This diploma thesis occupies itself with the subject of near synonymy, concretely with adjectives. On the basis of corpus linguistic methods two pairs of near synonyms have been researched - verschieden/unterschiedlich and bedeutend/bedeutsam. The 15 primary collocators (according to the syntactic position of each adjective) have been examined using the InterCorp parallel corpus methods in order to find out the most frequent Czech equivalence. Keywords: lexical-semantic relations, near synonymy, lexicography, corpora, cooccurrence analysis, Self Organizing Maps, CCDB

Submitted by Priscilla Araujo (priscilla@ibict.br) on 2016-08-11T17:14:13Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) LUANA SALES D.pdf: 6728909 bytes, checksum: 2eadee7606fac1789263665564c63b8d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-11T17:14:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) LUANA SALES D.pdf: 6728909 bytes, checksum: 2eadee7606fac1789263665564c63b8d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-07-23 / Esta pesquisa se desenrola sob as condições de um paradigma científico emergente, conhecido como e-Science ou 4º Paradigma Científico. Essa nova forma de fazer ciência se distingue pelo uso intensivo de redes de computadores, repositórios digitais distribuídos e pela geração extraordinária de dados de pesquisa, que é uma consequência do uso determinante de tecnologias de informação e de simulação por software do avanço da instrumentação científica. O ambiente informacional que se configura como consequência dessas transformações impacta sensivelmente os padrões de comunicação científica, principalmente no que tange às pesquisas cooperativas, ao compartilhamento e reuso de recursos informacionais e às formas de comunicar e de disseminar os resultados de pesquisa. Para contextualizar o seu campo de estudo, a tese contribui para delinear conceitos novos e renovados para a Ciência da Informação como e-Science, curadoria de dados de pesquisa, objetos digitais complexos, repositório de dados, CRIS (Current Research Information System) e outras infraestruturas essenciais para a gestão da pesquisa e das novas concepções de publicações acadêmicas e científicas. A pesquisa esta alicerçada sobre duas premissas: a primeira levanta a necessidade de um modelo de publicação científica que possa expressar e refletir o novo padrão de geração de conhecimento científico rico em dados, sendo capaz de integrar esses dados às publicações; a segunda preconiza que isso possa ser realizado segundo as possibilidades tecnológicas e os padrões decorrentes da Web Semântica. Essas duas premissas corporificam a formulação dahipótese colocada pela presente tese: uma publicação científica pode ser enriquecida e estar mais próxima às novas formas de geração de conhecimento da ciência contemporânea se estiver configurada segundo um modelo que vincule por meio de relações semânticas os dados e conjuntos de dados de pesquisa à publicação convencional. O método utilizado foi o dedutivo, partindo de conceitos gerais da Ciência da Informação aplicados à especificidade das Ciências Nucleares. Isto foi realizado de duas formas: por meio de levantamento bibliográfico, para fins de análise e interpretação qualitativa dos conceitos gerais, e por meio da abordagem de análise de domínio que permitiu analisar empiricamente a área de aplicação específica. Como resultado final obteve-se uma proposta de diretrizes para uma política nacional de curadoria digital e um modelo de publicação científica para a área de Ciências Nucleares, em que os dados são ligados às publicações acadêmicas por meio de relações semânticas sistematizadas em taxonomia construída para esta finalidade. Os modelos gráficos foram utilizados como ferramenta para representar e sintetizar os conceitos resultantes. Como conclusão constata-se: alterações no ciclo da comunicação científica, a possibilidade de construção de um novo modelo de publicação cientifica como padrão relevante para a prática de uma ciência mais aberta e mais colaborativa, e a viabilidade de incorporação dos princípios e das teorias da Biblioteconomia e da Ciência da Informação para a organização do conhecimento técnico-cientifico no mundo da eScience. / This research takes place under the conditions of an arising scientific paradigm, known as e-Science or 4th Scientific Paradigm. This new way of doing science is characterized by intensive use of computer networks, distributed