29 research outputs found

    24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

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    George Orwell´s nineteen eighty-four: The use of language as a vehicle for mind-control

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    George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) discusses the possible consequences of a totalitarian government in a dystopian future. It has been the departure of several investigations and research papers on the influence of language on society. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine whether language might be used as a vehicle for mind-control. First, Newspeak will be compared to several controlled natural languages and experimental languages to understand its objective. Second, it will be examined through different linguistic theories. Finally, an answer will be offered to the question of whether thought influences language or whether, on the contrary, language influences thought

    PORT PERFORMANCE AND CRUDE OIL EXPORT LOGISTICS SYSTEM DISTRIBUTION IN NIGERIA

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    Port Performance and Crude Oil Export Logistics System Distribution in Nigeria. Crude oil export is a resource that provides essential building blocks for economic development and prosperity for Crude oil exporting countries (COECs). Previous research found information flow been significant for logistics and supply chains sustainability. In the current low price environment, key COECs experienced recession, especially brought by the 2014 oil price crash. Obviously, performance of export terminals is vital to maintain competitive advantage. Nigeria’s reputation in the global oil market suffers due to avoidable delay arising because cargoes for tankers are occasionally disrupted through shutdown due to pipeline leaks or sabotage. In addition, when prices are relatively high an evolving energy transition scenario reveals a global shift in demand away from traditional fossil fuel to gas, and increasingly, reducing global demand for fossil fuels. The study was guided by a pragmatic philosophy, commencing with scoping interviews and mixed methods that embraced different analytical techniques. First, a model of key strategies to model port performance. Supply chain management (SCM) concepts were not fully understood by low-cost producers’ and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). International oil companies (IOCs operate more effectively than Indigenous companies and NNPC needs to review its business model. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) group decision makers scored the information sharing and synergy between supply chain actors’ strategy to be highest at 22.85%. Investment and security are topical in Nigeria because of inadequate investment in the pipeline automation security system, dredging, security platform and capability, metering systems and information communication technology. Improved port security encompass anti-piracy laws, private maritime security companies. The Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) remains a key concern for all stakeholders, particularly concerning investment and information sharing networks. Policy contribution includes the use of reliable and accurate metering systems for bill of lading figure. Theoretical contribution revealed template analysis being a rare technique. In addition, weather friendliness has been found to be effective for seamless logistics operations as a resource base view strategy for Nigeria.PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT FUND (PTDF), NIGERI

    EMIL: Extracting Meaning from Inconsistent Language

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    Developments in formal and computational theories of argumentation reason with inconsistency. Developments in Computational Linguistics extract arguments from large textual corpora. Both developments head in the direction of automated processing and reasoning with inconsistent, linguistic knowledge so as to explain and justify arguments in a humanly accessible form. Yet, there is a gap between the coarse-grained, semi-structured knowledge-bases of computational theories of argumentation and fine-grained, highly-structured inferences from knowledge-bases derived from natural language. We identify several subproblems which must be addressed in order to bridge the gap. We provide a direct semantics for argumentation. It has attractive properties in terms of expressivity and complexity, enables reasoning by cases, and can be more highly structured. For language processing, we work with an existing controlled natural language (CNL), which interfaces with our computational theory of argumentation; the tool processes natural language input, translates them into a form for automated inference engines, outputs argument extensions, then generates natural language statements. The key novel adaptation incorporates the defeasible expression ‘it is usual that’. This is an important, albeit incremental, step to incorporate linguistic expressions of defeasibility. Overall, the novel contribution of the paper is an integrated, end-to-end argumentation system which bridges between automated defeasible reasoning and a natural language interface. Specific novel contributions are the theory of ‘direct semantics’, motivations for our theory, results with respect to the direct semantics, an implementation, experimental results, the tie between the formalisation and the CNL, the introduction into a CNL of a natural language expression of defeasibility, and an ‘engineering’ approach to fine-grained argument analysis

    The University of Iowa 2018-19 General Catalog

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    The University of Iowa 2017-18 General Catalog

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    Knowledge-based and data-driven approaches for geographical information access

