Ce mémoire est constitué de 3 parties.La NP-complétude de la satisfaction de combinaisons booléennes de contraintes de sous-arbres est démontrée dans l'article [Ven87] ; la partie I de ce mémoire étudie dans quelle mesure l'ajout de contraintes régulières laisse espérer conserver la complexité NP. Ce modèle étendu définit une nouvelle classe de langages dont l'expressivité est comparée à celle des Rigid Tree Automata [JKV11]. Puis un début de formalisation des t-dags est donné.Les patterns ont été étudiés, principalement du point de vue des contraintes sur les données qu'ils demandent. La partie II de ce mémoire les étudie plus finement, en mettant de côté les données. Les squelettes sont définis en tant qu'intermédiaire de calcul et le fait que leur syntaxe caractérise leur sémantique est démontré. Puis un lemme de pompage est donné dans un cas restreint, un autre dans le cas général est étudié et conjecturé. Ensuite des fragments de combinaisons booléennes de patterns sont comparés en expressivité pour terminer avec l'étude de la complexité des problèmes de model-checking, satisfaisabilité et DTD-satisfaisabilité sur les dits fragments.Le contenu de la partie III constitue l'article [FMS11], c'est la démonstration de la caractérisation des langages des automates fortement déterministes de niveau 2 par des systèmes d'équations récurrentes caténatives. Celle-ci utilise, entre autres, des techniques de réécriture, la notion d'inconnues non-réécrivables et les ordres noethériens. Cette caractérisation constitue le cas de base de la récurrence démontrée dans [Sén07]. / This thesis is in 3 parts.The NP-completeness of satisfiability of boolean combinations of subtree constraints is shown in the article [Ven87] ; in the part I of this thesis, we study whether adding regular contraints lets hope for keeping the same complexity. This extended model defines a new class of languages which is compared in expressivity to the Rigid Tree Automata [JKV11]. Then a begining of formalisation of the t-dags is developped.The patterns have been studied mainly from the point of view of the constraints they demand on the data. The part II of this thesis study them more finely, by putting aside the data. The skeletons are defined as calculus intermediate and the characterisation holding between their syntax and their semantics is shown. Then a pumping lemma is prooved in a restreict case, another one is conjectured in the most general case. Then fragments of boolean combinations of patterns are compared in expressivity, this parts ends with the study of complexity of model-checking, satisfiability and DTD-satisfiability on these fragments.The content of part III constitutes the article [FMS11], it is the demonstration of the characterisation of strongly-deterministic 2-level pushdown automata by recurrent catenative equation systems. This proof uses in particular, some rewriting techniques, unrewritable unknowns and noetherian orders. This characterisation provides the base case of the recurrence shown in [Sén07].

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:30:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marjory Fornazari.pdf: 1090580 bytes, checksum: ed0f64c103fdddbbaf0c7c84b8b5f47a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-04-26 / The present approach, based in a theory of language as constituted of the reality and the law as a text, achieves a semiotic and dialogic analysis of the rules related to the tax by the contribution for the social insurance; that is, analyses them under the three language s degrees syntactic, semantics and pragmatics and try to offer a theoric model of validity, legality and efficacy inside the Brazilian law system in order to accomplish a more strict control in the institution, inspection, tax revenue and management in the product of the tax revenue of the contribution for the social insurance / O presente trabalho, tomando por base a teoria da linguagem como constitutiva de realidade e do direito enquanto texto, realiza uma análise semiótica e dialógica das normas atinentes à tributação das contribuições previdenciárias; isto é, as analisa sob os três planos da linguagem sintática, semântica e pragmática e busca oferecer um modelo teórico de controle de validade, vigência e eficácia dentro do sistema jurídico brasileiro com o intuito de realizar um controle mais rígido na instituição, fiscalização, arrecadação e na gerência do produto da arrecadação das contribuições previdenciárias

