Applying semiotic analysis to the design and modeling of distributed multimedia systems

Semiotics is the study of signs. Application of semiotics in information systems design is based on the notion that information systems are organizations within which agents deploy signs in the form of actions according to a set of norms. An analysis of the relationships among the agents, their actions and the norms would give a better specification of the system. Distributed multimedia systems (DMMS) could be viewed as a system consisted of many dynamic, self-controlled normative agents engaging in complex interaction and processing of multimedia information. This paper reports the work of applying the semiotic approach to the design and modeling of DMMS, with emphasis on using semantic analysis under the semiotic framework. A semantic model of DMMS describing various components and their ontological dependencies is presented, which then serves as a design model and implemented in a semantic database. Benefits of using the semantic database are discussed with reference to various design scenarios.

A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology

Grigorij Kreidlin (Russia). A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology. Mr. Kreidlin teaches in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the State University of Humanities in Moscow and worked on this project from August 1996 to July 1998. The classical approach to non-verbal and verbal oral communication is based on a traditional separation of body and mind. Linguists studied words and phrasemes, the products of mind activities, while gestures, facial expressions, postures and other forms of body language were left to anthropologists, psychologists, physiologists, and indeed to anyone but linguists. Only recently have linguists begun to turn their attention to gestures and semiotic and cognitive paradigms are now appearing that raise the question of designing an integral model for the unified description of non-verbal and verbal communicative behaviour. This project attempted to elaborate lexical and semantic fragments of such a model, producing a co-ordinated semantic description of the main Russian gestures (including gestures proper, postures and facial expressions) and their natural language analogues. The concept of emblematic gestures and gestural phrasemes and of their semantic links permitted an appropriate description of the transformation of a body as a purely physical substance into a body as a carrier of essential attributes of Russian culture - the semiotic process called the culturalisation of the human body. Here the human body embodies a system of cultural values and displays them in a text within the area of phraseology and some other important language domains. The goal of this research was to develop a theory that would account for the fundamental peculiarities of the process. The model proposed is based on the unified lexicographic representation of verbal and non-verbal units in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures, which the Mr. Kreidlin had earlier complied in collaboration with a group of his students. The Dictionary was originally oriented only towards reflecting how the lexical competence of Russian body language is represented in the Russian mind. Now a special type of phraseological zone has been designed to reflect explicitly semantic relationships between the gestures in the entries and phrasemes and to provide the necessary information for a detailed description of these. All the definitions, rules of usage and the established correlations are written in a semantic meta-language. Several classes of Russian gestural phrasemes were identified, including those phrasemes and idioms with semantic definitions close to those of the corresponding gestures, those phraseological units that have lost touch with the related gestures (although etymologically they are derived from gestures that have gone out of use), and phrasemes and idioms which have semantic traces or reflexes inherited from the meaning of the related gestures. The basic assumptions and practical considerations underlying the work were as follows. (1) To compare meanings one has to be able to state them. To state the meaning of a gesture or a phraseological expression, one needs a formal semantic meta-language of propositional character that represents the cognitive and mental aspects of the codes. (2) The semantic contrastive analysis of any semiotic codes used in person-to-person communication also requires a single semantic meta-language, i.e. a formal semantic language of description,. This language must be as linguistically and culturally independent as possible and yet must be open to interpretation through any culture and code. Another possible method of conducting comparative verbal-non-verbal semantic research is to work with different semantic meta-languages and semantic nets and to learn how to combine them, translate from one to another, etc. in order to reach a common basis for the subsequent comparison of units. (3) The practical work in defining phraseological units and organising the phraseological zone in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures unexpectedly showed that semantic links between gestures and gestural phrasemes are reflected not only in common semantic elements and syntactic structure of semantic propositions, but also in general and partial cognitive operations that are made over semantic definitions. (4) In comparative semantic analysis one should take into account different values and roles of inner form and image components in the semantic representation of non-verbal and verbal units. (5) For the most part, gestural phrasemes are direct semantic derivatives of gestures. The cognitive and formal techniques can be regarded as typological features for the future functional-semantic classification of gestural phrasemes: two phrasemes whose meaning can be obtained by the same cognitive or purely syntactic operations (or types of operations) over the meanings of the corresponding gestures, belong by definition to one and the same class. The nature of many cognitive operations has not been studied well so far, but the first steps towards its comprehension and description have been taken. The research identified 25 logically possible classes of relationships between a gesture and a gestural phraseme. The calculation is based on theoretically possible formal (set-theory) correlations between signifiers and signified of the non-verbal and verbal units. However, in order to examine which of them are realised in practice a complete semantic and lexicographic description of all (not only central) everyday emblems and gestural phrasemes is required and this unfortunately does not yet exist. Mr. Kreidlin suggests that the results of the comparative analysis of verbal and non-verbal units could also be used in other research areas such as the lexicography of emotions.

