000), and matched for group on mother's level of education. Participants named various sea monsters as part of computerized word-learning games. Sixteen syllable-final coda consonants were analyzed for accuracy. These were drawn from thirteen nonwords distributed across five word-learning tasks. Results: Bilingual children were less accurate than monolingual children in production of both shared and unshared codas, though the gap was greater for unshared codas. Both bilingual and monolingual children were more accurate in production of shared codas than unshared codas. Conclusion: The results suggest that native language phonotactics influence accuracy of coda production in bilingual Spanish-English-speaking school-age children during word learning. Influences of native phonology on word learning could potentially impact academic achievement through vocabulary learning in the classroom.
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Benom, Carey. "An empirical study of English 'through' : lexical semantics, polysemy, and the correctness fallacy /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1404336481&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 342-374). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Gränsbo, Gustav. "Word Clustering in an Interactive Text Analysis Tool." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Interaktiva och kognitiva system, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-157497.
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A central operation of users of the text analysis tool Gavagai Explorer is to look through a list of words and arrange them in groups. This thesis explores the use of word clustering to automatically arrange the words in groups intended to help users. A new word clustering algorithm is introduced, which attempts to produce word clusters tailored to be small enough for a user to quickly grasp the common theme of the words. The proposed algorithm computes similarities among words using word embeddings, and clusters them using hierarchical graph clustering. Multiple variants of the algorithm are evaluated in an unsupervised manner by analysing the clusters they produce when applied to 110 data sets previously analysed by users of Gavagai Explorer. A supervised evaluation is performed to compare clusters to the groups of words previously created by users of Gavagai Explorer. Results show that it was possible to choose a set of hyperparameters deemed to perform well across most data sets in the unsupervised evaluation. These hyperparameters also performed among the best on the supervised evaluation. It was concluded that the choice of word embedding and graph clustering algorithm had little impact on the behaviour of the algorithm. Rather, limiting the maximum size of clusters and filtering out similarities between words had a much larger impact on behaviour.
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Granlund, Ann-Louise. "Comparing Emotional Intensity Between Languages: A parallel corpus Investigation on the Swedish word Njuta and its English equivalents." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Institutionen för globala politiska studier (GPS), 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-22490.
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Denna uppsats utforskar känslomässigt semantiska skillnader mellan ordet "njuta" och dess engelska motsvarigheter. Genom en empirisk engelsk-svensk parallell-corpus undersökning kommer jag försöka visa variationen i semantisk definition i ordets användning. Syftet är att demonstrera, i enlighet med min hypotes, att de engelska motsvarigheterna till det svenska ordet "njuta" är mindre känslomässigt laddade och att det svenska ordet är mera intensivt och semantiskt starkare än engelskans "enjoy".This paper seeks to investigate the emotional semantic differences between the Swedish word "njuta" and its English equivalents. As a Swede, when attempting to describe the word "njuta", the first natural description is to have feelings of lust, or to experience something with passion. The most common translation of the word into English is "enjoy" , and the first natural description of this word is for me to like something, or to find pleasure in it. The words that I have chosen to investigate have a wider meaning apart from simply experiencing feelings of pleasure to different degrees. They are also used in connection with having something, possessing, valuing, or consuming something . By an English-Swedish Parallel Corpus investigation I will try to show the variety of semantic definitions of usage of the word. The aim and scope of this paper is to demonstrate, in accordance with my hypothesis, how the English equivalents of the Swedish word njuta carry less emotional value, and that the Swedish word is more intense and semantically stronger than the English enjoy.
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Cederblad, Gustav. "Finding Synonyms in Medical Texts : Creating a system for automatic synonym extraction from medical texts." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-149643.
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This thesis describes the work of creating an automatic system for identifying synonyms and semantically related words in medical texts. Before this work, as a part of the project E-care@home, medical texts have been classified as either lay or specialized by both a lay annotator and an expert annotator. The lay annotator, in this case, is a person without any medical knowledge, whereas the expert annotator has professional knowledge in medicine. Using these texts made it possible to create co-occurrences matrices from which the related words could be identified. Fifteen medical terms were chosen as system input. The Dice similarity of these words in a context window of ten words around them was calculated. As output, five candidate related terms for each medical term was returned. Only unigrams were considered. The candidate related terms were evaluated using a questionnaire, where 223 healthcare professionals rated the similarity using a scale from one to five. A Fleiss kappa test showed that the agreement among these raters was 0.28, which is a fair agreement. The evaluation further showed that there was a significant correlation between the human ratings and the relatedness score (Dice similarity). That is, words with higher Dice similarity tended to get a higher human rating. However, the Dice similarity interval in which the words got the highest average human rating was 0.35-0.39. This result means that there is much room for improving the system. Further developments of the system should remove the unigram limitation and expand the corpus the provide a more accurate and reliable result.
