Representation of Original Sense of Chinese Characters by FOPC

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200

Neuroscience in marketing : an FMRI-Based Perspective on brands

Doutoramento em GestãoAlthough somewhat outdated, the American Marketing Association definition of brand still is largely accepted. In this case, brands are signs for product differentiation. The present research, instead, finds brands and their logos as meaningful signs that belong to the human communicative lexicon. Logos are ideograms, i.e. graphic representations that convey meanings. These meanings are transferred from one mind to other minds through brands, establishing communication between humans, and which is also used to self-monitoring in a self-reflexive process, i.e., reading the reactions of others to the ideographic messages once sent to them. Brands are intimately connected to meta-representational processes, whether they are seen as the repository of human attributes, whether themselves are perceived as interlocutors, in a quasi-human level. It also finds that the human emotion system is used to perceive, interpret, and classify brands. Founding in the neuro-based model of emotions developed by Damásio, the present research reveals that brands systematically recruits the emotion system when stimulate brains, which leads to posit that brands are felt in order to be perceived. It is also largely relying in the brain structures that support emotion processing, but also based in other regions that support self-relatedness processing, that is trained an artificial neural network that yields predictions of subjects' choices at a level much higher than mere chance. This procedure allows a coarse but promising consumers' "mind reading".Apesar de algo ultrapassada, a definição de marca da American Marketing Association ainda é largamente aceite. Assim, as marcas são sinais usados na diferenciação de produtos. A investigação presente, pelo contrário, sugere que as marcas e os seus logotipos são sinais com significado que pertencem ao léxico comunicativo humano. Os logotipos são ideogramas, i.e. representações gráficas que transmitem significados. Tais significados transferem-se de uma mente para outra através das marcas, estabelecendo uma comunicação entre humanos, e que também é usada na auto-monitorização num processo auto-reflexivo, i.e. lendo as reacções que os outros têm às mensagens ideográficas que lhes foram enviadas. As marcas estão intimamente ligadas aos processos meta-representacionais, seja por elas serem consideradas um repositório de atributos humanos, seja por elas próprias serem consideradas como interlocutores, a um nível quase-humano. Este estudo também constata que o sistema emocional humano é usado para perceber, interpretar, e classificar as marcas. Baseado no modelo neuronal das emoções de Damásio, verifica-se que as marcas recrutam sistematicamente o sistema das emoções sempre que elas estimulam um cérebro, o que leva a avançar que as marcas são sentidas de forma a serem percebidas. É com base em estruturas cerebrais que sustentam o processamento das emoções, mas também com base em outras regiões ligadas a processamentos da auto-reflexão, que é treinada uma rede neuronal artificial, da qual resultam previsões das escolhas dos sujeitos participantes, as quais estão a um nível muito superior ao mero acaso. Este procedimento permite uma "leitura da mente" algo grosseira, mas muito promissora

A Framework for the Organization and Discovery of Information Resources in a WWW Environment Using Association, Classification and Deduction

The Semantic Web is envisioned as a next-generation WWW environment in which information is given well-defined meaning. Although the standards for the Semantic Web are being established, it is as yet unclear how the Semantic Web will allow information resources to be effectively organized and discovered in an automated fashion. This dissertation research explores the organization and discovery of resources for the Semantic Web. It assumes that resources on the Semantic Web will be retrieved based on metadata and ontologies that will provide an effective basis for automated deduction. An integrated deduction system based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) and description logic (DL) was built. A case study was conducted to study the system effectiveness in retrieving resources in a large Web resource collection. The results showed that deduction has an overall positive impact on the retrieval of the collection over the defined queries. The greatest positive impact occurred when precision was perfect with no decrease in recall. The sensitivity analysis was conducted over properties of resources, subject categories, query expressions and relevance judgment in observing their relationships with the retrieval performance. The results highlight both the potentials and various issues in applying deduction over metadata and ontologies. Further investigation will be required for additional improvement. The factors that can contribute to degraded performance were identified and addressed. Some guidelines were developed based on the lessons learned from the case study for the development of Semantic Web data and systems

Contract related agents

Imperial Users onl

A comparative study of compound words in English, Japanese and mainland Scandanavian

The aim of this thesis is to propose a structure for compounds, specifically compound nouns in Japanese, English and Mainland Scandinavian within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 1995). The purpose is to show that words are derived in Narrow Syntax as phrases and that words must have asymmetrical structure, i. e. a head of the word should be determined. The proposed structure of a compound noun in the languages in question is as follows: (1) P(X) root P(x) root P(x) Structure (1) is derived with the following assumptions in mind. 1. The place of Morphology within the Minimalist Program is argued to be outside the Lexicon and after the Narrow Syntax. This has led several linguists to argue that a word is derived in the same way as a phrase. Moreover, linear order is redundant in the Narrow Syntax, since the structure determines the word order. As a result, it is not the Right-hand Head Rule proposed by Williams (1981) which determines the head of a compound word but the structure does. The Right-hand Head Rule may have a place in the phonology, though, in stipulating how a word derived in the Narrow Syntax is spelled out. The rule is formulated by Williams to apply in Morphology. In most current minimalist theories morphology is after spell-out. But the head must be determined before spell-out, since it determines the LF as well as determining aspects of the PF. 2. Nothing prevents us applying Merge at the level of the word as well as the phrasal level. As Williams' (1981) Right-hand Head Rule cannot be used within the Minimalist Program, Collins (2002) definition of head is used for compound words. According to Collins, a head is a category which has one or more unsaturated features. Another stipulation taken from Collins (2202) is that when a lexical item is chosen from the lexical array and introduced to the derivation, the unsaturated features of this lexical item must be satisfied before any new unsaturated lexical items are chosen from the lexical array. The effect of these two assumptions is that when two categories a and ß are merged, only one of them, say a, can have an unsaturated feature (which is not saturated by ß), so a will be the head. The structure (1) shows the following. " First, a root without word class features is merged with a Property feature, the content of which is given by the root. " The Property feature is represented above as P(roperty) (x) where `x' represents the unvalued referential index. " There are two ways to check P(x): one is assigning xa value, that is an index, and the other is deleting x. Since the P(x) feature is unsaturated in the sense that it needs a referential index from either D or DP, it is a head, and as such it percolates to the dominating node. Then, another root is merged to form a compound word. As P(x) is the only unsaturated feature before and/or after the root is merged, it is percolated and it is the head of the whole compound. The present theory can account for the syntactic and semantic properties of a wide range of compounds, particularly noun-noun compounds in English, Japanese, and Mainland Scandinavian, within a syntactic theory based on minimalist assumptions.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Vector Semantics

This open access book introduces Vector semantics, which links the formal theory of word vectors to the cognitive theory of linguistics. The computational linguists and deep learning researchers who developed word vectors have relied primarily on the ever-increasing availability of large corpora and of computers with highly parallel GPU and TPU compute engines, and their focus is with endowing computers with natural language capabilities for practical applications such as machine translation or question answering. Cognitive linguists investigate natural language from the perspective of human cognition, the relation between language and thought, and questions about conceptual universals, relying primarily on in-depth investigation of language in use. In spite of the fact that these two schools both have ‘linguistics’ in their name, so far there has been very limited communication between them, as their historical origins, data collection methods, and conceptual apparatuses are quite different. Vector semantics bridges the gap by presenting a formal theory, cast in terms of linear polytopes, that generalizes both word vectors and conceptual structures, by treating each dictionary definition as an equation, and the entire lexicon as a set of equations mutually constraining all meanings