Stabilizing knowledge through standards - A perspective for the humanities

It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists should theoretically be at the best place to bring their expertise into standard developments, being even more neutral on issues that may typically be related to competing industrial interests. Even if it could be thought of as even more complex to think about developping standards in the humanities, we will show how this can be made feasible through the experience gained both within the Text Encoding Initiative consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation. By taking the specific case of lexical resources, we will try to show how this brings about new ideas for designing future research infrastructures in the human and social sciences

The mechanism underlying backward priming in a lexical decision task: Spreading activation versus semantic matching

Koriat (1981) demonstrated that an association from the target to a preceding prime, in the absence of an association from the prime to the target, facilitates lexical decision and referred to this effect as "backward priming". Backward priming is of relevance, because it can provide information about the mechanism underlying semantic priming effects. Following Neely (1991), we distinguish three mechanisms of priming: spreading activation, expectancy, and semantic matching/integration. The goal was to determine which of these mechanisms causes backward priming, by assessing effects of backward priming on a language-relevant ERP component, the N400, and reaction time (RT). Based on previous work, we propose that the N400 priming effect reflects expectancy and semantic matching/integration, but in contrast with RT does not reflect spreading activation. Experiment 1 shows a backward priming effect that is qualitatively similar for the N400 and RT in a lexical decision task. This effect was not modulated by an ISI manipulation. Experiment 2 clarifies that the N400 backward priming effect reflects genuine changes in N400 amplitude and cannot be ascribed to other factors. We will argue that these backward priming effects cannot be due to expectancy but are best accounted for in terms of semantic matching/integration

DLSITE-1: lexical analysis for solving textual entailment recognition

This paper discusses the recognition of textual entailment in a text-hypothesis pair by applying a wide variety of lexical measures. We consider that the entailment phenomenon can be tackled from three general levels: lexical, syntactic and semantic. The main goals of this research are to deal with this phenomenon from a lexical point of view, and achieve high results considering only such kind of knowledge. To accomplish this, the information provided by the lexical measures is used as a set of features for a Support Vector Machine which will decide if the entailment relation is produced. A study of the most relevant features and a comparison with the best state-of-the-art textual entailment systems is exposed throughout the paper. Finally, the system has been evaluated using the Second PASCAL Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge data and evaluation methodology, obtaining an accuracy rate of 61.88%.QALL-ME consortium, 6º Programa Marco, Unión Europea, referencia del proyecto FP6-IST-033860. Gobierno de España, proyecto CICyT número TIN2006-1526-C06-01

Building a wordnet for Turkish

This paper summarizes the development process of a wordnet for Turkish as part of the Balkanet project. After discussing the basic method-ological issues that had to be resolved during the course of the project, the paper presents the basic steps of the construction process in chronological order. Two applications using Turkish wordnet are summarized and links to resources for wordnet builders are provided at the end of the paper

PHP/HTML design and build of a computer adaptive test to assess English fluency among native Spanish speakers

textThe following is a review of key findings from the implementation of a PHP/HTML web-based application to assess English fluency among native Spanish speakers. The scope of this professional report includes mainly the design, build, and implementation of a web based system accessible through www.babelous.com. This written portion is intended to briefly summarize initial results from the implementation of the successfully built application, provide information on how to replicate the application, and detail areas of focus for future development.Public AffairsBusiness Administratio

Including widespread geometry formats in semantic graphs using RDF literals

The exchange of building data involves both geometric and non-geometric data. A promising Linked Data approach is to embed data from existing geometry formats inside Resource Description Framework (RDF) literals. Based on a study of relevant specifications and related work, this toolset-independent approach was found suitable for the exchange of geometric construction data. To implement the approach in practice, the File Ontology for Geometry formats (FOG) and accompanying modelling method is developed. In a proof-of-concept web application that uses FOG, is demonstrated how geometry descriptions of different existing formats are automatically recognised and parsed