This research study examines the relationship between conjunctive cohesion and relational coherence in students' narrative and expository compositions and writing quality (here defined in terms of teachers' ratings). Altogether 64 compositions were analysed using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory and Crombie's (1985) set of interpropositional relations. The results of the study show that both conjunctive cohesion density and relational coherence, as defined by the density of contiguous functional relations, affect perceptions of writing quality. Writers of low-rated narrative and low-rated expository compositions not only used a more limited range of conjunctives but their compositions manifested less cohesion density and contiguous relation density than writers of high-rated narrative and expository compositions did. / Linguistics / M. A. (Applied Linguistics)

In South Africa students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds enrol at institutions of higher learning underprepared for the academic work expected of them. One reason for this is that English in South Africa is primarily an urban language and both Black children and teachers, especially in rural areas, lack sufficient exposure to it (Lemmer 1995) and at tertiary institutions students are expected to communicate efficiently in the language of instruction. The real-world problem at issue is ultimately the need for these students studying through the medium of English to develop their ability to participate actively in tutorials to improve both their academic understanding and their spoken discourse competence, which includes the ‘highly complex task of participating in talk-in-interaction’ (Dalton-Puffer 2007:280). Underlying the present study, then, is the conviction that through frequent interaction in the language of instruction, students will not only gain competence in speaking skills, but also deepen and expand their knowledge of their subject areas. This conviction led to the introduction of tutorials on a trial basis in my department and the study sought to develop a framework for analysing patterns of interaction in the tutorials that would also address the question of how the quality of such patterns might be assessed. The main construct investigated was ‘participation effectiveness’ (the quantity of speaker discourse acts and turns and speaker initiative at discourse act and turn-taking levels) and the overall findings indicated that third-year students participated more effectively than first-years; females performed better than males; and males in male-led tutorials used more discourse acts than females; while females in female-led tutorials did better than males. The analyses of effects of tutor discourse behaviour on student participation revealed that the types of questions tutors used and how they were combined were strong determinants of students' participation effectiveness. Although the approach of the study is essentially quantitative, the operationalisation of this main construct's two key components, namely 'participation' and 'initiative', forms a basis for also deriving more qualitative insights into this academically very important genre of spoken discourse. / Linguistics / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