digital repositories and by extraordinary generation of research data, which is a consequence of the heavy use of information and simulation technologies and advancing of scientific instrumentation. The information environment that is established as a result of these transformations significantly impacts the patterns of scientific communication, especially regarding to cooperative research, the sharing and reuse of information resources and ways to communicate and to disseminate research results. In order to create a context for their field of study, the thesis contributes to delineate new and renewed concepts for Information Science such as e-Science, curation of research data, complex digital objects, data repository, CRIS (Current Research Information System Model ) and others key infrastructures for the management of research and also of new conceptions of academic and scientific publications. The research is based on two assumptions: first raises the need for a model of scientific publication that would reflect the new standard for generating scientific knowledge characterized by data richness, and being able to integrate these data to publications; the second highlights that this can be performed according to the technological possibilities and standards arising from the Semantic Web. These two assumptions embody the formulation of the hypothesis raised by this thesis: a scientific publication can be enriched and be closer to new ways of generating knowledge, which characterizes contemporary science, if it is configured according to a model that links through semantic relations the research data and datasets to conventional publication. The method adopted was the deductive one, starting from general concepts of Information Science applied to the specificity of Nuclear Sciences. This was accomplished in two ways: through a literature review, for purposes of analysis and qualitative interpretation of the general concepts; and through the domain analysis approach that allowed empirically analyze the particular application area. As a final result was obtained a proposal of guidelines for a national policy for digital curation, and a model of scientific publication to the Nuclear Sciences area, in which the research data are linked to the academic publications by means of semantic relations systematized into taxonomy built for this purpose. Graphic models are used as a tool to represent and synthesize the resulting concepts. As a conclusion it is observed: changes in the scholarly communication cycle, the possibility of building a new scientific model as relevant standard to the practice of a more open and more collaborative science, and feasibility of incorporating the principles and theories of librarianship and Information Science for the organization of technical and scientific knowledge in the world of eScience.

The purpose of this study was to examine which of the two vocabulary-learning methods non-contextualized vocabulary learning and vocabulary learning combined with semantic relations promote the learning and retention of new vocabulary items. The following research questions were asked: Which of the two above-mentioned methods best promotes the students’ vocabulary learning and word comprehension? What differences can be noted in the students’ test results regarding learning and retention of new vocabulary items between these two methods? Which method promotes the students' long-term retention of vocabulary items and word comprehension? In total, 36 students from two classes, divided into four groups, participated in the study. Each group was taught using one of the two methods. After the first round of lessons, the teaching methods were swapped such that all the students tried both methods and so that the survey could be considered reliable. The empirical material was obtained from field experiments and tests in direct connection with the lessons and retention tests four days later. The results were analyzed using Schema theory and a theory of memory processing called Executive Control Processes. These theories were used to investigate the students’ retention of vocabulary items and how students use schematic knowledge to associate words to one another. The results showed that the second method, the combined method, seemed to be the most promising not only for retention, but also for the number of learned vocabulary items and for word comprehension.

