Stuttgart, FH, Diplomarb., 1998.

Nowadays, geoprocessing has moved in large parts from isolated desktop usage into the Web. Thereby, the overall availability of geoprocessing functionality has theoretically improved. Nevertheless, web-based geoprocessing functionality is still not readily available and usable as means to find and subsequently compare functionality are yet missing. Discoverability and exchangeability of geoprocessing functionality are limited, and the fundamental benefits of online usage are not fully exploited. To close this gap, this thesis defines a conceptualization with geooperators representing well-defined geoprocessing functionality, and categories representing distinct geooperator attributes as a starting point. Geooperators and categories are connected by associative and hierarchical links forming an interlinked network. The conceptualization serves as basis for two purposes: On the one hand, discovery of geooperators has to be improved. There is a multitude of different GIS users from varying backgrounds, all having a slightly different view on geoprocessing functionality. To embrace these varying views, several actually existing and established categorizations for geooperators are integrated into the conceptualization and structured hierarchically. Thus, multiple different perspectives on geooperators are enabled. The perspectives and the underlying categorizations are integrated into a geooperator browser serving as client that users can employ for discovery. The geooperator browser offers a faceted browsing interface based on the derived perspectives and categories. Several different search modes are offered and can be used simultaneously, thereby facilitating an improved discovery. On the other hand, to establish comparability and subsequently semantically interoperable exchangeability of geooperators, respective geooperator attributes are defined. Thereby, backend and provider independence of geoprocessing services is achieved. The conceptualization is formalized to allow for machine readability and processing which is required for usage in Spatial Data Infrastructures and the Semantic Web. The formalized conceptualization is labeled geooperator thesaurus. It is encoded by Semantic Web standards and offered in a Semantic Web compliant manner. The integration into geoprocessing service metadata is enabled by injecting semantic annotations that link to the respective concepts in the geooperator thesaurus. The thesaurus serves as the underlying data model for the geooperator browser. The thesis concludes with an outlook and discussions of future work. Foremost, the content of the geooperator thesaurus needs to be extended as it currently only comprises a representative subset of geooperators. An approach is suggested to involve the geoprocessing community as an important source of geoprocessing expertise in the maintenance and further development of the thesaurus. On a conceptual level, the thesaurus needs to be extended to a fully-fledged ontology including a formal geoprocessing algebra to support the creation of geooperator workflows. From a discovery point of view, the concept of geoprocessing patterns is outlined. Geoprocessing patterns list geooperators that are commonly used for certain geoprocessing tasks, and provide best practices about applying them in a meaningful manner and sequence. / An Stelle von isolierter Desktop-basierter Nutzung von Geoprozessierung werden heutzutage mehr und mehr webbasierte Angebote zur Verfügung gestellt. Dadurch hat sich die generelle Verfügbarkeit von Geoprozessierungsfunktionalität theoretisch verbessert. Da jedoch das Auffinden und anschließend oft notwendige Vergleichen von Funktionalität nur eingeschränkt möglich ist, können die Vorteile einer webbasierten Verfügbarkeit nicht vollständig genutzt werden. Um dieser Problematik zu begegnen, wird im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit eine Konzeptualisierung entwickelt, die wohldefinierte Geoprozessierungsfunktionalität als Geooperatoren und Kategorien als Unterscheidungsmerkmale für Geooperatoren zur Verfügung stellt. Geooperatoren und Kategorien sind über assoziative und hierarchische Links zu einem Netzwerk verknüpft. Diese Konzeptualisierung erfüllt zwei grundlegende Aufgaben: Einerseits muss das Auffinden von Geooperatoren für Nutzer mit unterschiedlichsten Anwendungshintergründen möglich sein. Diese Nutzer haben unterschiedlichste Sichten auf Geooperatoren, die berücksichtigt und unterstützt werden sollen. Dazu werden etablierte Kategorisierungen aus Literatur und Praxis in die Konzeptualisierung integriert, entsprechend hierarchisch strukturiert und als Perspektiven auf Geooperatoren für den Zugriff nach Außen zur Verfügung gestellt. Diese Perspektiven und die darunterliegenden Kategorien werden als Facetten in einen Geooperatorbrowser integriert, der als webbasierter Client von den Nutzern für das Auffinden von Geooperatoren verwendet werden kann. Die explorative Suche über Facetten nach Geoprozessierungsfunktionalität wird durch eine Schlüsselwortsuche und einen geführten Suchmodus ergänzt und damit insgesamt die Auffindbarkeit von Geooperatoren verbessert. Andererseits sollen die Vergleichbarkeit und der anschließend semantisch interoperable Austausch von Geooperatoren ermöglicht werden. Dazu werden durch einen Vergleich von Geooperatorattributen Ähnlichkeiten von Geooperatoren definiert und zusammen mit der Konzeptualisierung als Geooperatorthesaurus formalisiert. Durch die Formalisierung wird eine Maschinenlesbarkeit und -prozessierbarkeit erreicht. Nur so kann ein anbieter- und backendunabhängiger Austausch von Geoprozessierungsdiensten in Geodateninfrastrukturen ermöglicht werden. Der Thesaurus nutzt Semantic-Web-Standards und wird in einer Semantic-Web-kompatiblen Art und Weise im Web publiziert. Die Integration in Metadaten von Geoprozessierungsdiensten wird durch semantische Annotationen erreicht, die auf die entsprechenden Konzepte im Thesaurus verlinken. Der Thesaurus dient als Datenbasis für den Geooperatorenbrowser. Die Arbeit schließt mit einem Ausblick auf und einer Diskussion von zukünftigen Forschungsarbeiten ab. Da der Thesaurus zurzeit nur eine repräsentative Menge an Beispieldaten enthält, muss als erster wichtiger Schritt der Inhalt des Thesaurus erweitert werden. Für die mittel- und langfristige Instandhaltung und Weiterentwicklung des Thesaurus wird ein Konzept zur Einbindung der GIS-Community vorgeschlagen, da hier gebündelte Geoprozessierungsexpertise vorhanden ist. Auf einer konzeptuellen Ebene muss der Thesaurus für eine semantisch und technisch verbesserte Verkettung von Geooperatoren zu einer vollständigen Ontologie mit einer formalen Geoprozessierungsalgebra weiterentwickelt werden. Für eine weitere Verbesserung der Auffindbarkeit von Geooperatoren wird das Konzept von Geoprozessierungspatterns skizziert, die Geooperatoren zusammenfassen, die oft im Kontext einer bestimmten Aufgabe zusammen genutzt werden. Zusätzlich werden über die Patterns Best Practices zur sinnvollen Anwendung und Verkettung der enthaltenen Geooperatoren zur Verfügung gestellt.

