Web aggregation has been available regionally for several years, but this service has not been offered globally. As an example, using multiple regional comparison aggregators, we analyze the global prices for a Sony camcorder, which differ by more than three times. We further explain that lack of global comparison aggregation services partially contribute to such huge price dispersion. We also discuss difficulties encountered in the manual integration of global web sources. Motivated by this example, we propose a context mediation architecture for global aggregation to address semantic disparities of global information sources. Global aggregation services can bring efficiency to the global market and can be useful for market research and other business uses. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

no / Building on models of transfer effects between musical training and language processing and on evidence of similarities in the way the brain responds to unexpected elements in music and language, we investigated whether effects of musical training could be observed at the level of sentence processing. Using sentences that tax the semantic processes involved in natural comprehension and avoid outright anomalies, we showed a striking difference between musicians and non-musicians: contrary to non-musicians, musicians showed no N400 response to novel metaphorical words which were more difficult to integrate semantically into their context than literal controls. This difference between musicians and non-musicians in semantic processing in sentences shows an effect of musicianship at the highest level of music–language transfer effects demonstrated so far in the literature. As well as adding to the growing body of evidence surrounding the relationship between musical training and language processing, this work provides support for theories which suggest shared resources, computations, and neural areas underpinning the high-level processing of music and language.

The semantic integration of geographically distributed and heterogeneous data resources still remains a key challenge in Grid infrastructures. Today's mainstream Grid technologies hold the promise to meet this challenge in a systematic manner, making data applications more scalable and manageable. The thesis conducts a thorough investigation of the problem, the state of the art, and the related technologies, and proposes an Architecture for Semantic Integration of Data Sources (ASIDS) addressing the semantic heterogeneity issue. It defines a simple mechanism for the interoperability of heterogeneous data sources in order to extract or discover information regardless of their different semantics. The constituent technologies of this architecture include Globus Toolkit (GT4) and OGSA-DAI (Open Grid Service Architecture Data Integration and Access) alongside other web services technologies such as XML (Extensive Markup Language). To show this, the ASIDS architecture was implemented and tested in a realistic setting by building an exemplar application prototype on a HealthGrid (pilot implementation). The study followed an empirical research methodology and was informed by extensive literature surveys and a critical analysis of the relevant technologies and their synergies. The two literature reviews, together with the analysis of the technology background, have provided a good overview of the current Grid and HealthGrid landscape, produced some valuable taxonomies, explored new paths by integrating technologies, and more importantly illuminated the problem and guided the research process towards a promising solution. Yet the primary contribution of this research is an approach that uses contemporary Grid technologies for integrating heterogeneous data resources that have semantically different. data fields (attributes). It has been practically demonstrated (using a prototype HealthGrid) that discovery in semantically integrated distributed data sources can be feasible by using mainstream Grid technologies, which have been shown to have some Significant advantages over non-Grid based approaches.

Here we consider the verification and semantic integration for the set of first-order time ontologies by Allen-Hayes, Ladkin, and van Benthem that axiomatize time as points, intervals, or a combination of both within an ontology repository environment. Semantic integration of the set of time ontologies is explored via the notion of theory interpretations using an automated reasoner as part of the methodology. We use the notion of representation theorems for verification by characterizing the models of the ontology up to isomorphism and proving that they are equivalent to the intended structures for the ontology. Provided is a complete account of the meta-theoretic relationships between ontologies along with corrections to their axioms, translation definitions, proof of representation theorems, and a discussion of various issues such as class-quantified interpretations, the impact of namespacing support for Common Logic, and ontology repository support for semantic integration as related to the time ontologies examined.

Here we consider the verification and semantic integration for the set of first-order time ontologies by Allen-Hayes, Ladkin, and van Benthem that axiomatize time as points, intervals, or a combination of both within an ontology repository environment. Semantic integration of the set of time ontologies is explored via the notion of theory interpretations using an automated reasoner as part of the methodology. We use the notion of representation theorems for verification by characterizing the models of the ontology up to isomorphism and proving that they are equivalent to the intended structures for the ontology. Provided is a complete account of the meta-theoretic relationships between ontologies along with corrections to their axioms, translation definitions, proof of representation theorems, and a discussion of various issues such as class-quantified interpretations, the impact of namespacing support for Common Logic, and ontology repository support for semantic integration as related to the time ontologies examined.

Univ., Diss.--Karlsruhe, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [227] - 243 S.

