Both creativity and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders have been associated with activation of remote semantic concepts, but this activation results in innovative output in one case and communication disturbances in the other. The present study examined the relationship between monitoring semantic information (which relies on executive brain function), creativity, and characteristics of schizotypy in an undergraduate population. Results indicate that executive function differentiates the use of semantic information in creativity and schizotypy. Specification of the balance between executive monitoring and activation of semantic information is important for determining how communication disturbances manifest, and for the measurement of creativity and schizotypy in the general population.

...than 15 Semantic Differential Scale or multiple choice questions, and no more than 4 open-ended response questions. Estimate of Burden: Public reporting...participant reading speed level. Sample questions may...

This study presents two cases with fluent aphasia in Telugu with semantic dementia and post-stroke fluent aphasia. Comparable scores were obtained on the conventional neuropsychological and language tests that were administered on the two cases. Both cases demonstrated fluent, grammatical and well-articulated speech with little content, impaired comprehension, and anomia. When conventional tests were supplemented with detailed testing of semantic memory and combined with an exhaustive history, a differential diagnosis was effectively made. It was possible to determine the type of word retrieval deficits in both cases. While the person with post-stroke fluent aphasia demonstrated an access type of word retrieval deficit, the person with semantic dementia demonstrated a degradation of the semantic system itself. Even though the two fluent aphasics were seemingly similar, marked differences in the type of problem and presenting symptoms were noticed. The study aims to elucidate the differential nature of fluent aphasia in these two disorders. (Contains 1 table.)

User's perception of product, by essence subjective, is a major topic in marketing and industrial design. Many methods, based on users' tests, are used so as to characterise this perception. We are interested in three main methods: multidimensional scaling, semantic differential method, and preferen...

Many multisyllabic words contain shorter words that are not semantic units, like the CAP in HANDICAP and the DURA (hard) in VERDURA (vegetable). The spaces between printed words identify word boundaries, but spurious identification of these embedded words is a potentially greater challenge for spoken language comprehension, a challenge that is handled by different mechanisms in different models of auditory word recognition. Subphonemic acoustic differences - subtle differences in pronunciation - often differentiate embedded words from genuine words. We examined semantic access to embedded words in two languages with different phonology by presenting carrier words followed by targets related to the embedded words and recording event-related potentials and lexical decision times in 34 Spanis...

Recent studies implicate regions in the frontal, temporal and occipital cortices of the brain in audio-visual (AV) integration of familiar objects. It remains unclear, however, which brain regions contribute to the creation of object-related AV memories, and whether activation of these regions is affected by crossmodal congruency. Here we used event-related functional MRI in a subsequent memory paradigm to investigate the neural substrates of successful encoding of semantically congruent and incongruent AV memories. Creation of both types of memories activated a region in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In addition, successful encoding of semantically related and unrelated AV pairs was correlated with increased activity in regions within the right lateral occipital cortex and bilateral lateral temporal cortex, respectively. These results may highlight a common role of IFG in retrieval of semantic information during encoding and suggest that the occipital and temporal cortices differentially process perceptual versus conceptual associations of AV memories. PMID:22024505

Abstract in english Background and Objectives: Inconsistencies in the relationship between schizotypy dimensions and neurocognitive functions found in correlational studies may be clarified with the use of alternative methodological approaches. The aim of this study was to examine the existence of different profiles of schizotypal traits and their neurocognitIve correlates in non-clinical subjects by means of cluster analysis. Methods: We examined seventy six healthy adults from the general (more) population with a comprehensive neurocognitive battery and a schizotypal personality self-report. Results: Four neurocognitive factors were extracted: visuospatial, semantic evocation, verbal memory, and set-shifting. A three cluster model yielded the following clusters: "lowschizotypy", "positive schizotypy", and "negative/disorganized schizotypy". The positive and negative/disorganized schizotypy clusters showed poorer performance on semantic evocation compared with the low schizotypy cluster. Conclusions: We found different patterns of specific schizotypy features in a healthy adult community sample and these clusters presented differential performance in relation with the ability to evoke semantic information.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) data sharing is a valuable approach for sharing data among people when they are belonging to different institutions. There are strong demands on both flexible, high-precision search and protection of privacy at peer-to-peer data retrievals. Especially, it is demanded for searching relevant files in P2P environment by using metadata while the terms in metadata that are used in such queries and annotations include some private information. In this paper, I present a mechanism and an analysis of P2P-based semantic file sharing and retrieval that uses mobile agents. The mechanism enables us to utilize private ontologies for flexible concept-oriented semantic searches without loss of privacy in processing semantic matching among private metadata of files and the requested semantic queries. The private ontologies are formed on a certain reference ontology with differential ontologies for personalization. In my approach, users can manage and annotate their files with their own private ontologies. Reference ontologies are used to find out semantically relevant files for the given queries that include semantic relations among existing files and the requested files. Mobile agent approach is applied for both implementing a system with less use of network bandwidth and coding it into a set of simple and small programs. I show the effectiveness of the use of private ontologies in metadata-based file retrieval. Also I show that the mobile agent approach has somewhat less overhead in execution time when the network latency is relatively high, while it is small enough even when the network is ideally fast.   

The article is a research report from a study on selected groups of specialists? attitudes towards sexuality of people with intellectual and physical disabilities. 98 persons, including special educators, social workers, nurses and physiotherapists, completed semantic differentials of the author?s design. The Author?s own research concerned a broader meaning of sexuality taking into account its physical and psychosocial aspects. Sexual behavior, partnerships, contraception and sex education were among the concepts analyzed on the constructed differential. It was concluded that specialist respondents show more consent (stronger acceptance and more positive evaluation) to most aspects of sexuality of physically but not people with intellectual disabilities. Only sterilization is more accepte...

Patent databases provide valuable information for technology management. However, the rapid growth of patent documents, the lengthy text and the rich of content in technical terminology, and the complicated relationships among the patents, make it taking a lot of human effort for conducting analyses. As a result, an automated system for assisting the inventors in patent analysis as well as providing support in technological innovation is in great demand. In this paper, a Semantic-based Intellectual Property Management System (SIPMS) has been developed for supporting the management of intellectual properties (IP). It incorporates semantic analysis and text mining techniques for processing and analyzing the patent documents. The method differentiates itself from the traditional technological...

Abstract According to the -Semantic Differential- the connotative meaning of words can be quantified in statistically defined dimensions where every word is uniquely located on the dimensions Evaluation (E), Potency (P), and Activity (A). We studied 249 children between 9 and 18 years of age who rated 72 German nouns on 12 bipolar adjective scales. Three age groups were compared: 9-11, 12-14, and 15-18 years. Varimax-rotated factor analysis yielded the classical EPA dimensions that were independent of age. This indicates that the basic structure and dimensionality of the semantic space is stable. On the other hand, the connotative meaning of individual words changed with age, and it was also affected by gender. In about half of the cases boys differed in their ratings from girls. Our data ...

proposed. The combination with Semantic Web technologies introduces a notion of semantics, which can enhance scalability through automation of service development and deployment. Ontology technology – the core of the Semantic Web – can be the...

Diversification of consumer needs and digitization change the music industry more competitive. Record labels must raise the hit probability in the music marketing. However, most of music marketing researches are qualitative. In this paper, the hit factors of J-POP music are analyzed with Kansei information processing. Concretely, 25 J-POP music songs of the Oricon yearbook 2007 are analyzed by the semantic differential method and factor analysis. Moreover, Kansei J-POP hit factor analysis is evaluated by interview surveys of two business persons in music industry.   

In the process of implementing a protocol for the transport of science data, the Open Source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) group has learned a considerable amount about the internal anatomy of what are commonly considered monolithic concepts. In order to communicate among our group, we have adopted a collection of deinitions and observations about data and the metadata that make them useful: differentiating between "semantic" and "syntactic" metadata, and deining categories such as "translational" and "use" metadata. We share the deinitions and categorizations here in the hope that others will ind them as useful as we do.   

Semantic graphs can be used to organize large amounts of information from a number of sources into one unified structure. A semantic query language provides a foundation for extracting information from the semantic graph. The graph query language described here provides a simple, powerful method for querying semantic graphs.

A minimum algebraic structure needed in Scott-Strachey style denotational semantics for parallel programs is developed. Some elementary algebra shows that nondeterministic semantics is inherently and uniquely present. Conversely, any simple nondeterministic semantics provides uniquely a semantics for a minimal parallel computation capability. 16 references.

