Com a utilização de quatro eqüinos fêmeas, adultas, sem raça definida, com peso médio de 450 Kg em um delineamento experimental quadrado latino 4 X 4, os objetivos deste trabalho foram determinar os coeficientes de digestibilidade total da matéria seca, matéria orgânica, nutrientes digestíveis totais, proteína bruta, fibra solúvel em detergente ácido, fibra solúvel em detergente neutro e do amido de dietas contendo milho submetido a quatro processamentos, quais sejam: trituração, laminação, floculação e, extrusão; e avaliar a resposta glicêmica, um dos indicadores do metabolismo pós-absortivo. Diferenças significativas foram encontradas na MO e FDA, sendo que a dieta que continha milho floculado teve melhor digestibilidade da MO e da FDA que a dieta contendo milho laminado e o milho triturado. O experimento também mostrou digestibilidade menor (p< 0,05) da PB da dieta com milho laminado em relação as demais. O tratamento contendo milho extrusado teve tendência uma resposta glicêmica maior. O que indica que o processamento pode ser útil na alimentação de eqüinos / Using 4 adult mares, without a defining breed, with an average weight of 450 Kg in an experimental design latin square 4 x 4, the objectives of this research were to determine the dry matter total digestibility coefficient, organic matter, total digestible nutrients, crude protein, soluble fiber in detergent acid, soluble fiber in detergent neutral and starch in diets containing corn submitted to four different processes; grinded, chopped, flocked and extrused; and evaluate the glicemic answer, one of the indicators of the of the post-absorption metabolism. Significant differences (p<0,05) were found in the MO and FDA digestibility in the diet containing flocked corn comparated to the diet with chopped corn. The experiment also demonstrated digestibility to CP smaller (p<0,05) in the treatment with chopped corn when compared to the other treataments. The diet with extrused corn had a tendency a higher glicemic answer. This demonstrates that corn processing can be useful in equine feeding.

One of the most important social activities in the lives of human beings is conversation. Apart from thoughts and ideas, we can express our feelings and emotions by means of conversation. Moreover, since conversation is recognized as a reciprocal process, we can understand and grasp what the people involved in the interaction are displaying. Being all around us, conversation is a means which makes us social. Its description and analysis have become a concern for many scientists. For the past forty years, conversation has been a subject of study for sociologists, linguists and social psychologists. Since that time, we may speak of the emergence of conversation analysis (hereinafter referred to as CA).

This study focuses on virtual services and more particularly on the usage of chat services to provide a formal evidence of the status of one particular chat reference service. It explores the efficiency of the chat service model at Umeå University Library for the period August 2015 to February 2016 and covers a total of 221 virtual chat transactions. It uses content analysis and a process model of chat-based reference to bring comprehension of the content for both inquiries and replies to understand the usage of this service and discern trends and discrepancies. The results show that September and February have the highest amount of questions due to the distribution of the academic year. Furthermore, the requests appeared to be spread evenly over the distinguished categories with a slightly lower number of research related questions which reflect the difficulty to perform a reference interview in the virtual context. The study uncovered that the types of inquiries affect the level of completeness and consequently questions requiring general knowledge of the library are more successfully answered than more specific questions. The referrals are connected to the knowledge area of the librarian answering the chat and remain internal. Those results can be easily improved through skill development programs but librarian evaporation remains a predominant issue that should be addressed. Despite the circumstantial attendance of the chat, the chat service appears to be a valid alternative to the information desk and the library management should improve the chat efficacy by involving more competences.

