Exploiting Linked Open Data and Natural Language Processing for Classification of Political Speech

This paper shows the effectiveness of a DBpedia-based approach for text categorization in the e-government field. Our use case is the analysis of all the speech transcripts of current White House members. This task is performed by means of TellMeFirst, an open-source software that leverages the DBpedia knowledge base and the English Wikipedia linguistic corpus for topic extraction. Analysis results allow to identify the main political trends addressed by the White House, increasing the citizens' awareness to issues discussed by politicians. Unlike methods based on string recognition, TellMeFirst semantically classifies documents through DBpedia URIs, gathering all the words that belong to a similar area of meaning (such as synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms of a lemma) under the same unambiguous concept

Modeling and Analyzing Systemic Risk in Complex Sociotechnical Systems The Role of Teleology, Feedback, and Emergence

Recent systemic failures such as the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Global Financial Crisis, and Northeast Blackout have reminded us, once again, of the fragility of complex sociotechnical systems. Although the failures occurred in very different domains and were triggered by different events, there are, however, certain common underlying mechanisms of abnormalities driving these systemic failures. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to avoid such disasters in the future. Moreover, these disasters happened in sociotechnical systems, where both social and technical elements can interact with each other and with the environment. The nonlinear interactions among these components can lead to an “emergent” behavior – i.e., the behavior of the whole is more than the sum of its parts – that can be difficult to anticipate and control. Abnormalities can propagate through the systems to cause systemic failures. To ensure the safe operation and production of such complex systems, we need to understand and model the associated systemic risk. Traditional emphasis of chemical engineering risk modeling is on the technical components of a chemical plant, such as equipment and processes. However, a chemical plant is more than a set of equipment and processes, with the human elements playing a critical role in decision-making. Industrial statistics show that about 70% of the accidents are caused by human errors. So, new modeling techniques that go beyond the classical equipment/process-oriented approaches to include the human elements (i.e., the “socio” part of the sociotechnical systems) are needed for analyzing systemic risk of complex sociotechnical systems. This thesis presents such an approach. This thesis presents a new knowledge modeling paradigm for systemic risk analysis that goes beyond chemical plants by unifying different perspectives. First, we develop a unifying teleological, control theoretic framework to model decision-making knowledge in a complex system. The framework allows us to identify systematically the common failure mechanisms behind systemic failures in different domains. We show how cause-and-effect knowledge can be incorporated into this framework by using signed directed graphs. We also develop an ontology-driven knowledge modeling component and show how this can support decision-making by using a case study in public health emergency. This is the first such attempt to develop an ontology for public health documents. Lastly, from a control-theoretic perspective, we address the question, “how do simple individual components of a system interact to produce a system behavior that cannot be explained by the behavior of just the individual components alone?” Through this effort, we attempt to bridge the knowledge gap between control theory and complexity science

Designing Service-Oriented Chatbot Systems Using a Construction Grammar-Driven Natural Language Generation System

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an e�fficient and useful system. In this thesis we investigate current and past methods in this research area and place particular emphasis on Construction Grammar and its computational implementation. Our research shows that users have strong emotive reactions to how these systems behave, so we also investigate the human computer interaction component. We present three systems (KIA, John and KIA2), and carry out extensive user tests on all of them, as well as comparative tests. KIA is built using existing methods, John is built with the user in mind and KIA2 is built using the construction grammar method. We found that the construction grammar approach performs well in service oriented chatbots systems, and that users preferred it over other systems

Proceedings Ocean Biodiversity Informatics: International Conference on Marine Biodiversity Data Management, Hamburg, Germany 29 November to 1 December, 2004

The International conference on Marine Biodiversity Data management ‘Ocean Biodiversity Informatics’ was held in Hamburg, Germany, from 29 November to 1 December 2004. Its objective was to offer a forum to marine biological data managers to discuss the state of the field, and to exchange ideas on how to further develop marine biological data systems. Many marine biologists are actively gathering knowledge, as they have been doing for a long time. What is new is that many of these scientists are willing to share their knowledge, including basic data, with others over the Internet. Our challenge now is to try and manage this trend, avoid confusing users with a multitude of contradicting sources of information, and make sure different data systems can be and are effectively integrated

