People with some types of motor disabilities who wish to generate text using a computer can find the process both fatiguing and time-consuming. These problems can be alleviated by reducing the quantity of keystrokes they must make, and one approach is to allow the user to enter shortened, abbreviated input, which is then re-expanded for them, by a program ‘filling in the gaps’. Word Prediction is one approach, but comes with drawbacks, one of which is the requirement that generally the user must type the first letters of their intended word, regardless of how unrepresentative they may consider those letters to be. Abbreviation Expansion allows the user to type reduced forms of many words in a way they feel represents them more effectively. This can be done by the omission of one or more letters, or the replacement of letter sequences with other, usually shorter, sequences. For instance, the word ‘hyphenate might be shortened to ‘yfn8’, by leaving out some letters and replacing the ‘ph’ and ‘ate’ with the shorter but phonetically similar ‘f’ and ‘8’. ‘Fixed Abbreviation Expansion’ requires the user to memorise a set of correspondences between abbreviations and the full words which they represent. While this enables useful keystroke savings to be made, these come alongside an increased cognitive load and potential for error. Where a word is encountered for which there is no preset abbreviation, or for which the user cannot remember one, keystroke savings may be lost. ‘Flexible Abbreviation Expansion’ allows the user to leave out whichever letters they feel to be ‘less differentiating' and jump straight ahead to type those they feel are most ‘salient’ and most characterise the word, choosing abbreviations ‘on the fly’. The need to memorise sets of correspondences is removed, as the user can be offered all candidates for which the abbreviation might be a representation, usually in small sets on screen. For useful savings to be made, the intended word must regularly be in the first or second set for quick selection, or the system might attempt to place the intended word at the very top of its list as frequently as possible. Thus it is important to generate and rank the candidates effectively, so that high probability words can be offered in a shortlist. Lower-ranking candidates can be offered in secondary lists which are not immediately displayed. This can reduce both the cognitive load and keystrokes needed for selection. The thesis addresses the task of reducing the number of keystrokes needed for text creation with a large, expressive vocabulary, using a new approach to flexible abbreviation expansion. To inform the solution, two empirical studies were run to gather letter-level statistics on the abbreviation methods of twenty-nine people, under different degrees of constriction (that is, different restrictions on the numbers of characters by which to reduce). These studies showed that with a small amount of priming, people would abbreviate in regular ways, both shared between users, and repeated through the data from an individual. Analysis showed the most common strategies to be vowel deletion, phonetic replacement, loss of double letters, and word truncation. Participants reduced the number of letters in their texts by between 25% (judged to maintain a high degree of comprehensibility) up to 40% (judged to be a maximum degree of brevity whilst still retaining comprehensibility). Informed by these results, an individual-word-level algorithm was developed. For each input abbreviation, a set of candidates is produced, ranked in such a way as to potentially save substantial keystrokes when used across a whole text. A variety of statistical and linguistic techniques, often also used in spelling checking and correction, are used to rank them so that the most probable will be easiest to select, and with fewest keystrokes. The algorithm works at the level of the individual word, without looking at surrounding context. Evaluation of the algorithm demonstrated that it outperforms its nearest comparable alternative, of ranking word lists exclusively by word frequency. The evaluation was performed on the data from the second empirical study, using vocabulary sizes of 2-, 10-, 20- and 30-thousand words. The results show the algorithm to be of potential benefit for use as a component of a flexible abbreviation expansion system. Even with the overhead of selection of the intended word, useful keystroke savings could still be attained. It is envisaged that such a system could be implemented on many platforms, including as part of an AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) device, and an email system on a standard PC, thus making typed communication for the user group more comfortable and expansive.

