A presente tese tem por objetivo investigar os efeitos do uso do minerador de textos Sobek no processo de leitura e compreensão textual de estudantes. Este minerador de textos é capaz de extrair informações relevantes de textos e representá-las de forma gráfica. Esta tese está apoiada nas teorias de aprendizagem significativa, de uso de mapas conceituais para representação de conhecimento e em pesquisas que apontam que representações gráficas de palavras auxiliam na leitura de textos e na sua decodificação. De acordo com a pesquisa de David Ausubel, a aprendizagem significativa ocorre através da assimilação de novos conceitos e ideias e associação destas ao conhecimento que a pessoa já possui. Através da utilização de um minerador de textos com representação gráfica de informações, busca-se apresentar aos estudantes uma representação visual de textos. Esta representação se assemelha a de um mapa conceitual, de forma a auxiliar no processo de compreensão e assimilação de informações pelos estudantes. Nesta representação, ligações entre termos considerados relevantes pelo minerador auxiliam no entendimento destes termos e simbolizam relações presentes no texto, fato esse que pode auxiliar os estudantes a compreenderem melhor o texto e relacionarem novas informações àquelas que já possuem Nesta tese, foi realizado um estudo para auxiliar estudantes nas atividades relacionadas ao letramento. A pesquisa se caracteriza como mista (qualitativa e quantitativa). A coleta de dados se deu a partir da aplicação de questionários com professores e alunos, além de avaliações com o objetivo de verificar contribuições do uso da ferramenta a partir de seu uso do ponto de vista do letramento. Como resultado, encontramos que estudantes que utilizaram o Sobek obtiveram um número mais elevado de respostas corretas nas atividades de interpretação de textos. Em média, os alunos acertaram 66% das questões quando utilizando o minerador de textos Sobek, contra apenas 47% das questões que eram respondidas sem o apoio do minerador. Outro resultado apresentado é o alto grau de satisfação de alunos e professores quanto à tecnologia e seu uso em sala de aula. Além destes resultados, obtivemos uma avaliação acerca da capacidade do minerador de textos de extrair termos considerados relevantes ao texto. / This thesis aimed to investigate the effects of using Sobek Text Miner to improve literacy. Sobek is a tool capable of extracting relevant information from texts and representing them in a graphical way. The thesis is supported by meaningful learning theory, conceptual maps theory and several research theories which indicate that graphical representation of words may improve reading capability and word decoding. According to David Ausubel, meaningful learning occurs through the assimilation of new concepts and ideas and association of those to what the person already knows. Using text mining with graphical representation of information, we seek to provide students with a graphical representation of a text. This text representation is similar to a concept map, helping students assimilate and comprehend that information. In Sobek’s representation, the relationship between terms considered relevant to text comprehension may assist students to better understand the meaning of each term and demonstrate relationships that are presented in the text, improving context comprehension. Furthermore, the relationship between terms may help information assimilation, once it relates the new information with previous known information This project conducted a study using Sobek text miner in classroom to support student’s literacy. In order to assess the tool’s possible benefits in reading and comprehension activities, we designed a series of classroom activities. To evaluate those activities, qualitative and quantitative approaches were used. The study was conducted in two primary schools, with students from 5th grade and 8th grade. Interviews were also made with the teachers and students, inquiring them about the tool's and main functions and its ability to help students from a literacy point of view. The study shows that students answered more correct question when using Sobek than when no support technology was used. Also, both students and teachers approved the software and agreed that it does improve student’s text comprehension. It also describes an evaluation of Sobek's capability to extract terms considered relevant for text comprehension.