This paper develops a procedure to statically analyze aspects of the meaning or semantics of scientific and engineering code. The analysis involves adding semantic declarations to a user's code and parsing this semantic knowledge with the original code using multiple expert parsers. These semantic parsers are designed to recognize formulae in different disciplines including physical and mathematical formulae and geometrical position in a numerical scheme. In practice, a user would submit code with semantic declarations of primitive variables to the analysis procedure, and its semantic parsers would automatically recognize and document some static, semantic concepts and locate some program semantic errors. A prototype implementation of this analysis procedure is demonstrated. Further, the relationship between the fundamental algebraic manipulations of equations and the parsing of expressions is explained. This ability to locate some semantic errors and document semantic concepts in scientific and engineering code should reduce the time, risk, and effort of developing and using these codes.

Special processes recruited during the recognition of personally familiar people have been assumed to reflect the rich episodic and semantic information that selectively represents each person. However, the processes may also include person nonselective ones, which may require interpretation in terms beyond the memory mechanism. To examine this possibility, we assessed decrease in differential activation during the second presentation of an identical face (repetition suppression) as an index of person selectivity. During fMRI, pictures of personally familiar, famous, and unfamiliar faces were presented to healthy subjects who performed a familiarity judgment. Each face was presented once in the first half of the experiment and again in the second half. The right inferior temporal and left inferior frontal gyri were activated during the recognition of both types of familiar faces initially, and this activation was suppressed with repetition. Among preferentially activated regions for personally familiar over famous faces, robust suppression in differential activation was exhibited in the bilateral medial and anterior temporal structures, left amygdala, and right posterior STS, all of which are known to process episodic and semantic information. On the other hand, suppression was minimal in the posterior cingulate, medial prefrontal, right inferior frontal, and intraparietal regions, some of which were implicated in social cognition and cognitive control. Thus, the recognition of personally familiar people is characterized not only by person-selective representation but also by nonselective processes requiring a research framework beyond the memory mechanism, such as a social adaptive response.

While many studies have investigated the role of message-level valence in persuasive messages (i.e., how positive or negative message content affects attitudes), none of these have examined whether word-level valence can modulate such effects. We investigated whether emotional language used within persuasive messages influenced attitudes and whether the processing of such communications could be modulated by regulatory focus. Using a 2 (Message: Positive, Negative)?×?2 (Words: Positive, Negative) design, participants read car reviews and rated each on a series of semantic differentials and product recommendations. While positive messages were always rated higher than negative ones, the valence of a message’s component words differentially impacted attitudes toward distinct aspects of the product. On promotion-focus features, messages containing negative words produced higher ratings; for prevention-focus aspects, those with positive words resulted in higher ratings. We argue that adopting a prevention- or promotion-focused stance can influence the interpretation of emotion words in relation to overall message comprehension. PMID:15741511

Abstract in portuguese Relações semânticas entre estímulos equivalentes foram avaliadas utilizando "tentativas de decisão léxica" e diferencial semântico. Foram utilizadas as estruturas de treino conhecidas como "um-para-muitos" e "muitos-para-um" na geração de três classes de estímulos equivalentes envolvendo cinco conjuntos de estímulos: A, B, C, D e E. Para um grupo de participantes, denominado de Grupo Um para Muitos (GUM), as relações diretamente treinadas obedeciam à estrut (more) ura AB, BC, CD e CE; um outro grupo experimental, denominado de Grupo Muitos para Um (GMU), foi treinado na estrutura DC, EC, CB e BA. Para os dois grupos, os estímulos do conjunto B eram fotografias de faces expressando emoções e os estímulos dos conjuntos A, C, D e E eram figuras abstratas. A seguir, duas figuras (já vistas ou novas) eram apresentadas em seqüência, como "dica" e "alvo", em tentativas em que o participante respondia se reconhecia ou não a figura alvo. As respostas foram mais rápidas quando dica e alvo pertenciam à mesma classe, reproduzindo com estímulos abstratos equivalentes o efeito de dica semântica. Figuras abstratas foram então avaliadas por diferencial semântico. As avaliações do GUM foram similares às avaliações das faces por um grupo controle e as avaliações do GMU não foram. Os dados sugerem que a intensidade relativa da transferência de significados entre estímulos equivalentes pode depender da direção das relações que os participantes devem estabelecer. Abstract in english Semantic relations among equivalent stimuli were evaluated by lexical decision tasks and a semantic differential. Two training structures, known as "one-to-many" and "many-to-one", were employed in order to generate three classes of equivalent stimuli involving five sets of stimuli: A, B, C, D and E. Stimuli for set B were pictures of faces expressing emotions whereas stimuli for sets A, C, D and E were abstract pictures. For one group of participants, the One-to-many Gro (more) up, the directly trained relations were AB, BC, CD and CE; for the other experimental group, the Many-to-one Group, the directly trained relations were DC, EC, CB and BA. Two pictures were then presented in sequence as "prime" and "target" in trials in which participants responded whether they recognized or not the target. Responses were faster when prime and target belonged to the same equivalent class, reproducing the semantic priming effect. Abstract pictures were then evaluated through the semantic differential. Evaluations by the One-to-many Group were similar to the evaluations of the faces made by a control group, but those made by the Many-to-one Group were not. The data suggest that the transfer of meaning among equivalent stimuli may depend on the relations which are established by the participants.

There is evidence that the explicit lexical-semantic processing deficits which characterize aphasia may be observed in the absence of implicit semantic impairment. The aim of this article was to critically review the international literature on lexical-semantic processing in aphasia, as tested through the semantic priming paradigm. Specifically, this review focused on aphasia and lexical-semantic processing, the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the semantic paradigms used, and recent evidence from neuroimaging studies on lexical-semantic processing. Furthermore, evidence on dissociations between implicit and explicit lexical-semantic processing reported in the literature will be discussed and interpreted by referring to functional neuroimaging evidence from healthy populations. There is evidence that semantic priming effects can be found both in fluent and in non-fluent aphasias, and that these effects are related to an extensive network which includes the temporal lobe, the pre-frontal cortex, the left frontal gyrus, the left temporal gyrus and the cingulated cortex. PMID:22990731

This article presents the formal semantics of a large subset of the C language called Clight. Clight includes pointer arithmetic, "struct" and "union" types, C loops and structured "switch" statements. Clight is the source language of the CompCert verified compiler. The formal semantics of Clight is a big-step operational semantics that observes both terminating and diverging executions and produces traces of input/output events. The formal semantics of Clight is mechanized using the Coq proof assistant. In addition to the semantics of Clight, this article describes its integration in the CompCert verified compiler and several ways by which the semantics was validated.

The relationship between episodic and semantic memory systems has long been debated. Some authors argue that episodic memory is contingent on semantic memory (Tulving 1984), while others postulate that both systems are independent since they can be selectively damaged (Squire 1987). The interaction between these memory systems is particularly important in the elderly, since the dissociation of episodic and semantic memory defects characterize different aging-related pathologies. Here, we investigated the interaction between semantic knowledge and episodic memory processes associated with faces in elderly subjects using an experimental paradigm where the semantic encoding of famous and unknown faces was compared to their episodic recognition. Results showed that the level of semantic awaren...

Numerous event-related brain potential (ERP) studies reveal the differential processing of emotional and neutral stimuli. Yet, it is an ongoing debate to what extent the ERP components found in previous research are sensitive to physical stimulus characteristics or emotional meaning. This study manipulated emotional meaning and stimulus orientation to disentangle the impact of stimulus physics and semantics on emotional stimulus processing. Negative communicative hand gestures of Insult were contrasted with neutral control gestures of Allusion to manipulate emotional meaning. An elementary physical manipulation of visual processing was implemented by presenting these stimuli vertically and horizontally. The results showed dissociable effects of stimulus meaning and orientation on the sequence of ERP components. Effects of orientation were pronounced in the P1 and N170 time frames and attenuated during later stages. Emotional meaning affected the P1, evincing a distinct topography to orientation effects. Although the N170 was not modulated by emotional meaning, the early posterior negativity and late positive potential components replicated previous findings with larger potentials elicited by the Insult gestures. These data suggest that the brain processes different attributes of an emotional picture in parallel and that a coarse semantic appreciation may already occur during relatively early stages of emotion perception. PMID:22798399

Semantic dementia (SD) is a relatively rare primary degenerative brain disease, often with onset before the age of 65, which belongs to the group of frontotemporal lobar degenerations. The central characteristic of SD is a progressive loss of semantic knowledge with manifestation in aphasia as well as impaired face and object recognition. A reliable discrimination of SD from other neurodegenerative conditions, in particular from Alzheimer's disease, may be a challenge for neurologists as well as neuropsychologists. In the first place, a sound knowledge base is expected from the expert in order to minimize false diagnoses. To illustrate this, a detailed case history of a 55-year old patient is presented who was referred for an independent medical and neuropsychological examination for disability benefits. The referral question was Pick's disease. However, the clinical manifestation as well as the results of a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation clearly indicated the diagnosis of SD with neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence of marked right temporal lobe atrophy. The case history highlights a number of problems inherent in current practice of dementia assessment. For differential diagnosis of dementing conditions, a thorough neuropsychological assessment appears to be indispensable. PMID:18677676

Automated approaches to measuring semantic similarity and relatedness can provide necessary semantic context information for information retrieval applications and a number of fundamental natural language processing tasks including word sense disambiguation. Challenges for the development of these a...

