Thesis advisor: Stephen F. Brown / Among the varied representations of mystical ascent in the Middle Ages, perhaps none was as original as that of Thomas Gallus (d.1246), an abbot of the Canons Regular at St. Andrea in Vercelli and the so-called "last of the great Victorines." Drawing on the highly-esteemed works of Dionysius the Areopagite, Thomas exegeted the Song of Songs in terms of the soul's ascent to God through both knowledge and love. His differs from earlier Song commentaries because of its Dionysius-inspired contention that the human soul reflects the nine orders of the angelic hierarchy. Through apophatic contemplation and desire for God, the soul ascends through these orders until its intellectual knowledge fails, and it is granted a union of love with through its Seraphic order. However, Thomas, following Gregory the Great and Hugh of St. Victor, argues that love itself is a kind of knowledge, indeed, the highest kind of knowledge, the very "wisdom of Christians." To bridge the gap between the grades of knowledge and of love, and between the intellect and affect, Thomas introduces the notion of the simplification of the soul, an idea that has its roots in the Neoplatonism of Dionysius. Simplification may be defined as the principle by which multiplicity and compositeness are anagogically abandoned in favor of greater unity and simplicity through mystical ascent. It forms the guiding principle of Gallus's mystical thought, and is described in three highly interrelated ways. First, the intellect leaves behind its knowledge of God through sensibilia, sensible knowledge gained through the senses and imagination, in favor of purely invisible contemplative objects or theoriae, which it contemplates first in its own reason and intellect, and then ecstatically and unitively in themselves. Each progressively higher level of contemplation is simpler and contains those below it. Secondly, the affect abandons its lesser desires for temporal and spiritual goods, and instead focuses its desire on the Good, which is the wellspring of all lower goods. Finally, and foundationally, simplification describes the movements of the powers of the soul, which unite as they ascend, increasingly reflecting the divine simplicity. This culminates with the affect's union with God, which undividedly contains within itself all lower forms of knowledge and love. When this fleeting union with God ends, the soul descends, becoming multiplex again, but it carries with it an inflow of graces, both intellectual and affectual, which are distributed to each order of its hierarchy "according to the capacity of each". This refreshment allows for future ascent. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

La biologie des systèmes cherche à comprendre et analyser des systèmes biologiques à l'aide de modèles mathématiques et informatiques. L'explosion des données expérimentales entraîne des modèles de plus en plus grands. Afin de pouvoir les analyser facilement ou les simuler rapidement, il est alors nécessaire de pouvoir les simplifier. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons des méthodes de simplifications de réseaux de réactions biochimiques. Ces méthodes sont suffisamment riches pour pouvoir simplifier un grand nombre de réseaux provenant d'applications biologiques. Elles sont contextuelles, permettant de considérer un réseau comme un sous-module d'un modèle plus grand, et de le simplifier sans modifier le comportement du modèle global. Enfin, nos simplifications sont correctes, c'est-à-dire qu'elles préservent la sémantique des réseaux. Dans un premier temps, nous nous intéressons à une sémantique non déterministe, basée sur la possibilité de converger vers les attracteurs du réseau. Nous étudions ensuite des simplifications pour la sémantique déterministe, permettant par exemple de supprimer des espèces intermédiaires à l'équilibre. Enfin, nous nous intéressons à la confluence d'une telle simplification, ainsi qu'au lien entre l'élimination des espèces intermédiaires et le calcul des modes élémentaires d'un réseau. / System biology aims at understanding and analyzing biological systems using mathematical and computational models. The explosion of the number of experimental data leads to larger and larger models. In order to be able to easily analyze them and quickly simulate them, it is necessary to be able to simplify them. In this thesis, we propose simplification methods for biochemical reaction networks. These methods are sufficiently rich to be able to simplify an important number of networks from biological applications. They are contextual, allowing to consider a network as a sub-module of a larger model, and to simplify it without modifying the behavior of the global model. Finally, our simplifications are sound, meaning that they preserve the semantics of the networks. Firstly, we are interested in a non deterministic semantics, based on the capability to converge to some attractors of the network. Then we study some simplifications for the deterministic semantics, allowing for instance to remove intermediate species at steady-state. Finally, we are interested by the confluence of this simplification, as well as the relation between the elimination of intermediate species and the computation of the elementary modes of a network.