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Howell-Fellows, Scott E. "Phonological mediation of semantics in visual word recognition, when a beach is a beach or a beach is a beech." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape10/PQDD_0021/MQ48014.pdf.
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Smith, Kelly. "The Rumble in the Disambiguation Jungle : Towards the comparison of a traditional word sense disambiguation system with a novel paraphrasing system." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Avdelningen för datorlingvistik, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-61642.
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Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of computationally identifying and labeling poly- semous words in context with their correct meaning, known as a sense. WSD is riddled with various obstacles that must be overcome in order to reach its full potential. One of these problems is the aspect of the representation of word meaning. Traditional WSD algorithms make the assumption that a word in a given context has only one meaning and therfore can return only one discrete sense. On the other hand, a novel approach is that a given word can have multiple senses. Studies on graded word sense assignment (Erk et al., 2009) as well as in cognitive science (Hampton, 2007; Murphy, 2002) support this theory. It has therefore been adopted in a novel, paraphrasing system which performs word sense disambiguation by returning a probability distribution over potential paraphrases (in this case synonyms) of a given word. However, it is unknown how well this type of algorithm fares against the traditional one. The current study thus examines if and how it is possible to make a comparison of the two. A method of comparison is evaluated and subsequently rejected. Reasons for this as well as suggestions for a fair and accurate comparison are presented.
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Sjökvist, Igor, and Viola Säfbom. "Ett nytt semantiskt intraoperativt test på svenska : Baserat på DuLIP:s semantic odd word out." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Logopedi, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-338661.
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Low-grade gliomas (LGGs) constitute a major challenge for health care because of their location and nature. LGGs are often found in eloquent areas, and their infiltrative growth cause neurological reorganization, which complicates the mapping of important functions. Awake surgery in combination with direct electrical stimulation (DES) and intraoperative tests is a relatively new method for mapping the brain's functional limits, thus eliminating as much of the tumor as possible while maintaining important functions. At present there is no available intraoperative test for semantic processing in Swedish. Tests of specific linguistic abilities improves the specificity of mapping which reduces post-operative linguistic impairments. Intraoperative tests can thus contribute to increased quality of life in the patient group. This study was based on the Dutch Lingusistic Intraoperative Protocol (DuLIP) test battery to create a Swedish version of the subtest semantic odd word out (SOWO). SOWO tests semantic processing via lexical reading. The adjusted and extended version of SOWO was tested during a pilot trial on 26 standard-language people. The study has resulted in a new semantic intraoperative test in Swedish that will be clinically examined at University Hospital in Uppsala. Hopefully, the new test contributes to better treatment options for patients with LGG.Lågmaligna tumörer (LGG) utgör en stor utmaning för vården på grund av deras lokalisation och karaktär. LGG återfinns ofta i elokventa områden och deras infiltrativa växtsätt orsakar neurologisk omorganisering, vilket komplicerar kartläggning av viktiga funktioner. Vakenkirurgi i kombination med direkt elektrisk stimulering (DES) och intraoperativa tester är en relativt ny metod för att kartlägga hjärnans funktionella gränser och därmed kunna avlägsna så stor del av tumören som möjligt samtidigt som viktiga funktioner kan bevaras. I dagsläget finns det inget tillgängligt intraoperativt test för semantisk bearbetning på svenska. Tester av specifika lingvistiska förmågor förbättrar specificiteten av kartläggningen vilket minskar postoperativa språkliga nedsättningar. Intraoperativa tester kan därmed bidra till ökad livskvalitet hos patientgruppen. Denna studie har utgått från det nederländska testbatteriet Dutch Lingusistic Intraoperative Protocol (DuLIP) för att skapa en svensk version av deltestet semantic odd word out (SOWO). SOWO testar semantisk bearbetning via lexikal läsning. Den anpassade och utökade versionen av SOWO pilottestades på 26 normalspråkiga personer. Studien har resulterat i ett nytt semantiskt intraoperativt test på svenska som ska prövas kliniskt på Akademiska sjukhuset i Uppsala. Förhoppningsvis bidrar det nya testet till bättre behandlingsmöjligheter för patienter med LGG.