Optimal operation of reservoir systems is necessary for better utilizing the limited water resources and to justify the high capital investments associated with reservoir projects. However, finding optimal policies for real-life problems of reservoir systems operation (RSO) is a challenging task as the available analytical methods can not handle the arbitrary functions of the problem and almost all methods employed are numerical or iterative type that are computer dependent. Since the computer resources in terms of memory and CPU time are limited, a limit exists for the size of the problem, in terms of arithmetic and memory involved, that can be handled. This limit is approached quickly as the dimension and the nonlinearity of the problem increases. In encountering the complex aspects of the problem all the traditionally employed methods have their own drawbacks. Linear programming (LP), though very efficient in dealing with linear functions, can not handle nonlinear functions which is the case mostly in real-life problems. Attempting to approximate nonlinear functions to linear ones results in the problem size growing enormously. Dynamic programming (DP), though suitable for most of the RSO problems, requires exponentially increasing computer resources as the dimension of the problem increases and at present many high dimensional real-life problems can not be solved using DP. Nonlinear programming (NLP) methods are not known to be efficient in RSO problems due to slow rate of convergence and inability to handle stochastic problems. Simulation methods can, practically, explore only a small portion of the search region. Many simplifications in formulations and adoption of approximate methods in literature still fall short in addressing the most critical aspects, namely multidimensionality, stochasticity, and additional complexity in conjunctive operation, of the problem. As the problem complexity increases and the possibility of arriving at the solution recedes, a near optimal solution with the best use of computational resources can be very valuable. In this context, genetic algorithms (GA) can be a promising technique which is believed to have an advantage in terms of efficient use of computer resources. GA is a random search method which find, in general, near optimal solutions using evolutionary mechanism of natural selection and natural genetics. When a pool of feasible solutions, represented in a coded form, are given fitness according to a objective function and explored by genetic operators for obtaining new pools of solutions, then the ensuing trajectories of solutions come closer and closer to the optimal solution which has the greatest fitness associated with it. GA can be applied to arbitrary functions and is not excessively sensitive to the dimension of the problem. Though in general GA finds only the near optimal solutions trapping in local optima is not a serious problem due to global look and random search. Since GA is not fully explored for RSO problems two such problems are selected here to study the usefulness and efficiency of GA in obtaining near optimal solutions. One problem is conjunctive operation of a system consisting of a surface reservoir and an aquifer, taken from the literature for which deterministic and stochastic models are solved. Another problem is real-time operation of a multipurpose reservoir, operated for irrigation (primary purpose) and hydropower production, which is in the form of a case study. The conjunctive operation problem consists of determining optimal policy for a combined system of a surface reservoir and an aquifer. The surface reservoir releases water to an exclusive area for irrigation and to a recharge facility from which it reaches the aquifer in the following period. Another exclusive area is irrigated by water pumped from the aquifer. The objective is to maximize the total benefit from the two irrigated areas. The inflow to the surface reservoir is treated as constant in deterministic model and taken at 6 different classes in stochastic model. The hydrological interactions between aquifer and reservoir are described using a lumped parameter model in which the average aquifer water table is arrived at based on the quantity of water in the aquifer, and local drawdown in pumping well is neglected. In order to evaluate the GA solution both deterministic and stochastic models are solved using DP and stochastic DP (SDP) techniques respectively. In the deterministic model, steady state (SS) cyclic (repetitive) solution is identified in DP as well as in GA. It is shown that the benefit from GA solution converges to as near as 95% of the benefit from exact DP solution at a highly discounted CPU time. In the stochastic model, the steady state solution obtained with SDP consists of converged first stage decisions, which took a 8-stage horizon, for any combination of components of the system state. The GA solution is obtained after simplifying the model to reduce the number of decision variables. Unlike SDP policy which gives decisions considering the state of the system in terms of storages, at reservoir, aquifer, and recharge facility, and previous inflow at the beginning of that period, GA gives decisions for each period of the horizon considering only the past inflow state of the period. In arriving at these decisions the effect of neglected state information is approximately reflected in the decisions by the process of refinement of the decisions, to conform to feasibility of storages in reservoir and aquifer, carried out in a simplified simulation process. Moreover, the validity of the solution is confirmed by simulating the operation with all possible inflow sequences for which the 8-stages benefit converged up to 90 % of the optimum. However, since 8 stages are required for convergence to SS, a 16-stage process is required for GA method in which the first 8 stages policy is valid. Results show that GA convergence to the optimum is satisfactory, justifying the approximations, with significant savings in CPU time. For real-time operation of a multipurpose reservoir, a rule curve (RC) based monthly operation is formulated and applied on a real-life problem involving releases for irrigation as well as power production. The RC operation is based on the target storages that have to be maintained, at each season of the year, in the reservoir during normal hydrological conditions. Exceptions to target storages are allowed when the demands have to be met or for conserving water during the periods of high inflows. The reservoir in the case study supplies water to irrigation fields through two canals where a set of turbines each at the canal heads generate hydropower. A third set of turbines operate on the river bed with the water let out downstream from the dam. The problem consists of determining the the RC target storages that facilitate maximum power production while meeting the irrigation demands up to a given reliability level. The RC target storages are considered at three different levels, corresponding to dry, normal, and wet conditions, according to the system state in terms of actual (beginning of period) storage of the reservoir. That is, if the actual beginning storage of the reservoir is less than some coefficient, dry-coe, times the normal target storage the target for the end of the period storage is taken at the dry storage target (of the three sets of storages). Similarly the wet level is taken for the end of the period target if the actual beginning storage is greater than some coefficient, wet-coe, times the normal storage. For other conditions the target is the normal storage level. The dry-coe and wet-coe parameters are obtained by trial and error analysis working on a small sequence of inflows. The three sets of targets are obtained from optimization over a 1000 year generated inflow sequence. With deterministic DP solutions, for small sequences of inflows, the optimization capability of GA-RC approach, in terms of objective function convergence, and generalization or robustness capability of GA-RC approach, for which the GA-RC benefit is obtained by simulating the reservoir operation using the previously obtained GA-RC solution, are evaluated. In both the cases GA-RC approach proves to be promising. Finally a 15 year real-time simulation of the reservoir is carried out using historical inflows and demands and the comparison with the historical operation shows significant improvement in benefit, i.e. power produced, without compromising irrigation demands throughout the simulation period.

This research study examines the relationship between conjunctive cohesion and relational coherence in students' narrative and expository compositions and writing quality (here defined in terms of teachers' ratings). Altogether 64 compositions were analysed using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory and Crombie's (1985) set of interpropositional relations. The results of the study show that both conjunctive cohesion density and relational coherence, as defined by the density of contiguous functional relations, affect perceptions of writing quality. Writers of low-rated narrative and low-rated expository compositions not only used a more limited range of conjunctives but their compositions manifested less cohesion density and contiguous relation density than writers of high-rated narrative and expository compositions did. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M. A. (Applied Linguistics)

In South Africa students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds enrol at institutions of higher learning underprepared for the academic work expected of them. One reason for this is that English in South Africa is primarily an urban language and both Black children and teachers, especially in rural areas, lack sufficient exposure to it (Lemmer 1995) and at tertiary institutions students are expected to communicate efficiently in the language of instruction. The real-world problem at issue is ultimately the need for these students studying through the medium of English to develop their ability to participate actively in tutorials to improve both their academic understanding and their spoken discourse competence, which includes the ‘highly complex task of participating in talk-in-interaction’ (Dalton-Puffer 2007:280). Underlying the present study, then, is the conviction that through frequent interaction in the language of instruction, students will not only gain competence in speaking skills, but also deepen and expand their knowledge of their subject areas. This conviction led to the introduction of tutorials on a trial basis in my department and the study sought to develop a framework for analysing patterns of interaction in the tutorials that would also address the question of how the quality of such patterns might be assessed. The main construct investigated was ‘participation effectiveness’ (the quantity of speaker discourse acts and turns and speaker initiative at discourse act and turn-taking levels) and the overall findings indicated that third-year students participated more effectively than first-years; females performed better than males; and males in male-led tutorials used more discourse acts than females; while females in female-led tutorials did better than males. The analyses of effects of tutor discourse behaviour on student participation revealed that the types of questions tutors used and how they were combined were strong determinants of students' participation effectiveness. Although the approach of the study is essentially quantitative, the operationalisation of this main construct's two key components, namely 'participation' and 'initiative', forms a basis for also deriving more qualitative insights into this academically very important genre of spoken discourse. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