Thesauri are important tools for many Natural Language Processing applications. Roget's Thesaurus is particularly useful. It is of high quality and has been in development for over a century and a half. Yet its applications have been limited, largely because the only publicly available edition dates from 1911. This thesis proposes and tests methods of automatically updating the vocabulary of the 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus. I use the Thesaurus as a source of training data in order to learn from Roget’s for the purpose of updating Roget’s. The lexicon is updated in two stages. First, I develop a measure of semantic relatedness that enhances existing distributional techniques. I improve existing methods by using known sets of synonyms from Roget’s to train a distributional measure to better identify near synonyms. Second, I use the new measure of semantic relatedness to find where in Roget’s to place a new word. Existing words from Roget’s are used as training data to tune the parameters of three methods of inserting words. Over 5000 new words and word-senses were added using this process. I conduct two kinds of evaluation on the updated Thesaurus. One is on the procedure for updating Roget’s. This is accomplished by removing some words from the Thesaurus and testing my system's ability to reinsert them in the correct location. Human evaluation of the newly added words is also performed. Annotators must determine whether a newly added word is in the correct location. They found that in most cases the new words were almost indistinguishable from those already existing in Roget's Thesaurus. The second kind of evaluation is to establish the usefulness of the updated Roget’s Thesaurus on actual Natural Language Processing applications. These applications include determining semantic relatedness between word pairs or sentence pairs, identifying the best synonym from a set of candidates, solving SAT-style analogy problems, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and sentence ranking for text summarization. The updated Thesaurus consistently performed at least as well or better the original Thesaurus on all these applications.

