In this work, we use optical methods to study electrochemical reactions and processes occurring on the nanometer length scale. Optical methods are advantageous over traditional electrochemical methods because of their high spatial resolution and sensitivity at both the single nanoparticle and single molecule level. This dissertation describes a series of studies in which super-localization and dark-field optical imaging is used to provide insight into spatial and temporal heterogeneity in nanoscale electrochemical systems with <25 nm spatial resolution. In the first set of experiments, three-dimensional (3-D) super-resolution imaging is used to determine the tip-substrate distance in nanoscale scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) with precision better than 25 nm. Correlating the tip-substrate distance using both optical and electrochemical techniques showed excellent agreement. Second, single nanoparticles (NP) were delivered through a nanopipette, and their resistive-pulse signals were correlated with a fluorescence optical signal. The diffusion trajectories of individual NP delivered to the external solution and to an electrified interface were obtained by 3-D super-resolution imaging, and showed signatures of both sub-diffusive and super-diffusive behavior, depending on the balance of forces between the flow from the pipette and the applied potential at the electrified substrate. Next, we studied the influence of surface oxide layers on single silver NP electrodissolution by tracking the intensity and spatial variation of scattering from single nanoparticles over time. We discovered that silver NPs can undergo electrodissolution in either a spatially symmetric or asymmetric manner, based on the nature of the surface oxide layer. Moreover, we also reported the simultaneous electrodeposition of silver oxide at the electrode surface during the electrodissolution of silver NPs, which enabled us to study the effect of multiple simultaneous redox reactions and their effects on one another. Overall, these experiments reveal local heterogeneity in nanoscale electrochemical processes and allow for many single nanoparticles to be measured in parallel, revealing relationships that are hidden using traditional electrochemical measurements. / Chemistry

Entity extraction is an important step in document understanding. Higher accuracy entity extraction on fine-grained entities can be achieved by combining the utility of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models. In this paper, a cascading model is proposed that implements NER and Relation extraction. This model utilizes relations between entities to infer context-dependent fine-grain named entities in text corpora. The RE module runs independent of the NER module, which reduces error accumulation from sequential steps. This process improves on the fine-grained NER F1-score of existing state-of-the-art from .4753 to .8563 on our data, albeit on a strictly limited domain. This provides the potential for further applications in historical document processing. These applications will enable automated searching of historical documents, such as those used in economics research and family history.

Digital Democracy is a CalMatters and California Polytechnic State University initia-tive to promote transparency in state government by increasing access to the Califor-nia legislature. While Digital Democracy is made up of many resources, one founda-tional step of the project is obtaining accurate, timely transcripts of California Senateand Assembly hearings. The information extracted from these transcripts providescrucial data for subsequent steps in the pipeline. In the context of Digital Democracy,upleveling is when humans verify, correct, and annotate the transcript results afterthe legislative hearings have been automatically transcribed. The upleveling processis done with the assistance of a software application called the Transcription Tool.The human upleveling process is the most costly and time-consuming step of the Dig-ital Democracy pipeline. In this thesis, we hypothesize that we can make significantreductions to the time needed for upleveling by using Natural Language Processing(NLP) systems and techniques. The main contribution of this thesis is engineeringa new automatic transcription pipeline. Specifically, this thesis integrates a new au-tomatic speech recognition service, a new speaker diarization model, additional textpost-processing changes, and a new process for speaker identification. To evaluate the system’s improvements, we measure the accuracy and speed of the newly integrated features and record editor upleveling time both before and after the additions.

Concept maps, introduced by Novak, aid learners' understanding. I hypothesize that concept maps also can function as a summary of large documents, e.g., electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). I have built a system that automatically generates concept maps from English-language ETDs in the computing field. The system also will provide Spanish translations of these concept maps for native Spanish speakers. Using machine translation techniques, my approach leads to concept maps that could allow researchers to discover pertinent dissertations in languages they cannot read, helping them to decide if they want a potentially relevant dissertation translated. I am using a state-of-the-art natural language processing system, called Relex, to extract noun phrases and noun-verb-noun relations from ETDs, and then produce concept maps automatically. I also have incorporated information from the table of contents of ETDs to create novel styles of concept maps. I have conducted five user studies, to evaluate user perceptions about these different map styles. I am using several methods to translate node and link text in concept maps from English to Spanish. Nodes labeled with single words from a given technical area can be translated using wordlists, but phrases in specific technical fields can be difficult to translate. Thus I have amassed a collection of about 580 Spanish-language ETDs from Scirus and two Mexican universities and I am using this corpus to mine phrase translations that I could not find otherwise. The usefulness of the automatically-generated and translated concept maps has been assessed in an experiment at Universidad de las Americas (UDLA) in Puebla, Mexico. This experiment demonstrated that concept maps can augment abstracts (translated using a standard machine translation package) in helping Spanish speaking users find ETDs of interest. / Ph. D.

