"Do Not Celebrate Your Feast without Your Neighbours" : A Study of References to Feasts and Festivals in Non-Literary Documents from Ramesside Period Deir el-Medina

This dissertation is a study of the forms and functions of feasts and feasting in the ancient Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina in Thebes (modern Luxor). This particular village, during the New Kingdom (c. 1550 1069 BC), was inhabited by the men (and their families) who constructed the Royal Tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. The royal artisans were probably more literate than the average Egyptians and the numerous Ramesside Period (c. 1295 1069 BC) non-literary texts found in the excavations of the village and its surroundings form the source material for this study. In this study, the methods used are mainly Egyptological and the references to feasts and feasting are considered in view of what is known of New Kingdom Egypt, Thebes, and Deir el-Medina. Nevertheless, it is the use of the methodological concept local vernacular religion that has resulted in the division of the research findings into two sections, i.e., references to feasts celebrated both in and outside the community and other references to feasts and feasting in the village. When considering the function of the feasts celebrated at Deir el-Medina, a functional approach to feasts introduced by anthropologists and archaeologists is utilized. The Deir el-Medina feasts which were associated with the official religion form a festival calendar of feasts celebrated annually on the same civil calendar day. The reconstructed festival calendar of Deir el-Medina reflects the feasts celebrated around Thebes or, at least, in Western Thebes. The function of the nationally and regionally observed feasts (which, at least at Deir el-Medina, resulted in a work-free day) may have been to keep people content so that they would continue to work which was to the advantage of the king and the elite surrounding him. Local feasts appear to have been observed more irregularly at Deir el-Medina or perhaps according to the lunar calendar. Feasts celebrated by the community as a whole served to maintain the unity of the group. In addition to feasts celebrated by the entire community, the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina could mark their own personal feasts and organize small gatherings during public feasts. Through such feasts, an individual man might form alliances and advance his chances of a favourable marriage or of acquiring a position on the work crew.

Hallinnon lehdistötiedotteiden kieli

This study seeks to answer the question of what the language of administrative press releases is like, and how and why it has changed over the past few decades. The theoretical basis of the study is provided by critical text analysis, supplemented with, e.g., the metafunction theory of Systemic Functional Grammar, the theory of poetic function, and Finnish research into syntax. The data includes 83 press releases by the City of Helsinki Public Works Department, 14 of which were written between 1979 and 1980 (old press releases), and 69 of which were written between 1998 and 1999 (new press releases). The analysis focuses on the linguistic characteristics of the releases, their changes and variation, their relation to other texts and the extra linguistic context, as well as their genre. The core research method is linguistic text analysis. It is supplemented with an analysis of the communicative environment, based on the authors' interviews and written documents. The results can be applied to the improvement of texts produced by the authorities and even by other organizations. The linguistic analysis focuses on features that transform the texts in the data making them guiding, detailed, and poetic. The releases guide the residents of the city using modal verbal expressions and performative verbs that enable the mass media to publish the guiding expressions on their own behalf as such. The guiding is more persuasive in the new press releases than in the old ones, and the new ones also include imperative clauses and verbless directives that construct direct interaction. The language of the releases is made concrete and structurally detailed by, e.g., concrete vocabulary, proper nouns and terms, as well as definitions, adverbials and comparisons, which are used specifically to present places and administrative organizations in detail. The rhetorical features in the releases include alliteration and metaphors, which are found in the new releases especially in the titles. The emphasized features are used to draw the readers' attention and to highlight the core contents of the texts. The new releases also include words that are colloquial in style, making the communicative situations less official. Structurally, the releases have changed from being letter-like to a more newsflash-like format. The changes in the releases can be explained by the development towards more professional communications and the more market-oriented ideology adopted in the communicative environment. Key words: change in administrative language, press releases, critical text analysis, linguistic text analysis

