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Audio description is considered a relatively new research field, and in South Africa it is not yet being used extensively to make visual channels accessible to blind audiences. Therefore research in this field is necessary. The literature review of this study shows that very little empirical research has been done where real audiences were tested. This study set out to test the impact of audio described film on the transportation, identification and comprehension of real audiences. The focus was on mise-en-shot elements specifically and the impact they have on the transportation, identification and comprehension of audiences. A thorough analysis of the two scenes and their audio descriptions showed that in the audio description the emphasis tends to be on the visual elements and not on the way these elements are presented (which forms part of mise-en-shot elements). The way the film is showed to the audience contributes to the film‟s meaning and the director often shows the film to the audience in a specific way to reach a certain effect or feeling in the film. If these mise-en-shot elements are not presented in the audio description of the film it, the blind audience cannot be expected to experience an equivalent effect to that of the sighted audience. In order to test the impact of mise-en-shot elements a methodology based on Bortolussi and Dixon‟s (2010) Psyconarratology was used. Immersion and transportation studies (Green and Brock, 2000 and Tal-Or & Cohen, 2010) were used to develop an experiment for the study. Two groups of respondents were tested by exposing one group to all the available channels of the film and another to only the audio description and soundtrack. The initial hypothesis of this study was that the audience exposed to the audio description and soundtrack of the film would experience less transportation, identification and comprehension due to the loss of mise-en-shot elements in the film. By using T-tests and qualitative comparisons of the responses it was found that the lack of mise-en-shot elements in the film had no statistically significant impact on the transportation of the audience. Furthermore it was found that the lack of mise-en-shot elements has an impact on the identification of the audience. The group that had access to all the channels were more able to identify with the characters. In terms of comprehension it was discovered that there were bigger differences between the two groups in the scenes were the director relied on the visual elements of the film. Thus there are opportunities for further research pertaining to the identification of the audience. Furthermore it is recommended that further research be done to include other film genres as well as alternative ways of doing audio description. South Africa as well as other countries can gain tremendously from the use of audio description to make visual channels accessible to blind audiences. To reach such a goal further research is needed in the field, not only to master the art of audio describing but to also create awareness for this aid. / Thesis (MA (Language Practice))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

Ellipsis is a phenomenon whereby constituents which are normally obligatory in the grammar are omitted in actual discourse. It is found in all types of discourse, from everyday conversation to poetry. The omitted constituents can range from one word to an entire clause, and recovery of the ellipted item depends sometimes on the linguistic and sometimes on the non-linguistic context. From a practical point of view, the contribution of ellipsis in the context is twofold. First, it is one of several important means of achieving cohesion in a text. Secondly, ellipsis contributes to communicative appropriateness determined by the type of linguistic activity (e.g., narrative, casual conversation), the mode of communication (e.g., written / spoken) and the relationship between participants. The aim of this research is to provide a description of the functions of elliptical utterances – textual and interpersonal – in English and Japanese, based on a cross-linguistic analysis of dialogues in the English and Japanese map task corpora. In order to analyse ellipsis in relation to its two key functions, elliptical clauses in the map task dialogues were examined. I discuss how ellipsis is used to realise cohesion in the map task dialogues. The findings challenge the well-known claim that topics are established by full noun phrases, which are subsequently realised by pronouns (English) and null pronouns (Japanese). Rather, the results suggest that full noun phrases are used for topic continuity in both languages. Constituents which are ellipted in an utterance are identified and related to the moves types which the utterance realises within the exchange structure. The ellipted elements will be categorised according to the constituent types (Subject, Finite, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct), using the systemic functional approach. This analysis reveals that whereas in the English dialogues the most common types of ellipsis are that of Subject and Finite elements, in the Japanese dialogues the most common type is that of Subject. Types of ellipsis are also correlated with speech acts in the dialogues. The relation between types of ellipsis and particular speech acts associated with them is strikingly similar in the English and Japanese dialogues, despite the notable difference in grammar and pragmatics between the two languages. This analysis also shows how these types of ellipsis are associated with interpersonal effects in particular speech acts: ellipsis of Subject and Finite can contribute to a sharp contrast in the question and answer sequence, while Subject ellipsis in Japanese can contribute to modifying the command-like force in giving instructions. These effects can be summed up as epistemic and deontic modality respectively. Ultimately, it is argued that some types of ellipsis can serve as modality expressions. Additionally, in comparison to the way of realising the speech act of giving instructions in the English dialogues, it emerges that the Japanese speakers exploit ellipsis, which seems to be associated with lowering the degree of the speaker’s commitment to the proposition. As implications for pedagogical settings, I present pedagogical descriptions of ellipsis for Japanese learners of English and English learners of Japanese. Since the description is for specific learners, the approach which takes the difference in grammar and pragmatics between the two languages is made possible. Although descriptions state some detailed facts of ellipsis in English and Japanese, primarily highlighted is the importance of raising awareness of elliptical forms for particular functions in particular contexts. As ellipsis is a product of forms, functions and contexts, it is a most remarkable feature of spoken language. Spoken language is claimed by some researchers to show similar linguistic features among languages because of the restrictions inherent in the medium on communication. In the form of pedagogical description, I show the similarities and differences in ellipsis which derive from the grammar and pragmatics of each language, which are observed in the preceding linguistic research. Through the presentation of the findings which are modified for learners, learners will know how languages show convergence and divergence cross-linguistically.