Le Web social croît de plus en plus et donne accès à une multitude de ressources très variées, qui proviennent de sites de partage tels que del.icio.us, d’échange de messages comme Twitter, des réseaux sociaux à finalité professionnelle, comme LinkedIn, ou plus généralement à finalité sociale, comme Facebook et LiveJournal. Un même individu peut être inscrit et actif sur différents réseaux sociaux ayant potentiellement des finalités différentes, où il publie des informations diverses et variées, telles que son nom, sa localité, ses communautés, et ses différentes activités. Ces informations (textuelles), au vu de la dimension internationale du Web, sont par nature, d’une part multilingue, et d’autre part, intrinsèquement ambiguë puisqu’elles sont éditées par les individus en langage naturel dans un vocabulaire libre. De même, elles sont une source de données précieuses, notamment pour les applications cherchant à connaître leurs utilisateurs afin de mieux comprendre leurs besoins et leurs intérêts. L’objectif de nos travaux de recherche est d’exploiter, en utilisant essentiellement l’encyclopédie Wikipédia, les ressources textuelles des utilisateurs extraites de leurs différents réseaux sociaux afin de construire un profil élargi les caractérisant et exploitable par des applications telles que les systèmes de recommandation. En particulier, nous avons réalisé une étude afin de caractériser les traits de personnalité des utilisateurs. De nombreuses expérimentations, analyses et évaluations ont été réalisées sur des données réelles collectées à partir de différents réseaux sociaux. / The social Web grows more and more and gives through the web, access to a wide variety of resources, like sharing sites such as del.icio.us, exchange messages as Twitter, or social networks with the professional purpose such as LinkedIn, or more generally for social purposes, such as Facebook and LiveJournal. The same individual can be registered and active on different social networks (potentially having different purposes), in which it publishes various information, which are constantly growing, such as its name, locality, communities, various activities. The information (textual), given the international dimension of the Web, is inherently multilingual and intrinsically ambiguous, since it is published in natural language in a free vocabulary by individuals from different origin. They are also important, specially for applications seeking to know their users in order to better understand their needs, activities and interests. The objective of our research is to exploit using essentially the Wikpédia encyclopedia, the textual resources extracted from the different social networks of the same individual in order to construct his characterizing profile, which can be exploited in particular by applications seeking to understand their users, such as recommendation systems. In particular, we conducted a study to characterize the personality traits of users. Many experiments, analyzes and evaluations were carried out on real data collected from different social networks.

Introdução: O acompanhamento do parceiro no pré-natal, parto e pós-parto de sua companheira mostram resultados positivos em relação à saúde materna, infantil e também relacionados à saúde do homem. É uma importante estratégia de aproximar os futuros pais dos serviços de saúde e melhorar o vínculo destes com a paternidade. Objetivo: Avaliar se a implementação da tecnologia SMS através do programa PRENACEL para o parceiro como um programa de educação em saúde é um suplemento útil ao acompanhamento pré-natal padrão. Método: Ensaio aleatorizado controlado por conglomerados representados por unidades de saúde. Selecionamos 20 unidades de saúde que foram aleatoriamente alocadas segundo critérios pré estabelecidos, 10 sendo controle e 10 como intervenção. Os parceiros das gestantes que iniciaram o pré-natal antes da 20ª semana de gestação foram a população do estudo. Os parceiros inscritos no PRENACEL receberam periodicamente mensagens curtas de texto via celular com informações sobre gestação e parto. Nas unidades do grupo controle os parceiros receberam, junto com suas companheiras, o pré-natal padrão. Resultados: 186 parceiros foram entrevistados, 62 do grupo PRENACEL, 73 do grupo intervenção, mas que não optaram pelo PRENACEL e 51 do grupo controle. Encontramos um perfil com idade média de 30 anos e a maioria dos entrevistados (51%) se declarou como raça/cor parda. Grande parte dos entrevistados (39,7%) relatou ter em média de 9,3 anos de estudo. A maioria dos homens (57,5%) coabita com a companheira e foi classificada como classe C (63,7%). A adesão ao programa PRENACEL foi de 53,4%. Houve uma maior participação dos parceiros do grupo PRENACEL nas consultas de pré- natal, assim como foi observada uma maior presença destes no momento do parto como acompanhante quando comparado aos demais grupos. Conclusão: O estudo mostrou que uma estratégia de educação em saúde utilizando as tecnologias de comunicação parece ter boa aceitabilidade e um papel promissor no engajamento de homens aos cuidados pré-natal, parto e pós-parto de suas companheiras. / Introduction: The partner accompanying the prenatal care, birth and postpartum care of the woman has presented positive results in relation to mother and child health and also in relation to the health of the man. This is an important strategy to bring future fathers closer to health services and to improve their link with paternity. Aim: To evaluate whether the implementation of SMS technology, through the PRENACEL program for the partner as a health education program, is a useful supplement to standard prenatal monitoring. Method: A parallel cluster randomized trial, with the clusters representing health units. The partners of the pregnant women who started prenatal care prior to the 20th week of gestation were the study population of the intervention group. The participants received periodic short text messages via mobile phone with information about the pregnancy and birth. In the control group units the partners, together with the women, received the standard prenatal care. Results: 186 partners were interviewed, 62 from the PRENACEL group, 73 from the intervention group that did not opt for PRENACEL and 51 from the control group. A profile with a mean age of 30 years was found and the majority of respondents (51%) declared themselves as brown race/color. The interviewees presented a mean of 9.3 years of study. The majority of the men (57.5%) cohabited with their partner and 63.7% were classified as socioeconomic class C. The adherence to the PRENACEL program was 53.4%. There was a greater participation of the PRENACEL partners in the prenatal consultations, as well as a greater presence of them accompanying the woman at the moment of the birth when compared to the other groups. Conclusion: The study showed that a health education strategy using communication technology seems to have good acceptability and a promising role in engaging men in the prenatal care, birth and postpartum care of their partners.

