Thesis (M.S.) in Spatial Information Science and Engineering--University of Maine, 2009. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-114).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2000. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 132 p. : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-132).

O interesse da psicologia experimental pelo estudo da emoção e sua relação com a cognição foi, até pouco tempo, deixado em segundo plano. Recentemente, com o avanço da neurociência cognitiva, as pesquisas começaram a enfatizar, também, a investigação da relação cognição-emoção, gerando vários modelos explicativos. Mais recentemente, os teóricos voltaram sua atenção para a avaliação cognitiva, em estados de humor negativos como a depressão e ansiedade. Este trabalho investigou, através de experimentos controlados, as três grandes hipóteses que existem sobre o processamento de informação na ansiedade. O estudo foi realizado com 50 estudantes universitários de ambos os sexos. Foi utilizado o software Super Lab®, folhas de registro para avaliação das respostas e a escala Beck para a mensuração do nível de ansiedade. O primeiro experimento avaliou o impacto que estímulos semânticos ambíguos têm no tipo de escolha e na tomada de decisão; os resultados, calculados pela ANOVA, indicaram que os participantes tendem a escolher mais significados negativos, frente a uma escolha ambígua, se comparada às neutras F(1, 49) =107,08, p0,0001. Além disso, os participantes mais ansiosos diferem em média dos menos ansiosos no tempo que levam para se decidirem F(1, 49) =4689, p=0,033. O segundo experimento utilizou uma versão original da tarefa de Stroop emocional; em uma delas, avaliamos o papel que a classe gramatical tinha na focalização atencional dos participantes e, para tanto, utilizamos verbos, adjetivos e substantivos, neutros e ameaçadores, em slides individuais. Uma análise posthoc de Bonferroni indicou que os adjetivos ameaçadores são os que mais elevam a atenção dos participantes com p0,05. Pudemos perceber, também, que a parcela mais ansiosa da amostra leva, em média, mais tempo para nomear as cores das palavras ameaçadoras, de um modo geral F(1, 99) =6,656, p=0,011, o que indica uma grande hiper-vigilância para ameaça em geral. Na segunda tarefa de stroop, queríamos avaliar se palavras abstratas e concretas, neutras e ameaçadoras, eram processadas de um modo diferente. Os resultados indicaram que não, porém os participantes mais ansiosos demonstraram maior seletividade atencional, quando as palavras ameaçadoras foram tomadas como um todo F(1, 99) = 4270, p=0,041, o que pode indicar uma análise primitiva e pouco discriminada. No terceiro experimento, utilizamos listas de palavras com sete itens, onde o item central podia ser neutro ou ameaçador, sendo que, posteriormente, o participante evocava as palavras de que se lembrava. Os resultados indicaram que os participantes se lembraram igualmente bem das palavras iniciais e finais em ambas as listas; contudo, quando a palavra central era negativa, a lembrança foi significativamente mais elevada F(1, 49) = 25, 579, p0,0001, o que pode indicar que temos a tendência a memorizar melhor estímulos negativos. Em conjunto, nossos dados demonstram que os vieses cognitivos são características encontradas em todos os níveis de ansiedade, o que indica que eles devem fazer parte de processamento de informação normal, em situações de perigo. As diferenças encontradas nos participantes mais ansiosos indicam uma maior utilização de recursos executivos, em etapas posteriores de processamento. As implicações clínicas e experimentais são discutidas / The interest of experimental psychology for the study of emotions and its relation with the cognition was, until some time ago, left in second plain. Recently, with the advance of the cognitive neuroscience, the research had started to emphasize also the inquiry of the relation cognition-emotion, generating some clarifying models. More recently, the theoreticians had come back their attention toward the cognitive evaluation in negative mood states as depression and anxiety. Through controlled experiments, the three great hypotheses that exist on the processing of information in the anxiety were investigated in this work. The study was realized with 50 university students of both sexes. The software Super Lab® was used, registration sheet for evaluation of the answers and the Beck scale for the mensuration of the anxiety levels. The first experiment evaluated the impact that ambiguous semantic stimulatons have in the type of choice and taking of decision; the results, calculated for the ANOVA, had indicated that the participants tend to choose more negative meanings, front to a ambiguous choice, if compared with the neutral F (1, 49) =107,08, p0,0001. Moreover, the most anxious participants differ on average from less anxious in the time that lead to decide F (1, 49) =4689, p=0,033. The second experiment used an original version of the emotional Stroop task; in one of them, we evaluate the paper that the grammatical category had in the atencional focalization of the participants and, for in such a way, we use verbs, adjectives and substantives, neutral and threatening, in individual slides. An analysis post-hoc of Bonferroni indicated that the threatening adjectives are the ones that more raise the participants attention with p0,05. We could notice, also, that the most anxious parcel of the sample, takes more time, on average, to nominate the colors of the threatening words in a general way F (1, 99) =6,656, p=0,011, what indicates a great hiper-monitoring for threat in general. In the second stroop task, we wanted to evaluate if abstract and concrete words, neutral and threatening, were processed in a different way. The results had indicated that not, however the most anxious participants demonstrated more atencional selectivity, when the threatening words had been taken as a whole F (1, 99) = 4270, p=0,041, what it can indicate a primitive and few discriminated analysis. In the third experiment, we use lists of words with seven itens, where the central item could be neutral or threatening, being that, later the participant evoked the words that remembered. The results had indicated that they had remembered the initial and final words equally well in both the lists; however, when the central word was negative, the recall was significantly more raised F (1, 49) = 25, 579, p0,0001, what can indicate that we have the trend to better memorize negative stimulatons. In joint, our data demonstrate that the cognitive bias are characteristic and found in all anxiety levels, what shows that they must be part of the normal information processing, in danger situations. The differences found in the most anxious participants indicate a bigger use of executive resources, in posterior stages of processing. The clinical and experimental implications are discussed

No description available.