Knowledge graphs have emerged as a sophisticated advancement and refinement of semantic networks, and their deployment is one of the critical methodologies in contemporary artificial intelligence. The construction of knowledge graphs is a multifaceted process involving various techniques, where researchers aim to extract the knowledge from existing resources for the construction since building from scratch entails significant labor and time costs. However, due to the pervasive issue of heterogeneity, the description diversity across different knowledge graphs can lead to mismatches between concepts, thereby impacting the efficacy of knowledge extraction. This Ph.D. study focuses on automatic knowledge graph extension, i.e., properly extending the reference knowledge graph by extracting and integrating concepts from one or more candidate knowledge graphs. We propose a novel knowledge graph extension framework based on entity type recognition. The framework aims to achieve high-quality knowledge extraction by aligning the schemas and entities across different knowledge graphs, thereby enhancing the performance of the extension. This paper elucidates three major contributions: (i) we propose an entity type recognition method exploiting machine learning and property-based similarities to enhance knowledge extraction; (ii) we introduce a set of assessment metrics to validate the quality of the extended knowledge graphs; (iii) we develop a platform for knowledge graph acquisition, management, and extension to benefit knowledge engineers practically. Our evaluation comprehensively demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed extension framework and its functionalities through quantitative experiments and case studies.

No description available.