abstract: Religions, following Max Müller, have often been seen by scholars in religious studies as uniform collections of beliefs and practices encoded in stable “sacred books” that direct the conduct of religious actors. These texts were the chief focus of academic students of religion through much of the 20th century, and this approach remains strong in the 21st. However, a growing chorus of dissidents has begun to focus on the lived experience of practitioners and the material objects that structure that experience, and some textual scholars have begun extending this materialist framework to the study of texts. This dissertation is a contribution in that vein from the field of Daoist studies. Now split between two separate texts, the Most High Scripture of the Rectifying Methods of the Three Heavens began as a 4th-century collection of apocalyptic predictions and apotropaic devices designed to deliver a select group of Chinese literati to the heavens of Highest Clarity. Later editors during the early medieval period (ca. 220-589 CE) took one of two paths: for their own reasons, they altered the Rectifying Methods to emphasize either the world’s end or its continuation. Detailed study of these alterations and their contexts shows how individuals and groups used and modified the Rectifying Methods in in ways that challenge the conventional relationship between religious text and religious actor. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2019

Today’s airplanes and modern cars are equipped with displays to communicate important information to the pilot or driver. These displays needs to be tested for safety reasons; displays that fail can be a huge safety risk and lead to catastrophic events. Today displays are tested by checking the output signals or with the help of a person who validates the physical display manually. However this technique is very inefficient and can lead to important errors being unnoticed. MindRoad AB is searching for a solution where validation of the display is made from a camera pointed at it, text and numbers will then be recognized using a computer vision algorithm and validated in a time efficient and accurate way. This thesis compares the three different text detection algorithms, EAST, SWT and Tesseract to determine the most suitable for continued work. The chosen algorithm is then optimized and the possibility to develop a program which meets MindRoad ABs expectations is investigated. As a result several algorithms were combined to a fully working program to detect and recognize text in industrial displays.

The advance in technologies such as massive storage devices and high speed internet has led to an enormous increase in the volume of available documents in electronic form. These documents represent information in a complex and rich manner that cannot be analysed using conventional statistical data mining methods. Consequently, text mining is developed as a growing new technology for discovering knowledge from textual data and managing textual information. Processing and analysing textual information can potentially obtain valuable and important information, yet these tasks also requires enormous amount of computational resources due to the sheer size of the data available. Therefore, it is important to enhance the existing methodologies to achieve better scalability, efficiency and accuracy. / The emerging Grid technology shows promising results in solving the problem of scalability by splitting the works from text clustering algorithms into a number of jobs, each to be executed separately and simultaneously on different computing resources. That allows for a substantial decrease in the processing time and maintaining the similar level of quality at the same time. / To improve the quality of the text clustering results, a new document encoding method is introduced that takes into consideration of the semantic similarities of the words. In this way, documents that are similar in content will be more likely to be group together. / One of the ultimate goals of text mining is to help us to gain insights to the problem and to assist in the decision making process together with other source of information. Hence we tested the effectiveness of incorporating text mining method in the context of stock market prediction. This is achieved by integrating the outcomes obtained from text mining with the ones from data mining, which results in a more accurate forecast than using any single method.

<p>When children encounter new subjects in school, they are also faced with new ways of using language. Learning science thus means learning the language of science, and writing is one of the ways this is accomplished. The present study investigates writing in natural sciences in grades 5 and 8 in Swedish schools. Major theoretical influences for these investigations are found within the socio-cultural, dialogical and social semiotic perspectives on language use.</p><p>The study is based on texts written by 97 students, interviews around these texts and observations from 16 different classroom practices. Writing is seen as a situated practice; therefore analysis is carried out of the activities surrounding the texts. The student texts are analysed in terms of genre and in relation to their abstraction, density and use of expansions. This analysis shows among other things that the texts show increasing abstraction and density with increasing age, whereas the text structure and the use of expansions do not increase.</p><p>It is also argued that a central point in school writing must be the students’ way of talking about their texts. Analysis of interviews with the students is thus carried out in terms of text movability. The results from this analysis indicate that students find it difficult to talk about their texts. They find it hard to express the main content of the text, as well as to discuss it’s function and potential readers.</p><p>Previous studies argue that writing constitutes a potential for learning. In the material studied in this thesis, this potential learning tool is not used to any large extent. To be able to participate in natural sciences in higher levels, students need to take part in practices where the specialized language of natural science is used in writing as well as in speech.</p>

