Magister Scientiae - MSc / This study investigates the most important reasons behind the rst-year students' decision to select University of the Western Cape (UWC) as higher education institution. These reasons were organized into a few factors for easy interpretation. The data to be analyzed for this project is a subsection of the data collected during the orientation period of 2008. During the orientation week of 2008, the questionnaires were completed on a voluntary basis by new rst-year students. All questionnaires were anonymously completed and therefore the data does not contain any information that could be linked to any individual. For the purpose of this study, only the black African and coloured students were considered. The other racial groups were not analyzed due to too small sample sizes. Questionnaires with missing information on the reasons for selecting UWC were not nalyzed. We ended up with a sample of size 600. The data were statistically analyzed, using descriptive statistics, bivariate analyses, factor analysis, coefficient of congruence and bootstrap factor analysis. The results indicated that the most important reasons a ecting students to choose UWC were identi ed as good academic reputation, family member's advice, UWC graduates are successful and UWC graduates get good jobs. The least important reasons were found to be not accepted anywhere, parents / family members graduated from UWC, recruited by UWC and wanted to study near to home. The results also indicated that there were significant differences among students according to population groups, parent's monthly income and grade 12 average. Factor analysis of 12 variables yielded three extracted factors upon which student decisions were based. Similarities of these three factors were tested, and a high similarity among demographic characteristics and grade 12 average were found. Additional analyses were conducted to measure the accuracy of factor analyses models constructed using Spearman and Polychoric correlation matrices. The results indicated that both correlation matrices were  nbiased, with higher variance and higher loadings when the Polychoric correlation matrix was used to construct a factor analysis model for categorical data. / South Africa

Magister Commercii - MCom / A brand extension strategy is one of the marketing tools that firms utilise to introduce new products in the market. One of the advantages of adopting this strategy is that firms are able to leverage on the positive image, reputation, and equity of a recognised and established brand,thereby reducing risk associated with launching new products.This study examines how consumers perceive the overall quality and similarity/fit of the brand extensions (Nike camera, Nike socks, and Nike golf balls) in relation to the original brand (Nike athletic shoes) and how these perceptions influence their attitudes towards the extensions. The researcher proposes that the perceived overall quality of the brand extensions will be congruent to that of the original brand and that the attitude towards the brand extensions will be favourable only when there is a perceived similarity/fit between the brand extensions and the original brand.In order to get these insights, the study surveyed 147 undergraduate and postgraduate students from the University of the Western Cape across all faculties. A non-probability convenience sampling method was used to access respondents. To collect data, qualitative and quantitative methods were employed using a questionnaire which consisted of open-ended and closed-ended questions in the form of free associations technique and 5-point Likert scales. The data gathered was analysed by means of descriptive statistics and Spearman correlation coefficient. The findings indicate two things.(1) respondents only perceived Nike socks’ overall quality to be congruent to the original brand, Nike athletic shoes. (2) respondents only perceived Nike socks to be strongly similar to the original brand, Nike athletic shoes. Despite this, respondents had a favourable attitude towards all the brand extensions irrespective of whether they perceived the overall quality of the extensions to be congruent to the original brand or not, and whether they perceived the extensions to be similar to the original brand or not. These factors did not influence respondents’ attitudes towards the extensions negatively.

Postprocessing is like data preparation one of the most challenging tasks in data mining that users must deal with. It is desirable to simplify it so that the path to results is as fast and efficient as possible. The extension of the EasyMiner research project to filter the association rules by similarity to the knowledge-based rules, should be helped in this respect, which is the subject of this diploma thesis. The objectives were accomplished by a detailed analysis of the default state of EasyMiner in conjunction with a thoroughly thought-out implementation proposal without increasing the demands on the server or user of the application. An analysis of general practices and the author's deep knowledge of Internet application issues served to do this. The future deployment of this extension to the EasyMiner infrastructure will benefit from a clearer and more efficient work with the Knowledge base part, where it will no longer be necessary to evaluate the interest in the same or similar rules and the user will be able to focus directly on the quality of the results. This thesis is divided into chapters as a detailed description of how a similar problem can be approached in any other project that works with a certain form of knowledge base. Initial input analysis with access search for comparison of the various elements passes through a description of the default application state to a specific solution design. This should be a guideline for the implementation itself and for the testing of the proposed and implemented procedures.

The thesis aims to conduct a semantic analysis of the Dutch idioms containing the word "money", categorization of the idioms to semantic categories and comparison of the semantic similarity with the Czech idioms. The theoretical part describes general phraseology and also takes up with the features and the classification of idioms. Moreover, it focuses on the theory of cognitive semantics and the history of phraseology in general, within the Netherlandistics and the Czech phraseology. The practical part takes up with the characterization of the Dutch corpus, the semantic analysis of the Dutch idioms and determining of the semantic similarity in Czech. The corpus consists of 133 Dutch idioms containing the word "money". The results of the thesis show that the idioms can be categorized on the ground of their prototypical qualities or concepts. The most dominant concept is called "the power of money". In general, we can assume that the meanings of the idioms are really various and do not have to relate only with financial affairs. The analysis of the semantic similarity with the Czech idioms has shown that the most of the Dutch idioms do not have any Czech equivalent. The result of this thesis is also a Dutch-Czech phraseological dictionary.