The Language of Political Conflict: A Logico-Semantic Approach

A semantic approach towards political conflict first emerged in the 1930s and provides the methodological foundations for the description of political conflicts, in particular as the correlation between the language of description and reality. Any military or political confrontation presupposes axiological, conceptual and ideological confrontation. The form of adequate description can only be comprehended if the characteristic features of its language (structure) and thesaurus are revealed. Admitting the possibility of different descriptions implies the necessity of analysing this possible ambiguity, i.e. the characteristic features of the language which enable us to form various statements, including mutually exclusive ones. The insoluble task of finding a middle ground between the viewpoints of the conflicting parties should be replaced by soluble procedures of explaining and assessing the conflicting axiologies. For the description of conflict situations, when it is essential to represent various positions within a uniform system, an apparatus of model semantics seems to be the most appropriate one both for generating alternatives and for bringing them together in a modal system of a world in which procedures of transition from one world to another (i.e. the transworld compatibility between them) are also reflected. Reality is reconstructed not as a sort of middle ground between the mutually exclusive approaches nor as their sum, but as a result of the overlapping of various worlds and the procedures of transition from one state of affairs to another. The description of a conflict is therefore seen as a system of worlds connected by modal relations, with a system of worlds emerging as a reality to be described. This approach makes it possible to describe the processes from the points of view of the participating parties and, at the same time, to reveal their basic attitudes. The main idea of this research is shown by the problems analysed: the description of conflict as methodology; language and behaviour (general problems of semiotic description), the logico-semantic analysis of the notions of "problem and conflict", "Genesis and Chronology", "the recurrent model of the (historical) explanation and interpretation of the conflict". Zolyan used data on the Karabagh conflict to demonstrate the dependence of the structure of semio-cultural codes on current political development and considered post-soviet history as a semio-cultural problem. He sought to consider and reveal the logic of manipulations with history, and proposed the logic of preferences as a possible instrument for achieving compromise.

A day in the life of PubMed: analysis of a typical day's query log.

OBJECTIVE: To characterize PubMed usage over a typical day and compare it to previous studies of user behavior on Web search engines. DESIGN: We performed a lexical and semantic analysis of 2,689,166 queries issued on PubMed over 24 consecutive hours on a typical day. MEASUREMENTS: We measured the number of queries, number of distinct users, queries per user, terms per query, common terms, Boolean operator use, common phrases, result set size, MeSH categories, used semantic measurements to group queries into sessions, and studied the addition and removal of terms from consecutive queries to gauge search strategies. RESULTS: The size of the result sets from a sample of queries showed a bimodal distribution, with peaks at approximately 3 and 100 results, suggesting that a large group of queries was tightly focused and another was broad. Like Web search engine sessions, most PubMed sessions consisted of a single query. However, PubMed queries contained more terms. CONCLUSION: PubMed's usage profile should be considered when educating users, building user interfaces, and developing future biomedical information retrieval systems.

Deriving semantic sensor metadata from raw measurements

Sensor network deployments have become a primary source of big data about the real world that surrounds us, measuring a wide range of physical properties in real time. With such large amounts of heterogeneous data, a key challenge is to describe and annotate sensor data with high-level metadata, using and extending models, for instance with ontologies. However, to automate this task there is a need for enriching the sensor metadata using the actual observed measurements and extracting useful meta-information from them. This paper proposes a novel approach of characterization and extraction of semantic metadata through the analysis of sensor data raw observations. This approach consists in using approximations to represent the raw sensor measurements, based on distributions of the observation slopes, building a classi?cation scheme to automatically infer sensor metadata like the type of observed property, integrating the semantic analysis results with existing sensor networks metadata.

