The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the issue of the finding under Roman law, as one of the ways of acquiring ownership to a thing. The beginning is dedicated to the description of some specifics of Roman ownership, to its subject and to the ways of acquiring the ownership law at general. The thesis focuses on three main areas - occupation, acquiring the ownership to the abandoned things and the finding of a treasure. Occupation (occupatio) is a way of acquiring the ownership of the nobody's thing via its seizure. The thesis enumerates and describes each category of nobody's things. Attention is payed to the occupation of discovered movables, to the occupation of animals, immovables and to the seizure of things that belong to the enemy. Each of these categories of things has its specifics and it is very important to separate occupation from other ways of acquiring. The next issue is acquiring the ownership to the abandoned things (res derelictae). One have to differentiate between the period of classic Roman law and between the later law from the time of the emperor Justinian. The status of abandoned things in the classical era is not clear, as well as the method for obtaining their ownership. In the time of the codification of the emperor Justinian is the acquiring of abandoned things certainly more...

The research conducted for this thesis investigates the impact of thesauri on users' information searching behaviour, and the integration of thesauri into information searching interfaces in order to support the searching process. The work reported here consists of two preliminary studies, which served to refine research questions and explore the methodology, followed by two in-depth studies. The two in-depth studies were conducted with FACET, an experimental system developed at the University of Glamorgan in the context of an EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)-funded project focussing on faceted information retrieval in indexed multimedia collections. These studies were conducted with the participation of museum and library professionals. The author used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, such as "think aloud" protocols, questionnaires, application log files and content analysis. The in-depth studies resulted in important findings regarding the FACET interface which were considered in its further development. Findings also relate to thesaurus use in general - it was for example observed that behaviours such as browsing the thesaurus are not suitable at all search stages, so that users need to be guided in their choice of tools. One of the main findings was that conceptual problems encountered by searchers with little formal search training caused more difficulties than those related to interface design. This resulted in the conclusion that the information searching process needs to be supported by the interface and that more extensive use of thesauri in the form of support tools is possible at different stages of the search process. Based on literature on the information searching process and data from the first FACET study, the basis for a model of information searching in controlled vocabulary enhanced systems was developed and subsequently refined with data from the second in-depth study. This model aims in particular at facilitating the design and development of such systems. It consists of a textual and graphical representation of the search stages and an account of potential problems, their causes, possible detrimental effects on the further progress of the search and suggestions on how these can be avoided, under particular consideration of tools based on controlled vocabularies.

Lexical-semantic resources, including thesauri and WORDNET, have been successfully incorporated into a wide range of applications in Natural Language Processing. However they are very difficult and expensive to create and maintain, and their usefulness has been severely hampered by their limited coverage, bias and inconsistency. Automated and semi-automated methods for developing such resources are therefore crucial for further resource development and improved application performance. Systems that extract thesauri often identify similar words using the distributional hypothesis that similar words appear in similar contexts. This approach involves using corpora to examine the contexts each word appears in and then calculating the similarity between context distributions. Different definitions of context can be used, and I begin by examining how different types of extracted context influence similarity. To be of most benefit these systems must be capable of finding synonyms for rare words. Reliable context counts for rare events can only be extracted from vast collections of text. In this dissertation I describe how to extract contexts from a corpus of over 2 billion words. I describe techniques for processing text on this scale and examine the trade-off between context accuracy, information content and quantity of text analysed. Distributional similarity is at best an approximation to semantic similarity. I develop improved approximations motivated by the intuition that some events in the context distribution are more indicative of meaning than others. For instance, the object-of-verb context wear is far more indicative of a clothing noun than get. However, existing distributional techniques do not effectively utilise this information. The new context-weighted similarity metric I propose in this dissertation significantly outperforms every distributional similarity metric described in the literature. Nearest-neighbour similarity algorithms scale poorly with vocabulary and context vector size. To overcome this problem I introduce a new context-weighted approximation algorithm with bounded complexity in context vector size that significantly reduces the system runtime with only a minor performance penalty. I also describe a parallelized version of the system that runs on a Beowulf cluster for the 2 billion word experiments. To evaluate the context-weighted similarity measure I compare ranked similarity lists against gold-standard resources using precision and recall-based measures from Information Retrieval, since the alternative, application-based evaluation, can often be influenced by distributional as well as semantic similarity. I also perform a detailed analysis of the final results using WORDNET. Finally, I apply my similarity metric to the task of assigning words to WORDNET semantic categories. I demonstrate that this new approach outperforms existing methods and overcomes some of their weaknesses.