Toward ecological literacy: A permaculture approach to junior secondary science

Environmental, economic, and social trends suggest the need for more sustainable ways of thinking and patterns of behavior. Such a shift would require humanity to function at high levels of ecological literacy, which relies on a certain amount of scientific literacy. However, troubling evidence indicates an international pattern of student disengagement with science at the secondary level. Evidence also suggests that it is difficult to integrate environmental or sustainability education at this level, both within New Zealand and elsewhere. This research was aimed at examining the use of a novel approach, using permaculture, in junior secondary science (years 9 and 10) to enhance students‘ ecological and scientific literacy, as well as their attitudes toward studying science in school. Permaculture is an ecological design system based on science and ethics. A permaculture approach to science education involves eco-design thinking as well as the use of local permaculture properties and practitioners, and the science behind common permaculture practices. The approach is also meant to be relevant and engaging, and to promote systems thinking. This study involved the design and delivery of an intervention based on permaculture principles to one year 10 science class in New Zealand. Research took the form of a naturalistic, interpretive, mixed methods case study, which included the use of questionnaires, interviews, and observations. Data collection focused on the impacts of a permaculture approach on the teaching and learning of science, on students‘ ecological literacy, and on students‘ attitudes toward learning science in school. Pre- and post-intervention questionnaires probed students‘ opinions on the environment, science, and learning science in school, and tested their sustainable thinking and systems thinking with concept mapping and SOLO Taxonomy exercises. Classroom observations took place over the course of 12 weeks, on average 3 days per week, totaling 31 days. Before and after some classroom visits I had informal conversations with the teacher, along with three formal interviews before, during and after the intervention. Three focus groups of students were interviewed immediately following the intervention. Findings show that a permaculture approach to junior secondary science can impact positively on students‘ understanding of science and sustainability, and may impact on their attitudes toward studying science in school. It also appeared to impact positively on the science teacher‘s attitude toward including sustainability in his teaching practice, and on his own sustainability learning. Regarding both students and teachers, a permaculture approach appears to have been effective to cultivate attitudes and trellis learning. The teacher and the students responded favorably to many aspects of the intervention, including the overall focus on the environment, the field trips, and some classroom learning activities. The teacher reported appreciating the way the intervention contextualized science with real world examples. Most students reported appreciating the experiential aspects of the intervention, as well as the relevance that a permaculture approach to science education provided. Findings indicate that advances in ecological and scientific literacy varied among students. Some students appeared: to improve their use of science and sustainability vocabulary; to become more aware of select socio-scientific issues; and, to better recognize scientific and ecological limits and possibilities. Some students also showed advances in sustainable thinking and systems thinking. Although many students expressed concern about issues such as pollution, wildlife, and genetic engineering – and prioritized protecting the environment over making money – there appeared to be a disconnect between these feelings and a sense of personal responsibility to act. Most students reported enjoying learning science with a focus on the environment, with one cohort indicating much greater enjoyment of the permaculture approach than their usual level of enjoyment of learning science in school. Trends in environmental degradation, population growth, energy inflation, and economic stagnation – especially pronounced since the beginning of this inquiry in 2008 – indicate that the world of the future will require ecologically literate citizens who can design and create truly sustainable systems for all human endeavors. Cultivating such citizens, and trellising their science and sustainability learning has implications for science education. This thesis identifies an innovative approach for junior secondary science in New Zealand that provides a way towards a more sustainable future

A black art: Ontology, data, and the Tower of Babel problem

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical dimensions of such informational ontologies, applied computational ontologies, and the interdisciplinary communities of practice (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998) that produce them. This dissertation fills a lacuna in communicative work in an emerging subfield of Science and Technology Studies (Latour & Woolgar, 1979) known as Critical Data Studies (boyd & Crawford, 2012; Dalton & Thatcher, 2014; Kitchin & Lauriault, 2014) by adopting a critical framework to analyze the systems of thought that inform applied computational ontology while offering insight into its realism-based methods and philosophical frameworks to gauge their ethical import. Since the early 1990s, computational ontologies have been used to organize massive amounts of heterogeneous data by individuating reality into computable parts, attributes, and relations. This dissertation provides a theory of computational ontologies as technologies of individuation (Simondon, 2005) that translate disparate data to produce informational cohesion. By technologies of individuation I mean engineered artifacts whose purpose is to partition portions of reality into computable informational objects. I argue that data are metastable entities and that computational ontologies restrain heterogeneous data via a process of translation to produce semantic interoperability. In this way, I show that computational ontologies effectively re-ontologize (Floridi, 2013) and produce reality and thus that have ethical consequences, specifically in terms of their application to social reality and social ontology (Searle, 2006). I use the Basic Formal Ontology (Arp, Smith, & Spear, 2015)—the world’s most widely used upper-level ontology—as a case study and analyze its methods and ensuing ethical issues concerning its social application in the Military Ontology before recommending an ethical framework. “Ontology” is a term that is used in philosophy and computer science in related but different ways—philosophical ontology typically concerns metaphysics while computational ontology typically concerns databases. This dissertation provides a critical history and theory of ontology and the interdisciplinary teams of researchers that came to adopt methods from philosophical ontology to build, persuade, and reason with applied computational ontology. Following a critical communication approach, I define applied computational ontology construction as a solution to a communication problem among scientists who seek to create semantic interoperability among data and argue that applied ontology is philosophical, informational in nature, and communicatively constituted (McPhee & Zaug, 2000). The primary aim is to explain how philosophy informs applied computational ontology while showing how such ontologies became instantiated in material organizations, how to study them, and describe their ethical implications

