Comparative Studies, Formal Semantics and PVS Encoding of CSP#

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Classical Guitar Music by Irish Composers: Performing Editions and Critical Commentary

The last four hundred years have seen the guitar fall in and out of fashion, from its position as a respected medium for art music to its role as an accompanying instrument. Improvements in the construction of the instrument at the end of the nineteenth century, coupled with growing interest from leading twentieth-century composers, have resulted in a substantial and important new repertoire. A significant increase in the number of new works is especially evident after 1950. The availability of performing editions and compact disc recordings of these works is vital for their dissemination internationally. Since 1969, Irish composers have created a considerable repertoire for guitar, but this repertoire has been sadly neglected by performers due to lack of such editions and recordings. This thesis presents performing editions of thirty-seven works for classical guitar by twenty-one Irish composers and comprises compositions for guitar with orchestra, guitar with another instrument or voice, and guitar solo; a set of five Compact Disc recordings which includes nineteen works by twelve Irish composers (almost four hours of music); a discussion with analytical comments on the works and editorial commentary on the editions, with details, where available, of the composer/performer collaboration; and a more in-depth discussion of seven selected works. This thesis aims to provide a resource for those who wish to perform, or carry out research, into this neglected repertoir

Craft Sciences

The field of ‘Craft Sciences’ refers to research conducted across and within different craft subjects and academic contexts. This anthology aims to expose the breadth of topics, source material, methods, perspectives, and results that reside in this field, and to explore what unites the research in such diverse contexts as, for example, the arts, conservation, or vocational craft education. The common thread between each of the chapters in the present book is the augmented attention given to methods—the craft research methods—and to the relationship between the field of inquiry and the field of practice. A common feature is that practice plays an instrumental role in the research found within the chapters, and that the researchers in this publication are also practitioners. The authors are researchers but they are also potters, waiters, carpenters, gardeners, textile artists, boat builders, smiths, building conservators, painting restorers, furniture designers, illustrators, and media designers. The researchers contribute from different research fields, like craft education, meal sciences, and conservation crafts, and from particular craft subjects, like boat-building and weaving. The main contribution of this book is that it collects together a number of related case studies and presents a reflection on concepts, perspectives, and methods in the general fields of craft research from the point of view of craft practitioners. It adds to the existing academic discussion of crafts through its wider acknowledgement of craftsmanship and extends its borders and its discourse outside the arts and crafts context. This book provides a platform from which to develop context-appropriate research strategies and to associate with the Craft Sciences beyond the borders of faculties and disciplines

TA31: The Early Prehistory of Fiji

I enjoyed reading this volume. It is rare to see such a comprehensive report on hard data published these days, especially one so insightfully contextualised by the editors’ introductory and concluding chapters. These scholars and the others involved in the work really know their stuff, and it shows. The editors connect the preoccupations of Pacific archaeologists with those of their colleagues working in other island regions and on “big questions” of colonisation, migration, interaction and patterns and processes of cultural change in hitherto-uninhabited environments. These sorts of outward-looking, big-picture contextual studies are invaluable, but all too often are missing from locally- and regionally-oriented writing, very much to its detriment. In sum, the work strongly advances our understanding of the early prehistory of Fiji through its well-integrated combination of original research and the reinterpretation of existing knowledge in the context of wider theoretical and historical concerns. In doing so The Early Prehistory of Fiji makes a truly substantial contribution to Pacific and archaeological scholarship

Learning discrete word embeddings to achieve better interpretability and processing efficiency

L’omniprésente utilisation des plongements de mot dans le traitement des langues naturellesest la preuve de leur utilité et de leur capacité d’adaptation a une multitude de tâches. Ce-pendant, leur nature continue est une importante limite en terme de calculs, de stockage enmémoire et d’interprétation. Dans ce travail de recherche, nous proposons une méthode pourapprendre directement des plongements de mot discrets. Notre modèle est une adaptationd’une nouvelle méthode de recherche pour base de données avec des techniques dernier crien traitement des langues naturelles comme les Transformers et les LSTM. En plus d’obtenirdes plongements nécessitant une fraction des ressources informatiques nécéssaire à leur sto-ckage et leur traitement, nos expérimentations suggèrent fortement que nos représentationsapprennent des unités de bases pour le sens dans l’espace latent qui sont analogues à desmorphèmes. Nous appelons ces unités dessememes, qui, de l’anglaissemantic morphemes,veut dire morphèmes sémantiques. Nous montrons que notre modèle a un grand potentielde généralisation et qu’il produit des représentations latentes montrant de fortes relationssémantiques et conceptuelles entre les mots apparentés.The ubiquitous use of word embeddings in Natural Language Processing is proof of theirusefulness and adaptivity to a multitude of tasks. However, their continuous nature is pro-hibitive in terms of computation, storage and interpretation. In this work, we propose amethod of learning discrete word embeddings directly. The model is an adaptation of anovel database searching method using state of the art natural language processing tech-niques like Transformers and LSTM. On top of obtaining embeddings requiring a fractionof the resources to store and process, our experiments strongly suggest that our representa-tions learn basic units of meaning in latent space akin to lexical morphemes. We call theseunitssememes, i.e., semantic morphemes. We demonstrate that our model has a greatgeneralization potential and outputs representation showing strong semantic and conceptualrelations between related words