Flow logic is a “fast prototyping” approach to program analysis that shows great promise of being able to deal with a wide variety of languages and calculi for computation. However, seemingly innocent choices in the flow logic as well as in the operational semantics may inhibit proving the analysis correct. Our main conclusion is that environment based semantics is more flexible than either substitution based semantics or semantics making use of structural congruences (like alpha-renaming).

This paper shows that previously reported generation algorithms run into problems when dealing with f-structure representations. A generation algorithm that is suitable for this type of representations is presented: the Semantic Kernel Generation (SKG) algorithm. The SKG method has the same processing strategy as the Semantic Head Driven generation (SHDG) algorithm and relies on the assumption that it is possible to compute the Semantic Kernel (SK) and non Semantic Kernel (Non-SK) information for each input structure.

A wide range of knowledge discovery and analysis applications, ranging from business to biological, make use of semantic graphs when modeling relationships and concepts. Most of the semantic graphs used in these applications are assumed to be static pieces of information, meaning temporal evolution of concepts and relationships are not taken into account. Guided by the need for more advanced semantic graph queries involving temporal concepts, this paper surveys the existing work involving temporal representations in semantic graphs.

We present a framework which constructs an event-style dis- course semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We assume discourse and sentence are distinct semantic objects, t...

In common with many state of the art semantic technologies, there is a lack of comprehensive, established evaluation mechanisms for semantic search tools. In this paper, we describe a new evaluation and benchmarking approach for semantic search tools using the infrastructure under development within...

Many people are working on the Semantic Web with the main objective being to enhance web searches. Our proposal is a new research strategy based on the existence of a discrete set of semantic relations for the creation and exploitation of semantic networks on the web. To do so, we have defined in a ...

Along with a continuously growing number of publicly available Web services (WS), we are witnessing a rapid development in semantic-related web technologies, which lead to the apparition of semantically described WS. In this work, we perform a comparative analysis of the syntactic and semantic appro...

This paper examines how the semantic locality of a search operator affects the fitness landscape of Genetic Programming (GP). We compare the fitness landscapes of GP search when standard subtree mutation and a recently proposed semantic-based mutation, Semantic Similarity-based Mutation (SSM), are u...

Presenting a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, this title describes some popular social media and social networking applications, lists their strengths and limitations, and explains some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics

This paper describes a complete denotational semantics, in the UTP framework, of slotted-Circus, a generic framework for reasoning about discrete timed/synchronously clocked systems. The key result presented here is a comprehensive semantics of the entire language that addresses various semantics issues that have been uncovered, whilst laying foundations for future extensions, particularly towards prioritized choice.

The number of publicly available Web services (WS) is continuously growing, and in parallel, we are witnessing a rapid development in semantic-related web technologies. The intersection of the semantic web and WS allows the development of semantic WS. In this work, we adopt a complex network perspec...

The graphic organizer called here heuristic diagram as an improvement of Gowin's Vee heuristic is proposed as a tool to teach history of science. Heuristic diagrams have the purpose of helping students (or teachers, or researchers) to understand their own research considering that asks and problem-solving are central to scientific activity. The left side originally related in Gowin's Vee with philosophies, theories, models, laws or regularities now agrees with Toulmin's concepts (language, models as representation techniques and application procedures). Mexican science teachers without experience in science education research used the heuristic diagram to learn about the history of chemistry considering also in the left side two different historical times: past and present. Through a semantic differential scale teachers' attitude to the heuristic diagram was evaluated and its usefulness was demonstrated.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of three swallowing aids on the adsorbent properties and palatability of a mixture of the oral charcoal adsorbent, Kremezin®. None of the swallowing aids had any effect on the adsorption of indole by Kremezin®, either in vitro and in vivo. In gustatory sensation tests of the palatability of the swallowing aids with Kremezin®, 14 items were evaluated according to the semantic differential (SD) method. Factor analysis of the results identified two main factors ‘Remaining after removing from mouth’ and ‘Sense of holding in mouth’ as predominantly determining the palatability. The swallowing aid with the highest viscosity allowed the best dispersion of Kremezin®, and also improved the palatability of Kremezin® the most.   

Abstract Conventional studies on affective meanings have been conducted using the semantic differential technique. Although it offers reasonably valid and reliable measures for the bindings between visual stimuli and affective responses, it is dependent on subjective rating. Thus, the present study examined whether the reaction time (RT) of affective judgments for visual stimuli (color, shape, and facial expression) can be an objective indicator of the strength of stimuli-response bindings. The results can be summarized as follows: (a) RTs for judging Evaluation were longer regardless of stimulus type; (b) RTs for Activity were shorter regardless of stimulus type; and (c) RTs for Lightness and Sharpness depended on stimulus type. These phenomena are consistent with the findings of previous...

This study investigates lighting conditions for elderly people under which object is perceived as “kirei”, according to implications of clarity and preference. An experiment was conducted using Semantic Differential method with young and elderly subjects to assess the appearance of objects under white LEDs, incandescent lamps, and fluorescent lamps. Results suggest that lighting under which objects are perceived as “kirei” for elderly people is that from incandescent lamps. Additional study is necessary to determine whether this result was obtained from the correlated color temperature or lamp-specific characteristics. Furthermore, assessment structural analysis was conducted using Graphical Modeling per age groups. These models suggest age-related differences of the assessment structure under which objects are perceived as “kirei”, especially the relation between “kirei” and brightness.   

This book contains a collection of self-instructional modules for college faculty and teaching assistants. The modules address key aspects of teacher-learner interaction, including setting of course objectives, preparing lectures, conducting classroom discussions, preparing various types of tests (multiple choice, true-false, matching test items, item analysis on objective tests, performance tests, and scoring essay questions), and improving faculty-student relationships. Also included are a series of exercises meant to assist the reader in practicing the principles learned from the book. In addition, guidelines are provided for developing and using objective and behavioral checklists, Likert and semantic differential rating scales, ranking techniques, and open-ended questions. A self-appraisal form is presented that helps identify interests and level of professional commitment. The book also includes a comprehensive index and a 17-item bibliography. References and sources follow chapters. (GLR)

The present study investigates the locus of language selection in less and more proficient language learners, specifically testing differential predictions of La Heij's (2005) concept selection model (CSM) and Kroll and Stewart's (1994) revised hierarchical model (RHM). Less and more proficient English dominant learners of Spanish participated in a Stroop translation task that included semantically related and unrelated word or picture distracters. The results for the more proficient learners provide support for the CSM as well as the RHM. The results for the less proficient learners provide support for the RHM and demonstrate the continued reliance on lexical level links and the difficulty in accessing the conceptual store during second language production. The selection by proficiency model of bilingual speech production is discussed.

In this study, we conducted a subjective evaluation experiment of a dual manipulator, which exhibits different motion characteristics. There are three motion characteristics: two of which are age-related, and the third is a robot motion characteristic and is newly added to these two motions. The motions are evaluated from motion areas and motion velocities. Subjects are elderly and young people, and the impressions of the motions are compared in two of the different age groups by the Semantic Differential (SD) method. The obtained results indicate that there are age differences in the evaluation of three manipulator motion areas. The elderly people show a higher reliability and a higher familiarity in a robot motion area than in the other two motions. The elderly people seem to be more affected by the manipulator motion than the young people. Therefore, a careful consideration is required when planning the motion of a manipulator for elderly people.   

Differentiating between early-onset bipolar disorder (BD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can be difficult. Memory problems are commonly reported in BD, and forgetfulness is among the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. We compared children and adolescents with BD (n = 23), ADHD combined type (ADHD-C; n = 26), BD + ADHD-C (n = 15), and 68 healthy controls on memory tests (Digit span, Children's Verbal Learning Test-II). Further analyses were performed on subgroups of BD (BD-I, BD-II/BD-NOS, with and without previous psychotic symptoms). All clinical groups demonstrated some problems with free recall, but the BD subgroup with a history of psychotic symptoms had a more pervasive problem that also included recognition and semantic clustering. The ADHD-C groups demonstrated the lowest performance on working memory. These data suggest that children and adolescents with BD and previously psychotic symptoms may have inefficient encoding of verbal material, whereas memory problems in ADHD-C appear more characterized by impaired free recall.