Discovery driven analysis on semi-structured text data

Discovery Driven Analysis (DDA) is a common feature of OLAP technology to analyze structured data. In essence, DDA helps analysts to discover anomalous data by highlighting 'unexpected' values in the OLAP cube. By giving indications to the analyst on what dimensions to explore, DDA speeds up the process of discovering anomalies and their causes. However, Discovery Driven Analysis (and OLAP in general) is only applicable on structured data, such as records in databases. We propose a system to extend DDA technology to semi-structured text documents, that is, text documents with a few structured data. Our system pipeline consists of two stages: first, the text part of each document is structured around user specified dimensions, using semi-PLSA algorithm; then, we adapt DDA to these fully structured documents, thus enabling DDA on text documents. We present some applications of this system in OLAP analysis and show how scalability issues are solved. Results show that our system can handle reasonable datasets of documents, in real time, without any need for pre-computation.

Usefulness of social tagging in organizing and providing access to the web: An analysis of indexing consistency and quality

This dissertation research points out major challenging problems with current Knowledge Organization (KO) systems, such as subject gateways or web directories: (1) the current systems use traditional knowledge organization systems based on controlled vocabulary which is not very well suited to web resources, and (2) information is organized by professionals not by users, which means it does not reflect intuitively and instantaneously expressed users’ current needs. In order to explore users’ needs, I examined social tags which are user-generated uncontrolled vocabulary. As investment in professionally-developed subject gateways and web directories diminishes (support for both BUBL and Intute, examined in this study, is being discontinued), understanding characteristics of social tagging becomes even more critical. Several researchers have discussed social tagging behavior and its usefulness for classification or retrieval; however, further research is needed to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate social tagging in order to verify its quality and benefit. This research particularly examined the indexing consistency of social tagging in comparison to professional indexing to examine the quality and efficacy of tagging. The data analysis was divided into three phases: analysis of indexing consistency, analysis of tagging effectiveness, and analysis of tag attributes. Most indexing consistency studies have been conducted with a small number of professional indexers, and they tended to exclude users. Furthermore, the studies mainly have focused on physical library collections. This dissertation research bridged these gaps by (1) extending the scope of resources to various web documents indexed by users and (2) employing the Information Retrieval (IR) Vector Space Model (VSM) - based indexing consistency method since it is suitable for dealing with a large number of indexers. As a second phase, an analysis of tagging effectiveness with tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity was conducted to ameliorate the drawbacks of consistency analysis based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Finally, to investigate tagging pattern and behaviors, a content analysis on tag attributes was conducted based on the FRBR model. The findings revealed that there was greater consistency over all subjects among taggers compared to that for two groups of professionals. The analysis of tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity in relation to tagging effectiveness was conducted to ameliorate difficulties associated with limitations in the analysis of indexing consistency based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Examination of exhaustivity and specificity of social tags provided insights into particular characteristics of tagging behavior and its variation across subjects. To further investigate the quality of tags, a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was conducted to determine to what extent tags are conceptually related to professionals’ keywords and it was found that tags of higher specificity tended to have a higher semantic relatedness to professionals’ keywords. This leads to the conclusion that the term’s power as a differentiator is related to its semantic relatedness to documents. The findings on tag attributes identified the important bibliographic attributes of tags beyond describing subjects or topics of a document. The findings also showed that tags have essential attributes matching those defined in FRBR. Furthermore, in terms of specific subject areas, the findings originally identified that taggers exhibited different tagging behaviors representing distinctive features and tendencies on web documents characterizing digital heterogeneous media resources. These results have led to the conclusion that there should be an increased awareness of diverse user needs by subject in order to improve metadata in practical applications. This dissertation research is the first necessary step to utilize social tagging in digital information organization by verifying the quality and efficacy of social tagging. This dissertation research combined both quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (content analysis using FRBR) approaches to vocabulary analysis of tags which provided a more complete examination of the quality of tags. Through the detailed analysis of tag properties undertaken in this dissertation, we have a clearer understanding of the extent to which social tagging can be used to replace (and in some cases to improve upon) professional indexing.