We explore the language production process by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors. Participants were asked to create complete sentences from sentence beginnings such as The elf's/elves' house with the tiny window/windows and The statue in the eirs/elves' gardens. These are subject noun phrases containing a head noun and controller of agreement (statue), and two nonheads, a "local noun" (window(s)/garden(s)), and a possessor noun (elf's/elves'). Past research has shown that a plural nonhead noun (an "attractor") within a subject noun phrase triggers the production of verb agreement errors, and further, that the nearer the attractor to the head noun, the greater the interference. This effect can be interpreted in terms of relative hierarchical distance from the head noun, or via a processing window account, which claims that during production, there is a window in which the head and modifying material may be co-active, and an attractor must be active at the same time as the head to give rise to errors. Using possessors attached at different heights within the same window, we are able to empirically distinguish these accounts. Possessors also allow us to explore two additional issues. First, case marking of local nouns has been shown to reduce agreement errors in languages with "rich" inflectional systems, and we explore whether English speakers attend to case. Secondly, formal syntactic analyses differ regarding the structural position of the possessive marker, and we distinguish them empirically with the relative magnitude of errors produced by possessors and local nouns. Our results show that, across the board, plural possessors are significantly less disruptive to the agreement process than plural local nouns. Proximity to the head noun matters: a possessor directly modifying the head noun induce a significant number of errors, but a possessor within a modifying prepositional phrase did not, though the local noun did. These findings suggest that proximity to a head noun is independent of a "processing window" effect. They also support a noun phrase-internal, case-like analysis of the structural position of the possessive ending and show that even speakers of inflectionally impoverished languages like English are sensitive to morphophonological case-like marking.