This paper reports a study of perceptions and attitudes relating to regional varieties of Polish. The methodology followed folk linguistic approaches to attitudes research. Respondents in two Polish provinces were asked to draw on a map of Poland where they thought the main regional varieties of Polish were spoken, and then to name and characterise these varieties in their own words. They were also asked to give correctness and social attractiveness ratings on semantic differential scales for a number of conceptually presented varieties. Students' subjective maps of dialect division showed little correspondence with the dialect maps produced by Polish dialectologists. In the evaluative profiles, respondents focused mainly on foreignness, Polishness, and linguistic features of the perceived language varieties. Judgements of correctness and attractiveness appear to be influenced by Poland's socio-political situation, especially associations with Germanness and Russianness. (Contains 8 figures and 4 tables.)

Abstract The Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) is proposed to simulate and analyze the mapping between the physical properties of tactile textures and people's affective responses. People were asked to rate the tactile feeling of 37 tactile textures against six pairs of adjectives on a semantic differential questionnaire. The friction coefficient, average roughness, compliance, and a thermal parameter of each tactile texture were measured. ANFIS models were built to predict the affective responses to tactile textures. The resulting ANFIS models demonstrated a good match between predicted and actual responses, and always yielded better performance when compared to linear and exponential regression models. The effects of physical properties of textures on affective responses were...

Many studies have attempted to measure human response in music halls in order to determine acoustic quality. However, all these works have used parameters defined by experts. This approach may be an important drawback since users who have to evaluate such concepts may not understand or misunderstand parameters which do not correspond to their own conceptual structure. This paper attempts to establish a methodology to define valid evaluation scales for different collectives and determine evaluation criteria related to the overall assessment of music hall acoustics. It analyses music hall acoustics from the users perspective and investigates the differences of perception between experts and non-experts through Semantic Differential within the frame of Kansei Engineering. The research was car...

Abstract in spanish El liderazgo es un fenómeno esencial en la administración de cualquier tipo de organización, se refiere a un patrón de conducta según como lo perciben los demás, y se desarrolla a partir de experiencias, educación, capacitación y condiciones naturales. La primera parte de este artículo se dedica a realizar una definición del liderazgo para luego clasificarlo en tres grupos: Liderazgo Transaccional, Liderazgo Transformacional y las teorías emergentes. A continua (more) ción se explican los pasos que componen la metodología propuesta para caracterizar el liderazgo en una organización la cual esta basada en la técnica de Semántica Diferencial de Osgood en la cual se construye una escala bipolar tipo diferencial semántico. Finalmente se muestran los resultados alcanzados de la aplicación de la metodología en las ONG en Antioquia, para lo cual se realiza una definición acerca de las ONG y las características percibidas de los líderes en esta clase de organizaciones en Antioquia. Abstract in english Leadership is a basic aspect f management for any type of organization, it refers to a behavioral pattern according to the perception of the other, and it is developed from experiences, education, capacity building and natural conditions. The first part of this paper focuses on defining leadership, classifying it in three groups: transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and emergent theories. Later, there is a description of the steps that constitute a metho (more) dology proposed to characterize leadership in organizations. This methodology is grounded in the Osgood Differentiation Semantics, in which a bipolar scale of semantical differentiation type is constructed. Finally, results from the application of this methodology in NGO (Non-Governmental Organizations) in Antioquia are shown. A definition of NGOs is carried out, as well as a description of the perceived characteristics of NGO leaders in Antioquia.

Abstract Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers- intuitions; at the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal-level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines...

This paper is about the semantics of production rule sets, a language used to model asynchronous digital circuits. Two formal semantics are developed and proved equivalent: a set-theoretic semantics that improves upon an earlier effort of ours, and an executable semantics in rewriting logic. The set-theoretic semantics is especially suited to meta-level proofs about production rule sets, whereas the executable semantics can be used with existing tools to establish, automatically, desirable properties of individual circuits. Experiments involving several small circuits are detailed wherein the executable semantics and the rewriting logic tool Maude are used to automatically check two important properties: hazard and deadlock freedom. In doing so, we derive several useful optimizations that ...

Traditionally, semantics has been seen as a feature of human language. The advent of the information era has led to its widespread redefinition as an information feature. Contrary to this praxis, I define semantics as a special kind of information. Revitalizing the ideas of Bar-Hillel and Carnap I have recreated and re-established the notion of semantics as the notion of Semantic Information. I have proposed a new definition of information (as a description, a linguistic text, a piece of a story or a tale) and a clear segregation between two different types of information - physical and semantic information. I hope, I have clearly explained the (usually obscured and mysterious) interrelations between data and physical information as well as the relation between physical information and semantic information. Consequently, usually indefinable notions of "information", "knowledge", "memory", "learning" and "semantics" have also received their suitable illumination and explanation.

Semantic Web is, without a doubt, gaining momentum in both industry and academia. The word "Semantic" refers to "meaning" - a semantic web is a web of meaning. In this fast changing and result oriented practical world, gone are the days where an individual had to struggle for finding information on the Internet where knowledge management was the major issue. The semantic web has a vision of linking, integrating and analysing data from various data sources and forming a new information stream, hence a web of databases connected with each other and machines interacting with other machines to yield results which are user oriented and accurate. With the emergence of Semantic Web framework the na\\"ive approach of searching information on the syntactic web is clich\\'e. This paper proposes an optimised semantic searching of keywords exemplified by simulation an ontology of Indian universities with a proposed algorithm which ramifies the effective semantic retrieval of information which is easy to access and time sav...

In this paper, we present a metric based on semantic relatedness which operates on semantic knowledge representations of engineering design and show how it can support design innovation. Our semantic knowledge representation is composed of an ontology representing design concepts using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) functional basis formalism. We assert that the uniqueness of a design concept is directly proportional to the mean semantic distance between itself and the set of competing design concepts represented as instances within our functional basis ontology. This leads to our Semantic Relatedness Uniqueness Metric called SeRUM. SeRUM draws upon semantic functional model representations of design concepts and computer science semantic relatedness techniques. ...

The goal of this paper is to present a model of children's semantic memory, which is based on a corpus reproducing the kinds of texts children are exposed to. After presenting the literature in the development of the semantic memory, a preliminary French corpus of 3.2 million words is described. Similarities in the resulting semantic space are compared to human data on four tests: association norms, vocabulary test, semantic judgments and memory tasks. A second corpus is described, which is composed of subcorpora corresponding to various ages. This stratified corpus is intended as a basis for developmental studies. Finally, two applications of these models of semantic memory are presented: the first one aims at tracing the development of semantic similarities paragraph by paragraph; the second one describes an implementation of a model of text comprehension derived from the Construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1988, 1998) and based on such models of semantic memory.

Semantic networks qualify the meaning of an edge relating any two vertices. Determining which vertices are most "central" in a semantic network is difficult because one relationship type may be deemed subjectively more important than another. For this reason, research into semantic network metrics has focused primarily on context-based rankings (i.e. user prescribed contexts). Moreover, many of the current semantic network metrics rank semantic associations (i.e. directed paths between two vertices) and not the vertices themselves. This article presents a framework for calculating semantically meaningful primary eigenvector-based metrics such as eigenvector centrality and PageRank in semantic networks using a modified version of the random walker model of Markov chain analysis. Random walkers, in the context of this article, are constrained by a grammar, where the grammar is a user defined data structure that determines the meaning of the final vertex ranking. The ideas in this article are presented within th...