Thesauri are important tools for many Natural Language Processing applications. Roget's Thesaurus is particularly useful. It is of high quality and has been in development for over a century and a half. Yet its applications have been limited, largely because the only publicly available edition dates from 1911. This thesis proposes and tests methods of automatically updating the vocabulary of the 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus. I use the Thesaurus as a source of training data in order to learn from Roget’s for the purpose of updating Roget’s. The lexicon is updated in two stages. First, I develop a measure of semantic relatedness that enhances existing distributional techniques. I improve existing methods by using known sets of synonyms from Roget’s to train a distributional measure to better identify near synonyms. Second, I use the new measure of semantic relatedness to find where in Roget’s to place a new word. Existing words from Roget’s are used as training data to tune the parameters of three methods of inserting words. Over 5000 new words and word-senses were added using this process. I conduct two kinds of evaluation on the updated Thesaurus. One is on the procedure for updating Roget’s. This is accomplished by removing some words from the Thesaurus and testing my system's ability to reinsert them in the correct location. Human evaluation of the newly added words is also performed. Annotators must determine whether a newly added word is in the correct location. They found that in most cases the new words were almost indistinguishable from those already existing in Roget's Thesaurus. The second kind of evaluation is to establish the usefulness of the updated Roget’s Thesaurus on actual Natural Language Processing applications. These applications include determining semantic relatedness between word pairs or sentence pairs, identifying the best synonym from a set of candidates, solving SAT-style analogy problems, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and sentence ranking for text summarization. The updated Thesaurus consistently performed at least as well or better the original Thesaurus on all these applications.

Zugl.: Nürnberg, Georg-Simon-Ohm-Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2007

I den här uppsatsen undersöker jag hur mitt låtskrivande påverkas av en strukturerad metod. Jag ställer tre huvudsakliga frågor: Kan man genom användandet av en tydlig struktur bli mer produktiv, kreativ och bättre på att nå ett förutbestämt resultat? För att skapa en struktur har jag använt mig av Pat Pattisons (2009) metod som han beskriver i Writing Better Lyrics, där man i skrivandet av en låt använder ett antal worksheets. Man använder även en begreppsordbok och ett rimlexikon för att samla material till textskrivandet. Jag hade som mål att skriva fem låtar, som var och en hade ett eget instrument som låten skulle framföras på. Låtarna hade också var sin förlaga, som jag transkriberade för att kunna ta inspiration till harmonik, melodi och texttema. I mitt resultat har jag kommit fram till att det finns både negativa och positiva aspekter med att hålla sig till en strukturerad metod, och jag redogör för hur jag under arbetets gång ibland bröt mot strukturen, när jag upplevde att det fanns kreativa vinster med att bryta mot den.

Thesauri are important tools for many Natural Language Processing applications. Roget's Thesaurus is particularly useful. It is of high quality and has been in development for over a century and a half. Yet its applications have been limited, largely because the only publicly available edition dates from 1911. This thesis proposes and tests methods of automatically updating the vocabulary of the 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus. I use the Thesaurus as a source of training data in order to learn from Roget’s for the purpose of updating Roget’s. The lexicon is updated in two stages. First, I develop a measure of semantic relatedness that enhances existing distributional techniques. I improve existing methods by using known sets of synonyms from Roget’s to train a distributional measure to better identify near synonyms. Second, I use the new measure of semantic relatedness to find where in Roget’s to place a new word. Existing words from Roget’s are used as training data to tune the parameters of three methods of inserting words. Over 5000 new words and word-senses were added using this process. I conduct two kinds of evaluation on the updated Thesaurus. One is on the procedure for updating Roget’s. This is accomplished by removing some words from the Thesaurus and testing my system's ability to reinsert them in the correct location. Human evaluation of the newly added words is also performed. Annotators must determine whether a newly added word is in the correct location. They found that in most cases the new words were almost indistinguishable from those already existing in Roget's Thesaurus. The second kind of evaluation is to establish the usefulness of the updated Roget’s Thesaurus on actual Natural Language Processing applications. These applications include determining semantic relatedness between word pairs or sentence pairs, identifying the best synonym from a set of candidates, solving SAT-style analogy problems, pseudo-word-sense disambiguation, and sentence ranking for text summarization. The updated Thesaurus consistently performed at least as well or better the original Thesaurus on all these applications.