In this thesis we discuss how to find equivalent representations of polynomial functions over the ring of integers modulo a power of a prime. Specifically, we look for lower degree representations and representations with fewer variables for which important applications in electrical and computer engineering exist. We present several algorithms for finding these compact formulations.

Modernioje visuomenėje reglamentavimas yra būtinas, kad galėtų funkcionuoti ekonomika visuomenė, tačiau per didelis reglamentavimas gali turėti ir neigiamų pasekmių – stabdyti inovacijas, mažinti konkurencingumą, produktyvumą bei sukurti nereikalingas kliūtis prekybai. Esant per daug sudėtingam reglamentavimui, didėja administracinė našta.Šio darbo tikslas - išanalizuoti ir apžvelgti administracinio supaprastinimo iniciatyvas bei išnagrinėti problemas, susijusias su administracinės naštos sumažinimo ir supaprastinimo iniciatyvų įgyvendinimu Lietuvoje. / In modern society regulations are necessary for society and economy functioning, but regulations, that are poorly designed, could have even negative outcomes – impede innovations, reduce competitiveness, productivity and to create unnecessary barriers to trade. If regulations are very complex, then administrative burden, so called “red tape”, increases.The goal of this master thesis is to analyse and review the initiatives of administrative simplification and to analyse problems, related to administrative burden reducing issues and the implementation of administrative simplification initiatives in Lithuania.

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the nature of an optional consonant deletion process, through an articulatory and acoustic study of word-final consonant clusters in Persian. Persian word-final coronal stops are optionally deleted when they are preceded by obstruents or the homorganic nasal /n/. For example, the final clusters in the words /næft/ “oil”, /suχt/ “burnt” and /qæsd/ “intention” are optionally simplified in fast/casual speech, resulting in: [næf], [suχ], and [qæs]. What is not clear from this traditional description is whether the coronal stop is truly deleted, or if a coronal gesture is produced, but not heard, because it is obscured by the adjacent consonants. According to Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1992, 2001), the articulatory gestures of the deleted segments can still exist even if the segments are not heard. In this dissertation, ultrasound imaging was used to determine whether coronal consonant deletion in Persian is categorical or gradient, and the acoustic consequences of cluster simplification were investigated through duration and spectral measures. This phonetic study enables an account for the optional nature of the cluster simplification process. A general phonological account is provided for the simplification of coda clusters with rising sonority, and the acoustic and articulatory investigation focuses on the simplification of clusters with coronal stops. Ten Persian-speaking graduate students from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, five male and five female, aged 25-38 participated in the articulatory and acoustic study. Audio and real time ultrasound video recordings were made while subjects had a guided conversation with a native speaker of Persian. 662 tokens of word-final coronal clusters were auditorily classified into unsimplified and simplified according to whether they contained an audible [t]. Singleton coda consonants and singleton /t/s were also captured as controls. The end of the constriction plateau of C1 and beginning of constriction plateau of C3 were used to define a time interval in which to measure the coronal gesture as the vertical distance between the tongue blade and the palate. Smoothing Splines ANOVA was used in a novel way to compare tongue blade height over time across the three conditions. The articulatory results of this study showed that the gestures of the deleted segments are often still present. More specifically, the findings showed that of the clusters that sounded simplified, some truly had no [t] gesture, some had gestural overlap, and some had reduced gestures. In order to explain the optional nature of the simplification process, it is argued that the simplified tokens are the result of two independent mechanisms. Inevitable mechanical and physiological effects generate gesturally reduced and overlapped tokens whereas planned language-specific behaviors driven by phonological rules or abstract cognitive representations result in no [t]-gesture output. The findings of this study support the main arguments presented in Articulatory Phonology regarding the underlying reasons for sound patterns and sound change. The results of this study are further used to examine different sound change models. It is argued that the simplified tokens with totally deleted [t] gesture could be the result of speakers changing their representations based on other people’s gestural overlap. This would be instances of the Choice and Chance categories in Blevins’ (2004) CCC sound change model. The acoustic results did not find any major cues which could distinguish simplified tokens from controls. It is argued that articulatory data should form an integral part of phonetic studies.

Machine translation translates a text from one language to another, while text simplification converts a text from its original form to a simpler one, usually in the same language. This survey paper discusses the evaluation (manual and automatic) of both fields, providing an overview of existing metrics along with their strengths and weaknesses. The first chapter takes an in-depth look at machine translation evaluation metrics, namely BLEU, NIST, AMBER, LEPOR, MP4IBM1, TER, MMS, METEOR, TESLA, RTE, and HTER. The second chapter focuses more generally on text simplification, starting with a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the field (i.e what ``simple'' means). Then, an overview of automatic evaluation metrics, namely BLEU and Flesch-Kincaid, is given, along with common approaches to text simplification. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future trajectory of both fields.