Multimodal systems can represent and manipulate semantics from different human communication modalities at different levels of abstraction, in which multimodal integration is required to integrate the semantics from two or more modalities and generate an interpretable output for further processing. In this work, we develop a framework pertaining to automatic cross-modality semantic integration of multimodal user interactions using speech and pen gestures. It begins by generating partial interpretations for each input event as a ranked list of hypothesized semantics. We devise a cross-modality semantic integration procedure to align the pair of hypothesis lists between every speech input event and every pen input event in a multimodal expression. This is achieved by the Viterbi alignment that enforces the temporal ordering and semantic compatibility constraints of aligned events. The alignment enables generation of a unimodal paraphrase that is semantically equivalent to the original multimodal expression. Our experiments are based on a multimodal corpus in the navigation domain. Application of the integration procedure to manual transcripts shows that correct unimodal paraphrases are generated for around 96% of the multimodal inquiries in the test set. However, if we replace this with automatic speech and pen recognition transcripts, the performance drops to around 53% of the test set. In order to address this issue, we devised the hypothesis rescoring procedure that evaluates all candidates of cross-modality integration derived from multiple recognition hypotheses from each modality. The rescoring function incorporates the integration score, N-best purity of recognized spoken locative references (SLRs), as well as distances between coordinates of recognized pen gestures and their interpreted icons on the map. Application of cross-modality hypothesis rescoring improved the performance to generate correct unimodal paraphrases for over 72% of the multimodal inquiries of the test set. / We have also performed a latent semantic modeling (LSM) for interpreting multimodal user input consisting of speech and pen gestures. Each modality of a multimodal input carries semantics related to a domain-specific task goal (TG). Each input is annotated manually with a TG based on the semantics. Multimodal input usually has a simpler syntactic structure and different order of semantic constituents from unimodal input. Therefore, we proposed to use LSM to derive the latent semantics from the multimodal inputs. In order to achieve this, we characterized the cross-modal integration pattern as 3-tuple multimodal terms taking into account SLR, pen gesture type and their temporal relation. The correlation term matrix is then decomposed using singular value decomposition (SVD) to derive the latent semantics automatically. TG inference on disjoint test set based on the latent semantics achieves accurate performance for 99% of the multimodal inquiries. / Hui, Pui Yu. / Adviser: Helen Meng. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-02, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-306). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Dans le domaine de la santé, il existe un nombre très important de sources de connaissances, qui vont de simples terminologies, classifications et vocabulaires contrôlés à des représentations très formelles, que sont les ontologies. Cette hétérogénéité des sources de connaissances pose le problème de l’utilisation secondaire des données, et en particulier de l’exploitation de données hétérogènes dans le cadre de la médecine personnalisée ou translationnelle. En effet, les données à utiliser peuvent être codées par des sources de connaissances décrivant la même notion clinique de manière différente ou décrivant des notions distinctes mais complémentaires.Pour répondre au besoin d’utilisation conjointe des sources de connaissances encodant les données de santé, nous avons étudié trois processus permettant de répondre aux conflits sémantiques (difficultés résultant de leur mise en relation) : (1) l’alignement qui consiste à créer des relations de mappings (équivalence et/ou subsumption) entre les entités des sources de connaissances, (2) l’intégration qui consiste à créer des mappings et à organiser les autres entités dans une même structure commune cohérente et, enfin, (3) l’enrichissement sémantique de l’intégration qui consiste à créer des mappings grâce à des relations transversales en plus de celles d’équivalence et de subsumption.Dans un premier travail, nous avons aligné la terminologie d’interface du laboratoire d’analyses du CHU de Bordeaux à la LOINC. Deux étapes principales ont été mises en place : (i) le prétraitement des libellés de la terminologie locale qui comportaient des troncatures et des abréviations, ce qui a permis de réduire les risques de survenue de conflits de nomenclature, (ii) le filtrage basé sur la structure de la LOINC afin de résoudre les différents conflits de confusion.Deuxièmement, nous avons intégré RxNorm à la sous-partie de la SNOMED CT décrivant les connaissances sur les médicaments afin d’alimenter la SNOMED CT avec les entités de RxNorm. Ainsi, les médicaments dans RxNorm ont été décrits en OWL grâce à leurs éléments définitionnels (substance, unité de mesure, dose, etc.). Nous avons ensuite fusionné cette représentation de RxNorm à la structure de la SNOMED CT, résultant en une nouvelle source de connaissances. Nous avons ensuite comparé les équivalences inférées (entre les entités de RxNorm et celles de la SNOMED CT) grâce à cette nouvelle structure avec les équivalences créées de manière morphosyntaxique. Notre méthode a résolu des conflits de nomenclature mais s’est confrontée à certains conflits de confusion et d’échelle, ce qui a mis en évidence le besoin d’améliorer RxNorm et SNOMED CT.Finalement, nous avons réalisé une intégration sémantiquement enrichie de la CIM10 et de la CIMO3 en utilisant la SNOMED CT comme support. La CIM10 décrivant des diagnostics et la CIMO3 décrivant cette notion suivant deux axes différents (celui des lésions histologiques et celui des localisations anatomiques), nous avons utilisé la structure de la SNOMED CT pour retrouver des relations transversales entre les concepts de la CIM10 et de la CIMO3 (résolution de conflits ouverts). Au cours du processus, la structure de la SNOMED CT a également été utilisée pour supprimer les mappings erronés (conflits de nomenclature et de confusion) et désambiguïser les cas de mappings multiples (conflits d’échelle). / In the biomedical domain, there are almost as many knowledge resources in health as there are application fields. These knowledge resources, described according to different representation models and for different contexts of use, raise the problem of complexity of their interoperability, especially for actual public health problematics such as personalized medicine, translational medicine and the secondary use of medical data. Indeed, these knowledge resources may represent the same notion in different ways or represent different but complementary notions.For being able to use knowledge resources jointly, we studied three processes that can overcome semantic conflicts (difficulties encountered when relating distinct knowledge resources): the alignment, the integration and the semantic enrichment of the integration. The alignment consists in creating a set of equivalence or subsumption mappings between entities from knowledge resources. The integration aims not only to find mappings but also to organize all knowledge resources’ entities into a unique and coherent structure. Finally, the semantic enrichment of integration consists in finding all the required mapping relations between entities of distinct knowledge resources (equivalence, subsumption, transversal and, failing that, disjunction relations).In this frame, we firstly realized the alignment of laboratory tests terminologies: LOINC and the local terminology of Bordeaux hospital. We pre-processed the noisy labels of the local terminology to reduce the risk of naming conflicts. Then, we suppressed erroneous mappings (confounding conflicts) using the structure of LOINC.Secondly, we integrated RxNorm to SNOMED CT. We constructed formal definitions for each entity in RxNorm by using their definitional features (active ingredient, strength, dose form, etc.) according to the design patterns proposed by SNOMED CT. We then integrated the constructed definitions into SNOMED CT. The obtained structure was classified and the inferred equivalences generated between RxNorm and SNOMED CT were compared to morphosyntactic mappings. Our process resolved some cases of naming conflicts but was confronted to confounding and scaling conflicts, which highlights the need for improving RxNorm and SNOMED CT.Finally, we performed a semantically enriched integration of ICD-10 and ICD-O3 using SNOMED CT as support. As ICD-10 describes diagnoses and ICD-O3 describes this notion according to two different axes (i.e., histological lesions and anatomical structures), we used the SNOMED CT structure to identify transversal relations between their entities (resolution of open conflicts). During the process, the structure of the SNOMED CT was also used to suppress erroneous mappings (naming and confusion conflicts) and disambiguate multiple mappings (scale conflicts).

Thesis (M.Sc.(Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-116).