Two studies were conducted to explore the feasibility of adapting reading passages by means of a computer thesaurus and an on-line dictionary. In Study 1, the Computer Thesaurus Study, three word replacement conditions to replace the marked mid- and low-frequency words of a reading passage were compared. Each condition’s performance for the proportion of marked words that could be replaced, the word frequency levels of the submitted synonyms that replaced the marked words, and the time duration needed to replace the marked words was examined. The participants were 12 English-language instructors who were native English speakers. The findings from Study 1 were determined by averaging the proportion of marked words replaced, averaging the word frequency level of submitted synonyms to replace the marked words, and averaging the time duration needed to replace the marked words. In Study 2, the On-line Dictionary Study, three look-up conditions for language learners to learn mid- and low-frequency target words and comprehend a reading passage when they are transferred away to an on-line dictionary were compared. The research questions were focused on how each look-up condition affected the recall and recognition of word forms, word meanings, and passage comprehension. The participants were 84 first-year Japanese medical university students. The data were analyzed with the Rasch model with regard to the recall and recognition of word forms and word meanings, and passage comprehension. Overall, the results suggest three findings in order to adapt the lexis of reading passages for learners in a timely manner. First, the results from the Computer Thesaurus Study suggest in terms of proportion of synonyms offered, the frequency level of synonyms offered, and the amount of time to provide synonyms, it might be best for instructors to replace the unknown words in passage without the use of a computer thesaurus. This study showed that the dynamic involved in choosing synonyms listed from a computer thesaurus increases word frequency level and the time to replace target words in a reading passage. Second, with regard to the On-line Dictionary Study, if the results that were both statistically significant and measurably different are considered, the spell, click and control conditions might promote the learning the forms of words, the meanings of words, and passage comprehension, respectively. However, the click condition might promote both the learning of word meanings and passage comprehension because its effects were higher and measurably different to the spell condition on these measures. Third, if only the results that were statistically significant from the On-line Dictionary Study are considered, there might be two conditions instead of three conditions to learn words and comprehend reading passages. The spell condition might be best for learning the forms and meanings of words and the control condition might be best for promoting passage comprehension. In terms of learning words, the results are consistent with the Type of Processing-Resource Allocation model in that there is a tradeoff for retaining the forms and meanings of words depending on if an activity emphasizes the spellings of words (spell) or the meanings of words (click). In terms of comprehending passages, the results are consistent with Cognitive Load Theory in that germane loads that increase the mental effort to complete a task (click or spell) diminish processing to learn information (control). / Teaching & Learning

The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA; http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla) is the publication platform of the project „Structure and Transformation in the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Texts and Knowledge in the Culture of Ancient Egypt“ (formerly known as “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch”) located in Berlin and Leipzig. It contains the largest corpus of Egyptian texts (ca. 1.4 million text words) and it is a very important tool for linguistic, philological, lexicographical, and cultural research. My paper introduces you to the software behind the TLA. I will show how easy it is to add a new text to the corpus with transcription, translation, Hieroglyphic codes, and metadata and how easy you can add any annotations of different types like rubra, citations from other texts, comments, direct speech. The software itself is freely available and platform independent. You are welcome to use our software to edit your texts and to cooperate with us!