Automatic translation has seen tremendous progress in recent years, mainly thanks to statistical methods applied to large parallel corpora. Transductions represent a principled approach to modeling translation, but existing transduction classes are either not expressive enough to capture structural regularities between natural languages or too complex to support efficient statistical induction on a large scale. A common approach is to severely prune search over a relatively unrestricted space of transduction grammars. These restrictions are often applied at different stages in a pipeline, with the obvious drawback of committing to irrevocable decisions that should not have been made. In this thesis we will instead restrict the space of transduction grammars to a space that is less expressive, but can be efficiently searched. First, the class of linear transductions is defined and characterized. They are generated by linear transduction grammars, which represent the natural bilingual case of linear grammars, as well as the natural linear case of inversion transduction grammars (and higher order syntax-directed transduction grammars). They are recognized by zipper finite-state transducers, which are equivalent to finite-state automata with four tapes. By allowing this extra dimensionality, linear transductions can represent alignments that finite-state transductions cannot, and by keeping the mechanism free of auxiliary storage, they become much more efficient than inversion transductions. Secondly, we present an algorithm for parsing with linear transduction grammars that allows pruning. The pruning scheme imposes no restrictions a priori, but guides the search to potentially interesting parts of the search space in an informed and dynamic way. Being able to parse efficiently allows learning of stochastic linear transduction grammars through expectation maximization. All the above work would be for naught if linear transductions were too poor a reflection of the actual transduction between natural languages. We test this empirically by building systems based on the alignments imposed by the learned grammars. The conclusion is that stochastic linear inversion transduction grammars learned from observed data stand up well to the state of the art.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The thesis deals with a metaphor and its place in philosophy. It engages in a concept of metaphor as a transference with a help of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Ricoeur, and others, and explores consequences which follow from such a concept in the perspective of truth conditions. Firstly, it focuses on an exploration of a nature of the metaphor with a relation to an earlier philosophical tradition. Secondly, it examines categories of similarity, reference and imagination as fundamental constituents of metaphorical utterances. Furthermore, it also re-evaluates the distinction between literal and figurative meaning and living and dead metaphors to uncover the metaphor as a creative principle of language, which is characteristic by its actualizing and approaching power.

This study explores the manner in which Anne Michaels uses figurative language, particularly metaphor, in her poetry and prose. In her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, and in certain of her poems, Michaels demonstrates the powers of language to destroy and to recuperate. For her, metaphor is not simply a literary device; it is an essential mechanism in the creation of an authentic story or poem. Moreover, in contrast to other figurative language such as euphemism, which she feels can be used to conceal the truth and make moral that which is immoral, metaphor in her view can be used to gain access to the truth and is therefore moral. Thus, as this study demonstrates, Michaels proposes as well as utilises the moral power of language. The ideas of four language theorists provide the basis of this study, and prove highly useful in application to Michaels’s work. With the aid of Certeau and Bourdieu, we examine Michaels’s participation in and literary presentation of the relationship of domination and subordination in which people seem to interact and which takes place partly through language. In the light of Ricoeur’s explication of the precise functions of metaphor, we discuss Fugitive Pieces as a novel whose engagement with the topic of the Holocaust in intensely emotive and figurative language makes it controversial in terms of what may or may not constitute the appropriate manner of Holocaust literary representation. Klemperer’s meticulous, first-hand study of the Nazis’ use of the German language during the period of the Third Reich proves illuminating in our exploration of the works of Michaels that feature themes of oppression and dispossession. In certain of her poems, Michaels stands in for real people and speaks in their voices. This is also a form of metaphor, this study suggests, as for the duration of each poem Michaels requires us to imagine that she is the real-life person who expresses him- or herself in the first person singular, which she patently is not. We could see this as appropriation and misrepresentation of those people’s lives and thoughts; however, with the aid of the notion of empathic identification we learn that Michaels’s approach is always empathic – she imaginatively places herself in various situations and people’s positions without ever losing her sense of individuality and separate identity, and her portrayal of their stories is always respectful and carefully considered. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / English / unrestricted

The field of statistical machine translation has made tremendous progress due to the rise of statistical methods, making it possible to obtain a translation system automatically from a bilingual collection of text. Some approaches do not even need any kind of linguistic annotation, and can infer translation rules from raw, unannotated data. However, most state-of-the art systems do linguistic structure little justice, and moreover many approaches that have been put forward use ad-hoc formalisms and algorithms. This inevitably leads to duplication of effort, and a separation between theoretical researchers and practitioners. In order to remedy the lack of motivation and rigor, the contributions of this dissertation are threefold: 1. After laying out the historical background and context, as well as the mathematical and linguistic foundations, a rigorous algebraic model of machine translation is put forward. We use regular tree grammars and bimorphisms as the backbone, introducing a modular architecture that allows different input and output formalisms. 2. The challenges of implementing this bimorphism-based model in a machine translation toolkit are then described, explaining in detail the algorithms used for the core components. 3. Finally, experiments where the toolkit is applied on real-world data and used for diagnostic purposes are described. We discuss how we use exact decoding to reason about search errors and model errors in a popular machine translation toolkit, and we compare output formalisms of different generative capacity.