Indexing Heterogeneous XML for Full-Text Search

XML documents are becoming more and more common in various environments. In particular, enterprise-scale document management is commonly centred around XML, and desktop applications as well as online document collections are soon to follow. The growing number of XML documents increases the importance of appropriate indexing methods and search tools in keeping the information accessible. Therefore, we focus on content that is stored in XML format as we develop such indexing methods. Because XML is used for different kinds of content ranging all the way from records of data fields to narrative full-texts, the methods for Information Retrieval are facing a new challenge in identifying which content is subject to data queries and which should be indexed for full-text search. In response to this challenge, we analyse the relation of character content and XML tags in XML documents in order to separate the full-text from data. As a result, we are able to both reduce the size of the index by 5-6\% and improve the retrieval precision as we select the XML fragments to be indexed. Besides being challenging, XML comes with many unexplored opportunities which are not paid much attention in the literature. For example, authors often tag the content they want to emphasise by using a typeface that stands out. The tagged content constitutes phrases that are descriptive of the content and useful for full-text search. They are simple to detect in XML documents, but also possible to confuse with other inline-level text. Nonetheless, the search results seem to improve when the detected phrases are given additional weight in the index. Similar improvements are reported when related content is associated with the indexed full-text including titles, captions, and references. Experimental results show that for certain types of document collections, at least, the proposed methods help us find the relevant answers. Even when we know nothing about the document structure but the XML syntax, we are able to take advantage of the XML structure when the content is indexed for full-text search.

Methods for Answer Extraction in Textual Question Answering

In this thesis we present and evaluate two pattern matching based methods for answer extraction in textual question answering systems. A textual question answering system is a system that seeks answers to natural language questions from unstructured text. Textual question answering systems are an important research problem because as the amount of natural language text in digital format grows all the time, the need for novel methods for pinpointing important knowledge from the vast textual databases becomes more and more urgent. We concentrate on developing methods for the automatic creation of answer extraction patterns. A new type of extraction pattern is developed also. The pattern matching based approach chosen is interesting because of its language and application independence. The answer extraction methods are developed in the framework of our own question answering system. Publicly available datasets in English are used as training and evaluation data for the methods. The techniques developed are based on the well known methods of sequence alignment and hierarchical clustering. The similarity metric used is based on edit distance. The main conclusions of the research are that answer extraction patterns consisting of the most important words of the question and of the following information extracted from the answer context: plain words, part-of-speech tags, punctuation marks and capitalization patterns, can be used in the answer extraction module of a question answering system. This type of patterns and the two new methods for generating answer extraction patterns provide average results when compared to those produced by other systems using the same dataset. However, most answer extraction methods in the question answering systems tested with the same dataset are both hand crafted and based on a system-specific and fine-grained question classification. The the new methods developed in this thesis require no manual creation of answer extraction patterns. As a source of knowledge, they require a dataset of sample questions and answers, as well as a set of text documents that contain answers to most of the questions. The question classification used in the training data is a standard one and provided already in the publicly available data.

Investigating online reading with eye tracking and EEG : The influence of text format, reading task and parafoveal stimuli on reading processes

Research on reading has been successful in revealing how attention guides eye movements when people read single sentences or text paragraphs in simplified and strictly controlled experimental conditions. However, less is known about reading processes in more naturalistic and applied settings, such as reading Web pages. This thesis investigates online reading processes by recording participants eye movements. The thesis consists of four experimental studies that examine how location of stimuli presented outside the currently fixated region (Study I and III), text format (Study II), animation and abrupt onset of online advertisements (Study III), and phase of an online information search task (Study IV) affect written language processing. Furthermore, the studies investigate how the goal of the reading task affects attention allocation during reading by comparing reading for comprehension with free browsing, and by varying the difficulty of an information search task. The results show that text format affects the reading process, that is, vertical text (word/line) is read at a slower rate than a standard horizontal text, and the mean fixation durations are longer for vertical text than for horizontal text. Furthermore, animated online ads and abrupt ad onsets capture online readers attention and direct their gaze toward the ads, and distract the reading process. Compared to a reading-for-comprehension task, online ads are attended to more in a free browsing task. Moreover, in both tasks abrupt ad onsets result in rather immediate fixations toward the ads. This effect is enhanced when the ad is presented in the proximity of the text being read. In addition, the reading processes vary when Web users proceed in online information search tasks, for example when they are searching for a specific keyword, looking for an answer to a question, or trying to find a subjectively most interesting topic. A scanning type of behavior is typical at the beginning of the tasks, after which participants tend to switch to a more careful reading state before finishing the tasks in the states referred to as decision states. Furthermore, the results also provided evidence that left-to-right readers extract more parafoveal information to the right of the fixated word than to the left, suggesting that learning biases attentional orienting towards the reading direction.