Terminology as a system of knowledge representation: An overview

Terminology has an important role in the framework of specialised knowledge, especially as regards its elaboration, representation and transmission through verbal language. This study focuses on the nature of knowledge that is organised in terminological collections. Terms are interpreted as the units where the mental, linguistic, communicative, and referential facets of specialised knowledge coalesce. Terminology schools belonging to different traditions have attributed distinct values to the notion of term and to its content, as a consequence of the underlying terminological and linguistic theories used as reference (\ua7 2.). Accordingly, terminology theories and applications display the prevalence of either a prescriptive or descriptive approach; the former characterises the General Theory of Terminology, the latter is typical of contemporary schools related to socioterminology, textual terminology, the sociocognitive approach, and the communicative theory of terminology (\ua7 3.). An analysis of the nature of knowledge as represented in terminology works makes it possible to recognise the importance of representing the system of knowledge through a relational scheme of concepts and terms which allows the user to delineate the definition of the single units of knowledge (\ua7 4.). This model, which has been outlined since W\ufcster\u2019s theory as a hierarchical frame of relations and dependences, can be described in terms of an ontology, also as a result of the recent integration of terminology with information science. Even though ontology offers a model of representation of specialised knowledge which is relatively neutral from the linguistic and cultural point of view, this structure can be integrated with the cognitive, sociological and pragmatic facets of terms, which have acquired a growing importance in contemporary terminology. In this way ontology remains a basic component of a satisfactory representation of concept systems, even when the analytical perspective is interlinguistic and intercultural, as is the case with the applications that follow the termontography method

A short survey of discourse representation models

With the advancement of technology and the wide adoption of ontologies as knowledge representation formats, in the last decade, a handful of models were proposed for the externalization of the rhetoric and argumentation captured within scientific publications. Conceptually, most of these models share a similar representation form of the scientific publication, i.e. as a series of interconnected elementary knowledge items. The main differences are given by the terminology used, the types of rhetorical and/or argumentation relations connecting the knowledge items and the foundational theories supporting these relations. This paper analyzes the state of the art and provides a concise comparative overview of the five most prominent discourse representation models, with the goal of sketching an unified model for discourse representation

From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc

On understanding and interpretation in mathematics: An integrative overview

For decades, understanding has been considered as a basic theme of interest and a research object in Mathematics Education. In this theoretical overview paper we present a integrative framework for organizing the diversity of results that emerge from the different studies on mathematical understanding and its interpretation. The proposal is applied onto a representation of relevant literature that has arise in the area over the last two decades. With this overview we seek to provide an useful reference for: (a) advancing towards a better insight of understanding in mathematics, (b) establishing the specific limitations and open questions that demarcate the boundaries of understanding and interpretation in mathematics, and (c) orienting its future study using a shared base of consolidated knowledge

Support vector machines and learning about time

The analysis of temporal data is an important issue of current research, because most real-world data either explicitly or implicitly contains some information about time. The key to successfully solving temporal learning tasks is to analyze the assumptions that can be made and prior knowledge one has about the temporal process of the learning problem and find a representation of the data and a learning algorithm that makes effective use of this knowledge. This paper will present a concise overview of the application Support Vector Machines to different temporal learning tasks and the corresponding temporal representations. --

Challenges of evaluating the information visualization experience

Information Visualisation (InfoVis) is defined as an interactive visual representation of abstract data. We view the user’s interaction with InfoVis tools as an experience which is made up of a set of highly demanding cognitive activities. These activities assist users in making sense and gaining knowledge of the represented domain. Usability studies that involve a task-based analysis and usability questionnaires are not enough to capture such an experience. This paper discusses the challenges involved when it comes to evaluating InfoVis tools by giving an overview of the activities involved in an InfoVis experience and demonstrating how they affect the visualisation process. The argument in this paper is based on our experiences in designing, building and evaluating an academic literature visualisation tool

Querying a regulatory model for compliant building design audit

The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a BIM model containing the design information, an electronic regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computerised representations. There have been numerous approaches to computer-aided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of standardisation. The current research project therefore focuses on using an open standard regulatory knowledge and BIM representations in conjunction with open standard executable compliant design workflows to automate the compliance audit process. This paper provides an overview of different approaches to access information from a regulatory model representation. The paper then describes the use of a purpose-built high-level domain specific query language to extract regulatory information as part of the effort to automate manual design procedures for compliance audit

The Representation and Use of Process Knowledge in the Design of Information Systems

This tutorial will provide an overview of the theories underlying the representation and use of process knowledge, the principal methods employed, and the implementation of the methods in CASE tools. We will also discuss factors that constrain the capture and use of process knowledge in organizational settings. The material covered in the tutorial will be illustrated through a stylized example, abstracted from an actual design situation