Background Emotionally salient information in spoken language can be provided by variations in speech melody (prosody) or by emotional semantics. Emotional prosody is essential to convey feelings through speech. In sensori-neural hearing loss, impaired speech perception can be improved by cochlear implants (CIs). Aim of this study was to investigate the performance of normal-hearing (NH) participants on the perception of emotional prosody with vocoded stimuli. Semantically neutral sentences with emotional (happy, angry and neutral) prosody were used. Sentences were manipulated to simulate two CI speech-coding strategies: the Advance Combination Encoder (ACE) and the newly developed Psychoacoustic Advanced Combination Encoder (PACE). Twenty NH adults were asked to recognize emotional prosody from ACE and PACE simulations. Performance was assessed using behavioral tests and event-related potentials (ERPs). Results Behavioral data revealed superior performance with original stimuli compared to the simulations. For simulations, better recognition for happy and angry prosody was observed compared to the neutral. Irrespective of simulated or unsimulated stimulus type, a significantly larger P200 event-related potential was observed for happy prosody after sentence onset than the other two emotions. Further, the amplitude of P200 was significantly more positive for PACE strategy use compared to the ACE strategy. Conclusions Results suggested P200 peak as an indicator of active differentiation and recognition of emotional prosody. Larger P200 peak amplitude for happy prosody indicated importance of fundamental frequency (F0) cues in prosody processing. Advantage of PACE over ACE highlighted a privileged role of the psychoacoustic masking model in improving prosody perception. Taken together, the study emphasizes on the importance of vocoded simulation to better understand the prosodic cues which CI users may be utilizing. PMID:18469714

Abstract in spanish Se llevaron a cabo tres experimentos para evaluar la atención a palabras de diferente valor emocional. Se trabajó con un paradigma experimental de doble tarea, registrando los tiempos de respuesta ante tonos, los cuales fueron presentados durante la lectura de palabras. El recuerdo también fue evaluado a través de una prueba de memoria intencional inmediata. Los resultados revelan que ni el valor, ni la excitación de las palabras, afectan la atención de los particip (more) antes. Solamente, en el tercer experimento, en el que las palabras pertenecieron a dos categorías semánticas específicas (sexual y riesgo de muerte) las mujeres mostraron significativamente mayor RTS ante palabras amenazadoras. No obstante, se observaron diferencias significativas en el recuerdo inmediato posterior, para los diferentes tipos de palabras en los tres experimentos. Los estudios futuros deben tener en cuenta: ( a) la situación diferencial de las palabras e imágenes para captar la atención, (b) la influencia diferencial de valencia, así como la excitación, en el recuerdo de palabras emocionales y (c) los efectos diferenciales de la categoría semántica de la atención prestada a estas palabras de hombres y mujeres. Abstract in english Three experiments were carried out in order to evaluate the attention paid to words of different emotional value. A dual-task experimental paradigm was employed, registering response times to acoustic tones which were presented during the reading of words. The recall was also evaluated by means of an intentional immediate recall test. The results reveal that neither the emotional valence nor the arousal of words on their own affected the attention paid by participants. On (more) ly in the third experiment, in which words belonging to two specific semantic categories (sexual and threatening) were used, did females show significantly higher RTS for threatening words. Nonetheless, significant differences were observed in the immediate subsequent recall for the different types of words in all three experiments. Future studies should take into account: a) the differential status of words and pictures to capture attention, b) the differential influence of valence, as well as arousal, on recall of emotional words, and c) the differential effects of the semantic category on the attention paid to these words by males and females.

I propose a variable-free treatment of dynamic semantics. By "dynamic semantics" I mean analyses of donkey sentences ("Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it") and other binding and anaphora phenomena in natural language where meanings of constituents are updates to information states, for instance as proposed by Groenendijk and Stokhof. By "variable-free" I mean denotational semantics in which functional combinators replace variable indices and assignment functions, for instance as advocated by Jacobson. The new theory presented here achieves a compositional treatment of dynamic anaphora that does not involve assignment functions, and separates the combinatorics of variable-free semantics from the particular linguistic phenomena it treats. Integrating variable-free semantics and dynamic semantics gives rise to interactions that make new empirical predictions, for example "donkey weak crossover" effects.

Semantic publishing is the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance the meaning of a published journal article, to facilitate its automated discovery, to enable its linking to semantically related articles, to provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and to facilitate integration of data between articles. Recently, semantic publishing has opened the possibility of a major step forward in the digital publishing world. For this to succeed, new semantic models and visualization tools are required to fully meet the specific needs of authors and publishers. In this article, we introduce the principles and architectures of two new ontologies central to the task of semantic publishing: FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, an ontology for recording and pu...

Abstract Interpretation of spatial features often requires combined reasoning over geometry and semantics. We introduce the Space package, an open source SWI-Prolog extension that provides spatial indexing capabilities. Together with the existing semantic web reasoning capabilities of SWI-Prolog, this allows efficient integration of spatial and semantic queries and provides an infrastructure for declarative programming with space and semantics. There are few systems that provide indexing and reasoning facilities for both spatial and semantic data. A common solution is to combine separate semantic reasoning and geospatial services. Such loose coupling has the disadvantage that each service cannot make use of the statistics of the other. This makes optimization of such a service-oriented arc...

Tagging activity has been recently identified as a potential source of knowledge about personal interests, preferences, goals, and other attributes known from user models. Tags themselves can be therefore used for finding personalized recommendations of items. This paper proposes a semantic extension for a hybrid tag-based recommender system, which suggests similar Web pages based on the similarity of their tags. The semantic extension aims at discovering tag relations which are not considered in basic syntax similarity. With the goal of generating more semantically grounded recommendations, the proposal extends a hybrid tag-based recommender system with a semantic factor, which looks for tag relations in different semantic sources. In order to evaluate the benefits acquired with the semantic extension, we have compared the new findings with results from a previous experiment involving 38 people from 12 countries using data from del.icio.us.

The Semantic Web has attracted significant attention during the last decade. On the one hand, many research groups have changed their focus towards Semantic Web research and research funding agencies particularly in Europe have explicitly mentioned Semantic Web in their calls for proposals. On the other hand, industry has also begun to watch developments with interest and a number of large companies have started to experiment with Semantic Web technologies to ascertain if these new technologies can be leveraged to add more value for their customers or internally within the company, while there are already several offers of vendors of Semantic Web solutions on the market. The essence of the Semantic Web is to structure Web-based information to make it more interoperable, machine-readable an...

Even though OpenMath has been around for more than 10 years, there is still confusion about the ?semantics of OpenMath?. As the recent MathML3 recommendation semantically bases Content MathML on OpenMath Objects, this question becomes more pressing. One source of confusions about OpenMath semantics is that it is given on two levels: a very weak algebraic semantics for expression trees, which is extended by considering mathematical properties in content dictionaries that interpret the meaning of (constant) symbols. While this two-leveled way to interpret objects is well-understood in logic, it has not been spelt out rigorously for OpenMath. We present two denotational semantics for OpenMath: a construction-oriented semantics that achieves full coverage of all legal OpenMath expressions at t...

In Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP), an annotated language corpus is used as a stochastic grammar. The most probable analysis of a new input sentence is constructed by combining sub-analyses from the corpus in the most probable way. This approach has been succesfully used for syntactic analysis, using corpora with syntactic annotations such as the Penn Treebank. If a corpus with semantically annotated sentences is used, the same approach can also generate the most probable semantic interpretation of an input sentence. The present paper explains this semantic interpretation method, and summarizes the results of a preliminary experiment. Semantic annotations were added to the syntactic annotations of most of the sentences of the ATIS corpus. A data-oriented semantic interpretation algorithm was succesfully tested on this semantically enriched corpus.

Social bookmarking systems allow users to organise collections of resources on the Web in a collaborative fashion. The increasing popularity of these systems as well as first insights into their emergent semantics have made them relevant to disciplines like knowledge extraction and ontology learning. The problem of devising methods to measure the semantic relatedness between tags and characterizing it semantically is still largely open. Here we analyze three measures of tag relatedness: tag co-occurrence, cosine similarity of co-occurrence distributions, and FolkRank, an adaptation of the PageRank algorithm to folksonomies. Each measure is computed on tags from a large-scale dataset crawled from the social bookmarking system del.icio.us. To provide a semantic grounding of our findings, a connection to WordNet (a semantic lexicon for the English language) is established by mapping tags into synonym sets of WordNet, and applying there well-known metrics of semantic similarity. Our results clearly expose differe...

In this paper we elaborate on a specific application in the context of hybrid description logic programs (hybrid DLPs), namely description logic Semantic Web type systems (DL-types) which are used for term typing of LP rules based on a polymorphic, order-sorted, hybrid DL-typed unification as procedural semantics of hybrid DLPs. Using Semantic Web ontologies as type systems facilitates interchange of domain-independent rules over domain boundaries via dynamically typing and mapping of explicitly defined type ontologies.

In this paper, we propose automatic situation clustering method for digital photo album. A group of photos having the same situation could have similar visual semantics. In this paper, visual semantic hints of photo are proposed and used to cluster situations. Experiments were performed with 2345 photos and results showed that the proposed clustering with the visual semantic hints was useful for automated situation clustering based on human perception.

We examine copy raising in two closely related Germanic languages, English and Swedish, and offer a formal analysis of its syntax and semantics. We develop a new event semantics analysis of copy raising. In addition to augmenting the body of empirical data on copy raising, we show that copy raising yields novel insights into a number of key theoretical issues, in particular: language and perception, the theory of arguments and thematic roles, and the broader semantics of control and raising.

