The MEANING Project

A pesar del progreso que se realiza en el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) aún estamos lejos de la Comprensión del Lenguaje Natural. Un paso importante hacia este objetivo es el desarrollo de técnicas y recursos que traten conceptos en lugar de palabras. Sin embargo, si queremos construir la próxima generación de sistemas inteligentes que traten Tecnología de Lenguaje Humano en dominios abiertos necesitamos resolver dos tareas intermedias y complementarias: resolución de la ambigüedad léxica de las palabras y enriquecimiento automático y a gran escala de bases de conocimiento léxico.Progress is being made in Natural Language Processing (NLP) but there is still a long way towards Natural Language Understanding. An important step towards this goal is the development of technologies and resources that deal with concepts rather than words. However, to be able to build the next generation of intelligent open domain Human Language Technology (HLT) application systems we need to solve two complementary and intermediate tasks: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and automatic large-scale enrichment of Lexical Knowledge Bases.The MEANING Project is funded by the EU 5th Framework IST Programme

Meaningful results for Information Retrieval in the MEANING project

The goal of the MEANING project (IST-2001-34460) is to develop tools for the automatic acquisition of lexical knowledge that will help Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). The acquired lexical knowledge from various sources and various languages is stored in the Multilingual Central Repository (MCR) (Atserias et al 04), which is based on the design of the EuroWordNet database. The MCR holds wordnets in various languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Basque), which are interconnected via an Inter-Lingual-Index (ILI). In addition, the MCR holds a number of ontologies and domain labels related to al

Strong correlations between text quality and complex networks features

Concepts of complex networks have been used to obtain metrics that were correlated to text quality established by scores assigned by human judges. Texts produced by high-school students in Portuguese were represented as scale-free networks (word adjacency model), from which typical network features such as the in/outdegree, clustering coefficient and shortest path were obtained. Another metric was derived from the dynamics of the network growth, based on the variation of the number of connected components. The scores assigned by the human judges according to three text quality criteria (coherence and cohesion, adherence to standard writing conventions and theme adequacy/development) were correlated with the network measurements. Text quality for all three criteria was found to decrease with increasing average values of outdegrees, clustering coefficient and deviation from the dynamics of network growth. Among the criteria employed, cohesion and coherence showed the strongest correlation, which probably indicates that the network measurements are able to capture how the text is developed in terms of the concepts represented by the nodes in the networks. Though based on a particular set of texts and specific language, the results presented here point to potential applications in other instances of text analysis.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Doing Project Management Ironically

AbstractThe central claim of this paper is that contemporary project management is practiced within the constraint of a single archetype, that of the ‘scientific’ project manager, and identification with that archetype has been a limiting factor in the development of project management as a sophisticated human practice. This paper argues for the inclusion of alternative disciplines within the over-all project management framework, and suggests philosophical hermeneutics as one such approach. Richard Rorty's particular pragmatic variation of the philosophic hermeneutic, which he calls ‘ironism’, is offered as the most suitable with which to support the practice of project management. Rorty's ironism is found to be mirrored in the everyday activities of project managers in the field via a series of phenomenological interviews. Through their own voices, project managers demonstrate that much of what they practice could already be considered ‘ironic’, yet are unable to articulate this aspect of their practice within existing, formal project management methodology. The result of this is significant disruption to the meaning project managers are able to derive from their work, and the results they are able to achieve. In advocating ironism, this paper does not seek to replace the corpus of formal project management theory, but rather to highlight its shortcomings and in so doing contributes to the expansion of the methods at the project manager's disposal

A New Approach to the Coherence Theory of Truth

This paper does not argue that the coherence theory should be the accepted theory about what truth is. It aims, rather, to present the coherence theory of truth in a new light, in a way that sheds understanding on why the theory has had such prominence in the history of the philosophy of truth. Thus, although this paper is not a defence of the theory per se, it offers a charitable interpretation of it. The coherence theory has a paradoxical status in the literature, since it is considered the chief competitor with the correspondence theory and yet critiques of it are often extremely scathing. This paper is designed to reveal a better grasp and understanding of what the coherence theory’s status should be. The first important result is that coherence is a perfectly acceptable extensional description of truth, as it simply predicates something about all the true things. The second even more interesting result is that if coherentists want their theory to achieve an analysis of the meaning of truth then they must be committed to an ontological position, specifically, some form of idealism. The conclusions of this paper therefore are informative about the theoretical space that coherentists have to move in today and also hopefully illuminative of why the coherence theory has been attached to the philosophical doctrines and positions that it has been associated with historically

A New Approach to the Coherence Theory of Truth

This paper does not argue that the coherence theory should be the accepted theory about what truth is. It aims, rather, to present the coherence theory of truth in a new light, in a way that sheds understanding on why the theory has had such prominence in the history of the philosophy of truth. Thus, although this paper is not a defence of the theory per se, it offers a charitable interpretation of it. The coherence theory has a paradoxical status in the literature, since it is considered the chief competitor with the correspondence theory and yet critiques of it are often extremely scathing. This paper is designed to reveal a better grasp and understanding of what the coherence theory’s status should be. The first important result is that coherence is a perfectly acceptable extensional description of truth, as it simply predicates something about all the true things. The second even more interesting result is that if coherentists want their theory to achieve an analysis of the meaning of truth then they must be committed to an ontological position, specifically, some form of idealism. The conclusions of this paper therefore are informative about the theoretical space that coherentists have to move in today and also hopefully illuminative of why the coherence theory has been attached to the philosophical doctrines and positions that it has been associated with historically

MEANING-full effects in information retrieval

This deliverable reports on testing the use and effect of the integration of the MEANING technology in the TwentyOne search engine of Irion

Developing a sustainable career through discourse: a qualitative study on a group of Italian project managers

Purpose: The current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies. Design/methodology/approach: Project managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis. Findings: Results showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed. Originality/value: The originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career