Due to the lack of short vowels or diacritics in Persian orthography, many Natural Language Processing applications for this language, including information retrieval, machine translation, text-to-speech, and automatic speech recognition systems need to disambiguate the input first, in order to be able to do further processing. In machine translation, for example, the whole text should be correctly diacritized first so that the correct words, parts of speech and meanings are matched and retrieved from the lexicon. This is primarily because of Persian’s ambiguous orthography. In fact, the core engine of any Persian language processor should utilize a diacritizer and a lexical disambiguator. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of an automatic diacritizer for Persian based on the state-of-the-art Finite State Transducer technology developed at Xerox by Beesley & Karttunen (2003). The result of morphological analysis and generation on a test corpus is shown, including the insertion of diacritics. This study will also look at issues that are raised by phonological and semantic ambiguities as a result of short vowels in Persian being absent in the writing system. It suggests a hybrid model (rule-based & inductive) that is inspired by psycholinguistic experiments on the human mental lexicon for the disambiguation of heterophonic homographs in Persian using frequency and collocation information. A syntactic parser can be developed based on the proposed model to discover Ezafe (the linking short vowel /e/ within a noun phrase) or disambiguate homographs, but its implementation is left for future work.

In this study, I used two independent perciform lineages (Neotropical Cichlidae and Nearctic Centrarchidae) to examine patterns of species richness and species coexistence a two spatial scales (e.g., macrohabitat and mesohabitat) and to examine inter-faunal patterns of ecomorphological convergence. The study was conducted during the low-water periods in four lowland rivers: the Cinaruco in Venezuela, the Tambopata in Peru, and the Neches and the Brazos rivers in Texas (USA). These rivers were chosen because of their similar characteristics, in terms of geomorphology, sediments, and water quality. The Cinaruco River and the Neches River have clear slightly-stained waters, whereas the Tambopata and the Brazos River have turbid waters with high loads of suspended sediments. I used morphological approaches as a surrogate to investigate patterns of species distribution in niche space, and predict patterns of species richness at different spatial scales. Despite high variation in the number of species in these two perciform assemblages, morphological analysis based on the means and standard deviations of nearest neighbor distance (NND) and mean distance to centroid (CD) revealed similar trends of morphological similarity in relation to species richness. Comparison of observed versus randomized data mesohabitat scale for all four rivers generally supported the niche expansion model of response to increase in species richness. At the scale of mesohabitats within rivers, most species assemblages appear to be organized by competitive interactions in accordance with the niche expansion model. The tropical species-rich Cinaruco River revealed particularly strong support for the niche expansion model. Intercontinental comparison of functional morphology and diets based on analysis of stomach contents and stable isotope ratios indicated broad morphological and dietary overlap between cichlid and centrarchid assemblages. For the most part, morphological ordinations showed that the two groups have diversified in a parallel manner within the confines of ram-suction modes of prey ingestion. This study concludes that even though differences are observed in historical and stochastic factors structuring fish assemblages in different geographic regions, consistent patterns of convergence at the species and assemblage levels results from natural selection under similar environmental conditions.

We introduce a new way to accurately segment the 3D femur from pelvic CT scans. The femur is a difficult target for segmentation due to its proximity to the acetabulum, irregular shape and the varying thickness of its hardened outer shell. Atypical bone morphologies, such as the ones present in hips suffering from Femoral Acetabular Impingements (FAIs) can also provide additional challenges to segmentation. We overcome these difficulties by (a) dividing the femur into the femur head and body regions (b) analysis of the femur-head and neighbouring acetabulum’s composition (c) segmentations with two levels of detail – rough and fine contours. Segmentations of the CT volume are performed iteratively, on a slice-by-slice basis and contours are extracted using the morphological snake algorithm. Our methodology was designed to require little initialization from the user and to deftly handle the large variation in femur shapes, most notably from deformations attributed to cam-type FAIs. Our efforts are to provide physicians with a new tool that creates patient-specific and high-quality 3D femur models while requiring much less time and effort. We tested our methodology on a database of 20 CT volumes acquired at the Ottawa General Hospital during a study into FAIs. We selected 6 CT scans from the database, for a total of 12 femurs, considering wide inter-patient variations. Of the 6 patients, 4 had unilateral cam-type FAIs, 1 had a bilateral cam-type FAI and the last was from a control group. The femurs segmented with our method achieved an average volume overlap error of 2.71 ± 0.44% and an average symmetric surface distance of 0.28 ± 0.04 mm compared against the same, manually segmented femurs. These results are better than all comparable literature and accurate enough to be used to in the creation of patient-specific 3D models.