L’objectif de ce travail de thèse était d’approfondir les connaissances actuelles sur l’organisation des concepts d’objets fabriqués manipulables. Plus particulièrement, nous nous sommes intéressés au traitement implicite des relations thématiques (e.g., scie-bois) et des relations de similarité fonctionnelle spécifique (e.g., scie-hâche) et générale (e.g., scie-couteau) lors de l’identification des objets fabriqués manipulables. Les stimuli ont été sélectionnés par une tâche de génération de propriétés et le traitement implicite des relations sémantiques a été évalué grâce à l’enregistrement des mouvements oculaires dans le Paradigme du Monde Visuel. Tout d’abord, nous avons évalué le développement du traitement implicite des relations thématiques et de similarité fonctionnelle chez les enfants de 6-, 8- 10- ans et chez l’adulte. Les résultats ont montré que le traitement implicite des relations de similarité fonctionnelle générale évolue progressivement avec l’âge, alors que les relations thématiques sont déjà implicitement traitées dès 6-ans. Ensuite, nous avons testé le rôle de l’action dans le traitement de ces relations. Chez l’adulte, les résultats ont montré que l’action amorce le traitement des relations thématiques différemment en fonction du niveau de représentation de l’action impliqué. Le traitement thématique est facilité par l’action représentée au niveau du geste mais gêné par l’action représentée au niveau de l’intention. Chez l’enfant, les données ont montré que le traitement de relations de similarité fonctionnelle générale est facilité par l’action représentée au niveau de l’intention. Les données préliminaires chez le patient cérébro-lésé renforcent l’idée d’une structure conceptuelle multidéterminée et graduelle. Dans l’ensemble, ce travail démontre que les connaissances sur les objets fabriqués manipulables sont organisées selon des relations sémantiques distinctes qui présentent des trajectoires développementales différentes et correspondent à diffèrent niveaux de représentation d’action. / The general aim of this work was to provide a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying manipulable artifact object conceptual organization. Specifically, we investigated implicit processing of thematic (e.g., saw-wood) and functional similarity relations at the specific (e.g., saw-axe) and general (e.g., saw-knife) levels during manipulable artifact object identification. Stimuli were selected from property generation and implicit semantic processing was investigated using eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm. First, we assessed the development of thematic and functional similarity processing in 6-, 8-, 10- year-old children and adults. Results demonstrated progressive emergence of general function similarity processing with age, while thematic and specific function similarity processing was already present from 6. Findings support a graded involvement of distinct mechanisms in object semantic processing and development. In the second series of experiments, we investigated the role of action in thematic and functional similarity processing by combining action priming with the Visual World Paradigm in adults and 6-year-olds. In adults, action primed thematic processing differently depending on the level of action representation entailed. Thematic processing was facilitated by gesture-level action representations but disturbed by intention-level action representations. In 6-year-olds, intention-level action representations improved general functional similarity relation implicit processing. Findings highlight the role of different action representation levels in manipulable artifact object semantic processing. Finally, preliminary data collected in 8 stroke patients provided additional evidence in favor of a multidetermined and graded manipulable artifact semantic structure. Together, findings demonstrate that knowledge about manipulable artifacts is organized along distinct types of semantic relations that show different developmental trajectories and relate to different levels of action representations.

Extraction of semantic relations from English text is the topic of this thesis. It focuses on exploitation of a dependency parser. A method based on syntactic patterns is proposed and evaluated in addition to evaluation of several statistical methods over syntactic features. It applies the methods for extraction of a hypernymy relation and evaluates it on the WordNet thesaurus. A system for extraction of semantic relations from text is designed and implemented based on these methods.

Many L2 students in Namibia are not adequately prepared for the academic demands of university courses, mainly because of poor reading skills in the L2. University students reading below their maturational levels, can mainly be attributed to their print-impoverished backgrounds, as reading is a skill that develops mainly through reading. Without any assistance, poor readers at university will continue to read poorly and as a result perform weaker in their academic courses compared to their peers who are better readers. The overall aim of this study is to explore the effects of a reading intervention program on a group of university students in Namibia. A quasiexperimental method with a control and an intervention group was employed. The effect of reading ability on academic performance was also investigated. In addition, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the pre-literacy experiences of students, the differences between good and poor readers at university, their views about the reading intervention program as well as the attitudes and practices of university lecturers towards reading instruction at tertiary level were examined. / Linguistics / M.A. (with specialisation in Applied Linguistics)

