750 research outputs found
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 edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (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 edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (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 speakers’ 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 Molyneux’s 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
Conservation Prioritization Problems and their Shadow Prices
Systematic conservation planning is an essential part of biodiversity preservation
Toward a Scalable Census of Dashboard Designs in the Wild: A Case Study with Tableau Public
Dashboards remain ubiquitous artifacts for presenting or reasoning with data
across different domains. Yet, there has been little work that provides a
quantifiable, systematic, and descriptive overview of dashboard designs at
scale. We propose a schematic representation of dashboard designs as node-link
graphs to better understand their spatial and interactive structures. We apply
our approach to a dataset of 25,620 dashboards curated from Tableau Public to
provide a descriptive overview of the core building blocks of dashboards in the
wild and derive common dashboard design patterns. To guide future research, we
make our dashboard corpus publicly available and discuss its application toward
the development of dashboard design tools.Comment: *J. Purich and A. Srinivasan contributed equally to the wor
Optimization and inference under fuzzy numerical constraints
Εκτεταμένη έρευνα έχει γίνει στους τομείς της Ικανοποίησης Περιορισμών με
διακριτά (ακέραια) ή πραγματικά πεδία τιμών. Αυτή η έρευνα έχει οδηγήσει σε
πολλαπλές σημασιολογικές περιγραφές, πλατφόρμες και
συστήματα για την περιγραφή σχετικών προβλημάτων με επαρκείς βελτιστοποιήσεις.
Παρά ταύτα, λόγω της ασαφούς φύσης
πραγματικών προβλημάτων ή ελλιπούς μας γνώσης για αυτά, η σαφής μοντελοποίηση
ενός προβλήματος ικανοποίησης περιορισμών δεν είναι πάντα ένα εύκολο ζήτημα ή
ακόμα και η καλύτερη προσέγγιση. Επιπλέον, το πρόβλημα της μοντελοποίησης και
επίλυσης ελλιπούς γνώσης είναι ακόμη δυσκολότερο. Επιπροσθέτως, πρακτικές
απαιτήσεις μοντελοποίησης και μέθοδοι βελτιστοποίησης του χρόνου αναζήτησης
απαιτούν συνήθως ειδικές πληροφορίες για το πεδίο εφαρμογής,
καθιστώντας τη δημιουργία ενός γενικότερου πλαισίου βελτιστοποίησης ένα
ιδιαίτερα δύσκολο πρόβλημα. Στα πλαίσια αυτής της εργασίας θα μελετήσουμε το
πρόβλημα της μοντελοποίησης και αξιοποίησης σαφών, ελλιπών ή ασαφών
περιορισμών, καθώς και πιθανές στρατηγικές βελτιστοποίησης. Καθώς τα
παραδοσιακά προβλήματα ικανοποίησης περιορισμών λειτουργούν βάσει συγκεκριμένων
και προκαθορισμένων κανόνων και σχέσεων, παρουσιάζει ενδιαφέρον η διερεύνηση
στρατηγικών και βελτιστοποιήσεων που θα επιτρέπουν το συμπερασμό νέων ή/και
αποδοτικότερων περιορισμών. Τέτοιοι επιπρόσθετοι κανόνες θα μπορούσαν να
βελτιώσουν τη διαδικασία αναζήτησης μέσω της εφαρμογής αυστηρότερων περιορισμών
και περιορισμού του χώρου αναζήτησης ή να προσφέρουν χρήσιμες πληροφορίες στον
αναλυτή για τη φύση του προβλήματος που
μοντελοποιεί.Extensive research has been done in the areas of Constraint Satisfaction with
discrete/integer
and real domain ranges. Multiple platforms and systems to deal with these kinds
of domains have been developed and appropriately optimized. Nevertheless, due
to the incomplete and possibly vague nature of real-life problems, modeling a
crisp and adequately strict satisfaction problem may not always be easy or even
appropriate. The problem of modeling incomplete
knowledge or solving an incomplete/relaxed representation of a problem is a
much harder issue to tackle. Additionally, practical modeling requirements and
search optimizations require specific domain knowledge in order to be
implemented, making the creation of a more generic optimization framework an
even harder problem.In this thesis, we will study the problem of modeling and
utilizing incomplete and fuzzy constraints, as well as possible optimization
strategies. As constraint satisfaction problems usually contain hard-coded
constraints based on specific problem and domain knowledge, we will investigate
whether strategies and generic heuristics exist for inferring new constraint
rules. Additional rules could optimize the search process by implementing
stricter constraints and thus pruning the search space or even provide useful
insight to the researcher concerning the nature of the investigated problem
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