This research evaluates the constraint diagrams (CD) notation, which is a formal representation for program specification that has some promise to be used by people who are not expert in software design. Multiple methods were adopted in order to provide triangulated evidence of the potential benefits of constraint diagrams compared with other notational systems. Three main approaches were adopted for this research. The first approach was a semantic and task analysis of the CD notation. This was conducted by the application of the Cognitive Dimensions framework, which was used to examine the relative strengths and weaknesses of constraint diagrams and conventional notations in terms of the perceptive facilitation or impediments of these different representations. From this systematic analysis, we found that CD cognitively reduced the cost of exploratory design, modification, incrementation, searching, and transcription activities with regard to the cognitive dimensions: consistency, visibility, abstraction, closeness of mapping, secondary notation, premature commitment, role-expressiveness, progressive evaluation, diffuseness, provisionality, hidden dependency, viscosity, hard mental operations, and error-proneness. The second approach was an empirical evaluation of the comprehension of CD compared to natural language (NL) with computer science students. This experiment took the form of a web-based competition in which 33 participants were given instructions and training on either CD or the equivalent NL specification expressions, and then after each example, they responded to three multiple-choice questions requiring the interpretation of expressions in their particular notation. Although the CD group spent more time on the training and had less confidence, they obtained comparable interpretation scores to the NL group and took less time to answer the questions, although they had no prior experience of CD notation. The third approach was an experiment on the construction of CD. 20 participants were given instructions and training on either CD or the equivalent NL specification expressions, and then after each example, they responded to three questions requiring the construction of expressions in their particular notation. We built an editor to allow the construction of the two notations, which automatically logged their interactions. In general, for constructing program specification, the CD group had more accurate answers, they had spent less time in training, and their returns to the training examples were fewer than those of the NL group. Overall it was found that CD is understandable, usable, intuitive, and expressive with unambiguous semantic notation.

Background. In the area of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a shared discipline between informatics and geography, the term geo-parsing is used to describe the process of identifying names in text, which in computational linguistics is known as named entity recognition and classification (NERC). The term geo-coding is used for the task of mapping from implicitly geo-referenced datasets (such as structured address records) to explicitly geo-referenced representations (e.g., using latitude and longitude). However, present-day GIS systems provide no automatic geo-coding functionality for unstructured text. In Information Extraction (IE), processing of named entities in text has traditionally been seen as a two-step process comprising a flat text span recognition sub-task and an atomic classification sub-task; relating the text span to a model of the world has been ignored by evaluations such as MUC or ACE (Chinchor (1998); U.S. NIST (2003)). However, spatial and temporal expressions refer to events in space-time, and the grounding of events is a precondition for accurate reasoning. Thus, automatic grounding can improve many applications such as automatic map drawing (e.g. for choosing a focus) and question answering (e.g. for questions like How far is London from Edinburgh?, given a story in which both occur and can be resolved). Whereas temporal grounding has received considerable attention in the recent past (Mani and Wilson (2000); Setzer (2001)), robust spatial grounding has long been neglected. Concentrating on geographic names for populated places, I define the task of automatic Toponym Resolution (TR) as computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to a representation of the extensional semantics of the location referred to (its referent), such as a geographic latitude/longitude footprint. The task of mapping from names to locations is hard due to insufficient and noisy databases, and a large degree of ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty other Londons on earth). In addition, names of places and the boundaries referred to change over time, and databases are incomplete. Objective. I investigate how referentially ambiguous spatial named entities can be grounded, or resolved, with respect to an extensional coordinate model robustly on open-domain news text. I begin by comparing the few algorithms proposed in the literature, and, comparing semiformal, reconstructed descriptions of them, I factor out a shared repertoire of linguistic heuristics (e.g. rules, patterns) and extra-linguistic