An ontology knowledge inspection methodology for quality assessment and continuous improvement

Ontology-learning methods were introduced in the knowledge engineering area to automatically build ontologies from natural language texts related to a domain. Despite the initial appeal of these methods, automatically generated ontologies may have errors, inconsistencies, and a poor design quality, all of which must be manually fixed, in order to maintain the validity and usefulness of automated output. In this work, we propose a methodology to assess ontologies quality (quantitatively and graphically) and to fix ontology inconsistencies minimising design defects. The proposed methodology is based on the Deming cycle and is grounded on quality standards that proved effective in the software engineering domain and present high potential to be extended to knowledge engineering quality management. This paper demonstrates that software engineering quality assessment approaches and techniques can be successfully extended and applied to the ontology-fixing and quality improvement problem. The proposed methodology was validated in a testing ontology, by ontology design quality comparison between a manually created and automatically generated ontology.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Approach for Automatic Generation of on-line Information Systems based on the Integration of Natural Language Processing and Adaptive Hypermedia Techniques

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de ingeniería informática. Fecha de lectura: 29-05-200

Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics

Building on the momentum enjoyed by cognitive-functional approaches within Classics, this volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in both Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories developed in cognitive linguistics, revealing the role of human embodiment in determining the meanings of various linguistic phenomena

Sprinkled semantic diffusion kernel for word sense disambiguation

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Word sense disambiguation (WSD), the task of identifying the intended meanings (senses) of words in context, has been a long-standing research objective for natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we are concerned with kernel methods for automatic WSD. Under this framework, the main difficulty is to design an appropriate kernel function to represent the sense distinction knowledge. Semantic diffusion kernel, which models semantic similarity by means of a diffusion process on a graph defined by lexicon and co-occurrence information to smooth the typical “Bag of Words” (BOW) representation, has been successfully applied to WSD. However, the diffusion is an unsupervised process, which fails to exploit the class information in a supervised classification scenario. To address the limitation, we present a sprinkled semantic diffusion kernel to make use of the class knowledge of training documents in addition to the co-occurrence knowledge. The basic idea is to construct an augmented term-document matrix by encoding class information as additional terms and appending them to training documents. Diffusion is then performed on the augmented term-document matrix. In this way, the words belonging to the same class are indirectly drawn closer to each other, hence the class-specific word correlations are strengthened. We evaluate our method on several Senseval/Semeval benchmark examples with support vector machine (SVM), and show that the proposed kernel can significantly improve the disambiguation performance over semantic diffusion kernel in terms of different measures and yield a competitive result with the state-of-the-art kernel methods for WSD

Toward a Cognitive Classical Linguistics

Building on the momentum enjoyed by cognitive-functional approaches within Classics, this volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in both Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories developed in cognitive linguistics, revealing the role of human embodiment in determining the meanings of various linguistic phenomena

The concept of 'Genetic Modification' in a Descriptive Translation Study (DTS) of an English-Spanish corpus of Popular Science Books on Genetic Engineering: Denominative Variation, Semantic Prosody and Ideological Aspects of Translation Strategies

El objetivo general consiste en examinar el concepto de 'modificación genética' a través de tres fenómenos lingüísticos: la variación denominativa, la prosodia semántica y los aspectos ideológicos de las principales estrategias de traducción. Para estudiar la variación denominativa se han seleccionado dos términos técnicos 'DNA' y 'gene/s' y dos subtécnicos 'food/s' y 'crop/s'. Para el estudio de la prosodia semántica se han analizado las concordancias de 'genetic' + N y 'genetically'`+ Adj. La comparación de las variantes denominativas y las prosodias semánticas en un corpus paralelo inglés-español de ingenería genética arrojan resultados sobre los aspectos ideológicos de las principales estrategias de traducción encontradas en el corpus.Departamento de Filología Ingles