Due to the lack of short vowels or diacritics in Persian orthography, many Natural Language Processing applications for this language, including information retrieval, machine translation, text-to-speech, and automatic speech recognition systems need to disambiguate the input first, in order to be able to do further processing. In machine translation, for example, the whole text should be correctly diacritized first so that the correct words, parts of speech and meanings are matched and retrieved from the lexicon. This is primarily because of Persian’s ambiguous orthography. In fact, the core engine of any Persian language processor should utilize a diacritizer and a lexical disambiguator. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of an automatic diacritizer for Persian based on the state-of-the-art Finite State Transducer technology developed at Xerox by Beesley & Karttunen (2003). The result of morphological analysis and generation on a test corpus is shown, including the insertion of diacritics. This study will also look at issues that are raised by phonological and semantic ambiguities as a result of short vowels in Persian being absent in the writing system. It suggests a hybrid model (rule-based & inductive) that is inspired by psycholinguistic experiments on the human mental lexicon for the disambiguation of heterophonic homographs in Persian using frequency and collocation information. A syntactic parser can be developed based on the proposed model to discover Ezafe (the linking short vowel /e/ within a noun phrase) or disambiguate homographs, but its implementation is left for future work.

No description available.

There is a great challenge to deal with psychid taxonomy due to the sexual dimorphism and conservative morphology of male. The genus Eumeta is widely distributed among Asia, Australia and Africa, with taxa resembling each other in morphological aspects. This historical confusion was originated from misidentification of type specimen and difficulty of specimen vouchering. Previous studies also recorded Eumeta of Taiwan, but taxa still uncertain actually. In present study, reared specimens were used to acquire morphology of different development and larval case style, and corroborated each other with barcode of life. As the results, Eumeta minuscula and E. variegata were confirmed in Taiwan. A highly variation of male morphology with genitalia asymmetry were described. Additionally, the male 8th tergite and sternite were suggested valuable for species identification. Having examined the type series specimen and original description, 13 species distributed in orient were grouping. Except E. minuscula and E. crameri were smaller and identifiable, a mass of ambiguous species included E. variegata, E. maxima, E. layardi, E. japonica, E. pryeri, E. sikkima, E. wallacei, E. javanica, E. wallacei var. bougainvillea, E. formosicola and E. kiushiuana were defined as E. variegata species-complex, and then revised this complex mainly with Taiwanese specimens. Due to the morphological variety of whole examination involving with those of Taiwan, 8 species were treated as junior synonym of E. variegata, excluding E. japonica, E. javanica and E. kiushiuana that remain undetermined because the types have not examined. Preliminary result of molecular work also supported this treatment as well, except an individual of China (Yunnan) that more information is needed.

Quadtree algorithm and morphological image processing are combined in the proposed method in this paper. A new method is proposed to improve the previous pattern mapping method for faster processing. The previous pattern mapping method is a pattern mapping method by storing the tree pattern by string form, which is a pointless data structure. In the proposed method the tree pattern is saved in a point data structure. Therefore, the pointer tree can be applied to the quadtree immediately without the transforming time, which was required in the previous pattern mapping method. In this paper, the pointless quad tree work is modified to pointer quad tree to reduce the processing time. The modified algorithm is applied to circuit detection, image restoration, image segmentation and cell counting.

The elevator is a common vertical transportation in our life. The elevator door system includes a door driven system, a door coupling, a door safety, and two door locks. The purpose of this work is to develop a systematic methodology for the design of the elevator door system. First, basic characteristics of the elevator door system are deduced, and all possible variants of function structures are synthesized by functional analysis method. Next, a system of kinematic notation is used to generate the principle solutions of each function in the function structure. Finally, all design concept variant can be created by using morphological chart method. Several design concept can be created for new elevator door system.

An investigation of Cambarus dubius and Cambarus carolinus was made in Tennessee to evaluate morphological Variation found in populations of these species and to determine aspects of life history and ecology. Taxonomic position and history of C. carolinus and C. dubius was reviewed and discussed. Three clines or possible subspecies in C. dubius were indicated in Tennessee based on both qualitative and quantitative evidence including: width and length of areola, shape and size of chelae, rostrum, central projection, mesial process, and color. C. dubius populations from northern West Virginia and southern Pennsylvania were significantly different from populations to the south. C. carolinus could not be separated by quantitative measurements from C. dubius, but could be distinguished on the basis of the central projection and other qualitative characters. Color phases were discussed for both C. dubius and C. carolinus. The range for both species in Tennessee was discussed and the range limits for C. dubius delineated. Life history and ecological data were reported for C. dubius and indicated for C. carolinus.

This work is compiled to meet the needs of students or teachers in homonymy. It this meant as a supplement to different textbooks, serves as a guide to those who wish to attain a more complete view of morphological homonymy. The work is devided into different sections, among which regular and irregular homonymy sctions are considered to be the most important ones. Each section includes a number of definitions, explanations, examples of the most common pairs of homonyms such as noun-verb, verb-verb, noun-adjective, adjective-verb, noun-noun and others. This work presents an axhaustive survey of homonymy, the variety of which suggests the idea of the dictionary of Lithuanian Morphological Homonyms.