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Pierrejean, Bénédicte. "Qualitative evaluation of word embeddings : investigating the instability in neural-based models." Thesis, Toulouse 2, 2020. http://www.theses.fr/2020TOU20001.
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La sémantique distributionnelle a récemment connu de grandes avancées avec l’arrivée des plongements de mots (word embeddings) basés sur des méthodes neuronales qui ont rendu les modèles sémantiques plus accessibles en fournissant des méthodes d’entraînement rapides, efficaces et faciles à utiliser. Ces représentations denses d’unités lexicales basées sur l’analyse non supervisée de gros corpus sont de plus en plus utilisées dans diverses applications. Elles sont intégrées en tant que première couche dans les modèles d’apprentissage profond et sont également utilisées pour faire de l’observation qualitative en linguistique de corpus. Cependant, malgré leur popularité, il n’existe toujours pas de méthode d’évaluation des plongements de mots qui donne à la fois une vision globale et précise des différences existant entre plusieurs modèles.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une méthodologie pour évaluer les plongements de mots. Nous fournissons également une étude détaillée des modèles entraînés avec la méthode word2vec.Dans la première partie de cette thèse, nous donnons un aperçu de l’évolution de la sémantique distributionnelle et passons en revue les différentes méthodes utilisées pour évaluer les plongements de mots. Par la suite, nous identifions les limites de ces méthodes et proposons de comparer les plongements de mots en utilisant une approche basée sur les voisins sémantiques. Nous expérimentons avec cette approche sur des modèles entrainés avec différents paramètres ou sur différents corpus. Étant donné la nature non déterministe des méthodes neuronales, nous reconnaissons les limites de cette approche et nous concentrons par la suite sur le problème de l’instabilité des voisins sémantiques dans les modèles de plongement de mots. Plutôt que d’éviter ce problème, nous choisissons de l’utiliser comme indice pour mieux comprendre les plongements de mots. Nous montrons que le problème d’instabilité n’affecte pas tous les mots de la même manière et que plus plusieurs traits linguistiques permettent d’expliquer une partie de ce phénomène. Ceci constitue un pas vers une meilleure compréhension du fonctionnement des modèles sémantiques vectorielsDistributional semantics has been revolutionized by neural-based word embeddings methods such as word2vec that made semantics models more accessible by providing fast, efficient and easy to use training methods. These dense representations of lexical units based on the unsupervised analysis of large corpora are more and more used in various types of applications. They are integrated as the input layer in deep learning models or they are used to draw qualitative conclusions in corpus linguistics. However, despite their popularity, there still exists no satisfying evaluation method for word embeddings that provides a global yet precise vision of the differences between models. In this PhD thesis, we propose a methodology to qualitatively evaluate word embeddings and provide a comprehensive study of models trained using word2vec. In the first part of this thesis, we give an overview of distributional semantics evolution and review the different methods that are currently used to evaluate word embeddings. We then identify the limits of the existing methods and propose to evaluate word embeddings using a different approach based on the variation of nearest neighbors. We experiment with the proposed method by evaluating models trained with different parameters or on different corpora. Because of the non-deterministic nature of neural-based methods, we acknowledge the limits of this approach and consider the problem of nearest neighbors instability in word embeddings models. Rather than avoiding this problem we embrace it and use it as a mean to better understand word embeddings. We show that the instability problem does not impact all words in the same way and that several linguistic features are correlated. This is a step towards a better understanding of vector-based semantic models
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鄭俊洺 and Chun-ming Cheng. "The connectionism approach to syntactic and semantic acquisition of simple Chinese sentences: the role of wordorder information." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31224118.
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de, Long Shauna P. A. "What Is the Relationship between Learning Spelling and Meaning Incidentally during Reading?" Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1558543156973626.
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Szumlanski, Sean. "Automatically Acquiring a Semantic Network of Related Concepts." Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2013. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/5712.