This paper discusses the features of an annotation language that we believe to be essential for optimizing user-defined abstractions. These features should capture semantics of function, data, and object-oriented abstractions, express abstraction equivalence (e.g., a class represents an array abstraction), and permit extension of traditional compiler optimizations to user-defined abstractions. Our future work will include developing a comprehensive annotation language for describing the semantics of general object-oriented abstractions, as well as automatically verifying and inferring the annotated semantics.

The present study examines the brain-level representation and composition of meaning in scalar quantifiers (e.g., some), which have both a semantic meaning (at least one) and a pragmatic meaning (not all). We adopted a picture-sentence verification design to examine event-related potential (ERP) effects of reading infelicitous quantifiers for which the semantic meaning was correct with respect to the context but the pragmatic meaning was not, compared to quantifiers for which the semantic meaning was inconsistent with the context and no additional pragmatic meaning is available. In the first experiment, only pragmatically inconsistent quantifiers, not semantically inconsistent quantifiers, elicited a sustained posterior negative component. This late negativity contrasts with the N400 effect typically elicited by nouns that are incongruent with their context, suggesting that the recognition of scalar implicature errors elicits a qualitatively different ERP signature than the recognition of lexico-semantic errors. We hypothesize that the sustained negativity reflects cancellation of the pragmatic inference and retrieval of the semantic meaning. In our second experiment, we found that the process of re-interpreting the quantifier was independent from lexico-semantic processing: the N400 elicited by lexico-semantic violations was not modulated by the presence of a pragmatic inconsistency. These findings suggest that inferential pragmatic aspects of meaning are processed using different mechanisms than lexical or combinatorial semantic aspects of meaning, that inferential pragmatic meaning can be realized rapidly, and that the computation of meaning involves continuous negotiation between different aspects of meaning. PMID:23103410

The most selective disorder of central conceptual knowledge arises in semantic dementia, a degenerative condition associated with bilateral atrophy of the inferior and polar regions of the temporal lobes. Likewise, semantic impairment in both herpes simplex virus encephalitis and Alzheimer's disease is typically associated with bilateral, anterior temporal pathology. These findings suggest that conceptual representations are supported via an interconnected, bilateral, anterior temporal network and that it may take damage to both sides to produce an unequivocal deficit of central semantic memory. We tested and supported this hypothesis by investigating a case series of 20 patients with unilateral temporal damage (following vascular accident or resection for tumour or epilepsy), utilizing a test battery that is sensitive to semantic impairment in semantic dementia. Only 1/20 of the cases, with a unilateral left lesion, exhibited even a mild impairment on the receptive semantic measures. On the expressive semantic tests of naming and fluency, average performance was worse in the left- than right-unilateral cases, but even in this domain, only one left-lesion case had scores consistently more than two standard deviations below control means. These results fit with recent parallel explorations of semantic function using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation as well as functional imaging in stroke aphasic and neurologically intact participants. The evidence suggests that both left and right anterior temporal lobe regions contribute to the representation of semantic memory and together may form a relatively damage-resistant, robust system for this critical aspect of higher cognition. PMID:20952378

The order in which participants choose to recall words from a studied list of randomly selected words provides insights into how memories of the words are represented, organised, and retrieved. One pervasive finding is that when a pair of semantically related words (e.g., "cat" and "dog") is embedded in the studied list, the related words are often recalled successively. This tendency to successively recall semantically related words is termed semantic clustering (Bousfield, 1953; Bousfield & Sedgewick, 1944; Cofer, Bruce, & Reicher, 1966). Measuring semantic clustering effects requires making assumptions about which words participants consider to be similar in meaning. However, it is often difficult to gain insights into individual participants' internal semantic models, and for this reason researchers typically rely on standardised semantic similarity metrics. Here we use simulations to gain insights into the expected magnitudes of semantic clustering effects given systematic differences between participants' internal similarity models and the similarity metric used to quantify the degree of semantic clustering. Our results provide a number of useful insights into the interpretation of semantic clustering effects in free recall. PMID:22646657

The goal of this lecture is to show how modern theorem provers---in this case, the Coq proof assistant---can be used to mechanize the specification of programming languages and their semantics, and to reason over individual programs and over generic program transformations, as typically found in compilers. The topics covered include: operational semantics (small-step, big-step, definitional interpreters); a simple form of denotational semantics; axiomatic semantics and Hoare logic; generation of verification conditions, with application to program proof; compilation to virtual machine code and its proof of correctness; an example of an optimizing program transformation (dead code elimination) and its proof of correctness.

The past few years have witnessed unparalleled efforts to make scientific data web accessible. The Semantic Web has proven invaluable in this effort; however, much of the literature is devoted to system design, ontology creation, and trials and tribulations of current technologies. In order to fully develop the nascent field of Semantic e-Science we must also evaluate systems in real-world settings. We describe a case study within the field of Heliophysics and provide a comparison of the evolutionary stages of data discovery, from manual to semantically enable. We describe the socio-technical implications of moving toward automated and intelligent data discovery. In doing so, we highlight how this process enhances what is currently being done manually in various scientific disciplines. Our case study illustrates that Semantic e-Science is more than just semantic search. The integration of search with web services, relational databases, and other cyberinfrastructure is a central tenet of our case study and one that we believe has applicability as a generalized research area within Semantic e-Science. This case study illustrates a specific example of the benefits, and limitations, of semantically replicating data discovery. We show examples of significant reductions in time and effort enable by Semantic e-Science; yet, we argue that a "complete" solution requires integrating semantic search with other research areas such as data provenance and web services.

We propose a video ontology system to overcome semantic gap in video retrieval. The proposed video ontology is aimed at bridging of the gap between the semantic nature of user queries and raw video contents. Also, results of semantic retrieval shows not only the concept of topic keyword but also a sub-concept of the topic keyword using semantic query extension. Through this process, recall is likely to provide high accuracy results in our method. The experiments compared with keyframe-based indexing have demonstrated that this proposed scene-based indexing presents better results in several kinds of videos.   

Purpose - Recently, the importance and effectiveness of Wikipedia Mining has been shown in several researches. One popular research area on Wikipedia Mining focuses on semantic relatedness measurement, and research in this area has shown that Wikipedia can be used for semantic relatedness measurement. However, previous methods are facing two problems; accuracy and scalability. To solve these problems, the purpose of this paper is to propose an efficient semantic relatedness measurement method that leverages global statistical information of Wikipedia. Furthermore, a new test collection is constructed based on Wikipedia concepts for evaluating semantic relatedness measurement methods. Design/methodology/approach - The authors' approach leverages global statistical information of the whole W...

We present a framework which constructs an event-style dis- course semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We assume discourse and sentence are distinct semantic objects, that play different roles in meaning evalua- tion. Moreover, two sets of composition functions, for handling different discourse relations, are introduced. The paper first gives the necessary background and motivation for event and dynamic semantics, then the framework with detailed examples will be introduced.

This paper targets at the problem of automatic semantic indexing of news videos by presenting a video annotation and retrieval system which is able to perform automatic semantic annotation of news video archives and provide access to the archives via these annotations. The presented system relies on the video texts as the information source and exploits several information extraction techniques on these texts to arrive at representative semantic information regarding the underlying videos. These techniques include named entity recognition, person entity extraction, coreference resolution, and semantic event extraction. Apart from the information extraction components, the proposed system also encompasses modules for news story segmentation, text extraction, and video retrieval along with a...

It is known that (mix) proof nets admits a coherence semantics, computed as a set of experiments. We prove here the converse: a proof structure is shown to be a proof net whenever its sets of experiments is a semantical object --- a clique of the corresponding coherence space. Moreover the interpret...

The well-definedness problem for a programming language consists of checking, given an expression and an input type, whether the semantics of the expression is defined for all inputs adhering to the input type. A related problem is the semantic type-checking problem which consists of checking, given...

In this paper, we give an overview of the four tasks submitted to TRECVID 2008 by COST292. The high-level feature extraction framework comprises four systems. The first system transforms a set of low-level descriptors into the semantic space using Latent Semantic Analysis and utilises neural network...

Languages play a central role in the Semantic Web. An important aspect regarding their design is syntax as it plays a crucial role in the wide acceptance of the Semantic Web approach. Like for programming languages, an evolution can be observed from low-level to high-level designs. High-level langua...

This article presents a system to extract Knowledge from webpages by producing semantic annotations. taking into account semantic information from the domain to annotate an element in a webpage implies solving two problems : (1) identifying the syntactic structure of this element in the webpage and ...

In the formal definition of the Ada language we are interested in giving the semantics to a sintactic object (called user-program) buit following an Ada grammar but for which some semantic restrictions hold (e.g. it should be legal for every implementation , etc.) [Dyn Sem Extent].

