27,190 research outputs found
A CNL for Contract-Oriented Diagrams
We present a first step towards a framework for defining and manipulating
normative documents or contracts described as Contract-Oriented (C-O) Diagrams.
These diagrams provide a visual representation for such texts, giving the
possibility to express a signatory's obligations, permissions and prohibitions,
with or without timing constraints, as well as the penalties resulting from the
non-fulfilment of a contract. This work presents a CNL for verbalising C-O
Diagrams, a web-based tool allowing editing in this CNL, and another for
visualising and manipulating the diagrams interactively. We then show how these
proof-of-concept tools can be used by applying them to a small example
Extracting Formal Models from Normative Texts
We are concerned with the analysis of normative texts - documents based on
the deontic notions of obligation, permission, and prohibition. Our goal is to
make queries about these notions and verify that a text satisfies certain
properties concerning causality of actions and timing constraints. This
requires taking the original text and building a representation (model) of it
in a formal language, in our case the C-O Diagram formalism. We present an
experimental, semi-automatic aid that helps to bridge the gap between a
normative text in natural language and its C-O Diagram representation. Our
approach consists of using dependency structures obtained from the
state-of-the-art Stanford Parser, and applying our own rules and heuristics in
order to extract the relevant components. The result is a tabular data
structure where each sentence is split into suitable fields, which can then be
converted into a C-O Diagram. The process is not fully automatic however, and
some post-editing is generally required of the user. We apply our tool and
perform experiments on documents from different domains, and report an initial
evaluation of the accuracy and feasibility of our approach.Comment: Extended version of conference paper at the 21st International
Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB
2016). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1607.0148
A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English
Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in
English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires
the combination of a number of different elements, including information
extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation,
and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on
a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a
suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building
models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given
model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based
tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English.
Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and
demonstrate the workflow established by our tool
Adding state to declarative languages to enable web applications
On the web, media tend to be encoded in declarative formats, which facilitate accessibility, reuse, and transformation. Web applications, on the other hand, are created with more procedural technology and do not enjoy these benefits. In this thesis we examine how this can be fixed. We examine a small part of the problem space, adaptive time based applications, and investigate how we can extend existing declarative languages to fa
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'Real men don't diet': an analysis of contemporary newspaper representations of men, food and health
Little research to date has focused on the meanings men attach to food and the relationship between diet and health. This is an important topic in light of the current âcrisisâ in men's health and the role of lifestyle factors such as diet in illness prevention. Since the mass media is a powerful source of information about health matters generally, media representations bear critical examination. The present paper reports on an in-depth qualitative analysis of contemporary UK newspaper articles on the topic of men and diet (N=44). The findings indicate a persistent adherence to hegemonic masculinities predicated on health-defeating diets, special occasion cooking of hearty meals, and a general distancing from the feminised realm of dieting. At the same time, men are constructed as naĂŻve and vulnerable when it comes to diet and health, while women are viewed as experts. The implications for health promotion with men are discussed
Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish
Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellÀ (in front of) and jÀljessÀ (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003).
When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellÀ (in front of) and jÀljessÀ (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected.
We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakersâ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers.
All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion.
We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion.
Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneuxâs question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo
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Combining Logics to Transform Organizational Agency: Blending Industry and Art at Alessi
To understand how organizations combine conflicting institutional logics strategically to create and pursue new market opportunities, we conducted an in-depth longitudinal study of the multiple efforts of the Italian manufacturer of household goods Alessi to combine the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production. Over three decades, Alessi developed three different strategies to combine normative elements of the two logics, using each strategy to envision and pursue different market opportunities. By combining the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production, Alessi was able to envision new possibilities for value creation and to enact them through innovation in product design. The three strategies triggered a common set of mechanisms through which the purposeful combining of logics enabled the pursuit of opportunity, while each strategy structured the process differently. We develop a theoretical model linking the development of recombinant strategies to the dynamic restructuring of organizational agency and the related capacity to create and pursue new market opportunities. Our findings and theoretical insights advance understanding of the processes through which organizations challenge taken-for-granted beliefs and practices to create new market opportunities, use logics as resources to enable embedded agency, and design hybrid organizational arrangements
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Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL
Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N
WHATâS IN A SERVICE? SPECIFYING THE BUSINESS SEMANTICS OF SOFTWARE SERVICES
The success of the service-oriented computing (SOC) paradigm considerably depends on the ability of service consumers to distinguish between published services and choose the ones best suited for a development project. Current SOC standards primarily give information about technical service properties such as the programming interface and the binding information. This enables designers to analyze the technical compatibility of services with the rest of the system. On the basis of such technical information, it is difficult to assess which business semantics a service actually implements and whether it is suited to satisfy functional requirements, however. In this paper, we therefore propose the WS-Functionality language which allows providers to specify the business semantics of software services in business terms. In a design science approach, we firstly describe how conceptual models, which contain business terms and relationships between them, can be used to specify the business semantics of services. Building upon this solution concept, we present the language constructs of WS-Functionality and show a prototypic implementation as proof-of-concept. In a controlled experiment, we were able to support our claim that the information provided with WS-Functionality enhances the ability of service consumers to analyze the business semantics of services and judge whether it satisfies existing functional requirements
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