Many L2 students in Namibia are not adequately prepared for the academic demands of university courses, mainly because of poor reading skills in the L2. University students reading below their maturational levels, can mainly be attributed to their print-impoverished backgrounds, as reading is a skill that develops mainly through reading. Without any assistance, poor readers at university will continue to read poorly and as a result perform weaker in their academic courses compared to their peers who are better readers. The overall aim of this study is to explore the effects of a reading intervention program on a group of university students in Namibia. A quasiexperimental method with a control and an intervention group was employed. The effect of reading ability on academic performance was also investigated. In addition, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the pre-literacy experiences of students, the differences between good and poor readers at university, their views about the reading intervention program as well as the attitudes and practices of university lecturers towards reading instruction at tertiary level were examined. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (with specialisation in Applied Linguistics)

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:03:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5900.pdf: 5031941 bytes, checksum: c33a127070b11fb3923bc17ba9d98189 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-03 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / The adequacy of educational content considering student´s culture, knowledge and values allow them to identify the relationship between what they are learning and their reality and, consequently they feel more interested and engaged at education. In contrast, in informatics at education, designing educational systems to allow adequacy is a challenge because of a lack of techniques to support the design and the difficulty to identify what and how allow this adequacy by users, because many users of these systems, as educators and students, do not have knowledge of designing. In this context, it is presented here a formalization of the design pattern with successful solutions for recurrent problems on designing co-authorship systems analyzed and/or experienced by the researcher of this dissertation during design and evaluations of these systems at Advanced Interaction Laboratory (LIA). These patterns intend to support designing of educational systems that allow users, as co-authors, adequate these systems, inserting the content to be displayed at them. Each pattern describes specific problem and solution. In order to support indentifying how these patterns are organized to each other, semantic relations defined by Minsky are adopted to organize them based on humans´ intellectual structure. Validations with different participants´ profiles, e.g., with or without knowledge about concepts related to design, software engineering, human-computer interaction, co-authorship, etc., were done to formalize, refine and observe the comprehension and/or application of these patterns to design co-authorship system prototypes, as well as, different participants from mathematic or pedagogy areas and teachers to validate the use these of these prototypes. The results shown that the pattern language is comprehensible and it supports designing to define what and how to display on interface to allow and help users insert content. / A adequação no conteúdo educacional de acordo com a cultura, o conhecimento e valores dos alunos permite aos mesmos identificarem relação entre o que estão aprendendo e suas realidades e, consequentemente se sentirem mais interessados e engajados no aprendizado. Contudo, no contexto da informática na educação, fazer o design de sistemas educacionais para permitir a adequação é um desafio, tanto pela falta de técnicas para apoiar o design, quanto pela dificuldade em identificar o que adequar, como permitir e facilitar essa adequação, pois muitos dos usuários desses sistemas, como educadores e alunos, não têm conhecimento e experiência com design de soluções computacionais. Nesse contexto, neste trabalho é apresentada a formalização de uma linguagem de padrões de design com soluções de sucesso para problemas recorrentes no design de sistemas de coautoria observadas e/ou experiência das pelo proponente deste trabalho, ao analisar esses sistemas e participar do processo de desenvolvimento e avaliação desses sistemas no Laboratório de Interação Avançada (LIA). Esses padrões têm como objetivo apoiar o design de sistemas educacionais que permitam aos usuários, como coautores, terem apoio para adequar os sistemas, inserindo o conteúdo que será exibido nos mesmos. Cada padrão de design se refere a um par problema-solução específico e, para apoiar a identificação e compreensão de como os padrões estão relacionados entre si, formando uma linguagem de padrões, são adotadas as relações semânticas definidas por Minsky para organizá-los e expressar o relacionamento entre eles de uma forma próxima a estrutura cognitiva humana. Validações com diferentes perfis de participantes, por exemplo, com e sem conhecimento sobre conceitos relacionados à Engenharia de Software, Interação Humano-Computador, Coautoria, etc., foram feitas para formalizar, refinar e observar a compreensão e/ou o uso dos padrões no design de protótipos de sistemas educacionais, bem como participantes das áreas de matemática ou pedagogia e educadores para validar o uso desses protótipos. Os resultados mostram que a linguagem de padrões de design semanticamente relacionados é compreendida e apoia o design para definir o que e como exibir nas interfaces dos sistemas para permitir e auxiliar os usuários na inserção do conteúdo.