La recherche en Sciences humaines et sociales repose souvent sur de grandes masses de données textuelles, qu'il serait impossible de lire en détail. Le Traitement automatique des langues (TAL) peut identifier des concepts et des acteurs importants mentionnés dans un corpus, ainsi que les relations entre eux. Ces informations peuvent fournir un aperçu du corpus qui peut être utile pour les experts d'un domaine et les aider à identifier les zones du corpus pertinentes pour leurs questions de recherche. Pour annoter automatiquement des corpus d'intérêt en Humanités numériques, les technologies TAL que nous avons appliquées sont, en premier lieu, le liage d'entités (plus connu sous le nom de Entity Linking), pour identifier les acteurs et concepts du corpus ; deuxièmement, les relations entre les acteurs et les concepts ont été déterminées sur la base d'une chaîne de traitements TAL, qui effectue un étiquetage des rôles sémantiques et des dépendances syntaxiques, entre autres analyses linguistiques. La partie I de la thèse décrit l'état de l'art sur ces technologies, en soulignant en même temps leur emploi en Humanités numériques. Des outils TAL génériques ont été utilisés. Comme l'efficacité des méthodes de TAL dépend du corpus d'application, des développements ont été effectués, décrits dans la partie II, afin de mieux adapter les méthodes d'analyse aux corpus dans nos études de cas. La partie II montre également une évaluation intrinsèque de la technologie développée, avec des résultats satisfaisants. Les technologies ont été appliquées à trois corpus très différents, comme décrit dans la partie III. Tout d'abord, les manuscrits de Jeremy Bentham, un corpus de philosophie politique des 18e et 19e siècles. Deuxièmement, le corpus PoliInformatics, qui contient des matériaux hétérogènes sur la crise financière américaine de 2007--2008. Enfin, le Bulletin des Négociations de la Terre (ENB dans son acronyme anglais), qui couvre des sommets internationaux sur la politique climatique depuis 1995, où des traités comme le Protocole de Kyoto ou les Accords de Paris ont été négociés. Pour chaque corpus, des interfaces de navigation ont été développées. Ces interfaces utilisateur combinent les réseaux, la recherche en texte intégral et la recherche structurée basée sur des annotations TAL. À titre d'exemple, dans l'interface pour le corpus ENB, qui couvre des négociations en politique climatique, des recherches peuvent être effectuées sur la base d'informations relationnelles identifiées dans le corpus: les acteurs de la négociation ayant discuté un sujet concret en exprimant leur soutien ou leur opposition peuvent être recherchés. Le type de la relation entre acteurs et concepts est exploité, au-delà de la simple co-occurrence entre les termes du corpus. Les interfaces ont été évaluées qualitativement avec des experts de domaine, afin d'estimer leur utilité potentielle pour la recherche dans leurs domaines respectifs. Tout d'abord, il a été vérifié si les représentations générées pour le contenu des corpus sont en accord avec les connaissances des experts du domaine, pour déceler des erreurs d'annotation. Ensuite, nous avons essayé de déterminer si les experts pourraient être en mesure d'avoir une meilleure compréhension du corpus grâce à avoir utilisé les applications, par exemple, s'ils ont trouvé de l'évidence nouvelle pour leurs questions de recherche existantes, ou s'ils ont trouvé de nouvelles questions de recherche. On a pu mettre au jour des exemples où un gain de compréhension sur le corpus est observé grâce à l'interface dédiée au Bulletin des Négociations de la Terre, ce qui constitue une bonne validation du travail effectué dans la thèse. En conclusion, les points forts et faiblesses des applications développées ont été soulignés, en indiquant de possibles pistes d'amélioration en tant que travail futur. / Social sciences and Humanities research is often based on large textual corpora, that it would be unfeasible to read in detail. Natural Language Processing (NLP) can identify important concepts and actors mentioned in a corpus, as well as the relations between them. Such information can provide an overview of the corpus useful for domain-experts, and help identify corpus areas relevant for a given research question. To automatically annotate corpora relevant for Digital Humanities (DH), the NLP technologies we applied are, first, Entity Linking, to identify corpus actors and concepts. Second, the relations between actors and concepts were determined based on an NLP pipeline which provides semantic role labeling and syntactic dependencies among other information. Part I outlines the state of the art, paying attention to how the technologies have been applied in DH.Generic NLP tools were used. As the efficacy of NLP methods depends on the corpus, some technological development was undertaken, described in Part II, in order to better adapt to the corpora in our case studies. Part II also shows an intrinsic evaluation of the technology developed, with satisfactory results. The technologies were applied to three very different corpora, as described in Part III. First, the manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. This is a 18th-19th century corpus in political philosophy. Second, the PoliInformatics corpus, with heterogeneous materials about the American financial crisis of 2007-2008. Finally, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), which covers international climate summits since 1995, where treaties like the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreements get negotiated.For each corpus, navigation interfaces were developed. These user interfaces (UI) combine networks, full-text search and structured search based on NLP annotations. As an example, in the ENB corpus interface, which covers climate policy negotiations, searches can be performed based on relational information identified in the corpus: the negotiation actors having discussed a given issue using verbs indicating support or opposition can be searched, as well as all statements where a given actor has expressed support or opposition. Relation information is employed, beyond simple co-occurrence between corpus terms.The UIs were evaluated qualitatively with domain-experts, to assess their potential usefulness for research in the experts' domains. First, we payed attention to whether the corpus representations we created correspond to experts' knowledge of the corpus, as an indication of the sanity of the outputs we produced. Second, we tried to determine whether experts could gain new insight on the corpus by using the applications, e.g. if they found evidence unknown to them or new research ideas. Examples of insight gain were attested with the ENB interface; this constitutes a good validation of the work carried out in the thesis. Overall, the applications' strengths and weaknesses were pointed out, outlining possible improvements as future work.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T20:19:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Deborah Regina Lambach Ferreira da Costa.pdf: 721094 bytes, checksum: 08a6d037883f68580c4820a74a74bd27 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-09-23 / In a globalized world, owners of image rights are more vulnerable to damages for which compensation may be sought. New technologies, the web, TV, broadcasting channels and mechanical systems in general, which disseminate information in real time making it accessible to millions of people, increase this exposure to defamation. Both legal entities governed by private and public law that own rights of publicity consistent with their legal status run the risk of having their images damaged. Items V and X of article 5 of the Brazilian Constitution provide that these entities are entitle to compensation for libel and slander, or moral damages in a literal translation from Portuguese. Detaching the concept of libel and slander from pain and suffering , the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice published case law summary [ Súmula ] No. 227 which resulted in the application of article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights to prevent abuse of the freedom of expression and ensure maximum protection to reputation. This study is an in-depth analysis of image rights based on the initial assumption that these are autonomous rights of publicity entitled to protection both at constitutional and infraconstitutional level. The compensation for image damages leaves formal positivism aside to follow the paradigm shift introduced by the Constitution of Brazil ratified in 1988 when social, ethical and operational principles -- even within the scope of civil liability -- where brought to light allowing the interpretation of the Civil Code to be consistent with the concepts of equity and justice in an attempt to foster ethics and compassion in society / Na era globalizada, o titular do direito à imagem está mais vulnerável a sofrer um dano ressarcível. O avanço da tecnologia, a Internet, a televisão, os meios de radiodifusão e o sistema mecanizado em geral, que propagam a informação em tempo real, acessível a milhões e milhões de outros sujeitos, expõe as pessoas cada vez mais ao vilipêndio. Tanto as pessoas jurídicas de direito privado, como as de direito público, podem ser vítimas de dano à imagem, porque titulares de direitos da personalidade compatíveis com a sua natureza jurídica. Ademais, lhes é assegurada a reparação do dano moral nos incisos V e X do artigo 5º da Constituição Federal. A jurisprudência, desapegando-se do conceito de dano moral como o dano da alma , editou a Súmula n. 227 do Superior Tribunal de Justiça. Passou-se a interpretar o artigo 10 da Convenção Europeia de Direitos Humanos de modo a coibir abusos do direito de livre expressão na proteção da reputação em toda a sua amplitude. De modo que o direito à imagem será analisado com profundidade, tomando-se como ponto de partida a afirmação de que é um direito da personalidade autônomo, recebendo proteção constitucional e infraconstitucional. A reparação do dano à imagem aparta-se do rigor formal do positivismo, acompanhando a mudança de paradigma trazida pela Constituição Federal de 1988, que aflorou, inclusive no âmbito da responsabilidade civil, princípios como da socialidade, da eticidade e da operabilidade, com vistas a dar interpretação e subsunção às normas do Código Civil consentâneas com a equidade e a justiça, em prol de uma sociedade mais ética e fraterna