Appropriate calculation of surface turbulent fluxes between the atmosphere and the underlying surface is one of the major challenges in geosciences. In practice, the surface turbulent fluxes are estimated from the mean surface meteorological variables based on the bulk transfer model combined with Monnin-Obukhov Similarity (MOS) theory. Few studies have been done to examine the extent that to which this flux parameterization framework can be applied to different weather and surface conditions. A novel validation method is developed in this thesis research, which is applied to evaluate the surface flux parameterization using in-situ observations. The main findings are: (a) the theoretical prediction that uses MOS theory does not match well with those directly computed from the observations collected in the coastal region. (b) Large spread in exchange coefficients mainly occurs in the calm wind regime with strong stability. (c) Large turbulent eddies, which depend largely on the mean flow and surface conditions, tend to break the constant flux assumption in the surface layer.

L'augmentation constante du volume d'information disponible sur le Web a rendu compliquée la découverte de nouvelles sources d'intérêt sur un sujet donné. Les experts du renseignement doivent faire face à cette problématique lorsqu'ils recherchent des pages sur des sujets spécifiques et sensibles. Ces pages non populaires sont souvent mal indexées ou non indexées par les moteurs de recherche à cause de leur contenu délicat, les rendant difficile à trouver. Nos travaux, qui s'inscrivent dans ce contenu du Renseignement d'Origine Source Ouverte (ROSO), visent à aider l'expert du renseignement dans sa tâche de découverte de nouvelles sources. Notre approche s'articule autour de la modélisation du besoin opérationnel et de l'exploration ciblée du Web. La modélisation du besoin informationnel permet de guider l'exploration du web pour découvrir et fournir des sources pertinentes à l'expert. / The constant growth of the Web in recent years has made more difficult the discovery of new sources of information on a given topic. This is a prominent problem for Expert in Intelligence Analysis (EIA) who are faced with the search of pages on specific and sensitive topics. Because of their lack of popularity or because they are poorly indexed due to their sensitive content, these pages are hard to find with traditional search engine. In this article, we describe a new Web source discovery system called DOWSER. The goal of this system is to provide users with new sources of information related to their needs without considering the popularity of a page unlike classic Information Retrieval tools. The expected result is a balance between relevance and originality, in the sense that the wanted pages are not necessary popular. DOWSER in based on a user profile to focus its exploration of the Web in order to collect and index only related Web documents.

The topic of this thesis is the problem of trademark infringement examined in the context of the development of legal jurisdiction. This also includes aspects of unfair competition, and in most of the cases a couple of factors are involved.I use Czechoslovakian, Czech, as well as some European court verdicts in relation to different legal regulations.

This dissertation describes WikiRank, an unsupervised method of assigning relative values to elements of a broad coverage encyclopedic information source in order to identify those entries that may be relevant to a given piece of text. The valuation given to an entry is based not on textual similarity but instead on the links that associate entries, and an estimation of the expected frequency of visitation that would be given to each entry based on those associations in context. This estimation of relative frequency of visitation is embodied in modifications to the random walk interpretation of the PageRank algorithm. WikiRank is an effective algorithm to support natural language processing applications. It is shown to exceed the performance of previous machine learning algorithms for the task of automatic topic identification, providing results comparable to that of human annotators. Second, WikiRank is found useful for the task of recognizing text-based paraphrases on a semantic level, by comparing the distribution of attention generated by two pieces of text using the encyclopedic resource as a common reference. Finally, WikiRank is shown to have the ability to use its base of encyclopedic knowledge to recognize terms from different ontologies as describing the same thing, and thus allowing for the automatic generation of mapping links between ontologies. The conclusion of this thesis is that the "knowledge access heuristic" is valuable and that a ranking process based on a large encyclopedic resource can form the basis for an extendable general purpose mechanism capable of identifying relevant concepts by association, which in turn can be effectively utilized for enumeration and comparison at a semantic level.