Courtroom Discourses: An Analysis of the Westerfield Jury Trial

Alla luce del crescente interesse verso le complesse dinamiche che uniscono inestricabilmente i concetti di legge e linguaggio, questo lavoro mira ad osservare tali dinamiche in un particolare evento comunicativo, ovvero un processo con giuria popolare. Pi\uf9 specificatamente, viene analizzato il caso California vs Westerfield, svoltosi in California nel 2002. Lo studio si basa in particolare sull\u2019osservazione dei processi comunicativi che avvengono tra professionisti del mondo legale (in particolare giudice ed avvocati) e i giurati, che per definizione non possiedono una specifica conoscenza in ambito giuridico. La relazione tra esperti e non-esperti in un processo \ue8 inoltre determinata dalla peculiarit\ue0 che da un lato i professionisti detengono una posizione vantaggiosa in termini di potere comunicativo e di conoscenze specifiche, ma al contempo il potere decisionale \ue8 ascritto esclusivamente ai giurati. Lo scopo primario \ue8 quello di giungere ad una migliore comprensione della complessa natura delle tecniche e delle strategie discorsive che emergono nella relazione tra professionisti e non in questo specifico evento. Dal punto di vista delle dinamiche comunicative i giurati sembrano assumere un ruolo di passivi spettatori dell\u2019evento che viene loro presentato e la relazione tra diversi partecipanti \ue8 caratterizzata da un\u2019asimmetrica distribuzione dei turni e delle possibilit\ue0 di intervento. Tale relazione \ue8 determinata da specifiche pratiche e restrizioni procedurali di un evento che \ue8 per definizione altamente istituzionalizzato. Al contempo per\uf2 l\u2019analisi prende in considerazione le molteplici sfumature che definiscono queste dinamiche e le varie possibilit\ue0 che i giurati possiedono per intervenire in modo pi\uf9 attivo nel processo, in particolare alla luce dei recenti sviluppi procedurali. Il lavoro osserva l\u2019ibridit\ue0 del linguaggio usato in tribunale, adottando diverse prospettive. Innanzitutto si studia la complessa relazione che esiste tra la modalit\ue0 scritta e quella orale durante diverse fasi del processo. L\u2019ibridit\ue0 \ue8 anche analizzata dal punto di vista della commistione di diversi stili e registri. Inoltre, lo studio osserva se e in che modo le caratteristiche che vengono generalmente attribuite al linguaggio legale, quali la presenza di lessico altamente specializzato, di strutture sintattiche complesse e di un registro molto formale, emergono in questo specifico tipo di processo. Particolare attenzione \ue8 dedicata all\u2019osservazione delle modalit\ue0 attraverso le quali specifici concetti giuridici vengono illustrati ai giurati in base ai diversi scopi comunicativi. Diversi tipi di tensioni vengono osservati all\u2019interno di questo contesto, quali la giustapposizione di tecnicismi e colloquialismi, o il conflitto tra il desiderio di sensazionalismo e la necessit\ue0 di muoversi all\u2019interno di un quadro standardizzato e caratterizzato da specifici vincoli procedurali.Given the increasing interest in the complex dynamics that inextricably combine the concepts of law and language, this work aims to examine these dynamics focusing on a particular communicative event, namely a trial by jury. More specifically, the case under scrutiny is California vs Westerfield, which was tried in California in 2002. The study is based on the observation of the communicative processes taking place between professionals (specifically, judges and lawyers) and jurors, who by definition do not possess any specific legal knowledge. The relationship between experts and non-experts in a trial is also determined by the peculiarity that professionals assumes an advantageous position in terms of communicative power and specialized knowledge, while the decisional power is ascribed exclusively to the jury. The primary goal of this work is to reach a better understanding of the complex nature of the techniques and discursive strategies that emerge in the communicative relationship between professionals and laymen in this particular event. From a communicative perspective, the jurors seem to assume the role of passive spectators, and the relationship between different participants is characterized by an asymmetric distribution of turns and limited active intervention. These dynamics are determined by the specific practices and procedural restrictions of an event that is by definition highly institutionalized. At the same time, however, the analysis takes into account the many nuances that define these dynamics and the various possibilities that the jurors have to intervene more actively in the process, particularly in the light of recent procedural developments. The work aims to observe the hybridity of the language used in court, adopting different perspectives. First, it investigates the complex relationship that emerges between written and oral communication in different phases of the trial. Hybridity is also observed from the point of view of the combination of different styles and registers. The study also examines to what extent the characteristics that are generally attributed to legal language, such as the presence of highly specialized vocabulary, complex syntactic structures and a very formal register emerge in this specific context. Particular attention is devoted to the observation of the specific strategies adopted to illustrate legal ideas and concepts to the jurors in light of the speaker\u2019s various communicative purposes. Several kinds of tensions are observed within this context, such as the juxtaposition of colloquialisms and jargon, and the conflict between the desire for sensationalism and the need to move within a standardized framework that is characterized by specific procedural constraints