Une ontologie (ou base de connaissances) est une représentation formelle de connaissances sous la forme d'entités et de faits sur ces entités. Ces dernières années de nombreuses ontologies ont été développées dans des contextes académiques et industriels. Elles sont généralement définies à l’aide du langage forme lRDF et interrogées avec le langage de requêtes SPARQL. Une connaissance partielle du contenu et de la structure d’une ontologie peut amener les utilisateurs à exécuter des requêtes qui retournent un résultat vide de réponses, considéré comme insatisfaisant. Parmi les techniques d’interrogation coopératives développées pour résoudre ce problème se trouve la technique de relaxation de requêtes. Elle consiste à affaiblir les conditions exprimées dans les requêtes pour retourner des résultats alternatifs à l'utilisateur. En étudiant les travaux existants sur la relaxation de requêtes SPARQL nous avons constaté qu’ils présentent plusieurs limitations :(1) ils ne permettent pas de définir précisément la relaxation à effectuer tout en offrant la possibilité de contrôler le processus de relaxation (2) ils n’identifient pas les causes réelles d'échec de la requête formulée par l'utilisateur et (3) ils n’intègrent pas d’outils interactifs pour mieux exploiter les techniques de relaxation proposées. Pour répondre à ces limitations, ce travail de thèse propose un framework pour la relaxation de requêtes SPARQL. Ce framework inclut un ensemble d'opérateurs de relaxation des requêtes SPARQL permettant de relaxer incrémentalement des parties précises de la requête utilisateur tout en contrôlant la pertinence des réponses alternatives retournées par rapport aux besoins exprimés par l’utilisateur dans sa requête. Notre framework propose également plusieurs algorithmes qui identifient les causes d’échec de la requête utilisateur et les requêtes qui réussissent (c'est-à-dire, qui ont des résultats) ayant un nombre maximal de conditions de la requête initialement exprimée. Ces informations permettent à l’utilisateur de mieux comprendre pourquoi sa requête échoue et d’exécuter des requêtes qui retournent des résultats alternatifs.Enfin, notre framework propose des stratégies de relaxation qui élargissent les conditions de la requête utilisateur en s’appuyant sur les causes d’échec de celle-ci. Ces stratégies permettent de réduire le temps d’exécution du processus de relaxation par rapport à l’approche classique, qui consiste à exécuter les requêtes relaxées, en fonction de leur similarité avec la requête utilisateur, jusqu’à l’obtention d’un nombre satisfaisant de résultats alternatifs. Les contributions proposées dans ce framework ont été implémentées et validées par des scénarios et expérimentations basés sur le banc d'essai LUBM. Ils montrent l’intérêt de nos contributions par rapport à l'état de l'art. / Ontology (or Knowledge base) is a formal representation of knowledge as entities and facts related to these entities. In the past years, several ontologies have been developed in academic and industrial contexts.They are generally defined with RDF language and querying with SPARQL language. A partial knowledge of instances and schema of ontology may lead user to execute queries that result in empty answers, considered as unsatisfactory. Among cooperative querying techniques which have been developed to solve the problem of empty answers, query relaxation technique is the well-known and used. It aims at weakening the conditions expressed in the original query to return alternative answers to the user. Existing work on relaxation of SPARQL queries we suffer from many drawbacks : (1) they do not allow defining in precise way the relaxation to perform with the ability to control the relaxation process (2) they do not identify the causes of failure of the request expressed by the user and (3) they do not include interactive tools to better exploit the relaxation techniques proposed. To address these limitations, this thesis proposes an advanced framework forquery relaxation SPARQL. First, this framework includes a set of relaxation operators dedicated to SPARQLqueries, to incrementally relax specific parts of the user request while controlling the relevance of the alternative responses returned w.r.t. to the user needs expressed in his request. Our framework also provides both several algorithms that identify the causes of failure of the user query and queries that are successful with a maximum number of conditions initially expressed in the failing request. This information allows the user to better understand why his request fails and execute queries that return non-empty alternative results. Finally,our framework offers intelligent relaxation strategies that rely on the causes of query failure. Such strategies reduce the execution time of the relaxation process compared to the traditional approach, which executes relaxed requests, based on their similarity to the user request, until a number of satisfactory alternative results is obtained. All contributions proposed in this framework were implemented and validated by experiments and scenarios based on the tests bench LUBM. They show the interest of our contributions w.r.t. the state of theart.