Homograph ambiguity resolution in front-end design for portuguese TTS systems

In this paper, a module for homograph disambiguation in Portuguese Text-to-Speech (TTS) is proposed. This module works with a part-of-speech (POS) parser, used to disambiguate homographs that belong to different parts-of-speech, and a semantic analyzer, used to disambiguate homographs which belong to the same part-of-speech. The proposed algorithms are meant to solve a significant part of homograph ambiguity in European Portuguese (EP) (106 homograph pairs so far). This system is ready to be integrated in a Letter-to-Sound (LTS) converter. The algorithms were trained and tested with different corpora. The obtained experimental results gave rise to 97.8% of accuracy rate. This methodology is also valid for Brazilian Portuguese (BP), since 95 homographs pairs are exactly the same as in EP. A comparison with a probabilistic approach was also done and results were discussed.

BIOMedical search engine framework: lightweight and customized implementation of domain-specific biomedical search engines

The Smart Drug Search is publicly accessible at http://sing.ei.uvigo.es/sds/. The BIOMedical Search Engine Framework is freely available for non-commercial use at https://github.com/agjacome/biomsef

Les "verbes savonnettes": frottements et glissements sémantiques

In the semantic analysis of tenses, the term event is frequently used. For example, following REICHENBACH (1947, 288), many studies mention three "points", within which (E) represents the "point of the event". Besides, like MARTIN (1985, 25), it is commonly considered -often implicitly- that "the duration of the utterance can [...] ideally be reduced to an instant t 0 [i.e. a point], [...] since within the utterance, truth conditions remain unaltered". However, events as well as utterances take time (cf. the use of "intervals " by GOSSELIN 1996). Here, I will analyze Present tense utterances such as "le ballon franchit la ligne" (the ball crosses/is crossing the line), for which the described event ("achievement" for VENDLER 1957; "réalisation instantanée" for VETTERS 1996) is shorter than the utterance that mentions it. I will show why the telic character (GAREY 1957) of achievements -unlike the other types of processes- makes it difficult to express an event contemporary to speech time since, against MARTIN's (1985, 25) idealization, truth conditions vary throughout the utterance. Taking encoding as the basis (somewhat following LEVELT 1989), I will argue that truth-condition variation can naturally lead to the over-represented use of past tenses (Passé composé in French) in child language for the expression of telic events during early acquisition (cf. e.g. WAGNER 2009).

Scene Classification Using a Hybrid Generative/Discriminative Approach

We investigate whether dimensionality reduction using a latent generative model is beneficial for the task of weakly supervised scene classification. In detail, we are given a set of labeled images of scenes (for example, coast, forest, city, river, etc.), and our objective is to classify a new image into one of these categories. Our approach consists of first discovering latent ";topics"; using probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA), a generative model from the statistical text literature here applied to a bag of visual words representation for each image, and subsequently, training a multiway classifier on the topic distribution vector for each image. We compare this approach to that of representing each image by a bag of visual words vector directly and training a multiway classifier on these vectors. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary using dense color SIFT descriptors and then investigate the classification performance under changes in the size of the visual vocabulary, the number of latent topics learned, and the type of discriminative classifier used (k-nearest neighbor or SVM). We achieve superior classification performance to recent publications that have used a bag of visual word representation, in all cases, using the authors' own data sets and testing protocols. We also investigate the gain in adding spatial information. We show applications to image retrieval with relevance feedback and to scene classification in videos

“IF ONLY I COULD�? ~ “THERE IS ALWAYS A LOOPHOLE"? Hope and hopelessness experienced by the severely depressive and nondepressive

