Bilingual Lexical Access in Reading : Analyzing the Effect of Semantic Context on Non-Selective Access in Bilingual Memory

Recent empirical studies about the neurological executive nature of reading in bilinguals differ in their evaluations of the degree of selective manifestation in lexical access as implicated by data from early and late reading measures in the eye-tracking paradigm. Currently two scenarios are plausible: (1) Lexical access in reading is fundamentally language non-selective and top-down effects from semantic context can influence the degree of selectivity in lexical access; (2) Cross-lingual lexical activation is actuated via bottom-up processes without being affected by top-down effects from sentence context. In an attempt to test these hypotheses empirically, this study analyzed reader-text events arising when cognate facilitation and semantic constraint interact in a 22 factorially designed experiment tracking the eye movements of 26 Swedish-English bilinguals reading in their L2. Stimulus conditions consisted of high- and low-constraint sentences embedded with either a cognate or a non-cognate control word. The results showed clear signs of cognate facilitation in both early and late reading measures and in either sentence conditions. This evidence in favour of the non-selective hypothesis indicates that the manifestation of non-selective lexical access in reading is not constrained by top-down effects from semantic context.

Lehrende als ‘agents of change’ - Konzeptionelle Überlegungen zu einer kinderrechtlichen Annotation und Ausdeutung der Standards für die Lehrerbildung

Die Dissertation geht von der Überlegung aus, dass ein Wandel im deutschen Bildungssystem aufgrund kinderrechtlicher und demokratischer Überlegungen eine essenzielle Zukunftsaufgabe ist. Dies geschieht im Besonderen vor dem Hintergrund kinderrechtlicher Forderungen, wie sie beispielsweise aus dem Status Deutschlands als Mitgliedsland der UN-Kinderrechtskonvention und des UN-Übereinkommens über die Rechte von Menschen mit Behinderung entstehen: Die Korrelation zwischen Herkunft und Bildungserfolg sowie die noch konzeptionell ungenügend entwickelten Ansätze zur Inklusion werden als bestimmend für die Diskussion erkannt. Die Arbeit vertritt die These, dass Lehrende eine zentrale Rolle in einem notwendigen Prozess der Umwandlung des deutschen Bildungssystems spielen können und nimmt in emanzipatorischer Absicht die Lehrenden als Zielgruppe in den Blick. Aufgrund der Struktur der Lehrendenausbildung wird zudem dafür argumentiert, entsprechende Veränderungen im Sinne ihrer Nachhaltigkeit und flächendeckenden Relevanz in der Lehrendenausbildung des ersten universitären Ausbildungsabschnittes zu verankern. Als Instrument, welches die Kriterien von Nachhaltigkeit und umfassender Relevanz erfüllt, werden die Standards für die Lehrerbildung im Bereich Bildungswissenschaften benannt und theoretisch unterfüttert. Grundsätzlich spannt sich der Blickwinkel der Arbeit zwischen der Betrachtung der Struktur des Bildungssystems, des Wissens und Könnens von Lehrenden und Lernenden im Sinne der Kompetenzorientierung sowie der Haltung auf, welche Lehrende einnehmen. Dabei wird aufgezeigt, dass sich diese Faktoren wechselseitig auf vielfache Art und Weise beeinflussen. Auf der Basis dieser Überlegungen wird zunächst das deutsche Bildungssystem in seinen Strukturen beschrieben und die Lehrenden und Lernenden als Teilnehmende am Bildungsgeschehen skizziert. Ein exkursiver Vergleich dreier aufgrund kinderrechtlicher Parameter ausgewählter europäischer Bildungssysteme eruiert zudem, inwiefern die aufgezeigten Bestimmungsgrößen Struktur, Wissen/Können und Haltung Einfluss auf kinderrechtliche Verfasstheit des Bildungssystems nehmen, wobei die Grundprinzipien der UN-Kinderrechtskonvention hier als Messinstrument dienen. Davon ausgehend, erscheint pädagogische Haltung als eine wesentliche Einflussgröße, die im weiteren Verlauf der Arbeit im Sinne der kritischen Pädagogik zu einer Konzeption Pädagogischer Verantwortung verdichtet wird. Vor diesem Hintergrund erfolgt eine Betrachtung aktueller Problematiken im deutschen Bildungssystem, die sich an den in den Standards für die Lehrerbildung identifizierten Ausbildungsschwerpunkten orientiert und erneut die Prinzipien und rechtlichen Vorgaben der UN-Kinderrechtskonvention als Maßstab wählt. Auf der Grundlage dieser umfassenden Diskussion werden in einem sich anschließenden Analyseschritt Annotationen vorgenommen, die die Formulierungen der 11 Standards für die Lehrerbildung inhaltlich erweitern und ergänzen. In Verbindung mit einer Pädagogischen Verantwortung, die sich der Ausbildung kritischer Mündigkeit verpflichtet, werden die annotierten Standards als eine Möglichkeit der kinderrechtlichen (Selbst-)Evaluation von Lehrenden sowie als Instrument einer kinderrechtliche Gesichtspunkte fokussierenden Lehrendenbildung verstanden und dargestellt.