Abbreviations are common in clinical documentation, as this type of text is written under time-pressure and serves mostly for internal communication. This study attempts to apply and extend existing rule-based algorithms that have been developed for English and Swedish abbreviation detection, in order to create an abbreviation detection algorithm for Swedish clinical texts that can identify and suggest definitions for abbreviations and acronyms. This can be used as a pre-processing step for further information extraction and text mining models, as well as for readability solutions. Through a literature review, a number of heuristics were defined for automatic abbreviation detection. These were used in the construction of the Swedish Clinical Abbreviation Normalizer (SCAN). The heuristics were: a) freely available external resources: a dictionary of general Swedish, a dictionary of medical terms and a dictionary of known Swedish medical abbreviations, b) maximum word lengths (from three to eight characters), and c) heuristics for handling common patterns such as hyphenation. For each token in the text, the algorithm checks whether it is a known word in one of the lexicons, and whether it fulfills the criteria for word length and the created heuristics. The final algorithm was evaluated on a set of 300 Swedish clinical notes from an emergency department at the Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm. These notes were annotated for abbreviations, a total of 2,050 tokens. This set was annotated by a physician accustomed to reading and writing medical records. The algorithm was tested in different variants, where the word lists were modified, heuristics adapted to characteristics found in the texts, and different combinations of word lengths. The best performing version of the algorithm achieved an F-Measure score of 79%, with 76% recall and 81% precision, which is a considerable improvement over the baseline where each token was only matched against the word lists (51% F-measure, 87% recall, 36% precision). Not surprisingly, precision results are higher when the maximum word length is set to the lowest (three), and recall results higher when it is set to the highest (eight). Algorithms for rule-based systems, mainly developed for English, can be successfully adapted for abbreviation detection in Swedish medical records. System performance relies heavily on the quality of the external resources, as well as on the created heuristics. In order to improve results, part-of-speech information and/or local context is needed for disambiguation. In the case of Swedish, compounding also needs to be handled.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:22:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-02-07Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:48:35Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 fusca_cj_me_sjrp.pdf: 504460 bytes, checksum: ec0f2136aa847064c00b95badf979b51 (MD5) / Este trabalho propõe investigar a abreviação em salas de bate-papo abertas (chats) da internet, frequentadas por escreventes que afirmam ter entre 15 e 20 anos. O conjunto do material é formado por duas “conversas” virtuais, com duração de 60 (sessenta) minutos cada uma. Reconhecida como uma das características do chamado “internetês”, busca-se refletir que a abreviação não consiste em mero “corte de palavras”, mas em recurso que apresenta regularidade e sistematicidade linguísticas. Esse processo é tomado como indício de (novo) gênero de discurso em emergência (BAKHTIN, 1997; MARCUSCHI, 2005). Com a finalidade de verificar os processos formadores de abreviaturas em bate-papos, ou seja, as regularidades linguísticas desse recurso, utiliza-se, como ferramenta de análise, a teoria de sílaba fonológica (SELKIRK, 1982). Acredita-se que, por meio do estudo da estrutura da sílaba, é possível avaliar que a escolha dos grafemas das abreviaturas é fundada na heterogeneidade da escrita (CORRÊA, 2004), visto que o escrevente pode se basear tanto em práticas orais/faladas quanto em práticas letradas/escritas para sua composição estrutural. Considera-se também que o funcionamento e a emergência de um modo de enunciação digital apenas são possíveis em meio a uma sociedade líquida (BAUMAN, 2004), caracterizada pela não permanência e fragilidade das relações entre os sujeitos. A consideração desses fatores parece ser indispensável para o entendimento de prática social ainda pouco (ou não) reconhecida / This research’s propose is to investigate the word’s abbreviation which appears on the internet chats, used by writers who affirm to be around 15 or 20 years old. The material’s amount is composed by two virtual “conversations” that spends around 60 minutes which one. Recognized as one characteristic of the well-known “internetês”, we consider that this abbreviation is not a simple attempt to “cut the words”, it is a resource that presents linguistics’ regularity. This process is seeing as a clue of a (new) speech genres that is borning (BAKHTIN, 1997; MARCUSCHI, 2005). In order to verify the process that forms possible abbreviations used on chats, in other words, the linguistic regularities of that resource, it is used, as a tool of analyze, the theory of phonological syllable (SELKIRK, 1982). It is believed that, based on the syllable structure’s study, it is possible to assess that the choice of the abbreviation’s graphemes is based on the writing heterogeneity (CORRÊA, 2004), since the writer can be based on oral/spoken practices or on literate/written practices. It is also considered that the operation and the emergency of a digital way to enunciate is only possible in a liquid society (BAUMAN, 2004), that is not characterized because of the fragile and permanent relationship among subjects. Considering these factors it seems to be indispensable to comprehend the social practices which are rarely (or never) recognized