by Chan Chi Wai. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [89]-91). / Abstract --- p.ii / List of Tables --- p.vii / List of Figures --- p.viii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Background Information And Scope of Thesis --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Related Work --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Scope of Thesis --- p.10 / Chapter 3 --- System Architecture and Design Principle --- p.12 / Chapter 3.1 --- Overall System Architecture --- p.12 / Chapter 3.2 --- Entry Term Construct and Thesaurus Frame --- p.14 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Semantic Classification --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- "Word, Entry Term and Semanteme" --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Relationship Type and Relationship Link --- p.19 / Chapter 3.3 --- Thesaurus Module and Maintenance Module --- p.22 / Chapter 3.4 --- Data Structure --- p.22 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Semantic Classification Tree --- p.24 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Entry Term Construct --- p.24 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Thesaurus Frame --- p.26 / Chapter 4 --- Relationship Inference --- p.28 / Chapter 4.1 --- Study on a Traverse of Two Relationship Links --- p.29 / Chapter 4.2 --- Grammar of the Relationship Inference Rules Definition --- p.33 / Chapter 4.3 --- Implementation Detail and API of Relationship Inference --- p.35 / Chapter 4.4 --- Evaluation on Relationship Inference --- p.39 / Chapter 5 --- Weight Schemes --- p.41 / Chapter 5.1 --- Thesaurus Frame Construction and Relationship Type Definition --- p.42 / Chapter 5.2 --- Two Kinds of Relationship Types --- p.44 / Chapter 5.3 --- Evaluation on different Weighting Scheme Formulas --- p.46 / Chapter 5.4 --- Term Ranking --- p.57 / Chapter 5.5 --- Normalization on Semantic Distance --- p.62 / Chapter 6 --- User Interface and API --- p.66 / Chapter 6.1 --- User Interface --- p.66 / Chapter 6.2 --- API --- p.74 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Thesaurus Management --- p.75 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Semantic Classifications --- p.76 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- Entry Terms --- p.77 / Chapter 6.2.4 --- Semantemes --- p.79 / Chapter 6.2.5 --- Relationship Types and Relationship Links --- p.80 / Chapter 6.2.6 --- Weighting Schemes --- p.83 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.86 / Reference --- p.89 / Chapter A --- System Installation --- p.92 / Chapter A.1 --- File Organization of TheSys --- p.92 / Chapter A. 1.1 --- API Source Codes (THESYS/API) --- p.93 / Chapter A. 1.2 --- Header Files (THESYS/include) --- p.94 / Chapter A. 1.3 --- Interface Source Codes and Library (THESYS/UI and THESYS/lib) --- p.95 / Chapter A. 1.4 --- System Generated Files --- p.96 / Chapter A.2 --- Setup TheSys with its User Interfaces --- p.97 / Chapter A.3 --- Employ TheSys with Customized Applications --- p.97 / Chapter B --- API Description --- p.99 / Chapter B.1 --- Thesaurus Management --- p.102 / Chapter B.2 --- Semantic Classifications --- p.107 / Chapter B.3 --- Entry Terms --- p.116 / Chapter B.4 --- Semanemes --- p.123 / Chapter B.5 --- Relationship Types and Relationship Links --- p.130 / Chapter B.6 --- Relationship Inference --- p.141 / Chapter B.7 --- Weighting Schemes --- p.145

Orientadora: Mariângela Spotti Lopes Fujita / Banca: Walter Moreira / Banca: Franciele Marques Redígolo / Banca: Dulce Amélia de Brito Neves / Banca: Daniela Pereira dos Reis / Resumo: O tesauro é uma lista de termos registrados de forma estruturada com termos relacionados, organizados hierarquicamente, explicitando a relação entre categorias e conceitos. Possibilita uma indexação mais precisa, pois tem como função representar os assuntos dos documentos. Considerando a importância do tesauro como instrumento de representação do conhecimento para controle de vocabulário na indexação, bem como a necessidade de sua constante atualização, nossa questão de pesquisa é: Os tesauros construídos por bibliotecas e sistemas de recuperação da informação apresentam aspectos normativos? Em um cenário positivo, quais são esses aspectos e como são aplicados. A questão da pesquisa se baseia em concepções normativas presentes na Norma ISO 25964-1 que estabelece diretrizes para a construção de tesauros em ambientes impressos e