The purpose of this study is to attempt to determine what influence configuration and/or letter sequence have on the recognition thresholds of words. It is felt that low configuration and/or rare letter sequences will result in lower recognition thresholds, while high configuration and/or common letter sequence will result in higher recognition thresholds when stimulus words are presented to subjects by means of a tachistoscope.

Making computers automatically find the appropriate meaning of words in context is an interesting problem that has proven to be one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Widespread potential applications of a possible solution to the problem could be envisaged in several NLP tasks such as text simplification, language learning, machine translation, query expansion, information retrieval and text summarization. Ambiguity of words has always been a challenge in these applications, and the traditional endeavor to solve the problem of this ambiguity, namely doing word sense disambiguation using resources like WordNet, has been fraught with debate about the feasibility of the granularity that exists in WordNet senses. The recent trend has therefore been to move away from enforcing any given lexical resource upon automated systems from which to pick potential candidate senses,and to instead encourage them to pick and choose their own resources. Given a sentence with a target ambiguous word, an alternative solution consists of picking potential candidate substitutes for the target, filtering the list of the candidates to a much shorter list using various heuristics, and trying to match these system predictions against a human generated gold standard, with a view to ensuring that the meaning of the sentence does not change after the substitutions. This solution has manifested itself in the SemEval 2007 task of lexical substitution and the more recent SemEval 2010 task of cross-lingual lexical substitution (which I helped organize), where given an English context and a target word within that context, the systems are required to provide between one and ten appropriate substitutes (in English) or translations (in Spanish) for the target word. In this dissertation, I present a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research and describe new experiments to tackle the tasks of lexical substitution and cross-lingual lexical substitution. In particular I attempt to answer some research questions pertinent to the tasks, mostly focusing on completely unsupervised approaches. I present a new framework for unsupervised lexical substitution using graphs and centrality algorithms. An additional novelty in this approach is the use of directional similarity rather than the traditional, symmetric word similarity. Additionally, the thesis also explores the extension of the monolingual framework into a cross-lingual one, and examines how well this cross-lingual framework can work for the monolingual lexical substitution and cross-lingual lexical substitution tasks. A comprehensive set of comparative investigations are presented amongst supervised and unsupervised methods, several graph based methods, and the use of monolingual and multilingual information.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Khaled Anatolios / Based upon his role as a peritus at Vatican II in the shaping of the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, Ratzinger reflected back on the deliberations at the Council soon after its conclusion and indicated that the new development of understanding of Revelation was that Revelation is to be seen "basically as dialogue." In his Introduction to Christianity, he would indicate that because of the experience of Jesus Christ, the Church comes to see that God is not only logos, but dia-logos. Throughout his theological and pastoral career, Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, consistently relies upon the framework of "dialogue" as the principle of coherence for how he attempts to articulate the one Christian mystery, whether he is speaking of Revelation, Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology or any other area of Christian theology. I attempt in this dissertation, to trace that principle of coherence in his thought and thereby give a hermeneutic for approaching one of the most influential theologians of our time. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Detta arbete inspirerades av att ha observerat reklamkampanjer som fått väldigt stor spridning till följd av att de uppmärksammats pga. att konsumenter har ogillat eller gillat budskapet i kampanjen vilket gett upphov till diskussioner muntligen eller online. Denna undersökning syftar till att undersöka hur faktorer som kön och ålder kan påverka konsumenters intryck av kontroversiell reklam och hur kontroversiell reklam kan påverka konsumenternas attityd till varumärken som använt sig av kontroversiell reklam. Studien undersöker även sannolikheten att konsumenter sprider positiv eller negativ word of mouth/elektronisk word of mouth om ett varumärke som använt sig av kontroversiell reklam.   Undersökningen genomfördes med en enkät med standardiserade svar där den insamlade datan sedan analyserades med Chi2 test, bivariat korrelationsanalys samt multipel regressionsanalys. I undersökningen kunde respondenterna ta ställning till fem positiva och fem negativa adjektiv, kopplade till en reklambild. Analysen indikerade att kvinnor var både mer negativa och mindre positiva till kontroversiell reklam, åtminstone för de utföranden som testades i studien, därtill visade studien att äldre var mindre positiva till kontroversiell reklam. Slutligen indikerade studien att konsumenters attityd till ett varumärke påverkas i enlighet med dess intryck av reklamen, dvs. att om dess intryck var negativt kommer de sprida ett negativt omdöme. Detta samband gällde även för word of mouth. / This study was inspired from observing ads that stirredup controversy and thereby got a lot of attention from consumers.The purpose of this study was to investigate how factors like gender and age may affectconsumers impression of controversial advertisements, but also to investigate how controversial advertisements may affect consumers attitudes towards brands that have used advertisements that were deemed as controversial. Lastly,the study investigates the probability that consumers will spread word of mouth/electronicword of mouth about the brands. The study was conducted through a survey with standardized answers and the data was analyzed with a Chi2 test, bivariate correlation analysis,and multiple regression analysis. The analysis indicated that women were more negative and less positive towards controversial advertisement than men were, atleastwithin the categories that were tested in the study. Furthermore, the study indicated that consumers attitudes towards a brand will be affected in the same way as the consumers impression of the controversial ad. Finally, results indicated that the probability for WOM is also affected in the same way as the consumers impression of the controversial advertisement.