El tratamiento y la representación de las colocaciones verbales en el lenguaje especializado del turismo de aventura

A collocation is considered a frequent co-occurrence of two words which hold a syntactic relationship and whose elements enjoy a different status. Given their perception as a unit in language, access to the prominent word (base) involves immediate access to the other item (collocate). In terms of meaning, some combinations tend to be more transparent than others. The pervasiveness of these word associations in language has sparked a strong research interest in the last decades. A compelling reason for this approach may be the fact that they are naturally produced by native speakers but must be actively learned by non-native individuals. Not only has this reality led to their treatment in the general language, but it has also become a legitimate field of study in a wide range of specialized languages, such as the environment, computing, law or tourism, which is our object of study. As a consequence, specialized knowledge resources covering this type of word combinations have seen the light with the primary purpose of offering some extra help to people who deal with this type of language, for example, translators, linguists or other professionals. Nevertheless, there is still much to do in this respect. Taken this into account, it is hypothesized that verb collocations in the specialized language of adventure tourism convey specialized meaning that is worth being collected in terminological products. Therefore, this work endeavors, as its main purpose, to perform a deep analysis of verb collocations in this specialized domain and their implementation in the entries for motion verbs in DicoAdventure, a specialized dictionary of adventure tourism, whose inspirational idea was to highlight the significant role of verbs in the linguistic expression of concepts. Accordingly, the following theoretical objectives were set: first, to cover the linguistic branches which influence specialized lexicography; second, to define the concept of specialized collocation; and third, to examine a vast number of lexicographical and terminological resources so as to discover the items of information that would make an adequate representation of collocations in a specialized dictionary and, then, design a model for such task. Furthermore, the following practical objectives were formulated: first, to extract the motion verbs which would be the bases of the collocations implemented; second, to retrieve the lexical collocations of these verbs; and third, to classify the resulting list of collocations according to the meaning expressed, that is, actual motion or fictive (or metaphorical) motion. The practical steps taken in this research were based on the English monolingual specialized corpus ADVENCOR, which contains promotional texts about adventure tourism, and the use of corpus management software. The results of the theoretical work can be summarized as follows: (1) the specialized language of adventure tourism must be considered as specialized as any others; (2) collocations are not usually encoded in verb entries in dictionaries; and (3) a specialized collocation carries specialized knowledge which must be covered in terminological products. On the other hand, regarding the practical work, 12% of the verbs extracted were selected, as they were the ones expressing motion. However, only 46.61% of them produced collocations according to the extraction criteria established. Last, after applying more strict criteria for the collocation classification, only 25.42% of the verbs along with their collocations were collected in the dictionary. In addition to these results, the theory of Frame Semantics proved useful to understand the meaning of the verbs and their collocates. As for their implementation, which was the primary objective of this doctoral dissertation, the inclusion of verb collocations was of paramount importance for the identification of distinct meanings expressed by one verb in different contexts, as collocates conveyed subtle nuances of meaning. Finally, it was concluded that the incorporation of explanations about the combinations in lay terms facilitates the comprehension of the entries to any type of user, from experts to laypersons, which makes DicoAdventure a terminological product that can render valuable assistance to individuals with distinct specialized expertise.Una colocación es una coaparición frecuente de dos palabras que mantienen una relación sintáctica y cuyos elementos alcanzan un estatus diferente. Puesto que se perciben como una unidad del lenguaje, el acceso al elemento prominente (base) conlleva el acceso inmediato al otro componente (colocativo). Con respecto a su significado, algunas combinaciones tienden a ser más transparentes que otras. La constante presencia de las colocaciones en el lenguaje ha despertado gran interés por su investigación en las últimas décadas. Una razón convincente de este acercamiento podría ser el hecho de que los hablantes nativos las producen de forma natural, mientras que los no nativos deben aprenderlas de manera activa. Esta realidad no solo ha llevado a su tratamiento en el lenguaje general, sino también a que se hayan convertido en un campo de estudio legítimo en una amplia gama de lenguajes especializados, como son el medio ambiente, la informática, el derecho o el turismo, que es el objeto de estudio de esta investigación. Como