The aim of this research was to structure a conceptual model of hope and hopelessness based on dictionary definitions, and to verify this model on the basis of the experiences of the severely depressive and non-depressive elderly. This research has produced a substantive theory of hope and hopelessness which is based on the experiences of the depressive and non-depressive elderly, and on the concept analysis of hope and hopelessness based on English dictionary definitions. The patients who participated in the research were 65 years old and older men and women (n=22) who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital because of major depression, and another group: the non-depressive elderly (n=21), who were recruited from the pensioners’ clubs. The data were collected in interviews using the Clinical Assessment Tool, developed by Farran, Salloway and Clark (1990) and Farran, Wilken and Popovich (1992), and it produced 553 pages of written text, which were analysed using the ATLAS/ti programme. ATLAS/ti is a tool for analysing qualitative data and is based on Grounded Theory. The medical and nursing records of the depressive elderly completed source triangulation. The concept analysis of hope and hopelessness was made on the basis of the definitions of English dictionaries (n=103), using semantic analysis and the ATLAS/ti programme. The most important hope-promoting factors were human relations, health and managing in everyday living. Autonomy, self-determination and feeling of security were highly appreciated among the elderly. Hopelessness, on the other hand, was most often associated with the same factors: human relations, health and everyday living. Especially, losses of significant others were experienced as strongly hope-diminishing. Old age had brought freedom from duties concerning others, but now, when you finally had an opportunity to enjoy yourself, you could not accomplish anything; you were clasped in the arms of total inability, depression had come. The most obvious difference in the life course of the depressive and nondepressive elderly was the abundance of traumatic experiences in the childhood and youth of the depressive elderly. The continuous circulation of fearful thoughts was almost touchable, and suicidality was described in connection with these thoughts. You were afraid to be awake and also to go to sleep. Managing day by day was the goal. The research produced the Basic Social Process (BSP) of hope: achieving - maintaining - losing, which expresses a continuous balancing between Being without and Being with. The importance of the object of hope was combined with the amount of hope and disappointment. The process of approaching defined the realisation of hope and the process of withdrawal that of losing. Joy and security versus grief and insecurity defined the Being with and Being without. Two core categories were found. The first one “If only I could�? reflects lack of energy, lack of knowledge, lack of courage and lack of ability. The other one “There is always a loophole�? reflects deliberate tracing of possibilities and the belief in finding solutions, and managing.

Adherence to best care practices in normal birth: construction and validation of an instrument

Abstract OBJECTIVE To describe the stages of construction and validation of an instrument in order to analyze the adherence to best care practices during labour and birth. METHOD Methodological research, carried out in three steps: construction of dimensions and items, face and content validity and semantic analysis of the items. RESULTS The face and content validity was carried out by 10 judges working in healthcare, teaching and research. Items with Content Validity Index (CVI) ≥ 0.9 were kept in full or undergone revisions as suggested by the judges. Semantic analysis, performed twice, indicated that there was no difficulty in understanding the items. CONCLUSION The instrument with three dimensions (organization of healthcare network to pregnancy and childbirth, evidence-based practices and work processes) followed the steps recommended in the literature, concluded with 50 items and total CVI of 0.98.

Ignorance and Indifference: Epistemic Indefinites in Slovak

This thesis investigates epistemic indefinites (EIs), elements noteworthy for their grammaticalized ignorance implicature, i.e. inability to provide further information about the identity of the expression's referent. This work contributes to the effort of finding a unified account of the cross-linguistic repertoire of EIs. It comprises a corpus survey and a semantic analysis of Slovak voľa- and -si, EI items not studied until now. First, the following hypothesis was tested: the semantic/syntactic functions expressed by an indefinite will fall into contiguous areas on an implicational map (Haspelmath 1997). The results of the corpus analysis revealed that the map does not entirely capture the Slovak EIs' functional distribution and interpretations. Secondly, the semantic analysis was developed within the alternatives-and-exhaustification framework (Chierchia 2013). I show that some of the EIs' behavior can be explained as a consequence of an assumed sensitivity to parameters proposed by Chierchia. I situate voľa- and -si with respect to the framework’s typology and offer a critical assessment of this theoretical perspective.

Identification of Research Portfolio for the Development of Filtration Equipment

This piece of work which is Identification of Research Portfolio for Development of Filtration Equipment aims at presenting a novel approach to identify promising research topics in the field of design and development of filtration equipment and processes. The projected approach consists of identifying technological problems often encountered in filtration processes. The sources of information for the problem retrieval were patent documents and scientific papers that discussed filtration equipments and processes. The problem identification method adopted in this work focussed on the semantic nature of a sentence in order to generate series of subject-action-object structures. This was achieved with software called Knowledgist. List of problems often encountered in filtration processes that have been mentioned in patent documents and scientific papers were generated. These problems were carefully studied and categorized. Suggestions were made on the various classes of these problems that need further investigation in order to propose a research portfolio. The uses and importance of other methods of information retrieval were also highlighted in this work.