The Interest of the Business Corporation and its Protection Abstract This thesis is about the general interests of business corporations. It creates a comprehensive overview, designed to enable the reader to become acquainted with the basic factors which are shaping such interests. While maintaining the link to Czech legal regulation and jurisprudence, it describes the nature of business corporations' interests at a basic level and it points to legal institutions that might indirectly complement this idea. The objectives detailed above are pursued in three ways, each of which is considered in one of the three parts of the thesis. The three parts follow each other sequentially, leading the reader through a comprehensive path to understanding some areas of the law that, at first, might seem unrelated. It sets basic distinguishing criteria for the different types of business corporations. These criteria are important for the thesis' eventual conclusions, which are in the theoretical level related primarily to capital companies. In the first part of the thesis, there is a brief summary of the historical development the economic aspect of business corporations and a discussion on conflict of interest issues, both inside and outside the corporation, which influence corporate interest. The second part deals with...

Title: Neural Network Based Named Entity Recognition Author: Jana Straková Institute: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Supervisor of the doctoral thesis: prof. RNDr. Jan Hajič, Dr., Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Abstract: Czech named entity recognition (the task of automatic identification and classification of proper names in text, such as names of people, locations and organizations) has become a well-established field since the publication of the Czech Named Entity Corpus (CNEC). This doctoral thesis presents the author's research of named entity recognition, mainly in the Czech language. It presents work and research carried out during CNEC publication and its evaluation. It fur- ther envelops the author's research results, which improved Czech state-of-the-art results in named entity recognition in recent years, with special focus on artificial neural network based solutions. Starting with a simple feed-forward neural net- work with softmax output layer, with a standard set of classification features for the task, the thesis presents methodology and results, which were later used in open-source software solution for named entity recognition, NameTag. The thesis finalizes with a recurrent neural network based recognizer with word embeddings and character-level word embeddings,...