Background. Level of detail is an optimization technique used by several modern games. The level of detail systems uses simplified triangular meshes to determine the optimal combinations of 3D-models to use in order to meet a user-defined criterion for achieving fast performance. Prior work has also pre-computed level of detail settings to only apply the most optimal settings for any given view in a 3D scene. Objectives. The aim of this thesis is to determine the difference in image quality between a custom level of detail pre-preprocessing approach proposed in this paper, and the level of detail system built in the game engine Unity. This is investigated by implementing a framework in Unity for the proposed level of detail pre-preprocessing approach in this paper and designing representative test scenes to collect all data samples. Once the data is collected, the image quality produced by the proposed level of detail pre-preprocessing approach is compared to Unity's existing level of detail approach using perceptual-based metrics. Methods. The method used is an experiment. Unity's method was chosen because of the popularity of the engine, and it was decided to implement the proposed level of detail pre-preprocessing approach also in Unity to have the most fair comparison with Unity's implementation. The two approaches will only differ in how the level of detail is selected, the rest of the rendering pipeline will be exactly the same. Results. The pre-preprocessing time ranged between 13 to 30 hours. The results showed only a small difference in image quality between the two approaches, Unity's built-in system provides a better overall image quality in two out of three test scenes. Conclusions. Due to the pre-processing time and no overall improvement, it was concluded that the proposed level of detail pre-preprocessing approach is not feasible.

O Processamento de Línguas Naturais é uma área interdisciplinar cujas pesquisas podem ser divididas em duas grandes linhas: análise e síntese da língua. Esta pesquisa de doutorado traz contribuições para ambas. Para a análise da língua, um modelo integrativo capaz de unir diferentes níveis linguísticos é apresentado e avaliado em relação aos níveis morfológico, (incluindo subníveis léxico e morfossintático), sintático e semântico. Enquanto análises tradicionais são feitas dos níveis mais baixos da língua para os mais altos, em uma estratégia em cascata, na qual erros dos níveis mais baixos são propagados para os níveis mais altos, o modelo de análise proposto é capaz de unificar a análise de diferentes níveis a partir de uma abordagem bidirecional. O modelo é baseado em uma grande rede neural, treinada em córpus, cujos padrões de treinamento são extraídos de tokens presentes nas orações. Um tipo de recorrência denominado coativação é aplicado no modelo para permitir que a análise de um padrão modifique e seja modificada pela análise de outros padrões em um mesmo contexto. O modelo de análise permite investigações para as quais não foi originalmente planejado, além de apresentar resultados considerados satisfatórios em lematização e análise morfossintática, porém ainda demandando aprimoramento para a tarefa de análise sintática. A ferramenta associada a esse modelo permitiu investigar a recorrência proposta e a interação bidirecional entre níveis da língua, incluindo seus subníveis. Experimentos para coativação e bidirecionalidade foram realizados e considerados satisfatórios. Para a área de síntese da língua, um modelo de simplificação sintática, tarefa considerada como adaptação de texto para texto, baseado em regras manuais é aplicado em textos analisados sintaticamente, tendo como objetivo tornar os textos sintaticamente mais simples para leitores com letramento rudimentar ou básico. A ferramenta associada a esse modelo permitiu realizar simplificação sintática com medida-f de 77,2%, simplificando aproximadamente 16% de orações em textos do gênero enciclopédico / Natural Language Processing is an interdisciplinary research area that encompasses two large research avenues: language analysis and language synthesis. This thesis contributes for both of them. In what concerns language analysis, it presents an integrative model that links different levels of linguistic analysis. The evaluation of such model takes into consideration several levels: morphologic (including lexical and morph-syntactic sub-levels), syntactic and semantic. Whereas traditional analysis are undertaken from the lower levels to the upper ones, propagating errors in such direction, the model proposed herein is able to unify different levels of analysis using a bidirectional approach. The model is based on a large-scale neural network trained in corpus, which extracts its training features from tokens within the sentences. A type of recurrence denominated co-activation is applied to the model to make the analysis of a pattern able to modify (and to be modified by) the analysis of other patterns in a same context. This model may be used for purposes different from those for which it was conceived and yields satisfactory results in lemmatization and part-of-speech analysis, but still needs work on syntactic analysis. The tool associated to this model makes it possible to analyze the proposed recurrence language and the bidirectional influence of different levels on each other, including sub-level interaction. Experiments on both co-activation and bidirectional level integration were performed, and the results were considered satisfactory. On the other hand, in what concerns language synthesis, this thesis presents a rule-based model of syntactic simplification (one of text adaptation techniques), applicable to syntactically parsed texts in order to render them simpler for low literacy readers. The tool associated to this model makes it possible to carry out the task of syntactic simplification in Portuguese language. Such tool achieved 77.2% of f-measure in a task that simplified approximately 16% of the sentences of an encyclopedic text