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We describe the automatic acquisition of a semantic network in which over 7,500 of the most frequently occurring nouns in the English language are linked to their semantically related concepts in the WordNet noun ontology. Relatedness between nouns is discovered automatically from lexical co-occurrence in Wikipedia texts using a novel adaptation of an information theoretic inspired measure. Our algorithm then capitalizes on salient sense clustering among these semantic associates to automatically disambiguate them to their corresponding WordNet noun senses (i.e., concepts). The resultant concept-to-concept associations, stemming from 7,593 target nouns, with 17,104 distinct senses among them, constitute a large-scale semantic network with 208,832 undirected edges between related concepts. Our work can thus be conceived of as augmenting the WordNet noun ontology with RelatedTo links. The network, which we refer to as the Szumlanski-Gomez Network (SGN), has been subjected to a variety of evaluative measures, including manual inspection by human judges and quantitative comparison to gold standard data for semantic relatedness measurements. We have also evaluated the network's performance in an applied setting on a word sense disambiguation (WSD) task in which the network served as a knowledge source for established graph-based spreading activation algorithms, and have shown: a) the network is competitive with WordNet when used as a stand-alone knowledge source for WSD, b) combining our network with WordNet achieves disambiguation results that exceed the performance of either resource individually, and c) our network outperforms a similar resource, WordNet++ (Ponzetto & Navigli, 2010), that has been automatically derived from annotations in the Wikipedia corpus. Finally, we present a study on human perceptions of relatedness. In our study, we elicited quantitative evaluations of semantic relatedness from human subjects using a variation of the classical methodology that Rubenstein and Goodenough (1965) employed to investigate human perceptions of semantic similarity. Judgments from individual subjects in our study exhibit high average correlation to the elicited relatedness means using leave-one-out sampling (r = 0.77, σ = 0.09, N = 73), although not as high as average human correlation in previous studies of similarity judgments, for which Resnik (1995) established an upper bound of r = 0.90 (σ = 0.07, N = 10). These results suggest that human perceptions of relatedness are less strictly constrained than evaluations of similarity, and establish a clearer expectation for what constitutes human-like performance by a computational measure of semantic relatedness. We also contrast the performance of a variety of similarity and relatedness measures on our dataset to their performance on similarity norms and introduce our own dataset as a supplementary evaluative
standard for relatedness measures.Ph.D.
Doctorate
Computer Science
Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Science
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Nilsson, Daniel. "Morpho-semantic processes in the English language used in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game : A case study of neologisms in Warhammer Online." Thesis, Växjö University, School of Humanities, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-2626.
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The language used in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (or MMORPGs) is a form of computer-mediate communication. It consists of elements from both written and spoken language, but it is a highly abbreviated and innovative form of written language. This study focuses on the English language used in a MMORPG called Warhammer Online. The aim of this study is to identify abbreviations, interpret their meanings and to analyze the word formation processes and semantic changes that are involved in new words. The method used in this study is a qualitative case study of the English language in a MMORPG from a synchronic point of view. The secondary sources used in this study include previous works on morphology and semantics. The material used is based on logs acquired from the game Warhammer Online as a subscribed player. The results presented in this study show new and unique words created by players in Warhammer Online, along with other semantic changes that have taken place. It is concluded that the English written language has not seen such a major change in its entirety before, within one community.
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Luzhkova, Elena. "Ongoing Semantic Change in Seven Swedish Words : A questionnaire-based study." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Avdelningen för allmän språkvetenskap, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-118029.