<p>The aim of this study is to examine the language from a small sample of texts from the chat channels of World of Warcraft and analyze the differences found between World of Warcraft English and Standard English. In addition, the studywill compare the language found in World of Warcraft with language found on other parts of the Internet, especially chatgroups. Based on 1045 recorded chat messages, this study examines the use of abbreviations, emoticons, vocabulary, capitalization, spelling, multiple letter use and the use of rare characters. The results of the investigation show that the language of World of Warcraft differs from Standard English on several aspects, primarily in the use of abbreviations. This is supported by secondary sources. The results also show that the use of language is probably not based on the desire to deliver a message quickly, but rather to reach out to people. In addition, the results show that the language found in World of Warcraft is more advanced than a simple effort to try to imitate speech, thereby performing more than written speech.</p>

<p>The language used in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (or MMORPGs) is a form of computer-mediate communication. It consists of elements from both written and spoken language, but it is a highly abbreviated and innovative form of written language. This study focuses on the English language used in a MMORPG called Warhammer Online. The aim of this study is to identify abbreviations, interpret their meanings and to analyze the word formation processes and semantic changes that are involved in new words. The method used in this study is a qualitative case study of the English language in a MMORPG from a synchronic point of view. The secondary sources used in this study include previous works on morphology and semantics. The material used is based on logs acquired from the game Warhammer Online as a subscribed player. The results presented in this study show new and unique words created by players in Warhammer Online, along with other semantic changes that have taken place. It is concluded that the English written language has not seen such a major change in its entirety before, within one community.</p>

Au XXe siècle, aux moyens traditionnels de transmission du langage verbal que constituent le parlé et l’écrit, s’est ajouté un troisième moyen, le transmis. Si, dans un premier temps, il s’est surtout agi d’un « parlé à distance » (téléphone, radio, cinéma, télévision), on est ensuite passé à « l’écrit à distance » (sites Internet, courrier électronique, chats, SMS). Les progrès technologiques ont été suivis d’une transformation linguistique : le code s’est adapté aux différents supports qui l’ont véhiculé. Les technologies électroniques de la parole, comme le note Spina (2001 : 31), ont donné une nouvelle impulsion au mode de communication orale. À la fin du XIXe siècle, en effet, l’invention du téléphone a représenté une véritable révolution. Aujourd’hui, après plus d’un siècle, le téléphone a dépassé ses limitations traditionnelles, il s’est fait petit et discret et, à la transmission du son, il a ajouté la possibilité de faire circuler de brefs messages de texte et même des e-mails.La diffusion de la communication SMS a transformé un instrument dévolu à l’échange oral en technologie d’écriture, mais l’originalité du support permet à l’écriture SMS de reproduire les structures morphologiques de l’interaction orale, malgré sa nature d’écrit. Ainsi, la vitesse de composition du message n’est pas la seule propriété qui permette à l’écriture SMS de s’approcher de l’oralité : la syntaxe y apparaît souvent comme plutôt élémentaire, avec une prédominance de parataxes et de constructions elliptiques de la phrase plutôt que d’hypotaxes, traits typiques du discours oral. Mais le SMS joue aussi sur les finalités communicatives en abaissant le registre formel de la langue et en favorisant ainsi un nouveau langage. Notre thèse, si elle n’est pas la première à analyser un corpus de SMS, est sûrement en revanche l’une des premières à comparer la typologie des processus observés dans deux langues, l’italien et le français, pour en définir mécanismes parallèles et diversités. / Verbal language has traditionally been communicated by two means: speech and writing. In the twentieth century, however, a third means came into existence: transmitted language. Initially this consisted mostly of language “spoken at a distance” (telephone, radio, cinema, television), but it then extended to include language “written at a distance” (Internet sites, electronic mail, online chat, SMS). Technological progress was followed by a transformation of the language, and the code has been adapted to the different media used to convey it. Electronic technologies of the word, as Spina notes (2001: 31), have given a new impetus to the oral mode of communication, based on the spoken word.At the end of the 19th century, the invention of the telephone was a real breakthrough, allowing the creation of new, and previously unavailable, forms of communication. Today, little more than a century later, the phone has exceeded even its traditional limitations and to the transmission of sound has been added the ability to write short text messages, and even to send e-mail. The spread of SMS communication has transformed an instrument devoted to oral exchange into a technology of writing: in fact, the originality of the support allows text messaging, despite its written nature, to reproduce the morphological structures of oral interaction. Thus, the speed of composing the message is not the only property that allows texting to approach orality: the syntax is often seen as rather basic, with a predominance of parataxis and elliptical constructions rather than hypotaxis, features that are typical of spoken discourse. But texting also plays on communicative purpose by adopting a more informal register and thus fostering a new language. The present thesis, while not the first study to analyze a corpus of SMS, is surely one of the first to compare the types of processes found in both languages, French and Italian, in order to define parallel mechanisms and differences.