The purpose of this thesis was the further development of a rule set used in an automatic text simplification system, and the exploration of whether it is possible to improve the performance of a rule based text simplification system by manual training. A first rule set was developed from a thor- ough literature review, and the rule refinement was performed by manually adapting the first rule set to a set of training texts. When there was no more change added to the set of rules, the training was considered to be completed, and the two sets were applied to a test set, for evaluation. This thesis evaluated the performance of a text simplification system as a clas- sification task, by the use of objective metrics: precision and recall. The comparison of the rule sets revealed a clear improvement of the system, since precision increased from 45% to 82%, and recall increased from 37% to 53%. Both recall and precision was improved after training for the ma- jority of the rules, with a few exceptions. All rule types resulted in a higher score on correctness for R2. Automatic text simplification systems target- ing real life readers need to account for qualitative aspects, which has not been considered in this thesis. Future evaluation should, in addition to quantitative metrics such as precision, recall, and complexity metrics, also account for the experience of the reader.

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the nature of an optional consonant deletion process, through an articulatory and acoustic study of word-final consonant clusters in Persian. Persian word-final coronal stops are optionally deleted when they are preceded by obstruents or the homorganic nasal /n/. For example, the final clusters in the words /næft/ “oil”, /suχt/ “burnt” and /qæsd/ “intention” are optionally simplified in fast/casual speech, resulting in: [næf], [suχ], and [qæs]. What is not clear from this traditional description is whether the coronal stop is truly deleted, or if a coronal gesture is produced, but not heard, because it is obscured by the adjacent consonants. According to Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1992, 2001), the articulatory gestures of the deleted segments can still exist even if the segments are not heard. In this dissertation, ultrasound imaging was used to determine whether coronal consonant deletion in Persian is categorical or gradient, and the acoustic consequences of cluster simplification were investigated through duration and spectral measures. This phonetic study enables an account for the optional nature of the cluster simplification process. A general phonological account is provided for the simplification of coda clusters with rising sonority, and the acoustic and articulatory investigation focuses on the simplification of clusters with coronal stops. Ten Persian-speaking graduate students from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, five male and five female, aged 25-38 participated in the articulatory and acoustic study. Audio and real time ultrasound video recordings were made while subjects had a guided conversation with a native speaker of Persian. 662 tokens of word-final coronal clusters were auditorily classified into unsimplified and simplified according to whether they contained an audible [t]. Singleton coda consonants and singleton /t/s were also captured as controls. The end of the constriction plateau of C1 and beginning of constriction plateau of C3 were used to define a time interval in which to measure the coronal gesture as the vertical distance between the tongue blade and the palate. Smoothing Splines ANOVA was used in a novel way to compare tongue blade height over time across the three conditions. The articulatory results of this study showed that the gestures of the deleted segments are often still present. More specifically, the findings showed that of the clusters that sounded simplified, some truly had no [t] gesture, some had gestural overlap, and some had reduced gestures. In order to explain the optional nature of the simplification process, it is argued that the simplified tokens are the result of two independent mechanisms. Inevitable mechanical and physiological effects generate gesturally reduced and overlapped tokens whereas planned language-specific behaviors driven by phonological rules or abstract cognitive representations result in no [t]-gesture output. The findings of this study support the main arguments presented in Articulatory Phonology regarding the underlying reasons for sound patterns and sound change. The results of this study are further used to examine different sound change models. It is argued that the simplified tokens with totally deleted [t] gesture could be the result of speakers changing their representations based on other people’s gestural overlap. This would be instances of the Choice and Chance categories in Blevins’ (2004) CCC sound change model. The acoustic results did not find any major cues which could distinguish simplified tokens from controls. It is argued that articulatory data should form an integral part of phonetic studies.