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The lexical semantics of a language is an area of linguistics that has many important implications for the life of modern society. It is important to understand how language change works and why this change occurs. Thus the aim of the work described in the thesis was to examine how six Swedish words, fett, fräsch, fräck, grym, häftig, and tajt are used by five different age groups of Swedish people in Uppsala region. To accomplish the aim of the study an appropriate questionnaire was compiled and used by the author. The questionnaire asked for information about the respondents as well as about the usage of each studied word. Analogous previous studies of the ongoing semantic change are reported in literature, frequently in regard to the words from English language. My results show that most of the chosen words are used differently by different age groups. Some words change their usage only slightly while other words experience larger metamorphose. The investigated words do not change their meaning completely, however some meanings do become more or less frequent. The results also show that the usage of the words does not always correlate to their dictionary definitions. Overall it can be concluded that semantic change for the considered words is a gradual ongoing process.Den lexikala semantiken i ett språk är ett område inom lingvistik som har många viktiga konsekvenser för livet i det moderna samhället. Det är viktigt att förstå hur språkförändring fungerar och varför denna förändring sker. Därför var syftet med det arbete som beskrivs i uppsatsen att undersöka hur sex svenska ord fett, fräsch, fräck, grym, häftig och tajt användes av fem olika åldersgrupper av infödda talare av svenska i Uppsalaregionen. För att uppnå syftet med studien sammanställdes en enkät. Enkäten innehöll frågor om respondenterna samt om användningen av vart och ett av de studerade orden. Liknande tidigare studier av pågående semantisk förändring rapporteras i litteraturen, ofta i fråga om orden från engelska. Resultaten visar att de flesta av de valda ord användes på olika sätt av olika åldersgrupper. Vissa ord har ändrat sin användning något medan andra ord har genomgått en större förändring. De undersökta orden ändrade inte sin betydelse helt och hållet, men vissa betydelser blev mer eller mindre frekventa. Resultaten visade också att användningen av orden inte alltid korrelerar med deras ordboksdefinitioner. Sammantaget kan man dra slutsatsen att semantisk förändring för dessa ord var en gradvis process.
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Bangerter, Renee. "Since Joseph Smith's Time: Lexical Semantic Shifts in the Book of Mormon." BYU ScholarsArchive, 1998. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4500.
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In the years since Joseph Smith completed the translation of the Book of Mormon, the English language has changed; some common phraseologies and word meanings are dissimilar to today's. Often, in reading the Book of Mormon, we impose our current definitions onto terms that in 1830 had a different meaning. Our interpretation of these words, as well as the passages in which they are found, is skewed by our modern definitions. These words, when they occur in the Book of Mormon, demonstrate dialectal and obsolete senses. In the case of some words, the dialectal or obsolete sense is so far removed in meaning from the prevailing modern sense that Book of Mormon readers may be unsure how to interpret the meaning.In this study I investigate words in the Book of Mormon text that have taken on different meanings, thus leading to potential misreadings within some passages of the text.
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Rosenberg, Maria. "La formation agentive en français : les composés [VN/A/Adv/P]N/A et les dérivés V-ant, V-eur et V-oir(e)." Phd thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för franska, italienska och klassiska språk, 2008. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00486981.
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This study addresses the French morphological construction [VN/A/Adv/P]N/A. The main objectives are to posit a single rule for its formation and to question the implications of the agent polysemy. The theoretical framework is lexeme-based morphology, which adheres to weak lexicalism. The first part of our analysis is qualitative and concerns the availability aspect of productivity. The method is introspective. The internal semantic patterns of the French construction are examined. Our results give evidence for the claim that a single morphological construction rule, [VN/A/Adv/P]N/A, is responsible for the cases where the first constituent is a verb stem, and the second constituent may correspond to an internal argument, an external argument or a semantic adjunct. All cases manifest the same patterns, which are related to the denotative meanings included in the agent polysemy: Agent, Instrument, Locative, Action, Result and Cause. Our contrastive analysis shows that the same patterns are found in the four Swedish agentive formations, [N/A/Adv/PV-are]N, [N/A/Adv/PV]N, [N/A/Adv/PV-a]N and [VN]N, which correspond to the French [VN/A/Adv/P]N/A construction and which also contain a verbal constituent and its internal or external argument, or an adjunct. The second part of our analysis is quantitative and concerns the profitability aspect of productivity. The method is inductive. The aim is to explore the polysemy of agent and its assumed hierarchical structure, in synchrony and diachrony. Four French agentive formations, [VN/A/Adv/P]N/A compounds and V-ant, V-eur and V-oir(e) derivations, are included in order to examine semantic competition and blocking effects. Our results give evidence for the existence of an agent polysemy but deny that it has a hierarchical structure valid for every agentive formation. The meanings in the agent polysemy are more or less profitable according to formation type: blocking effects could explain this behaviour.
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Lau, Ka-po Natalie. "Semantic interference of Chinese words in the picture-word interference task /." View the Table of Contents & Abstract, 2006. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36846181.
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