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    Geographical Information Access (GeoIA) can be defined as a way of retrieving information from textual collections that includes the automatic analysis and interpretation of the geographical constraints and terms present in queries and documents. This PhD thesis presents, describes and evaluates several heterogeneous approaches for the following three GeoIA tasks: Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR), Geographical Question Answering (GeoQA), and Textual Georeferencing (TG). The GIR task deals with user queries that search over documents (e.g. ¿vineyards in California?) and the GeoQA task treats questions that retrieve answers (e.g. ¿What is the capital of France?). On the other hand, TG is the task of associate one or more georeferences (such as polygons or coordinates in a geodetic reference system) to electronic documents. Current state-of-the-art AI algorithms are not yet fully understanding the semantic meaning and the geographical constraints and terms present in queries and document collections. This thesis attempts to improve the effectiveness results of GeoIA tasks by: 1) improving the detection, understanding, and use of a part of the geographical and the thematic content of queries and documents with Toponym Recognition, Toponym Disambiguation and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and 2) combining Geographical Knowledge-Based Heuristics based on common sense with Data-Driven IR algorithms. The main contributions of this thesis to the state-of-the-art of GeoIA tasks are: 1) The presentation of 10 novel approaches for GeoIA tasks: 3 approaches for GIR, 3 for GeoQA, and 4 for Textual Georeferencing (TG). 2) The evaluation of these novel approaches in these contexts: within official evaluation benchmarks, after evaluation benchmarks with the test collections, and with other specific datasets. Most of these algorithms have been evaluated in international evaluations and some of them achieved top-ranked state-of-the-art results, including top-performing results in GIR (GeoCLEF 2007) and TG (MediaEval 2014) benchmarks. 3) The experiments reported in this PhD thesis show that the approaches can combine effectively Geographical Knowledge and NLP with Data-Driven techniques to improve the efectiveness measures of the three Geographical Information Access tasks investigated. 4) TALPGeoIR: a novel GIR approach that combines Geographical Knowledge ReRanking (GeoKR), NLP and Relevance Feedback (RF) that achieved state-of-the-art results in official GeoCLEF benchmarks (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2008; Mandl et al., 2008) and posterior experiments (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2015a). This approach has been evaluated with the full GeoCLEF corpus (100 topics) and showed that GeoKR, NLP, and RF techniques evaluated separately or in combination improve the results in MAP and R-Precision effectiveness measures of the state-of-the-art IR algorithms TF-IDF, BM25 and InL2 and show statistical significance in most of the experiments. 5) GeoTALP-QA: a scope-based GeoQA approach for Spanish and English and its evaluation with a set of questions of the Spanish geography (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2006). 6) Four state-of-the-art Textual Georeferencing approaches for informal and formal documents that achieved state-of-the-art results in evaluation benchmarks (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2014) and posterior experiments (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2011; Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2015b).L'Accés a la Informació Geogràfica (GeoAI) pot ser definit com una forma de recuperar informació de col·lecions textuals que inclou l'anàlisi automàtic i la interpretació dels termes i restriccions geogràfiques que apareixen en consultes i documents. Aquesta tesi doctoral presenta, descriu i avalua varies aproximacions heterogènies a les seguents tasques de GeoAI: Recuperació de la Informació Geogràfica (RIG), Cerca de la Resposta Geogràfica (GeoCR), i Georeferenciament Textual (GT). La tasca de RIG tracta amb consultes d'usuari que cerquen documents (e.g. ¿vinyes a California?) i la tasca GeoCR tracta de recuperar respostes concretes a preguntes (e.g. ¿Quina és la capital de França?). D'altra banda, GT es la tasca de relacionar una o més referències geogràfiques (com polígons o coordenades en un sistema de referència geodètic) a documents electrònics. Els algoritmes de l'estat de l'art actual en Intel·ligència Artificial encara no comprenen completament el significat semàntic i els termes i les restriccions geogràfiques presents en consultes i col·leccions de documents. Aquesta tesi intenta millorar els resultats en efectivitat de les tasques de GeoAI de la seguent manera: 1) millorant la detecció, comprensió, i la utilització d'una part del contingut geogràfic i temàtic de les consultes i documents amb tècniques de reconeixement de topònims, desambiguació de topònims, i Processament del Llenguatge Natural (PLN), i 2) combinant heurístics basats en Coneixement Geogràfic i en el sentit comú humà amb algoritmes de Recuperació de la Informació basats en dades. Les principals contribucions d'aquesta tesi a l'estat de l'art de les tasques de GeoAI són: 1) La presentació de 10 noves aproximacions a les tasques de GeoAI: 3 aproximacions per RIG, 3 per GeoCR, i 4 per Georeferenciament Textual (GT). 2) L'avaluació d'aquestes noves aproximacions en aquests contexts: en el marc d'avaluacions comparatives internacionals, posteriorment a avaluacions comparatives internacionals amb les col·lections de test, i amb altres conjunts de dades específics. La majoria d'aquests algoritmes han estat avaluats en avaluacions comparatives internacionals i alguns d'ells aconseguiren alguns dels millors resultats en l'estat de l'art, com per exemple els resultats en comparatives de RIG (GeoCLEF 2007) i GT (MediaEval 2014). 3) Els experiments descrits en aquesta tesi mostren que les aproximacions poden combinar coneixement geogràfic i PLN amb tècniques basades en dades per millorar les mesures d'efectivitat en les tres tasques de l'Accés a la Informació Geogràfica investigades. 4) TALPGeoIR: una nova aproximació a la RIG que combina Re-Ranking amb Coneixement Geogràfic (GeoKR), PLN i Retroalimentació de Rellevancia (RR) que aconseguí resultats en l'estat de l'art en comparatives oficials GeoCLEF (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2008; Mandl et al., 2008) i en experiments posteriors (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2015a). Aquesta aproximació ha estat avaluada amb el conjunt complert del corpus GeoCLEF (100 topics) i ha mostrat que les tècniques GeoKR, PLN i RR avaluades separadament o en combinació milloren els resultats en les mesures efectivitat MAP i R-Precision dels algoritmes de l'estat de l'art en Recuperació de la Infomació TF-IDF, BM25 i InL2 i a més mostren significació estadística en la majoria dels experiments. 5) GeoTALP-QA: una aproximació basada en l'àmbit geogràfic per espanyol i anglès i la seva avaluació amb un conjunt de preguntes de la geografía espanyola (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2006). 6) Quatre aproximacions per al georeferenciament de documents formals i informals que obtingueren resultats en l'estat de l'art en avaluacions comparatives (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2014) i en experiments posteriors (Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2011; Ferrés and Rodríguez, 2015b).Postprint (published version