A person's friends, neighbours and other social relationships can have a large impact on their economic outcomes. We examine three important ways that networks can affect people's lives: when networks describe who they communicate with, who they can trust, and who benefits from their public good provision. We analyse information transmission in networks in a new, intuitive way which removes the problematic redundancy of double counting the signals that travel through more than one walk between nodes. Two-connectedness and cycles of length four play an important role in whether players are `visible', which means that other players can communicate about them. Next, using this approach to network communication, we investigate cooperation and punishment in a society where information flows about cheating are determined by an arbitrary fixed network. We identify which players can trust and cooperate with each other in a repeated game where members of a community are randomly matched in pairs. Our model shows how two aspects of trust depend on players' network position: they are `trusting' if they are more likely to receive information about other players' types; and they are `trusted' if others can communicate about them, giving them strong incentives not to deviate. Lastly, in networks with private provision of public goods, we show that a `neutral' policy corresponds to a switch in the direction of the impact of income redistribution. Where redistribution is non- neutral, we can identify the welfare effects of transfers, including whether or not Pareto-improving transfers are possible. If not, we find the implicit welfare weights of the original equilibrium. In this setting, we also identify a transfer paradox, where, counter-intuitively, a transfer of wealth between economic agents can result in the giver being better off at the new Nash equilibrium, while the recipient is worse off.

First, the current study aims to provide companies with a comprehensive understanding on how consumers' ethical associations emerge, so that they will be better positioned to design social strategies aligned with consumers' expectations, and communicate their contribution to several social needs in an effective way. In this context, the objective is to empirically investigate the effect of varying geographic scope of companies' donations on consumers' perceptions of brand morality. The second objective is to examine the impact that a company's donation size has, on consumers' perceptions of brand morality, their willingness to pay a price premium, and their intentions to spread positive word-of-mouth. The third objective of this study is to complement extant research on the role that various individual differences paly on whether or how strongly consumers react to a company's philanthropic activity. Specifically, this research intends to investigate how people's ethnocentric tendency, perceived social control, attributions about company motives, and cause involvement, are likely to exert influence on their perceptions of brand morality, positive word-of-mouth intentions, and willingness to pay more. The final objective of this research is to add knowledge to the literature on potential outcomes of perceived brand morality, which has currently received little attention. More specifically, the question that will be addressed in this study is whether, and to what extent, consumers' positive word-of-mouth communication intentions, and willingness to pay more are affected by their perceptions of the brand's morality.

The primary aim of this thesis was to identify the mechanism under-pinning the word-predictability effect, while a secondary aim was to investigate whether words are processed in serial or parallel. In five experiments, adults’ eye-movements were monitored as they read sentences for comprehension on a computer screen. In Experiments 1 and 2, a critical target-word that was either of high- or low-frequency and either predictable or unpredictable was embedded in experimental sentences. The nature of the preview of the target word was manipulated such that it was either identical to the target or was misspelled (the misspelling was more severe in Experiment 2). Predictability effects were apparent in the identical preview condition in both experiments, whilst they were only apparent in the misspelled condition of Experiment 1. This outcome is compatible with early Guessing Game type models of reading which propose that readers predictions about up-coming words using contextual parafoveal information. When taken together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 also suggested that frequency and predictability exert additive effects on fixation durations.In Experiment 3, four levels of word-predictability were employed. The function relating word-predictability and word-processing time was strictly monotonic: word-processing time decreased as predictability increased. This outcome was consistent with a word-prediction account of predictability in which there is no penalty for incorrect guessing. Experiment 3 also showed that processing time on the pre-target word increased as the predictability of the up-coming increased. This outcome replicated an effect obtained by Kliegl, Nuthmann and Engbert (2006) who claim that it arises as a result of memory retrieval processes cued by prior sentence context Experiment 4 replicated the manipulation in Experiment 3 but included additional condition in which the preview of the target word was masked while in parafoveal vision, using a pixel scrambling technique. The target-predictability effect was again a graded one, and did not depend upon the availability of initial information, providing evidence against the word-prediction theory. Additionally, there was no pre-target predictability effect in the unmasked condition. There was a pre-target effect in an direction in the masked condition, although this appeared to be a consequence of the mask. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4, but replaced the masked condition with a non-predictable but semantically related word, and the results showed no pre-target effects at all. It was concluded that inverted pre-predictability effects are more likely to be related to higher-level sentential processing.