Submitted by Rafael Santana (rafael.silvasantana@ufpe.br) on 2017-07-14T17:36:21Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Tese - Edvan Aguiar.pdf: 4466098 bytes, checksum: 5dffe51268add65a59e22074a8f495e0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-14T17:36:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Tese - Edvan Aguiar.pdf: 4466098 bytes, checksum: 5dffe51268add65a59e22074a8f495e0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-29 / CAPES, CNPQ, FACEPE / Esta tese aborda o papel da presença dos outros clientes sobre o comportamento do consumidor em ambiente varejista. Argumenta-se que os outros tendem a influenciar emoções individuais, determinando, em grande medida, a satisfação, as intenções de compra e o retorno à loja. À luz da Teoria do Impacto Social (LATANÉ, 1981) e do Paradigma Similaridade-Atração (BYRNE, 1971), este estudo propõe que a identificação do consumidor com os outros clientes que compartilham o mesmo ambiente de loja minimiza a influência do crowding nas respostas individuais (emoções, atitudes e comportamentos). Portanto, esta pesquisa objetivou investigar de modo a similaridade percebida modera a relação entre percepção de crowding e respostas do consumidor, em ambiente varejista com diferentes níveis de densidade humana, proximidade física e perfil dos outros consumidores (aparência física). A partir de um estudo de desenho experimental, as hipóteses de pesquisa e o modelo conceitual foram testados, e os resultados suportaram a proposta de tese defendida. A similaridade percebida contribui para que emoções e atitudes negativas sejam mitigadas, bem como comportamentos de afastamento, mesmo em situações crowding na loja. Esta variável impacta positivamente com a avaliação que o consumidor faz sobre o varejista, os produtos e sua própria experiência de compra. Os achados também indicam que a similaridade percebida influencia atitudes e comportamentos por meio das respostas emocionais (mediação). O estudo amplia o corpo teórico de conhecimento ao fornecer evidências de que a identificação social modera (interfere) em como o crowding é percebido e avaliado pelos consumidores. / This dissertation talks about the role of other customers‟ presence on consumer behavior in retail environment. It is argued that other customrs tend to influence indivudual emotions, determining, mostly, satisfaction, purchase intentions and return to store. Based on Social Impact Theory (LATANÉ, 1981) and Similarity-Attraction Paradigm (BYRNE, 1971), this study proposes that consumer identification toward other customers that share the same retail store, mitigate crowding influence on individual responses (emotions, attitudes and behaviors). Therefore, this research aimed to investigate how perceived similarity moderates the relationship between crowding perception and consumer responses, in retail environment with different levels of human density, physical proximity and other customers‟ profile (physical appearence). Drawing an experimental design methodology, the research hypotheses and the conceptual model have been tested, and the results have supported the argument defended. Perceived similarity contributes to mitigate negative emotions and attitudes, as well as avoidance behaviors, despite the store is crowded. This variable impacts positively the evaluation that consumers make about the retailer, products and their own shopping experience. The findings also indicate that perceived similarity influences attitudes and behaviors through emotional responses (mediation). The study expands the body of knowledge providing evidences that social identification moderates (interfers) on how crowding is perceived and evaluated by consumers.

O aumento da geração e do intercâmbio de imagens médicas digitais tem incentivado profissionais da computação a criarem ferramentas para manipulação, armazenamento e busca por similaridade dessas imagens. As ferramentas de recuperação de imagens por conteúdo, foco desse trabalho, têm a função de auxiliar na tomada de decisão e na prática da medicina baseada em estudo de casos semelhantes. Porém, seus principais obstáculos são conseguir uma rápida recuperação de imagens armazenadas em grandes bases e reduzir o gap semântico, caracterizado pela divergência entre o resultado obtido pelo computador e aquele esperado pelo médico. No presente trabalho, uma análise das funções de distância e dos descritores computacionais de características está sendo realizada com o objetivo de encontrar uma aproximação eficiente entre os métodos de extração de características de baixo nível e os parâmetros de percepção do médico (de alto nível) envolvidos na análise de imagens. O trabalho de integração desses três elementos (Extratores de Características, Função de Distância e Parâmetro Perceptual) resultou na criação de operadores de similaridade, que podem ser utilizados para aproximar o sistema computacional ao usuário final, visto que serão recuperadas imagens de acordo com a percepção de similaridade do médico, usuário final do sistema / The continuous growth of the medical images generation and their use in the day-to-day procedures in hospitals and medical centers has motivated the computer science researchers to develop algorithms, methods and tools to store, search and retrieve images by their content. Therefore, the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) field is also growing at a very fast pace. Algorithms and tools for CBIR, which are at the core of this work, can help on the decision making process when the specialist is composing the images analysis. This is based on the fact that the specialist can retrieve similar cases to the one under evaluation. However, the main reservation about the use of CBIR is to achieve a fast and effective retrieval, in the sense that the specialist gets what is expected for. That is, the problem is to bridge the semantic gap given by the divergence among the result automatically delivered by the system and what the user is expecting. In this work it is proposed the perceptual parameter, which adds to the relationship between the feature extraction algorithms and distance functions aimed at finding the best combination to deliver to the user what he/she expected from the query. Therefore, this research integrated the three main elements of similarity queries: the image features, the distance function and the perceptual parameter, what resulted in searching operators. The experiments performed show that these operators can narrow the distance between the system and the specialist, contributing to bridge the semantic gap