Nowadays, geoprocessing has moved in large parts from isolated desktop usage into the Web. Thereby, the overall availability of geoprocessing functionality has theoretically improved. Nevertheless, web-based geoprocessing functionality is still not readily available and usable as means to find and subsequently compare functionality are yet missing. Discoverability and exchangeability of geoprocessing functionality are limited, and the fundamental benefits of online usage are not fully exploited. To close this gap, this thesis defines a conceptualization with geooperators representing well-defined geoprocessing functionality, and categories representing distinct geooperator attributes as a starting point. Geooperators and categories are connected by associative and hierarchical links forming an interlinked network. The conceptualization serves as basis for two purposes: On the one hand, discovery of geooperators has to be improved. There is a multitude of different GIS users from varying backgrounds, all having a slightly different view on geoprocessing functionality. To embrace these varying views, several actually existing and established categorizations for geooperators are integrated into the conceptualization and structured hierarchically. Thus, multiple different perspectives on geooperators are enabled. The perspectives and the underlying categorizations are integrated into a geooperator browser serving as client that users can employ for discovery. The geooperator browser offers a faceted browsing interface based on the derived perspectives and categories. Several different search modes are offered and can be used simultaneously, thereby facilitating an improved discovery. On the other hand, to establish comparability and subsequently semantically interoperable exchangeability of geooperators, respective geooperator attributes are defined. Thereby, backend and provider independence of geoprocessing services is achieved. The conceptualization is formalized to allow for machine readability and processing which is required for usage in Spatial Data Infrastructures and the Semantic Web. The formalized conceptualization is labeled geooperator thesaurus. It is encoded by Semantic Web standards and offered in a Semantic Web compliant manner. The integration into geoprocessing service metadata is enabled by injecting semantic annotations that link to the respective concepts in the geooperator thesaurus. The thesaurus serves as the underlying data model for the geooperator browser. The thesis concludes with an outlook and discussions of future work. Foremost, the content of the geooperator thesaurus needs to be extended as it currently only comprises a representative subset of geooperators. An approach is suggested to involve the geoprocessing community as an important source of geoprocessing expertise in the maintenance and further development of the thesaurus. On a conceptual level, the thesaurus needs to be extended to a fully-fledged ontology including a formal geoprocessing algebra to support the creation of geooperator workflows. From a discovery point of view, the concept of geoprocessing patterns is outlined. Geoprocessing patterns list geooperators that are commonly used for certain geoprocessing tasks, and provide best practices about applying them in a meaningful manner and sequence. / An Stelle von isolierter Desktop-basierter Nutzung von Geoprozessierung werden heutzutage mehr und mehr webbasierte Angebote zur Verfügung gestellt. Dadurch hat sich die generelle Verfügbarkeit von Geoprozessierungsfunktionalität theoretisch verbessert. Da jedoch das Auffinden und anschließend oft notwendige Vergleichen von Funktionalität nur eingeschränkt möglich ist, können die Vorteile einer webbasierten Verfügbarkeit nicht vollständig genutzt werden. Um dieser Problematik zu begegnen, wird im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit eine Konzeptualisierung entwickelt, die wohldefinierte Geoprozessierungsfunktionalität als Geooperatoren und Kategorien als Unterscheidungsmerkmale für Geooperatoren zur Verfügung stellt. Geooperatoren und Kategorien sind über assoziative und hierarchische Links zu einem Netzwerk verknüpft. Diese Konzeptualisierung erfüllt zwei grundlegende Aufgaben: Einerseits muss das Auffinden von Geooperatoren für Nutzer mit unterschiedlichsten Anwendungshintergründen möglich sein. Diese Nutzer haben unterschiedlichste Sichten auf Geooperatoren, die berücksichtigt und unterstützt werden sollen. Dazu werden etablierte Kategorisierungen aus Literatur und Praxis in die Konzeptualisierung integriert, entsprechend hierarchisch strukturiert und als Perspektiven auf Geooperatoren für den Zugriff nach Außen zur Verfügung gestellt. Diese Perspektiven und die darunterliegenden Kategorien werden als Facetten in einen Geooperatorbrowser integriert, der als webbasierter Client von den Nutzern für das Auffinden von Geooperatoren verwendet werden kann. Die explorative Suche über Facetten nach Geoprozessierungsfunktionalität wird durch eine Schlüsselwortsuche und einen geführten Suchmodus ergänzt und damit insgesamt die Auffindbarkeit von Geooperatoren verbessert. Andererseits sollen die Vergleichbarkeit und der anschließend semantisch interoperable Austausch von Geooperatoren ermöglicht werden. Dazu werden durch einen Vergleich von Geooperatorattributen Ähnlichkeiten von Geooperatoren definiert und zusammen mit der Konzeptualisierung als Geooperatorthesaurus formalisiert. Durch die Formalisierung wird eine Maschinenlesbarkeit und -prozessierbarkeit erreicht. Nur so kann ein anbieter- und backendunabhängiger Austausch von Geoprozessierungsdiensten in Geodateninfrastrukturen ermöglicht werden. Der Thesaurus nutzt Semantic-Web-Standards und wird in einer Semantic-Web-kompatiblen Art und Weise im Web publiziert. Die Integration in Metadaten von Geoprozessierungsdiensten wird durch semantische Annotationen erreicht, die auf die entsprechenden Konzepte im Thesaurus verlinken. Der Thesaurus dient als Datenbasis für den Geooperatorenbrowser. Die Arbeit schließt mit einem Ausblick auf und einer Diskussion von zukünftigen Forschungsarbeiten ab. Da der Thesaurus zurzeit nur eine repräsentative Menge an Beispieldaten enthält, muss als erster wichtiger Schritt der Inhalt des Thesaurus erweitert werden. Für die mittel- und langfristige Instandhaltung und Weiterentwicklung des Thesaurus wird ein Konzept zur Einbindung der GIS-Community vorgeschlagen, da hier gebündelte Geoprozessierungsexpertise vorhanden ist. Auf einer konzeptuellen Ebene muss der Thesaurus für eine semantisch und technisch verbesserte Verkettung von Geooperatoren zu einer vollständigen Ontologie mit einer formalen Geoprozessierungsalgebra weiterentwickelt werden. Für eine weitere Verbesserung der Auffindbarkeit von Geooperatoren wird das Konzept von Geoprozessierungspatterns skizziert, die Geooperatoren zusammenfassen, die oft im Kontext einer bestimmten Aufgabe zusammen genutzt werden. Zusätzlich werden über die Patterns Best Practices zur sinnvollen Anwendung und Verkettung der enthaltenen Geooperatoren zur Verfügung gestellt.