Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Department: Computer Science.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Vita. / Bibliography: p. 254-259. / by Asher Reuveni. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 55-57. / by Man-Kam Yip. / M.S.

Thesis. 1978. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 156-159. / M.S.

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1979. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND SCIENCE. / Bibliography: leaves 72-73. / by Owen Theodore Anderson. / B.S.

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

A picture paints a thousand words, or so we are told. But how many words does it take to paint a picture? And how can words create pictures in the first place? In this thesis we examine a new theory of linguistic meaning -- where the meaning of words and sentences is determined by the scenes they evoke. We describe how descriptive text is parsed and semantically interpreted and how the semantic interpretation is then depicted as a rendered 3D scene. In doing so, we describe WordsEye, our text-to-scene system, and touch upon many fascinating issues of lexical semantics, knowledge representation, and what we call "graphical semantics." We introduce the notion of vignettes as a way to bridge between function and form, between the semantics of language and the grounded semantics of 3D scenes. And we describe how VigNet, our lexical semantic and graphical knowledge base, mediates the whole process. In the second part of this thesis, we describe four different ways WordsEye has been tested. We first discuss an evaluation of the system in an educational environment where WordsEye was shown to significantly improve literacy skills for sixth grade students versus a control group. We then compare WordsEye with Google Image Search on "realistic" and "imaginative" sentences in order to evaluate its performance on a sentence-by-sentence level and test its potential as a way to augment existing image search tools. Thirdly, we describe what we have learned in testing WordsEye as an online 3D authoring system where it has attracted 20,000 real-world users who have performed almost one million scene depictions. Finally, we describe tests of WordsEye as an elicitation tool for field linguists studying endangered languages. We then sum up by presenting a roadmap for enhancing the capabilities of the system and identifying key opportunities and issues to be addressed.

Este trabalho apresenta uma aplicação da tecnologia adaptativa, de forma viável e prática, ao processo de tomada de decisão encontrado nas organizações e nos sistemas de apoio à decisão. Para alcançar esse fim, é proposto um ambiente para desenvolvimento de aplicações baseado em tabelas de decisão adaptativas. Desta forma um usuário leigo nos conceitos de computação, mas que tenha conhecimento do processo de decisão e do uso de tabelas de decisão, possa compreender, validar, modificar e mesmo desenvolver programas nesta ferramenta. Os principais resultados obtidos neste estudo foram a definição e construção de dispositivos adaptativos, em especial, as tabelas de decisão adaptativas, em linguagem funcional; e a definição de uma linguagem de entrada para a ferramenta proposta, classificada como uma linguagem de domínio específico. / This work presents an application of adaptive technology to the decision making process applied in the business management and Decision Support Systems. To accomplish this goal, a development environment based on adaptive decision tables is proposed. This way, a user who is not familiar to the computing concepts, but that does know the decision making process and the use of decision tables, can understand, change and even develop applications in this environment. The main results obtained from this study were the implementation of adaptive devices, specifically the adaptive decision tables, in functional languages, and the definition of an input language to the development environment proposed, that can be classified as a domain specific language.