consecuencia, se han creado recursos de conocimiento especializado con el propósito fundamental de ofrecer ayuda a las personas que interactúan con este tipo de lenguaje, por ejemplo, traductores, lingüistas u otro tipo de profesionales. No obstante, aún queda mucho por hacer en este aspecto. Teniendo esto en cuenta, la hipótesis de este trabajo se basa en la idea de que las colocaciones verbales en el lenguaje especializado del turismo de aventura expresan significados especializados que merecen ser recopilados en productos terminológicos. Por lo tanto, este trabajo tiene como principal objetivo el estudio exhaustivo de las colocaciones verbales en este campo de especialidad y su implementación en las entradas de los verbos de movimiento en DicoAdventure, un diccionario especializado del turismo de aventura, cuyo punto de partida fue la intención de destacar el importante papel que juegan los verbos en la expresión lingüística de los conceptos. Por consiguiente, se establecieron los siguientes objetivos teóricos: primero, revisar las ramas de la lingüística que ejercen una influencia en la lexicografía especializada; segundo, definir el concepto de colocación especializada; y tercero, examinar un gran número de recursos lexicográficos y terminológicos para descubrir qué tipo de información conformaría una representación adecuada de colocaciones en un diccionario especializado y, a continuación, diseñar un modelo para esta tarea. Además, se propusieron estos objetivos prácticos: primero, extraer los verbos de movimiento que serían las bases de las colocaciones implementadas; segundo, extraer las colocaciones léxicas de estos verbos; y tercero; clasificar la lista resultante de colocaciones según su significado, es decir, movimiento real o movimiento figurado (o metafórico). Los pasos prácticos que se dieron en esta investigación se llevaron a cabo mediante la gestión del corpus especializado monolingüe en inglés ADVENCOR, que contiene textos promocionales sobre el turismo de aventura, y el uso de software de gestión de corpus. Los resultados de la parte teórica del trabajo se pueden resumir de la siguiente manera: (1) el lenguaje especializado del turismo de aventura debe considerarse tan especializado como otros; (2) las colocaciones no suelen codificarse en las entradas de verbos en los diccionarios; y (3) una colocación especializada contiene conocimiento especializado que debe aparecer en productos terminológicos. Por otro lado, con respecto al trabajo práctico, se seleccionó el 12% de los verbos extraídos, ya que eran los que expresaban movimiento. Sin embargo, solo el 46,61% de ellos produjeron colocaciones según los criterios de extracción establecidos. Por último, después de aplicar criterios más estrictos para la clasificación de las colocaciones, solo el 25,42% de los verbos con sus colocaciones fueron recogidos en el diccionario. Además de estos resultados, se demostró la utilidad de la teoría de la Semántica de Marcos para entender el significado de los verbos y sus colocativos. En cuanto a su implementación, que era el objetivo principal de esta tesis doctoral, la inclusión de colocaciones verbales fue de suma importancia para la identificación de los distintos significados expresados por un verbo en diferentes contextos, puesto que los colocativos aportaban sutiles matices de significado. Finalmente, se concluyó que la incorporación de explicaciones sobre las combinaciones en términos legos favorece la comprensión de las entradas por parte de cualquier tipo de usuario, desde expertos a personas no especialistas, lo cual hace de DicoAdventure un producto terminológico que puede proporcionar valiosa ayuda a personas con diversa formación especializada

Assessment of English Idiom Comprehension among University Students in Unguja.

Understanding English idioms is essential in mastering the language. Despite idioms being extensively studied in the African context, showing the importance of idiomatic competence, studies on how Zanzibari students comprehend idioms are still very limited. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess the comprehension of English idioms among University students in Unguja, which will lead to increasing their English proficiencies. It includes the extent of students’ comprehension of idioms, factors affecting comprehension of the idioms and whether inherent features of an idiom influence students’ comprehension. The study adopted a quantitative approach and a descriptive research design. The researcher used questionnaires and cloze tests to collect data from 180 respondents from three universities in Zanzibar; the State University of Zanzibar, Sumait University, and Zanzibar University. The findings revealed that the respondents’ performance in idiom comprehension was below average. The results showed that the respondents performed better in idioms presented with an enabling context than those presented in isolation, i.e. without an enabling context. The results also showed that the inherent factors such as ambiguity, transparency, and compositeness of idioms influenced the comprehension of English idioms. The findings from this research have several implications for the students, lecturers, syllabus designers, material developers, and researchers. Idioms should be emphasised in classroom instruction, introduced in vocabulary lists, and provided more exercises to motivate learners to apply various effective language learning strategies