Resumo: Este trabalho propõe investigar a abreviação em salas de bate-papo abertas (chats) da internet, frequentadas por escreventes que afirmam ter entre 15 e 20 anos. O conjunto do material é formado por duas "conversas" virtuais, com duração de 60 (sessenta) minutos cada uma. Reconhecida como uma das características do chamado "internetês", busca-se refletir que a abreviação não consiste em mero "corte de palavras", mas em recurso que apresenta regularidade e sistematicidade linguísticas. Esse processo é tomado como indício de (novo) gênero de discurso em emergência (BAKHTIN, 1997; MARCUSCHI, 2005). Com a finalidade de verificar os processos formadores de abreviaturas em bate-papos, ou seja, as regularidades linguísticas desse recurso, utiliza-se, como ferramenta de análise, a teoria de sílaba fonológica (SELKIRK, 1982). Acredita-se que, por meio do estudo da estrutura da sílaba, é possível avaliar que a escolha dos grafemas das abreviaturas é fundada na heterogeneidade da escrita (CORRÊA, 2004), visto que o escrevente pode se basear tanto em práticas orais/faladas quanto em práticas letradas/escritas para sua composição estrutural. Considera-se também que o funcionamento e a emergência de um modo de enunciação digital apenas são possíveis em meio a uma sociedade líquida (BAUMAN, 2004), caracterizada pela não permanência e fragilidade das relações entre os sujeitos. A consideração desses fatores parece ser indispensável para o entendimento de prática social ainda pouco (ou não) reconhecida / Abstract: This research's propose is to investigate the word's abbreviation which appears on the internet chats, used by writers who affirm to be around 15 or 20 years old. The material's amount is composed by two virtual "conversations" that spends around 60 minutes which one. Recognized as one characteristic of the well-known "internetês", we consider that this abbreviation is not a simple attempt to "cut the words", it is a resource that presents linguistics' regularity. This process is seeing as a clue of a (new) speech genres that is borning (BAKHTIN, 1997; MARCUSCHI, 2005). In order to verify the process that forms possible abbreviations used on chats, in other words, the linguistic regularities of that resource, it is used, as a tool of analyze, the theory of phonological syllable (SELKIRK, 1982). It is believed that, based on the syllable structure's study, it is possible to assess that the choice of the abbreviation's graphemes is based on the writing heterogeneity (CORRÊA, 2004), since the writer can be based on oral/spoken practices or on literate/written practices. It is also considered that the operation and the emergency of a digital way to enunciate is only possible in a liquid society (BAUMAN, 2004), that is not characterized because of the fragile and permanent relationship among subjects. Considering these factors it seems to be indispensable to comprehend the social practices which are rarely (or never) recognized / Orientador: Fabiana Cristina Komesu / Coorientador: Luciani Ester Tenani / Banca: Lourenço Chacon Jurado Filho / Banca: Fernanda Correa Silveira Galli / Mestre

Word forming process of clipping and its presentation and comprehension in French textbooks at B1 level This diploma thesis focuses on the word formation process of clipping and its presentation and seizing in French textbooks at the B1 level. The theoretical part of the work aims to describe the clipping in the context of other word forming processes and to provide basic information about this process based on the study of professional publications. This part of the work defines clipping and presents the basic typology (apocope and apheresis). Based on specific examples, the thesis describes the morphological and phonetic attributes of clipping, and also mentions specific forms of words associated with this process, such as lexical amalgams. In addition, the theoretical part mentions the words classes usually affected by clipping, the question of grammatical categories or the concept of clipping in the Czech language. The aim of the practical part is to analyse the occurence of the process of clipping in teaching at high schools, using three contemporary French textbooks at the B1 level according to CEFR. The presence or absence of the clipping process in the teaching is also analysed via questionnaire research in selected years of high school. The thesis is based on the assumption that the...