eletrônicos. A proposta de pesquisa é investigar a construção e manutenção de tesauros para identificar a aplicabilidade de aspectos normativos com o objetivo de contribuir com estudos na Ciência da Informação sobre sistemas de organização do conhecimento, mais especificamente com investigações sobre elementos normativos e sua aplicação em tesauros. Como metodologia, foi realizada uma análise em uma amostra de seis tesauros. Essa análise teve como princípio a seção 13 da norma ISO 25964-1, que é composta por seis categorias denominadas: planejamento do tesauro; estágio inicial de compilação; construção; introdução do tesauro; disseminação e atualização ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The thesaurus is a list of terms registered in a structured way with related terms, organized hierarchically, explaining the relationship between categories and concepts. It enables a more precise indexing, since it has the function of representing the subjects of the documents. Considering the importance of the thesaurus as an instrument of knowledge representation to control vocabulary in indexing, as well as the need for its constant updating, our research question is: Are thesauri built by libraries and information retrieval systems presenting normative aspects? In a positive scenario, what these aspects are and how they are applied. The research question is based on normative concepts present in the ISO Standard 25964-1 that establishes guidelines for the construction of thesauri in printed and electronic environments. The research proposal is to investigate the construction and maintenance of thesauri to identify the applicability of normative aspects in order to contribute with studies in Information Science on knowledge organization systems, more specifically with investigations on normative elements and their application in thesauri. As a methodology, an analysis was performed on a sample of six thesauri. This analysis was based on section 13 of ISO 25964-1, which is composed of six categories called: thesaurus planning; initial stage of compilation; construction; introduction of the thesaurus; dissemination and updating chosen as a parameter. Based on these categori... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Thesauri are important tools for many Natural Language Processing applications. Roget's Thesaurus is particularly useful. It is of high quality and has been in development for over a century and a half. Yet its applications have been limited, largely because the only publicly available edition dates from 1911. This thesis proposes and tests methods of automatically updating the vocabulary of the 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus. I use the Thesaurus as a source of training data in order to learn from Roget’s for the purpose of updating Roget’s. The lexicon is updated in two stages. First, I develop a measure of semantic relatedness that enhances existing distributional techniques. I improve existing methods by using known sets of synonyms from Roget’s to train a distributional measure to better identify near synonyms. Second, I use the new measure of semantic relatedness to find where in Roget’s to place a new word. Existing words from Roget’s are used as training data to tune the parameters of three methods of inserting words. Over 5000 new words and word-senses were added using this process. I conduct two kinds of evaluation on the updated Thesaurus. One is on the procedure for updating Roget’s. This is accomplished by removing some words from the Thesaurus and testing my system's ability to reinsert them in the correct location. Human evaluation of the newly added words is also performed. Annotators must determine whether a newly added word is in the correct location. They found that in most cases the new words were almost indistinguishable from those already existing in Roget's Thesaurus. The second kind of evaluation is to establish the usefulness of the updated Roget’s Thesaurus on actual Natural Language Processing applications. These applications include determining semantic relatedness between word pairs or sentence pairs, identifying the best synonym from a set of candidates, solving SAT-style analogy problems, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and sentence ranking for text summarization. The updated Thesaurus consistently performed at least as well or better the original Thesaurus on all these applications.