The specification of a decoder, i.e., a program that translates sentences from one natural language into another, is an intricate process, driven by the application and lacking a canonical methodology. The practical nature of decoder development inhibits the transfer of knowledge between theory and application, which is unfortunate because many contemporary decoders are in fact related to formal-language theory. This thesis proposes an algebraic framework where a decoder is specified by an expression built from a fixed set of operations. As yet, this framework accommodates contemporary syntax-based decoders, it spans two levels of abstraction, and, primarily, it encourages mutual stimulation between the theory of weighted tree automata and the application.

Le thème central de la présente thèse est le contenu sémantique des quantificateurs logiques. Dans leur forme la plus simple, les quantificateurs permettent d’établir l’existence, ou la non-existence, d’individus répondant à une propriété. En tant que tels, ils incarnent la richesse et la complexité de la logique du premier ordre, par delà la logique propositionnelle. Nous contribuons à l’analyse sémantique des quantificateurs, du point de vue de la théorie de la dualité, dans trois domaines différents des mathématiques et de l’informatique théorique. D’une part, dans la théorie des langages formels à travers la logique sur les mots. D’autre part, dans la logique intuitionniste propositionnelle et dans l’étude de l’interpolation uniforme. Enfin, dans la topologie catégorique et dans la sémantique catégorique de la logique du premier ordre. / The unifying theme of the thesis is the semantic meaning of logical quantifiers. In their basic form quantifiers allow to state theexistence, or non-existence, of individuals satisfying a property. As such, they encode the richness and the complexity of predicate logic, as opposed to propositional logic. We contribute to the semantic understanding of quantifiers, from the viewpoint of duality theory, in three different areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science. First, in formal language theory through the syntactic approach provided by logic on words. Second, in intuitionistic propositional logic and in the study of uniform interpolation. Third, in categorical topology and categorical semantics for predicate logic.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:20:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Christine Mendonca.pdf: 2253283 bytes, checksum: 178d246138f7a4db20c37d186b09aa66 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-11-07 / The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to analyze the arguments presented by the Brazilian Supreme Court s decisions on tax matters so as to identify the ways in which that constitutional agency has contributed to maintain and protect the Rule of law. Theoretical tools provided by the logical-semantic constructivist method and the Luhmanian systems theory help understand the range and importance of the legal interpretation of the law, and, based on that, help verify how to process interferences coming from other social subsystems. The process of interpretation developed by the law s observer-interpreter will be registered in the juridical argumentation by him presented. And, in the case of the Supreme Court, it will be part of the reasoning supporting the Ministers votes. The analysis of those arguments is a fundamental tool to investigate the occurrence of corruption between inter-systemic codes that undermines the maintenance of the Rule of law / A presente tese de doutorado tem por objetivo analisar a argumentação nas decisões judiciais em matéria tributária produzidas pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal de modo a identificar de que forma esse órgão constitucional está contribuindo para a manutenção do Estado de Direito. A partir dos instrumentos teóricos fornecidos pelo método construtivista lógico-semântico e pela teoria sistêmica luhmaniana compreende-se a extensão e a importância da interpretação jurídica do direito. Verifica-se, a partir dela, como devem ser processados os ruídos provenientes de outros subsistemas sociais. O processo de interpretação realizado pelo observadorintérprete do direito será registrado na argumentação jurídica por ele apresentada. E, no caso do Supremo, comporá a fundamentação dos votos dos Ministros. A análise desses argumentos é fundamental para investigar a ocorrência de corrupção entre os códigos intersistêmicos que tanto fragiliza a manutenção do Estado de Direito