Spiders weave intricate webs for catching prey, providing shelter and setting mating rituals; arguably the most notable of these creations is the orb web. In this thesis we model the essential vibrations of orb webs by first considering a spider web as a multilinked structure of elastic strings. We then solve the associated eigenvalue problem using a Chebyshev pseudospectral collocation method to discretize the system. This thesis first examines the vibrations of webs with uniform material properties throughout, then investigates the effects of using biologically realistic material parameters for silks within a single web. Understanding how spiders detect and react to the vibrations produced by their webs is of interest for both biological and engineering applications. / Master of Science / Spiders weave intricate webs for catching prey, providing shelter, and setting mating rituals; arguably the most notable of these creations is the orb web. In this thesis we model the essential vibrations of orb webs by first considering a spider web as a multilinked structure of elastic strings. Using numerical methods, we approximate the fundamental frequencies of the web. This thesis first examines the vibrations of webs with uniform material properties throughout, then investigates the effects of biologically realistic parameters of the varying material properties for silks within a single web. Understanding how spiders detect and react to the vibrations produced by their webs is of interest for both biological and engineering applications.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 207 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-179).

Delivering the right information to the user is fundamental in information retrieval system. Many traditional information retrieval models assume word independence and view a document as bag-of-words, however getting the right information requires a deep understanding of the content of the document and the relationships that exist between words in the text. This study focuses on developing two new document ranking techniques, which are based on a lexical cohesive relationship of collocation. Collocation relationship is a semantic relationship that exists between words that co-occur in the same lexical environment. Two types of collocation relationship have been considered; collocation in the same grammatical structure (such as a sentence), and collocation in the same semantic structure where query terms occur in different sentences but they co-occur with the same words. In the first technique, we only considered the first type of collocation to calculate the document score; where the positional frequency of query terms co-occurrence have been used to identify collocation relationship between query terms and calculating query term’s weight. In the second technique, both types of collocation have been considered; where the co-occurrence frequency distribution within a predefined window has been used to determine query terms collocations and computing query term’s weight. Evaluation of the proposed techniques show performance gain in some of the collocations over the chosen baseline runs.

Delivering the right information to the user is fundamental in information retrieval system. Many traditional information retrieval models assume word independence and view a document as bag-of-words, however getting the right information requires a deep understanding of the content of the document and the relationships that exist between words in the text. This study focuses on developing two new document ranking techniques, which are based on a lexical cohesive relationship of collocation. Collocation relationship is a semantic relationship that exists between words that co-occur in the same lexical environment. Two types of collocation relationship have been considered; collocation in the same grammatical structure (such as a sentence), and collocation in the same semantic structure where query terms occur in different sentences but they co-occur with the same words. In the first technique, we only considered the first type of collocation to calculate the document score; where the positional frequency of query terms co-occurrence have been used to identify collocation relationship between query terms and calculating query term’s weight. In the second technique, both types of collocation have been considered; where the co-occurrence frequency distribution within a predefined window has been used to determine query terms collocations and computing query term’s weight. Evaluation of the proposed techniques show performance gain in some of the collocations over the chosen baseline runs.

Šiame darbe tirtos šešiažodės kolokacijos, kuriose yra bent vienas daiktavardis. Tyrimas atlikas laikantis nuomonės, kad kolokacija – dažnai kartu einančių žodžių junginys, sudarytas bent iš vieno kaitomo žodžio ir turintis bendrą reikšmę. Tirtos kolokacijos automatiškai buvo išrinktos iš Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstyno naudojant statistinį Gravity Count metodą. Šis darbas skirtas tam, kad būtų išsamiau išanalizuotos lietuvių kalbos kolokacijos, taigi darbo tikslas – nustatyti šešiažodžių daiktavardinių kolokacijų gramatinius ir semantinius modelius bei galimas jų sąsajas. Kolokacijos buvo atrinktos iš Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstyno statistiniu būdu. Darbo šaltinį sudaro daugiau nei 100 mln. žodžių. Šešiažodės kolokacijos, lyginant su iš dviejų, trijų, keturių žodžių sudarytomis kolokacijomis, yra gana retos, nes minėtų tipų kolokacijos sudaro 85 proc. visų daiktavardinių kolokacijų. Nustatyta, kad kuo ilgesnė frazė, tuo ji rečiau vartojama tekstyne. Šiame darbe kolokacijos analizuotos gramatiniu ir semantiniu aspektais. Analizuojant gramatiškai, kolokacijos suskirstytos į šešis tipus, pagal tai, kiek jose vartojama daiktavardžių. Tuos tipus sudaro kolokacijos, kuriose pavartotas vienas, du, trys, keturi, penki arba šeši daiktavardžiai. Kiekvienas šis tipas buvo tirtas išsamiau. Kolokacijos buvo anotuotos su automatinės morfologinės analizės programa. Tokiu būdu buvo nustatyti visi galimi gramatiniai kolokacijų modeliai. Jų rasta 824. Daugiausiai gramatinių modelių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The main purpose of this research was to set grammatical and semantic typology of six-word – length Lithuanian collocations. Collocations were extracted automatically from the „Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language“ using statistical Gravity Counts method. The Source of this study concist of 100 million words. Six–words–length collocations are very rare, two, three, four–length-words collocations make 85% of all noun collocations. It was notified that as the phrase is longer, as more seldom it is used in Corpora. In this study collocations were researched grammatically and semantically. Grammatically researhed collocations were devided into six types, accourding to the number of nouns used in it. Those types are made of collocations which have one, two, three, four, five, six nouns. All those types were researched more deeply. Collocations were annotated using automatical marphology analysis program. In this way all possible grammatical collocation models concist of three nouns collocations – 255 models (31.33 %). Different collocations number is not equal to different grammatical models. 1560 different collocations were found. The most of different collocations have four nouns – 459 which makes 1/3 of all collocations. Despite the variaty of grammatical models, the models which are made of single collocations are the most frequent. The more noun collocation type has, the less single grammatical models can be made, for example, single one noun collocations make... [to full text]

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, August, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-42). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 58-64).

Thesis (Ph. D.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1998. / Restricted until June 1999. Bibliography: leaves 150-155.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 58-64). Also available in print.