The next generation of the web, the Semantic Web, integrates distributed web resources from various domains by allowing data (instantial and ontological data) to be shared and reused across applications, enterprise and community boundaries based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Nevertheless, the RDF was not developed for casual users who are unfamiliar with the RDF but interested in data represented using RDF. NLG may be a possible solution to bridging the gap between the casual users and RDF data, but the cost of separately applying fine grained NLG techniques for every domain in the Semantic Web would be extremely high, and hence not realistic.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Communication is an essential skill for every military officer. Their jobs are accomplished through communication This thesis evaluates the usefulness of the SRC-6E reconfigurable computing system for a radar signal processing application and documents the process of creating and importing VHDL code to configure the user definable logic on the SRC-6E. The research builds on previous work which implemented a false radar imaging algorithm on the SRC-6E. Data from alternative computational approaches to the same problem are compared to determine the effectiveness of SRC-6E solution. The results show that the SRC-6E provides and effective solution for implementations with greater than 64 range bins. An evaluation of the SRC-6E difficulty of use is conducted, including a discussion of required skills, experience and development times. The algorithm test code is included in the appendices.

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of logic-based knowledge representation languages used to describe the knowledge of an application domain and reason about it in formally well-defined way. They allow users to describe the important notions and classes of the knowledge domain as concepts, which formalize the necessary and sufficient conditions for individual objects to belong to that concept. A variety of different DLs exist, differing in the set of properties one can use to express concepts, the so-called concept constructors, as well as the set of axioms available to describe the relations between concepts or individuals. However, all classical DLs have in common that they can only express exact knowledge, and correspondingly only allow exact inferences. Either we can infer that some individual belongs to a concept, or we can't, there is no in-between. In practice though, knowledge is rarely exact. Many definitions have their exceptions or are vaguely formulated in the first place, and people might not only be interested in exact answers, but also in alternatives that are "close enough". This thesis is aimed at tackling how to express that something "close enough", and how to integrate this notion into the formalism of Description Logics. To this end, we will use the notion of similarity and dissimilarity measures as a way to quantify how close exactly two concepts are. We will look at how useful measures can be defined in the context of DLs, and how they can be incorporated into the formal framework in order to generalize it. In particular, we will look closer at two applications of thus measures to DLs: Relaxed instance queries will incorporate a similarity measure in order to not just give the exact answer to some query, but all answers that are reasonably similar. Prototypical definitions on the other hand use a measure of dissimilarity or distance between concepts in order to allow the definitions of and reasoning with concepts that capture not just those individuals that satisfy exactly the stated properties, but also those that are "close enough".

Description logics (DLs) are knowledge representation languages that provide the theoretical underpinning for modern ontology languages such as OWL and serve as the basis for the development of ontology reasoners and tools. Most modern ontology reasoners are based on optimized tableau algorithms, which perform reasoning by trying to build counter-models. More recently, another kind of reasoning algorithms has been introduced that, instead of building counter-models, directly derive logical consequences of axioms in the ontology using inference rules. Such consequence-based algorithms were first introduced for the EL family of DLs, and later extended to more expressive Horn DLs. However, up until now, consequence-based algorithms could not handle non-Horn features such as disjunctions. We consider several complementary aspects of consequence-based reasoning in this thesis. Firstly, we describe the parallelized consequence-based reasoner ELK, which is currently the fastest reasoner for EL ontologies. Secondly, we demonstrate how consequence-based algorithms can be extended to handle disjunctions using inference rules reminiscent of ordered resolution. Finally, we combine our consequence-based framework with methods based on tree decompositions, and thus obtain what we believe are the first fixed-parameter tractability results for subsumption reasoning in DLs.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

The purpose of this study is to examine how and in what contexts the Swedish social services are discussed online. To answer this purpose we have studied two Swedish Internet communities, and looked into what was written about social services during a year’s span. To get an overview of our results, we found thematic analysis useful to distinguish general themes. We found, inter alia, that the social services is most often mentioned in the contexts of factual questions or when trying to rally public opinion against the social services. We also found that it’s in the contexts of economy, children, and alcohol and drugs that social services are present in Internet communities. The examined online discourse on Swedish social services was mostly objective and factual, and free from value statements, though often negative. The negative descriptions of the social services often refer to the position of power that the social services possess. It is far less frequent for the social services be described in a positive light. / Syftet med detta examensarbete var att undersöka i vilka sammanhang socialtjänsten förekommer i svenska internetfora samt hur socialtjänsten där framställs. För att besvara syftet genomfördes en netnografisk forskning där vi observerade vad som skrivits om socialtjänsten i fora. Vi avgränsade oss till två olika internetfora och gjorde vidare avgränsningar till inlägg aktuella under ett år och som innehöll ordet socialtjänst. För att få en bra överblick över det insamlade materialet gjordes en tematisk analys som resulterade i att två övergripande teman återfanns. Dessa två sammanhang var för att antingen efterfråga kunskap eller att väcka opinion. Inom dessa teman återfanns ytterligare tre sammanhang där socialtjänsten förekommer, dessa var gällande: ekonomi, barn och alkohol och droger. Framställningen av socialtjänsten påvisades vara ambivalent. I många inlägg återges socialtjänsten sakligt men det förekommer även att socialtjänsten framställs på ett negativt sätt. De negativa framställningarna av socialtjänsten syftar oftast på socialtjänstens maktposition. Mindre vanligt, men ändock förekommande, är att socialtjänsten framställs på ett positivt sätt.

MA, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2002