No description available.

No description available.

Information stored by managed organizations in free text documents, databases, and engineered knowledge repositories can often be processed as networks of conceptual nodes and relational links (concept graphs). However, these models tend to be informal as related to new or multi-source tasks. This work contributes to the understanding of techniques for matching knowledge elements: in informal node-link knowledge representations, drawn from existing data resources, to support user-guided analysis. Its guiding focus is the creation of tools that compare, retrieve, and merge existing information resources.Three essays explore important algorithmic and heuristic elements needed to leverage concept graphs in real-world applications. Section 2 documents an algorithm which identifies likely matches between student and instructor concept maps aiming to support semi-automatic matching and scoring for both classroom and unsupervised environments. The knowledge-anchoring, similarity flooding algorithm significantly improves on term-based matching by leveraging map structure and also has potential as a methodology for combining other informal, human-created knowledge representations. Section 3 describes a decompositional tagging approach to organizing (aggregating) automatically extracted biomedical pathway relations. We propose a five-level aggregation strategy for extracted relations and measure the effectiveness of the BioAggregate tagger in preparing extracted information for analysis and visualization. Section 4 evaluates an importance flooding algorithm designed to assist law enforcement investigators in identifying useful investigational leads. While association networks have a long history as an investigational tool, more systematic processes are needed to guide development of high volume cross-jurisdictional data sharing initiatives. We test path-based selection heuristics and importance flooding to improve on traditional association-closeness methodologies.Together, these essays demonstrate how structural and semantic information can be processed in parallel to effectively leverage ambiguous network representations of data. Also, they show that real applications can be addressed by processing available data using an informal concept graph paradigm. This approach and these techniques are potentially useful for workflow systems, business intelligence analysis, and other knowledge management applications where information can be represented in an informal conceptual network and that information needs to be analyzed and converted into actionable, communicable human knowledge.

This thesis presents an analysis of a learning situation of positive and negative integers. It is considered as a case study within the more general context of the development of school learning analysis tools based on cognitive psychology. An analysis of error patterns obtained from a group of 55 secondary I level students has shown: (1) that the acquisition of the integer concept can imply several levels of integration of the sign and the numerical aspect; (2) that the set of all possible addition and subtraction items can be classified according to their possibility of being related to previous numerical knowledge; (3) that errors in addition and subtraction can be explained by either the utilisation of previous knowledge that was contrary to what was taught, or by systematic transformations of the procedures that were taught, or by problems with the integer concept. The thesis ends with a discussion of the properties of an information processing system that could generate the observed performances, and of the pedagogical implications of that kind of analysis.

No description available.

No description available.

The development of numerical skills in children with Down syndrome is an area of research that has been neglected in the literature despite overwhelming evidence of its importance, both pedagogically, and for everyday functioning. The present study examines two important sub-skills of numeracy. Twelve boys with Down syndrome were compared to 24 typically developing boys (matched on verbal mental age and on chronological age) on two novel, computerized tasks designed to measure sequential processing and counting. Boys with Down syndrome performed comparably to both groups of typically matched controls on the sequential task. However, differences emerged when boys with Down syndrome were required to point and attribute meaning to each step on the counting task. These findings offer novel insights into the development of number skills and provide important data that can aid in the creation of syndrome-specific education strategies to maximize the potential of children with Down syndrome.

Kalbos pasaulėvaizdis laikomas ne tikrovės atspindžiu kalboje, bet jos interpretacija. Kalba nesukuria naujos realybės, ji parodo, kaip žiūrima į pasaulį ir ką jame galima pamatyti. Kalbos pasaulėvaizdis formuojasi kalbėtojams aktyviai pažįstant pasaulį, todėl skirtingų kalbų pasaulio interpretacijos skiriasi. Darbo objektas – konceptas, lietuvių kalboje reprezentuojamas žodžiu pyktis, anglų – anger. Remiamasi antropocentrinės paradigmos idėjomis – į kalbą žvelgiama kaip į kultūros fenomeną. Žodžio reikšmė laikoma mažiausiu koncepto aktualizacijos laipsniu. Emocinių būsenų ypatybės siejamos su atitinkamomis konceptualiosiomis metaforomis, kurių esmė – santykis tarp dviejų sričių: ištakų (angl. source domain) ir tikslo (angl. target domain). Perkeliant vienos srities žinias į kitą sritį, remiamasi tik tomis konkretaus objekto savybėmis, kurios žmogui yra pažįstamos iš jo fizinės patirties. Kitas metaforų šaltinis yra kultūrinė patirtis. Praktinėje dalyje yra nagrinėjamos dviejų indoeuropiečių kalbų – anglų ir lietuvių – konceptualiosios metaforos, kurių tikslo sritis yra pyktis (angl. anger) bei šio koncepto vertimo ypatumai. Sugretinus šių kalbų konceptualiąsias metaforas, rasta panašumų ir skirtumų. Panašumai liudija anglų ir lietuvių kalbų vartotojams būdingą panašų pasaulio suvokimą. Pyktis siejamas su skysčiu, ugnimi, pavojingu gyvūnu, t.t. Pykčio konceptas dažniausiai reiškia neigiamą vertinimą, keliamą pavojų emocijos patyrėjui, jos stiprumą, jausmų kontrolės... [to full text]

No description available.

No description available.