Automated short-answer marking cannot 'guarantee' 100% agreement between the marks generated by a software system and the marks produced separately by a human. This problem has prevented automated marking systems from being used in high-stake short-answer marking. Given this limitation, can an automated short-answer marking system have any practical application? This thesis describes how an automated short-answer marking system, called IndusMarker, can be effectively used to improve learning and teaching.The design and evaluation of IndusMarker are also presented in the thesis. IndusMarker is designed for factual answers where there is a clear criterion for answers being right or wrong. The system is based on structure matching, i.e. matching a pre-specified structure, developed via a purpose-built structure editor, with the content of the student's answer text. An examiner specifies the required structure of an answer in a simple purpose-designed language called Question Answer Markup Language (QAML). The structure editor ensures that users construct correct required structures (with respect to QAML's syntax and informal semantics) in a form that is suitable for accurate automated marking.

Multiple-choice (MCQs) and short-answer questions (SAQs) are the most common test formats for assessing English reading proficiency. While the former provides test-takers with prescribed options, the latter requires short written responses. Test developers favor MCQs over SAQs for the following reasons: less time required for rating, high rater agreement, and wide content coverage. This mixed methods dissertation investigated the impacts of test format on reading performance, metacognitive awareness, test-completion processes, and task perceptions. Participants were eighty English as a second language (ESL) learners from a Midwestern community college. They were first divided into two groups of approximately equivalent reading proficiencies and then completed MCQ and SAQ English reading tests in different orders. After completing each format, participants filled out a survey about demographic information, strategy use, and perceptions of test formats. They also completed a 5-point Likert-scale survey to assess their degree of metacognitive awareness. At the end, sixteen participants were randomly chosen to engage in retrospective interviews focusing on their strategy use and task perceptions. This study employed a mixed methods approach in which quantitative and qualitative strands converged to draw an overall meta-inference. For the quantitative strand, descriptive statistics, paired sample t-tests, item analyses, two-way ANOVAs, and correlation analyses were conducted to investigate 1) the differences between MCQ and SAQ test performance and 2) the relationship between test performance and metacognitive awareness. For the qualitative strand, test-takers’ MCQ and SAQ test completion processes and task perceptions were explored using coded interview and survey responses related to strategy use and perceptions of test formats. Results showed that participants performed differently on MCQ and SAQ reading tests, even though both tests were highly correlated. The paired sample t-tests revealed that participants’ English reading and writing proficiencies might account for the MCQ and SAQ performance disparity. Moreover, there was no positive relationship between reading test performance and the degree of metacognitive awareness generated by the frequency of strategy use. Correlation analyses suggested whether a higher or lower English reading proficiency of the participants was more important than strategy use. Although the frequency of strategy use did not benefit test performance, strategies implemented for MCQ and SAQ tests were found to generate interactive processes allowing participants to gain deeper understanding of the source texts. Furthermore, participants’ perceptions toward MCQs, SAQs, and a combination of both revealed positive and negative influences among test format, reading comprehension, and language learning. Therefore, participants’ preferences of test format should be considered when measuring their English reading proficiency. This study has pedagogical implications on the use of various test formats in L2 reading classrooms.

The multiple-choice test question is a popular item format used for tests ranging from classroom assessments to professional licensure exams. The popularity of this format stems from its administration and scoring efficiencies. The most common multiple-choice format consists of a stem that presents a problem to be solved accompanied by a single correct answer and two, three, or four incorrect answers. A well-constructed item using this format can result in a high quality assessment of an examinee's knowledge, skills and abilities. However, for some complex, higher-order knowledge, skills and abilities, a single correct answer is often insufficient. Test developers tend to avoid using multiple correct answers out of a concern about the increased difficulty and lower discrimination of such items. However, by avoiding the use of multiple correct answers, test constructors may inadvertently create validity concerns resulting from incomplete content coverage and construct irrelevant variance. This study explored an alternative way of implementing multiple-choice questions with two or more correct answers by specifying in each question the number of answers examinees should select instead of using the traditional guideline to select all that apply. This study investigated the performance of three operational exams that use a standard multiple-choice format where the examinees are told how many answers they are to select. The collective statistical performance of multiple-choice items that included more than one answer that is keyed as correct was compared with the performance of traditional single-answer, multiple-choice (SA) items within each exam. The results indicate that the multiple-answer, multiple-choice (MA) items evaluated from these three exams performed at least as well as to the single-answer questions within the same exams.

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