FBI fingerprint identification automation study. AIDS 3 evaluation report. Volume 2: Technical feasibility

The results of this effort are presented in a manner for use by both the AIDS 3 Operational and Economic Feasibility subtasks as well as the Development of Alternative subtask. The approach taken was to identify the major functions that appear in AIDS 3 and then to determine which technologies would be needed for support. The technologies were then examined from the point of view of reliability, throughput, security, availability, cost and possible future trends. Whenever possible graphs are given to indicate projected costs of rapidly changing technologies

Contributions of formal language theory to the study of dialogues

For more than 30 years, the problem of providing a formal framework for modeling dialogues has been a topic of great interest for the scientific areas of Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Formal Languages, Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. In the beginning the goal was to develop a "conversational computer", an automated system that could engage in a conversation in the same way as humans do. After studies showed the difficulties of achieving this goal Formal Language Theory and Artificial Intelligence have contributed to Dialogue Theory with the study and simulation of machine to machine and human to machine dialogues inspired by Linguistic studies of human interactions. The aim of our thesis is to propose a formal approach for the study of dialogues. Our work is an interdisciplinary one that connects theories and results in Dialogue Theory mainly from Formal Language Theory, but also from another areas like Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics and Multiprogramming. We contribute to Dialogue Theory by introducing a hierarchy of formal frameworks for the definition of protocols for dialogue interaction. Each framework defines a transition system in which dialogue protocols might be uniformly expressed and compared. The frameworks we propose are based on finite state transition systems and Grammar systems from Formal Language Theory and a multi-agent language for the specification of dialogue protocols from Artificial Intelligence. Grammar System Theory is a subfield of Formal Language Theory that studies how several (a finite number) of language defining devices (language processors or grammars) jointly develop a common symbolic environment (a string or a finite set of strings) by the application of language operations (for instance rewriting rules). For the frameworks we propose we study some of their formal properties, we compare their expressiveness, we investigate their practical application in Dialogue Theory and we analyze their connection with theories of human-like conversation from Linguistics. In addition we contribute to Grammar System Theory by proposing a new approach for the verification and derivation of Grammar systems. We analyze possible advantages of interpreting grammars as multiprograms that are susceptible of verification and derivation using the Owicki-Gries logic, a Hoare-based logic from the Multiprogramming field

Le rôle et la place de l'anglais de spécialité dans les petites annonces pour l'emploi en milieu scientifique

This dissertation focuses on English for Specific Purposes and more particularly on the terminology of scientific job advertisements discourse, an area still in pristine condition from a linguistic point of view. Job advertisements discourse is the sum of various discourses, i.e. human resources, advertising as well as a discourse which may be termed as "tourist" discourse and scientific discourse. Since the main purpose of advertisements is to advertise the company or the research laboratory, science discourse is minimized because it appears that this particular discourse fails to comply with the announcers’ ultimate aim. Once an analysis of human resources terms was done, a study was undertaken on scientific fields and a new terminology has been suggested, namely that of scientific hyperfields, fields and sub-fields. The analysis of scientific terms calls for a necessary distinction that has to be made between scientific terms and specialized terms. At last, the dissertation undertakes an analysis of linguistic and graphic means used in the advertising discourse.Cette étude en anglais de spécialité s’inscrit dans le domaine de la terminologie du discours des annonces pour l’emploi en milieu scientifique, domaine encore inexploré d’un point de vue linguistique. Le discours des annonces pour l’emploi est la somme de plusieurs discours, notamment discours des ressources humaines, discours publicitaire, discours qu’on peut appeler « touristique » et discours scientifique. Puisque le but primordial de l’annonce est de faire la publicité de l’entreprise ou du laboratoire de recherche, le discours scientifique y est réduit au minimum car il s’avère que ce discours ne peut se plier à la finalité et aux contraintes des annonceurs. Après une analyse des vocables des ressources humaines, un travail a été entrepris sur les domaines scientifiques concernés et une nouvelle terminologie a été proposée, articulée notamment autour de hyperdomaines, domaines et sous-domaines scientifiques. L’analyse des vocables scientifiques suggère une distinction nécessaire entre les vocables scientifiques et les termes spécialisés. Enfin, le travail se clôt par un examen des moyens linguistiques et graphiques mis en œuvre dans le discours publicitaire