In this paper we review existing appoaches to semantics construction in LTAG (Lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar) which are all based on the notion of derivation (tree)s. We argue that derivation structures in LTAG are not appropriate to guide semantic composition, due to a non-isomorphism, in LTAG,...

Web clustering is an approach for aggregating web objects into various groups according to underlying relationships among them. Finding co-clusters of web objects in semantic space is an interesting topic in the context of web usage mining, which is able to capture the underlying user navigational interest and content preference simultaneously. In this paper we will present a novel web co-clustering algorithm named Co-Clustering in Semantic space (COCS) to simultaneously partition web users and pages via a latent semantic analysis approach. In COCS, we first, train the latent semantic space of weblog data by using Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model, and then, project all weblog data objects into this semantic space with probability distribution to capture the relationship among web pages and web users, at last, propose a clustering algorithm to generate the co-cluster corresponding to each semantic factor in the latent semantic space via probability inference. The proposed approach is evaluated by experiments performed on real datasets in terms of precision and recall metrics. Experimental results have demonstrated the proposed method can effectively reveal the co-aggregates of web users and pages which are closely related.

An evolution of the Semantic Web, the Social Semantic Web (s2w), facilitates knowledge sharing with "useful information based on human contributions, which gets better as more people participate." The s2w reaches beyond the search box to move us from a collection of hyperlinked facts, to meaningful, real time context. When focused through the lens of Enterprise Search, the Social Semantic Web facilitates the fluid transition of meaningful business information from the source to the user. It is the confluence of human thought and computer processing structured with the iterative application of taxonomies, folksonomies, ontologies, and metadata schemas. The importance and nuances of human interaction are often deemphasized when focusing on automatic generation of semantic markup, which results in dissatisfied users and unrealized return on investment. Users consistently qualify the value of information sets through the act of selection, making them the de facto stakeholders of the Social Semantic Web. Employers are the ultimate beneficiaries of s2w utilization with a better informed, more decisive workforce; one not achieved with an IT miracle technology, but by improved human-computer interactions. Johnson Space Center Taxonomist Sarah Berndt and Mike Doane, principal owner of Term Management, LLC discuss the planning, development, and maintenance stages for components of a semantic system while emphasizing the necessity of a Social Semantic Web for the Enterprise. Identification of risks and variables associated with layering the successful implementation of a semantic system are also modeled.

We study the algebraic structure of a programming language with higher-order store, in the style of ML references. Instead of working directly on the operational semantics of the language, we consider its fully abstract game semantics defined by Abramsky, Honda and McCusker one decade ago. This alte...

Purpose: To examine the nature and extent of semantic deficits in bilingual children with language impairment (LI). Method: Thirty-seven Spanish-English bilingual children with LI (ranging from age 7;0 [years;months] to 9;10) and 37 typically developing (TD) age-matched peers generated 3 associations to 12 pairs of translation equivalents in English and Spanish. Responses were coded as paradigmatic (e.g., "dinner-lunch," "cena-desayuno" ["dinner-breakfast"]), syntagmatic (e.g., "delicious-pizza," "delicioso-frijoles" ["delicious-beans"]), and errors (e.g., "wearing-where," "vestirse-mal" ["to get dressed-bad"]). A semantic depth score was derived in each language and conceptually by combining children's performance in both languages. Results: The LI group achieved significantly lower semantic depth scores than the TD group after controlling for group differences in vocabulary size. Children showed higher conceptual scores than single-language scores. Both groups showed decreases in semantic depth scores across multiple elicitations. Analyses of individual performances indicated that semantic deficits (1 "SD" below the TD mean semantic depth score) were manifested in 65% of the children with LI and in 14% of the TD children. Conclusion: School-age bilingual children with and without LI demonstrated spreading activation of semantic networks. Consistent with the literature on monolingual children with LI, sparsely linked semantic networks characterize a considerable proportion of bilingual children with LI.

Krifka [1993] has suggested that focus should be seen as a means of providing material for a range of semantic and pragmatic functions to work on, rather than as a specific semantic or pragmatic function itself. The current paper describes an implementation of this general idea, and applies it to the interpretation of {\\em only} and {\\em not}.

In this thesis we investigate two operational models of name-passing calculi: one based on coalgebra, and one based on enriched automata. We develop a semantic framework for modelling the open bisimulation in ?-calculus, hyperbisimulation in Fusion calculus, and the first semantic interpretation of ...

Since its early days, deterministic sequential game semantics has been limited to linear or polarized fragments of linear logic. Every attempt to extend the semantics to full propositional linear logic has bumped against the so-called Blass problem, which indicates (misleadingly) that a category of ...

This paper is an attempt to specify the discourse-semantics of grammatical Theme for multilingual text generation. In order to do so, we use previous empirical investigations, which have specified its higher-level contextual sources of control (Lavid 1994), to propose a discourse-semantic resource-c...

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder that is characterized by the production of semantic reading errors, greater success when reading aloud concrete and highly imageable words, frequent visual and visual-semantic errors, morphological errors and very poor reading of nonwords. The right hemi...

A concept of "evolving categories" is suggested to build a simple, scalable, mathematically consistent framework for representing in uniform way both data and algorithms. A state machine for executing algorithms becomes clear, rich and powerful semantics, based on category theory, and still allows easy implementation. Moreover, it gives an original insight into the nature and semantics of algorithms.

Iconicity is a property that pervades the lexicon of many sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL). Iconic signs exhibit a motivated, nonarbitrary mapping between the form of the sign and its meaning. We investigated whether iconicity enhances semantic priming effects for ASL and whether iconic signs are recognized more quickly than noniconic signs are (controlling for strength of iconicity, semantic relatedness, familiarity, and imageability). Twenty deaf signers made lexical decisions to the 2nd item of a prime-target pair. Iconic target signs were preceded by prime signs that were (a) iconic and semantically related, (b) noniconic and semantically related, or (c) semantically unrelated. In addition, a set of noniconic target signs was preceded by semantically unrelated primes. Significant facilitation was observed for target signs when they were preceded by semantically related primes. However, iconicity did not increase the priming effect (e.g., the target sign PIANO was primed equally by the iconic sign GUITAR and the noniconic sign MUSIC). In addition, iconic signs were not recognized faster or more accurately than were noniconic signs. These results confirm the existence of semantic priming for sign language and suggest that iconicity does not play a robust role in online lexical processing. PMID:20919784

In message passing implementations, associative matching structures are used to permit list entries to be searched in parallel fashion, thereby avoiding the delay of linear list traversal. List management capabilities are provided to support list entry turnover semantics and priority ordering semantics.

We address in this paper the verification of imperative programs with recursion. Our approach consists in using abstract interpretation to relate the standard semantics of imperative programs to an abstract semantics, by the mean of a Galois connection, and then to resort to intraprocedural techniqu...

A projection onto convex sets (POCS)-based annotation method for semantic image retrieval is presented in this paper. Utilizing database images previously annotated by keywords, the proposed method estimates unknown semantic features of a query image from its known visual features based on a POCS algorithm, which includes two novel approaches. First, the proposed method semantically assigns database images to some clusters and introduces a nonlinear eigenspace of visual and semantic features in each cluster into the constraint of the POCS algorithm. This approach accurately provides semantic features for each cluster by using its visual features in the least squares sense. Furthermore, the proposed method monitors the error converged by the POCS algorithm in order to select the optimal cluster including the query image. By introducing the above two approaches into the POCS algorithm, the unknown semantic features of the query image are successfully estimated from its known visual features. Consequently, similar images can be easily retrieved from the database based on the obtained semantic features. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for semantic image retrieval.   

In this paper we present a clustering-based method for representing semantic concepts on multimodal low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the goodness of such models with entropy-based methods. As different semantic concepts in video are most accurately represented with different feat...

With the advent of the Semantic Web and Semantic Technologies, ontologies have become one of the most prominent paradigms for knowledge representation and reasoning. The popular ontology language OWL, based on description logics, became a W3C recommendation in 2004 and a standard for modelling ontol...

The given work is devoted to development of the computer-aided system of semantic text analysis of a technical specification. The purpose of this work is to increase efficiency of software engineering based on automation of semantic text analysis of a technical specification. In work it is offered...

The logical foundations of processes handling uncertainty in information use some classes of algebras as algebraic semantics. The sets of provable formulas in corresponding inference systems from the point of view of uncertain information can be described by fuzzy filters of those algebraic semantic...

Managing uncertainty and/or vagueness is starting to play an important role in Semantic Web representation languages. Our aim is to overview basic concepts on representing uncertain and vague knowledge in current Semantic Web ontology and rule languages (and their combination).