This work focuses on proposition of transfer of the expressions entered in the C pro­gramming language into DIMACS format and creation of program in programming language C++ making this transfer. This work contains a description of the C pro­gramming language and its operators. It also con­tains a description of the conjunctive normal form and a descri­ption of the DIMACS format. Following is a proposal for a program for the transfer of expression in the C programming language to the DIMACS format and description of reali­zation of program performing this transfer.

In Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA), user queries are evaluated over a set of facts under the open world assumption, while taking into account background knowledge given in the form of a Description Logic (DL) ontology. Motivated by situation awareness applications, temporal conjunctive queries (TCQs) have recently been proposed as a useful extension of traditional OBDA to support the processing of temporal information. This paper extends the existing complexity analysis of TCQ entailment to very expressive DLs underlying the OWL 2 standard, and in contrast to previous work also allows for queries containing transitive roles. / This is an extended version of the paper “Temporal Conjunctive Queries in Expressive Description Logics with Transitive Roles”, published in the Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI’15).

Dans cette thèse nous nous sommes intéressés à l’extension du problème job-shop en ajoutant la contrainte du transport des jobs entre les différentes machines. Dans cette étude nous avons retenu l’existence de deux types de robots, les robots de capacité de chargement unitaire (capacité=1 veut dire qu’un robot ne peut transporter qu’un seul job à la fois) et les robots de capacité de chargement non unitaire (capacité>1 veut dire qu’un robot peut transporter plusieurs job à la fois). Nous avons traité cette extension en deux étapes. Ainsi, la première étape est consacrée au problème du job-shop avec plusieurs robots de capacité de chargement unitaire et en seconde étape en ajoutant la capacité de chargement non unitaire aux robots. Pour les deux problèmes étudiés nous avons proposé :• Une modélisation linéaire ;• Une modélisation sous forme de graphe disjonctif ;• Plusieurs heuristiques de construction de solutions ;• Plusieurs recherches locales qui améliorent les solutions obtenues ;• Utilisation des algorithmes génétiques / mémétiques comme schéma global d’optimisation ;• De nouveaux benchmarks, des résultats de test de nos approches sur nos benchmarks et ceux de la littérature et ces résultats sont commentés et comparés à ceux de la littérature. Les résultats obtenus montrent la pertinence de notre modélisation ainsi que sa qualité. / In this thesis we are interested in the extension of the job-shop problem by adding the constraint of transport of jobs between different machines. In this study we used two types of robots, robots with unary loading capacity (capacity =1 means that each robot can carry only one job at a time,) and robots with non unary loading capacities (robot with capacity >1 can carry more than one job at time). Thus, the first step is devoted to the problem of job-shop with several robots with unary loading capacity. In the second step we extend the problem by adding the non-unary loading capacities to the robots. For both problems studied we have proposed :• A linear modeling ;• A Disjunctive graph Model ;• Several constructive heuristics ;• Several local searches methods that improve the obtained solutions ;• Use of genetic / memetic algorithms as a global optimization schema ;• New benchmarks, test results of our approaches on our benchmarks and those present in the literature and these results are commented and compared with those of literature. The results show the relevance of our model and its quality.

Classical planning is the problem of nding a sequence of actions that take an agent from an initial state to a desired goal situation, assuming deter- ministic outcomes for actions and perfect information. Satis cing planning seeks to quickly nd low-cost solutions with no guarantees of optimality. The most e ective approach for satis cing planning has proved to be heuristic search using non-admissible heuristics. In this thesis, we introduce several such heuristics that are able to take into account costs on actions, and there- fore try to minimize the more general metric of cost, rather than length, of plans, and investigate their properties and performance. In addition, we show how the problem of planning with soft goals can be compiled into a classical planning problem with costs, a setting in which cost-sensitive heuristics such as those presented here are essential. / La plani caci on cl asica es el problema que consiste en hallar una secuencia de acciones que lleven a un agente desde un estado inicial a un objetivo, asum- iendo resultados determin sticos e informaci on completa. La plani caci on \satis cing" busca encontrar una soluci on de bajo coste, sin garant as de op- timalidad. La b usqueda heur stica guiada por heur sticas no admisibles es el enfoque que ha tenido mas exito. Esta tesis presenta varias heur sticas de ese g enero que consideran costes en las acciones, y por lo tanto encuentran soluciones que minimizan el coste, en lugar de la longitud del plan. Adem as, demostramos que el problema de plani caci on con \soft goals", u objetivos opcionales, se puede reducir a un problema de plani caci on clasica con costes en las acciones, escenario en el que heur sticas sensibles a costes, tal como las aqu presentadas, son esenciales.