Code comprehension is crucial for software development, as it ensures that code is easy to read andunderstand.Identifiers, such as variable-, function-, and methodnames playa significant role in code comprehension, and it isimportantthat they are written using meaningful names so thateveryone understands their usage. However, sometimes theycontainabbreviations that can have significantly differentexplanationsdepending on the context they are written in, which couldnegatively impact comprehension if the context is notfully known.Large code bases can be hard to navigate but with thehelp ofCode Visualization Tool (CVT) they can provide anoverviewthat helpfully displays the program’s flow and call graphs.Tohelp with abbreviations in large code bases this studywasconducted to investigate the use of Abbreviation Resolver(AR)techniques integrated into a CVT called Doxygen to seethe effecton identifier comprehension. A survey was performed ontwoopen-source projects with questions about thecomprehensionof different methods using their identifiers with bothresolvedidentifiers and abbreviated identifiers. The survey utilizedAR toanalyze participant ́s understanding of abbreviations todetermine it ́s usefulness. The findings suggest that the use ofa CVTwith an integrated AR helps in understanding uncommonanddomain-knowledge abbreviations which contribute toimprovedcode comprehension.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:42:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1980865 bytes, checksum: cc644ccfc2740ded432fde6ea3bf2de3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-17 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This study deals with a very common phenomenon of the manuscripts writing in the past centuries; the abbreviation. Although it seems that this is a phenomenon that results from continued use of the computer or an immediate trend of globalized era, this research, from the perspective of discursive traditions and language of the text, will show that this is a characteristic of the current time about writing manuscripts, and it is mainly a written tradition of priestly and goes forward to the idea of paper economy, widespread idea on the studies of medieval writing. For the analysis of the information, it was assembled a corpus collected from a main Church in the city of Mossoró, composed by several books, which the first one was analyzed, corresponing to the period of the nineteenth century. As theoretical basis it was used Coseriu (1979), Oesterreicher (2002), Kabatek (2006), the analysis was amde under the theory of Traditions Discursive and under the textual language in which it is considered that all texts are made based on a previous text and existing features of the model can be preserved or not, depending on the needs either of the author or the moment. This study arose from the need of drawing a profile of writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the town of Mossoró. From the results we can state that the writing of tumble books reflects on the historical context in which the spelling did not follow a pattern. According to that, writing was based on the tradition of Portuguese models, which somehow made the abbreviations remain over a long time in the texts of the colonial era. / Este trabalho trata de um dos fenômenos bastante comum da escrita dos manuscritos dos séculos passados; a abreviação. Embora se pense que esse é um fenômeno decorrente do uso contínuo do computador ou uma tendência imediatista da era globalizada, esta pesquisa, sob o olhar das Tradições Discursivas e da linguística do texto, vai mostrar que essa é uma característica corrente da escrita da época dos manuscritos, e é principalmente uma tradição da escrita sacerdotal e vai de encontro à ideia de abreviação por economia de papel, ideia bastante difundida em estudos da escrita medieval. Para a análise de dados, foi montado um corpus coletado da Igreja Matriz na cidade de Mossoró, composto por vários livros de Tombo, dos quais só se analisou o primeiro, o qual corresponde ao período do século XIX. Como base teórica utilizou-se Coseriu (1979), Oesterreicher (2002), Kabatek (2006), a análise foi feita sob a teoria das Tradições Discursivas e da linguística textual nas quais se considera que todos os textos são produzidos tendo em base um texto já existente e características do modelo podem ser preservadas ou não dependendo da necessidade do autor ou do momento. Esse estudo nasceu da necessidade de traçar um perfil da escrita dos séculos XIX e XX da cidade de Mossoró. Dos resultados podemos apontar que a escrita dos livros de tombo reflete o contexto histórico em que a ortografia não seguia um padrão. Com isso a escrita baseava-se na tradição dos modelos portugueses, o que de certa forma, fez com que as abreviaturas permanecem ao longo de muito tempo nos textos da época colonial.