Thesauri are important tools for many Natural Language Processing applications. Roget's Thesaurus is particularly useful. It is of high quality and has been in development for over a century and a half. Yet its applications have been limited, largely because the only publicly available edition dates from 1911. This thesis proposes and tests methods of automatically updating the vocabulary of the 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus. I use the Thesaurus as a source of training data in order to learn from Roget’s for the purpose of updating Roget’s. The lexicon is updated in two stages. First, I develop a measure of semantic relatedness that enhances existing distributional techniques. I improve existing methods by using known sets of synonyms from Roget’s to train a distributional measure to better identify near synonyms. Second, I use the new measure of semantic relatedness to find where in Roget’s to place a new word. Existing words from Roget’s are used as training data to tune the parameters of three methods of inserting words. Over 5000 new words and word-senses were added using this process. I conduct two kinds of evaluation on the updated Thesaurus. One is on the procedure for updating Roget’s. This is accomplished by removing some words from the Thesaurus and testing my system's ability to reinsert them in the correct location. Human evaluation of the newly added words is also performed. Annotators must determine whether a newly added word is in the correct location. They found that in most cases the new words were almost indistinguishable from those already existing in Roget's Thesaurus. The second kind of evaluation is to establish the usefulness of the updated Roget’s Thesaurus on actual Natural Language Processing applications. These applications include determining semantic relatedness between word pairs or sentence pairs, identifying the best synonym from a set of candidates, solving SAT-style analogy problems, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and sentence ranking for text summarization. The updated Thesaurus consistently performed at least as well or better the original Thesaurus on all these applications.

Thesauri are important tools for many Natural Language Processing applications. Roget's Thesaurus is particularly useful. It is of high quality and has been in development for over a century and a half. Yet its applications have been limited, largely because the only publicly available edition dates from 1911. This thesis proposes and tests methods of automatically updating the vocabulary of the 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus. I use the Thesaurus as a source of training data in order to learn from Roget’s for the purpose of updating Roget’s. The lexicon is updated in two stages. First, I develop a measure of semantic relatedness that enhances existing distributional techniques. I improve existing methods by using known sets of synonyms from Roget’s to train a distributional measure to better identify near synonyms. Second, I use the new measure of semantic relatedness to find where in Roget’s to place a new word. Existing words from Roget’s are used as training data to tune the parameters of three methods of inserting words. Over 5000 new words and word-senses were added using this process. I conduct two kinds of evaluation on the updated Thesaurus. One is on the procedure for updating Roget’s. This is accomplished by removing some words from the Thesaurus and testing my system's ability to reinsert them in the correct location. Human evaluation of the newly added words is also performed. Annotators must determine whether a newly added word is in the correct location. They found that in most cases the new words were almost indistinguishable from those already existing in Roget's Thesaurus. The second kind of evaluation is to establish the usefulness of the updated Roget’s Thesaurus on actual Natural Language Processing applications. These applications include determining semantic relatedness between word pairs or sentence pairs, identifying the best synonym from a set of candidates, solving SAT-style analogy problems, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and sentence ranking for text summarization. The updated Thesaurus consistently performed at least as well or better the original Thesaurus on all these applications.