knowledge sources (e.g. population sizes). I then investigate how to combine these sources of evidence to obtain a superior method. I also investigate the noise effect introduced by the named entity tagging step that toponym resolution relies on in a sequential system pipeline architecture. Scope. In this thesis, I investigate a present-day snapshot of terrestrial geography as represented in the gazetteer defined and, accordingly, a collection of present-day news text. I limit the investigation to populated places; geo-coding of artifact names (e.g. airports or bridges), compositional geographic descriptions (e.g. 40 miles SW of London, near Berlin), for instance, is not attempted. Historic change is a major factor affecting gazetteer construction and ultimately toponym resolution. However, this is beyond the scope of this thesis. Method. While a small number of previous attempts have been made to solve the toponym resolution problem, these were either not evaluated, or evaluation was done by manual inspection of system output instead of curating a reusable reference corpus. Since the relevant literature is scattered across several disciplines (GIS, digital libraries, information retrieval, natural language processing) and descriptions of algorithms are mostly given in informal prose, I attempt to systematically describe them and aim at a reconstruction in a uniform, semi-formal pseudo-code notation for easier re-implementation. A systematic comparison leads to an inventory of heuristics and other sources of evidence. In order to carry out a comparative evaluation procedure, an evaluation resource is required. Unfortunately, to date no gold standard has been curated in the research community. To this end, a reference gazetteer and an associated novel reference corpus with human-labeled referent annotation are created. These are subsequently used to benchmark a selection of the reconstructed algorithms and a novel re-combination of the heuristics catalogued in the inventory. I then compare the performance of the same TR algorithms under three different conditions, namely applying it to the (i) output of human named entity annotation, (ii) automatic annotation using an existing Maximum Entropy sequence tagging model, and (iii) a na¨ıve toponym lookup procedure in a gazetteer. Evaluation. The algorithms implemented in this thesis are evaluated in an intrinsic or component evaluation. To this end, we define a task-specific matching criterion to be used with traditional Precision (P) and Recall (R) evaluation metrics. This matching criterion is lenient with respect to numerical gazetteer imprecision in situations where one toponym instance is marked up with different gazetteer entries in the gold standard and the test set, respectively, but where these refer to the same candidate referent, caused by multiple near-duplicate entries in the reference gazetteer. Main Contributions. The major contributions of this thesis are as follows: • A new reference corpus in which instances of location named entities have been manually annotated with spatial grounding information for populated places, and an associated reference gazetteer, from which the assigned candidate referents are chosen. This reference gazetteer provides numerical latitude/longitude coordinates (such as 51320 North, 0 50 West) as well as hierarchical path descriptions (such as London > UK) with respect to a world wide-coverage, geographic taxonomy constructed by combining several large, but noisy gazetteers. This corpus contains news stories and comprises two sub-corpora, a subset of the REUTERS RCV1 news corpus used for the CoNLL shared task (Tjong Kim Sang and De Meulder (2003)), and a subset of the Fourth Message Understanding Contest (MUC-4; Chinchor (1995)), both available pre-annotated with gold-standard. This corpus will be made available as a reference evaluation resource; • a new method and implemented system to resolve toponyms that is capable of robustly processing unseen text (open-domain online newswire text) and grounding toponym instances in an extensional model using longitude and latitude coordinates and hierarchical path descriptions, using internal (textual) and external (gazetteer) evidence; • an empirical analysis of the relative utility of various heuristic biases and other sources of evidence with respect to the toponym resolution task when analysing free news genre text; • a comparison between a replicated method as described in the literature, which functions as a baseline, and a novel algorithm based on minimality heuristics; and • several exemplary prototypical applications to show how the resulting toponym resolution methods can be used to create visual surrogates for news stories, a geographic exploration tool for news browsing, geographically-aware document retrieval and to answer spatial questions (How far...?) in an open-domain question answering system. These applications only have demonstrative character, as a thorough quantitative, task-based (extrinsic) evaluation of the utility of automatic toponym resolution is beyond the scope of this thesis and left for future work.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 236-240). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2006. / Includes bibliography.