Innovazione nel Semantic Web: Evoluzione della base di conoscenza semantica YAGO

La presente ricerca tratta lo studio delle basi di conoscenza, volto a facilitare la raccolta, l'organizzazione e la distribuzione della conoscenza. La scelta dell’oggetto è dovuta all'importanza sempre maggiore acquisita da questo ambito di ricerca e all'innovazione che esso è in grado di apportare nel campo del Web semantico. Viene analizzata la base di conoscenza YAGO: se ne descrivono lo stato dell’arte, le applicazioni e i progetti per sviluppi futuri. Il lavoro è stato condotto esaminando le pubblicazioni relative al tema e rappresenta una risorsa in lingua italiana sull'argomento.

Lexical Interference in Semantic Processing of Simple Words: Implications for Brand Names

This study provides evidence for a Stroop-like interference effect in word recognition. Based on phonologic and semantic properties of simple words, participants who performed a same/different word-recognition task exhibited a significant response latency increase when word pairs (e.g., POLL, ROD) featured a comparison word (POLL) that was a homonym of a synonym (pole) of the target word (ROD). These results support a parallel-processing framework of lexical decision making, in which activation of the pathways to word recognition may occur at different levels automatically and in parallel. A subset of simple words that are also brand names was examined and exhibited this same interference. Implications for word recognition theory and practical implications for strategic marketing are discussed.

Learning to Interpret and Generate Instructional Recipes

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Annotation of Gyrodactylus salaris transcriptome

Relationship between organisms within an ecosystem is one of the main focuses in the study of ecology and evolution. For instance, host-parasite interactions have long been under close interest of ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation science, due to great variety of strategies and interaction outcomes. The monogenean ecto-parasites consist of a significant portion of flatworms. Gyrodactylus salaris is a monogenean freshwater ecto-parasite of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) whose damage can make fish to be prone to further bacterial and fungal infections. G. salaris is the only one parasite whose genome has been studied so far. The RNA-seq data analyzed in this thesis has already been annotated by using LAST. The RNA-seq data was obtained from Illumina sequencing i.e. yielded reads were assembled into 15777 transcripts. Last resulted in annotation of 46% transcripts and remaining were left unknown. This thesis work was started with whole data and annotation process was continued by the use of PANNZER, CDD and InterProScan. This annotation resulted in 56% successfully annotated sequences having parasite specific proteins identified. This thesis represents the first of Monogenean transcriptomic information which gives an important source for further research on this specie. Additionally, comparison of annotation methods interestingly revealed that description and domain based methods perform better than simple similarity search methods. Therefore it is more likely to suggest the use of these tools and databases for functional annotation. These results also emphasize the need for use of multiple methods and databases. It also highlights the need of more genomic information related to G. salaris.

Semantic Mining based on graph theory and ontologies. Case Study: Cell Signaling Pathways

In this paper we use concepts from graph theory and cellular biology represented as ontologies, to carry out semantic mining tasks on signaling pathway networks. Specifically, the paper describes the semantic enrichment of signaling pathway networks. A cell signaling network describes the basic cellular activities and their interactions. The main contribution of this paper is in the signaling pathway research area, it proposes a new technique to analyze and understand how changes in these networks may affect the transmission and flow of information, which produce diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Our approach is based on three concepts from graph theory (modularity, clustering and centrality) frequently used on social networks analysis. Our approach consists into two phases: the first uses the graph theory concepts to determine the cellular groups in the network, which we will call them communities; the second uses ontologies for the semantic enrichment of the cellular communities. The measures used from the graph theory allow us to determine the set of cells that are close (for example, in a disease), and the main cells in each community. We analyze our approach in two cases: TGF-β and the Alzheimer Disease.

Scalable semantic aware context storage

The number of connected devices collecting and distributing real-world information through various systems, is expected to soar in the coming years. As the number of such connected devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to store and share all these new sources of information. Several context representation schemes try to standardize this information, but none of them have been widely adopted. In previous work we addressed this challenge, however our solution had some drawbacks: poor semantic extraction and scalability. In this paper we discuss ways to efficiently deal with representation schemes' diversity and propose a novel d-dimension organization model. Our evaluation shows that d-dimension model improves scalability and semantic extraction.

Semantic features for context organization

In recent years the technological world has grown by incorporating billions of small sensing devices, collecting and sharing real-world information. As the number of such devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all these new information sources. There is no uniform way to share, process and understand context information. In previous publications we discussed efficient ways to organize context information that is independent of structure and representation. However, our previous solution suffers from semantic sensitivity. In this paper we review semantic methods that can be used to minimize this issue, and propose an unsupervised semantic similarity solution that combines distributional profiles with public web services. Our solution was evaluated against Miller-Charles dataset, achieving a correlation of 0.6.