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:06:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6477.pdf: 3193803 bytes, checksum: 2bf85c80b2865f8b7efd9d6eeb6aa172 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-11-28 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / Recently, there is an enormous amount of scientific material written in textual format and published in electronic ways (paper on proceedings and articles on journals). In the biomedical field, researchers need to analyse a vast amount of information in order to update their knowledges, in order to get more precise diagnostics and propose more modern and effective treatments. The task of getting knowledge is extremely onerous and the manual process to annotate relationships and to propose novel hypothesis for treatments becomes very slow and error-prone. In this sense, as a result of this master s research it is proposed a method to extract cause and effect semantic relationships in sentences of scientific papers of the biomedical domain. The goal of this work is to propose and implements a solution for: (1) to extract terms from the biomedical domain (genes, proteins, chemical components, structures and anatomical processes, cell components and strutures, and treatmens), (2) to identify existing relationships on the texts, from the extracted terms, and (3) to suggest a knowledge network based on the relations of cause and effect . Over the approach using textual patterns, our proposed method had extracted semantic relations with a precision of 94,83 %, recall of 98,10 %, F-measure of 96,43 %. / Atualmente, existe uma enorme quantidade de material científico escrito em formato textual e publicado em meios eletrônicos (artigos em anais de eventos e periódicos). Na área biomédica, pesquisadores necessitam assimilar uma grande parte deste conteúdo com a finalidade de se atualizarem e, por conseguinte realizarem diagnosticos mais precisos e aplicar tratamentos mais modernos e eficazes. A tarefa de obtenção de conhecimento é bastante onerosa e o processo manual para anotar relacionamentos e propor novas hipóteses de tratamentos torna-se muito lento. Neste sentido, como resultado desta pesquisa de mestrado, foi proposto um método para a extração de relacionamentos semânticos do tipo causa e efeito em artigos científicos do domínio biomédico. Mais especificamente, o objetivo deste trabalho é propor e implementar uma solução para (1) extrair termos do domínio biomédico de documentos científicos (genes, componentes químicos, proteínas, estruturas e processos anatômicos, componentes e estruturas celulares e tratamentos), (2) identificar relacionamentos existentes nos textos, com base nos termos extraídos, e (3) sugerir uma rede de conhecimento baseada nos relacionamentos extraídos. Através de uma abordagem utilizando regras e padrões textuais, o método proposto extraiu relacionamentos semânticos com uma precisão de 94,83 %, cobertura de 98,10 % e Medida-F de 96,43 %.

The continued underperformance of many L2 students at primary, secondary and tertiary level is a cause for grave concern in South Africa. In an attempt to better understand the cognitivelinguistic conditions and processes that underlie academic performance and underperformance, this study looks at the problem of differential academic performance by focussing on the inferential ability of undergraduate L2 students during the reading of expository texts. The study works within a constructivist theory of reading, where the successful understanding of a text is seen to involve the construction of a mental representation of what the text is about. Inferencing plays an important role in constructing meaning during reading because it enables the reader to link incoming information with already given information, and it enables the reader to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text by converting the linear input into a hierarchical mental representation of interrelated information. The main finding showed that the ability to make inferences during the reading of expository texts was strongly related to academic performance: the more inferences students made during the reading of expository texts, the better they performed academically. This relationship held across the making of various inferences, such as anaphoric inferences, vocabulary inferences, inferences about various semantic relations, and thematic inferences. In particular, the ability to make anaphoric, contrastive and causal inferences emerged as the strongest predictors of academic performance. The study provides strong empirical evidence that the ability to make inferences during reading enables a reader to construct meaning and thereby also to acquire new knowledge. Reading is not only a tool for independently accessing information in an information-driven society, it is fundamentally a tool for constructing meaning. Reading and inferencing are not additional tools that students need to master in the learning context- they constitute the very process whereby learning occurs. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)