Pendant plusieurs décennies, la problématique du programme politique monarchique a monopolisé l’historiographie contemporaine des frontières naturelles de la France. En effet, des années 1815/1830 jusqu’à celles de l’entre-deux guerres, deux thèses se sont imposées tour à tour. La première, soutenue par une large partie des historiens du XIXe siècle, a défendu l’idée selon laquelle la monarchie de l’Ancien Régime se serait donnée pour but de rendre à la France les limites de l’ancienne Gaule. La seconde, soutenue essentiellement par Gaston Zeller, cherche à démontrer que tous ces historiens ont eu une lecture trop « téléologique » de l’histoire de France. Si la question de ce prétendu programme politique monarchique a occupé une place importante de l’historiographie contemporaine, elle n’est pourtant pas centrale et de nouvelles perspectives de recherche s’offrent aujourd’hui à l’historien, comme celle de la définition de la « frontière naturelle ». Bien que l’expression ne soit pas inconnue des documents de l’époque moderne, les occurrences restent rares, les contemporains de l’Ancien Régime usant de diverses formules synonymes renvoyant toutes à un concept métaphysique, religieux et philosophique centré sur l’ordre naturel : à ce titre, les frontières naturelles sont des limites physiques imposées aux peuples et aux États par Dieu dès la Création pour que chacun d’eux puisse vivre en parfaite harmonie et en paix perpétuelle. Les frontières naturelles de la France proviennent d’un univers mental et mythique. Mental, puisque la redécouverte des textes antiques achève de graver dans la mémoire collective la notion d’une Gaule-France. Mythique, en raison du fait que la France succède à la Gaule par le processus de réappropriation de l’espace antique romain par Clovis. Tout un mythe de construction territoriale de l’espace de l’État français se met en place, soutenu et encouragé par la monarchie, non seulement par le biais de l’éducation mais aussi par la diffusion de nombreux ouvrages imprimés avec le privilège du roi. Mais par le traité de Verdun de 843, le « mythe de la France éternelle » s’effondre, le partage de l’empire de Charlemagne amputant la France d’une partie de ses frontières originelles. Aussi le Grand Siècle, qui coïncide avec le réveil de la conscience nationale, voit-il l’émergence de grandes figures mythiques : à ce titre, certains rois et certains ministres deviennent, à l’époque moderne, des symboles de la restauration de l’ordre naturel qui se fonde sur les lois fondamentales du royaume de France. Cependant, si la monarchie ne s’est pas donné pour but de rendre à la France les limites de l’ancienne Gaule, les frontières naturelles ont parfois orienté la politique extérieure pour défendre les impératifs stratégiques en matière de sécurité du territoire : tel est le cas du traité des Pyrénées de 1659 et de celui d’Utrecht de 1713. Bien que ces traités posent un problème d’application par la suite, l’article 42 de la paix des Pyrénées, qui fixe la frontière entre la France et l’Espagne au niveau du Roussillon et de la Catalogne, va faire l’objet, tout au long du XVIIIe siècle, de revendications politiques de la part des communautés françaises résidant dans les parties centrale et occidentale de la chaîne montagneuse. Dès lors, les frontières naturelles deviennent un enjeu de lutte majeure entre le pouvoir monarchique et ses sujets frontaliers. / No abstract available

Perceptual processes take time to unfold. Whether a person is processing a visual scene, identifying the category an object belongs to, or recognizing a word, cognitive processes involving competition across time occur. These ongoing competitive processes have been ignored in studies of learning. However, some forms of learning suggest that learning could occur while competition is ongoing, resulting in the formation of mappings involving the competing representations. This dissertation uses word learning as a test case to determine whether such learning exists. In a series of five experiments, participants were taught words under different stimulus and task conditions to encourage or discourage learning during periods of lexical competition. These studies reveal a complex relationship between ongoing lexical competition processes and word learning. Specifically, in cases where learners rely on unsupervised associative learning, they present evidence of learning that is continuous in time, starting during periods of lexical competition and continuing throughout the course of its resolution. These studies offer insight into the nature of associative learning, into the forms of learning that occur when learning new words, and into the ways that task and stimulus structure impinge on how a learner forms new associations.