Deep convolutional neural networks for semantic video object segmentation

In this thesis, we propose to infer pixel-level labelling in video by utilising only object category information, exploiting the intrinsic structure of video data. Our motivation is the observation that image-level labels are much more easily to be acquired than pixel-level labels, and it is natural to find a link between the image level recognition and pixel level classification in video data, which would transfer learned recognition models from one domain to the other one. To this end, this thesis proposes two domain adaptation approaches to adapt the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) image recognition model trained from labelled image data to the target domain exploiting both semantic evidence learned from CNN, and the intrinsic structures of unlabelled video data. Our proposed approaches explicitly model and compensate for the domain adaptation from the source domain to the target domain which in turn underpins a robust semantic object segmentation method for natural videos. We demonstrate the superior performance of our methods by presenting extensive evaluations on challenging datasets comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.

Aging and semantic integration in sentence processing: Testing the cognitive workload of wrap-up

The current study investigated the cognitive workload of sentence and clause wrap-up in younger and older readers. A large number of studies have demonstrated the presence of wrap-up effects, peaks in processing time at clause and sentence boundaries that some argue reflect attention to organizational and integrative semantic processes. However, the exact nature of these wrap-up effects is still not entirely clear, with some arguing that wrap-up is not related to processing difficulty, but rather is triggered by a low-level oculomotor response or the implicit monitoring of intonational contour. The notion that wrap-up effects are resource-demanding was directly tested by examining the degree to which sentence and clause wrap-up affects the parafoveal preview benefit. Older and younger adults read passages in which a target word N occurred in a sentence-internal, clause-final, or sentence-final position. A gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm was used in which, on some trials, a non-word preview of word N+1 was replaced by a target word once the eyes crossed an invisible boundary located between words N and N+1. All measures of reading time on word N were longer at clause and sentence boundaries than in the sentence-internal position. In the earliest measures of reading time, sentence and clause wrap-up showed evidence of reducing the magnitude of the preview benefit similarly for younger and older adults. However, this effect was moderated by age in gaze duration, such that older adults showed a complete reduction in the preview benefit in the sentence-final condition. Additionally, sentence and clause wrap-up were negatively associated with the preview benefit. Collectively, the findings from the current study suggest that wrap-up is cognitively demanding and may be less efficient with age, thus, resulting in a reduction of the parafoveal preview during normal reading.

Transcriptional dynamics of the developing sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) fruit: sequencing, annotation and expression profiling of exocarp-associated genes

The exocarp, or skin, of fleshy fruit is a specialized tissue that protects the fruit, attracts seed dispersing fruit eaters, and has large economical relevance for fruit quality. Development of the exocarp involves regulated activities of many genes. This research analyzed global gene expression in the exocarp of developing sweet cherry (Prunus avium L., 'Regina'), a fruit crop species with little public genomic resources. A catalog of transcript models (contigs) representing expressed genes was constructed from de novo assembled short complementary DNA (cDNA) sequences generated from developing fruit between flowering and maturity at 14 time points. Expression levels in each sample were estimated for 34 695 contigs from numbers of reads mapping to each contig. Contigs were annotated functionally based on BLAST, gene ontology and InterProScan analyses. Coregulated genes were detected using partitional clustering of expression patterns. The results are discussed with emphasis on genes putatively involved in cuticle deposition, cell wall metabolism and sugar transport. The high temporal resolution of the expression patterns presented here reveals finely tuned developmental specialization of individual members of gene families. Moreover, the de novo assembled sweet cherry fruit transcriptome with 7760 full-length protein coding sequences and over 20 000 other, annotated cDNA sequences together with their developmental expression patterns is expected to accelerate molecular research on this important tree fruit crop.

AnnoTALE: Bioinformatics tools for identification, annotation, and nomenclature of TALEs from Xanthomonas genomic sequences

Transcription activator-like effectors (TALEs) are virulence factors, produced by the bacterial plant-pathogen Xanthomonas, that function as gene activators inside plant cells. Although the contribution of individual TALEs to infectivity has been shown, the specific roles of most TALEs, and the overall TALE diversity in Xanthomonas spp. is not known. TALEs possess a highly repetitive DNA-binding domain, which is notoriously difficult to sequence. Here, we describe an improved method for characterizing TALE genes by the use of PacBio sequencing. We present 'AnnoTALE', a suite of applications for the analysis and annotation of TALE genes from Xanthomonas genomes, and for grouping similar TALEs into classes. Based on these classes, we propose a unified nomenclature for Xanthomonas TALEs that reveals similarities pointing to related functionalities. This new classification enables us to compare related TALEs and to identify base substitutions responsible for the evolution of TALE specificities. © 2016, Nature Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Latent semantic indexing eta ikasketa automatikoa hizkuntzaren prozesamenduaren arloan: testu-sailkatzea, hitzen adiera-desanbiguatzea eta korreferentzia-ebaztea SVD bidezko dimentsio murrizketa eta multi-sailkatzailea konbinatuz

220 p.