Apresentação do campo da Organização da Informação e do Conhecimento com o subsídio das disciplinas da Terminologia e da Linguística Aplicada com o intuito de aprofundar os fundamentos da pesquisa terminológica para fins documentários. Com isso, foi possível justificar a eficiência da articulação entre os termos nos tesauros, para permitir melhor acesso aos documentos artísticos dos museus. Assim, o problema de pesquisa pauta-se nas possibilidades informacionais alternativas em relação ao cerceamento representativo dos tesauros. Expõe-se a hipótese de que a expansão das relações terminológicas nos tesauros possibilitaria a integração social do museu por meio da confluência entre o Ciclo da Informação e a Espiral da Cultura Científica, denominada Espiral da Informação. Trata-se de uma pesquisa hipotético-dedutiva que combina indução e dedução, fato que permite a mobilidade essencial do pensamento, de modo que de um contexto específico é retirado o problema de pesquisa e, a ele, formulada uma possível solução que será comprovada ou refutada ao longo do desenvolvimento investigativo. Propostas de aperfeiçoamento são realizadas, a fim de evidenciar a importância da Organização da Informação e do Conhecimento para a comunicação e a geração de conhecimento no âmbito museológico. A interpretação subjetiva do indivíduo no museu deve ser respeitada, proporcionando maiores possibilidades de recuperação informacional, a partir da representação adequada de documentos. / Introducing the field of Information and Knowledge Organization with the subsidy disciplines of Terminology and Applied Linguistics in order to deepen the foundations of terminology research for documentary. Thus, it was possible to justify the efficiency of the relationship between the terms in the thesaurus, to allow better access to the documents of art museums. Thus, the research problem is guided in informational alternative possibilities in relation to the restriction of the representative thesauri. Exposes the hypothesis that the expansion of terminological relations of thesaurus enable the social integration of the museum through the confluence of the Information Cycle and the Spiral of Scientific Culture, called Spiral of Information. This is a hypothetical-deductive research that combines induction and deduction, a fact that allows the essential mobility of thought, so that a specific context is removed and the research problem, it formulated a possible solution that is proven or refuted over investigative development. Proposed improvements are made in order to highlight the importance of the Information and Knowledge Organization for communication and knowledge generation within museum. The subjective interpretation of the individual must be respected in the museum, providing greater possibilities for informational recovery from the proper representation of documents.

Orientador: Mariângela Spotti Lopes Fujita / Banca: Maria de Fátima Gonçalves Moreira Tálamo / Banca: João Batista Ernesto de Moraes / Banca: Marta Lígia Pomim Valentim / Banca: Vera Regina Casari Boccato / Resumo: Investiga a integração da Terminografia para a construção de tesauros na busca de procedimentos terminográficos que podem ser aplicados em conjunto com procedimentos metodológicos existentes de análise de assunto, para o aprimoramento da representação de conceitos na construção de tesauros. Realiza um estudo teórico-metodológico da construção de tesauro, com enfoque na identificação de conceitos em áreas de especialidade para a organização e recuperação temática da informação. Apresenta como objetivo geral enunciar um modelo metodológico para a construção de tesauro com a integração de procedimentos terminográficos. Como objetivos específicos: analisar e sintetizar referenciais teórico-metodológicos sobre construção de tesauros; identificar os principais aspectos teórico-metodológicos da Terminologia/Terminografia contribuintes para a construção de tesauros; e apresentar proposta de um modelo metodológico terminográfico para a construção de tesauros. A metodologia da pesquisa qualifica-se por sua natureza bibliográfica, descritiva e exploratória, concentrando-se na abordagem temática do vocabulário de áreas de especialidade. Enfatiza como um resultado do trabalho aplicado o "Tesauro Terminográfico Preliminar em Gestão da Informação", disponível na web. Conclui que o aprimoramento de etapas da construção de tesauro, aliado a contribuições de procedimentos terminográficos, produz uma representação de conceitos, por meio de termos, tendo em vista a obtenção de um vocabulário consistente, que compõe a base para a organização e recuperação temática da informação, e compatível com a demanda de áreas de especialidade. / Abstract: It investigates the terminographic integration for the thesauri construction in the search of terminographic procedures that may be used together with existing methodological procedures of subject analysis, for the improvement of the concepts representation in the thesauri construction. It is a theoretical-methodological study of the thesauri construction, focusing in the concepts identification in specialized area for the representation and thematic information retrieval. The general purpose of this research is to conceive a methodological model for the thesauri construction with the terminographic procedures integration. The specific purposes are to analyze and synthesize theoretical-methodological framework on thesauri construction, identify the main theoretical-methodological aspects of Terminology/Terminography which contribute to the thesauri construction, and present a proposal of a terminographic methodological model for the thesaurus construction. The research methodology is bibliographical, descriptive and exploratory, focusing on the thematic approach of vocabulary of speciality areas. It emphasizes as a result of this work, the "Preliminary Terminographic Thesauri in Information Management", available in the web. It concludes that the improvement of thesauri construction stages, with the contributions of terminographic procedures, produce a concepts representation, by means of terms, having in mind the acquisition of a consistent vocabulary, which forms the basis for the organization and thematic information retrieval, and compatible with the demand of specialized areas. / Doutor