Despite the increase in popularity of handheld devices, text entry on such devices is becoming more difficult due to reduced form factors that limit display size, input modes, and interaction techniques. In an effort to circumvent these issues, research has found that five-key methods are effective for text entry on devices such as in-car navigation systems, television and gaming controllers, wrist watches, and other small devices. Five-key text entry methods use four directional keys to move a selector over an on-screen keyboard and an Enter key for selection. Although other researchers have described five-key character layouts using alphabetical order and predictive layouts based on digraph frequencies, there is considerable latitude in designing the rest of a comprehensive on-screen keyboard. Furthermore, it might be possible to capitalize on the relative strengths of the alphabetic and predictive layouts by combining them in a hybrid layout. Thus, this research examines the design of alternative keyboard layouts for five-key text entry techniques. Three keyboard layouts (Alphabetical, Predictive, and Hybrid) were selected to represent standard and less familiar arrangements. The analysis centered on a series of controlled experiments conducted on a research platform designed by the author. In this work, when the immediate usability of three alternative keyboard layouts for supporting five-key text entry was investigated, results indicated no statistically significant differences in performance across the tested keyboards. Furthermore, experimental results show that following immediate usability, but still at the onset of learning, there was no overall difference in performance among the three keyboard layouts across four text types. However, the Alphabetical keyboard surpassed both the Predictive and Hybrid keyboards in text entry speed in typing Web addresses. The nonstandard keyboards performed superior to the Alphabetical keyboards in typing Words/Spaces and Sentences, but performed no better in typing Address strings than the Alphabetical. Use of mixed effects modeling suggested that the longitudinal data was best fitted by a quadratic model. Text entry performance on all three layouts improved as a function of practice, demonstrating that participants could learn the unfamiliar layouts to complete text entry tasks. Overall, there was no indication that use of nonstandard layouts impedes performance. In fact, trend in time data suggests that the learning rates were greater for the nonstandard keyboards over the standard layout. Overall, participants preferred the Hybrid layout. In summary, this dissertation focused on creating and validating novel and effective five-key text entry techniques for constrained devices.

When it comes to the production and reception of texts, most linguists will readily agree that writers as well as readers constitute and follow typical text patterns as they produce and read texts. It has become common today to describe text patterns as typical sets of manifestations of formal, thematic, and pragmatic features that arise from resemblances between different texts and that are inscribed in the communicative memories of a language community. However, speakers also transcend text patterns every day and oscillate between following and overstepping textual rules. This thesis investigates how speakers categorize linguistic knowledge in text patterns, and follow and transcend these patterns in everyday communication, using the example of Rainald Goetz’ text Loslabern. Excerpts from reviews about Loslabern illustrate how readers perceive the text: Some readers consider Loslabern as a ‘ruined’ text that falls apart, whereas others describe Loslabern as ‘ocean-like’ and fluid. Based on these reader experiences, the thesis attempts to answer the following central question: How can we describe ‘Loslabern’ and connatural texts from the viewpoint of textual linguistics in accordance with the readers’ intuitions? The thesis proposes and discusses three options: Textual linguistics may describe Loslabern i) as a broken text, ii) in terms of different concepts of text pattern, and iii) in terms of a novel concept of text pattern. The analytical section focuses on a discussion of different concepts of text pattern: discrete structural and prototypical pragmatic concepts. It examines how these concepts fall short of describing Loslabern in accordance with the readers’ intuitions. Following Wittgenstein and his concept of family resemblance, it creates a multi-dimensional and open concept of text patterns. This concept enables textual linguistics to depict the intertextual embeddedness of Loslabern and other texts systematically, to gain insight into the mechanisms of forming and transcending text patterns, and to describe Loslabern in accordance with the diversity of readers’ intuitions. In doing so, the thesis points at new directions in linguistics as well as literary studies.

This study investigates the translation process of three translator students and their production of translated non-fiction texts. The students are followed from an initial examination task over a period of time of 5 years. The translated texts produced during this period are analysed with selected methods of text analysis, which is compared to their source texts. The text analysis focuses on certain grammatical features that are known to generate problems for translators with the language pair Russian – Swedish. The results of the analysis show that the systematic differences in the languages involved are not as problematic as expected for the participants. Writing skills in the TL, translation principles and initial beliefs as well as the individual’s approach concerning the task of a translator turn out to have the most significant influences on the participants’ performance. In a complementary analysis, introspection data obtained from concurrent verbalisations are analysed according to a model that allows indicating and classifying marked processing in the translations. The role of contrastive language knowledge is especially emphasised in this part of the study. The results are put in relation to each other to obtain a picture of the individual development of the participating translator students. The three case studies show that each participant developed his/her competence during the time of the study. They also show that this development stays within a conceptual frame set by the participants before they started their training as translators. The implications for translator training that can be drawn from this study are mainly concerned with the importance of writing skills in the TL, contrastive language knowledge and the importance of questioning individual beliefs and principles concerning the task of the translator as well as approaches to translating.