    Análisis de las percepciones en torno a la práctica de la posedición en el sector profesional de la traducción en España

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    Programa de Doctorado en Lenguas Modernas, Traducción y Español como Lengua ExtranjeraEl mercado profesional de la traducción se encuentra en constante cambio. Los traductores profesionales deben enfrentarse a un mercado cada vez más globalizado e interconectado gracias a las nuevas tecnologías. Deben afrontar nuevos retos sin apenas tiempo de reacción. El volumen de demanda se incrementa y los plazos de entrega se reducen. Es por ello que la adaptabilidad del traductor cobra más importancia que nunca. El mercado demanda nuevas habilidades que antes no eran inherentes al traductor como, por ejemplo, el dominio de software complejo para la localización de páginas web o la capacidad de posteditar textos generados con traducción automática o de transcrear. A causa de estos cambios constantes en el mercado, es primordial conocer las percepciones de los traductores profesionales respecto a estas nuevas tendencias, para tener una imagen más real de cómo afectan todos estos avances a los profesionales que van a tener que afrontarlas de primera mano. Este proyecto de tesis que aquí presentamos tiene como objetivo principal mostrar cuáles son las percepciones de los traductores profesionales sobre la práctica de la postedición en el sector de la traducción en España. Entre otras cuestiones, pretendemos conocer si los traductores en activo realizan habitualmente este tipo de postediciones o si hay correspondencia entre el mundo académico y el profesional en este ámbito. Asimismo, se pretende conocer la opinión de traductores profesionales en activo relacionada con algunas cuestiones sobre este tema a nivel general.Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla. Departamento de Filología y TraducciónPostprin

    Runtime verification using Larva

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    Larva, which has been in use and continuous development for almost a decade, has been extended in several ways and used in a wide range of scenarios, from industrial deployment to educational ones. In this paper we give an overview of Larva and give an overview of its extensions and uses.peer-reviewe
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