In order to investigate conflicts between semantics and syntax, we recorded ERPs, while participants read Dutch sentences. Sentences containing conflicts between syntax and semantics (Fred eats in a sandwich…/Fred eats a restaurant…) elicited an N400. These results show that conflicts between syntax...

Semantic Web applications take off is being slower than expected, at least with respect to “real-world” applications and users. One of the main reasons for this lack of adoption is that most Semantic Web user interfaces are still immature from the usability and accessibility points of view. This is ...

Traditionally Semantic Web applications either included a web crawler or relied on external services to gain access to the Web of Data. Recent efforts, have enabled applications to query the entire Semantic Web for up-to-date results. Such approaches are based on either centralized indexing of seman...

In some contexts, well-formed natural language cannot be expected as input to information or communication systems. In these contexts, the use of grammar-independent input (sequences of uninflected semantic units like e.g. language-independent icons) can be an answer to the users' needs. A semantic analysis can be performed, based on lexical semantic knowledge: it is equivalent to a dependency analysis with no syntactic or morphological clues. However, this requires that an intelligent system should be able to interpret this input with reasonable accuracy and in reasonable time. Here we propose a method allowing a purely semantic-based analysis of sequences of semantic units. It uses an algorithm inspired by the idea of ``chart parsing'' known in Natural Language Processing, which stores intermediate parsing results in order to bring the calculation time down. In comparison with using declarative logic programming - where the calculation time, left to a prolog engine, is hyperexponential -, this method brings...

Declarative memory is usually described as consisting of two systems: semantic and episodic memory. Between these two poles, however, may lie a third entity: personal semantics (PS). PS concerns knowledge of one's past. Although typically assumed to be an aspect of semantic memory, it is essentially absent from existing models of knowledge. Furthermore, like episodic memory (EM), PS is idiosyncratically personal (i.e., not culturally-shared). We show that, depending on how it is operationalized, the neural correlates of PS can look more similar to semantic memory, more similar to EM, or dissimilar to both. We consider three different perspectives to better integrate PS into existing models of declarative memory and suggest experimental strategies for disentangling PS from semantic and epis...

Semantic web services (SWS) are self-contained, self-describing, semantically marked-up software resources that can be published, discovered, composed and executed across the Web in a semi-automatic way. They are a key component of the future Semantic Web, in which networked computer programs become providers and users of information at the same time. This work focuses on developing a full-life-cycle software toolset for creating and maintaining Semantic Web Services (SWSs) based on the Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) framework. A main part of WSMO-based SWS is service capability - a declarative description of Web service functionality. A formal syntax and semantics for such a description is provided by Web Service Modeling Language (WSML), which is based on different logical formalisms, namely, Description Logics, First-Order Logic and Logic Programming. A WSML description of a Web service capability is represented as a set of complex logical expressions (axioms). We develop a specialized user-friendly...

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously noted that the formation of semantic representations requires more than a simple combination of verbal and nonverbal features to generate conceptually based similarities and differences. Classical and contemporary neuroscience has tended to focus upon how different neocortical regions contribute to conceptualization through the summation of modality-specific information. The additional yet critical step of computing coherent concepts has received little attention. Some computational models of semantic memory are able to generate such concepts by the addition of modality-invariant information coded in a multidimensional semantic space. By studying patients with semantic dementia, we demonstrate that this aspect of semantic memory becomes compromised following atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes and, as a result, the patients become increasingly influenced by superficial rather than conceptual similarities. PMID:20133780

Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented using Extensible Mark up Language (XML) technologies. Shared semantic models typically evolve and require maintenance. In addition, to promote interoperability and reduce integration costs, the shared semantics should be reused as much as possible. Semantic components must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this paper, we describe an activity model for creation, use, and maintenance of a shared semantic model that is coherent and supports efficient enterprise integration. We then use this activity model to frame our research and the development of tools to support those activities. We provide overviews of these tools primarily in the context of the W3C XML Schema. At the present, we focus our work on the W3C XML Schema as the representation of choice, due to its extensive adoption by industry.

Importance of document clustering is now widely acknowledged by researchers for better management, smart navigation, efficient filtering, and concise summarization of large collection of documents like World Wide Web (WWW). The next challenge lies in semantically performing clustering based on the semantic contents of the document. The problem of document clustering has two main components: (1) to represent the document in such a form that inherently captures semantics of the text. This may also help to reduce dimensionality of the document, and (2) to define a similarity measure based on the semantic representation such that it assigns higher numerical values to document pairs which have higher semantic relationship. Feature space of the documents can be very challenging for document clustering. A document may contain multiple topics, it may contain a large set of class-independent general-words, and a handful class-specific core-words. With these features in mind, traditional agglomerative clustering algori...

Abstract Building on abstract reference models, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has established standards for storing, discovering, and processing geographical information. These standards act as a basis for the implementation of specific services and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Research on geo-semantics plays an increasing role to support complex queries and retrieval across heterogeneous information sources, as well as for service orchestration, semantic translation, and on-the-fly integration. So far, this research targets individual solutions or focuses on the Semantic Web, leaving the integration into SDI aside. What is missing is a shared and transparent Semantic Enablement Layer for SDI which also integrates reasoning services known from the Semantic Web. Instead of dev...

A number of recent authors (Galles and Pearl, Found Sci 3 (1):151?182, 1998; Hiddleston, No?s 39 (4):232?257, 2005; Halpern, J Artif Intell Res 12:317?337, 2000) advocate a causal modeling semantics for counterfactuals. But the precise logical significance of the causal modeling semantics remains murky. Particularly important, yet particularly under-explored, is its relationship to the similarity-based semantics for counterfactuals developed by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Harvard University Press, 1973b). The causal modeling semantics is both an account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals, and an account of which inferences involving counterfactuals are valid. As an account of truth conditions, it is incomplete. While Lewis?s similarity semantics lets us evaluate counterfactuals with ar...

There are many applications in which integrity constraints can play an important role. An example is the semantic query optimization method developed by Chakravarthy, Grant, and Minker for definite deductive databases. They use integrity constraints during query processing to prevent the exploration of search space that is bound to fail. In this paper, the authors generalize the semantic query optimization method to apply to negated atoms. The generalized method is referred to as semantic compilation. They show that semantic compilation provides an alternative search space for negative query literals. They also show how semantic compilation can be used to transform a disjunctive database with or without functions and denial constraints without negation into a new disjunctive database that complies with the integrity constraints.

In this article we present a neural network model of sentence generation. The network has both technical and conceptual innovations. Its main technical novelty is in its semantic representations: the messages which form the input to the network are structured as sequences, so that message elements are delivered to the network one at a time. Rather than learning to linearise a static semantic representation as a sequence of words, our network rehearses a sequence of semantic signals, and learns to generate words from selected signals. Conceptually, the network's use of rehearsed sequences of semantic signals is motivated by work in embodied cognition, which posits that the structure of semantic representations has its origin in the serial structure of sensorimotor processing. The rich seque...

Starting from the standard call-by-need reduction for the ?-calculus that is common to Ariola, Felleisen, Maraist, Odersky, and Wadler, we inter-derive a series of hygienic semantic artifacts: a reduction-free storeless abstract machine, a continuation-passing evaluation function, and what appears to be the first heapless natural semantics for call-by-need evaluation. Furthermore we observe that the evaluation function implementing this natural semantics is in defunctionalized form. The refunctionalized counterpart of this evaluation function implements an extended direct semantics in the sense of Cartwright and Felleisen. Overall, the semantic artifacts presented here are simpler than many other such artifacts that have been independently worked out, and which require ingenuity, skill, and independent soundness proofs on a case-by-case basis. They are also simpler to inter-derive because the inter-derivational tools (e.g., refocusing and defunctionalization) already exist.

In this paper we analyze declarative deterministic and non-deterministic semantics for active rules. In particular we consider several (partial) stable model semantics, previously defined for deductive rules, such as well-founded, max deterministic, unique total stable model, total stable model, and maximal stable model semantics. The semantics of an active program AP is given by first rewriting it into a deductive program P, then computing a model M defining the declarative semantics of P and, finally, applying `consistent' updates contained in M to the source database. The framework we propose permits a natural integration of deductive and active rules and can also be applied to queries with function symbols or to queries over infinite databases.

Work towards creation of a knowledge sharing system for sustainability science through the application of semantic data modeling is described. An ontology grounded in description logics was developed based on the ISO 15926 data model to describe three types of sustainability science conceptualizations: situational knowledge, analytic methods, and scenario frameworks. Semantic statements were then created using this ontology to describe expert knowledge expressed in research proposals and papers related to sustainability science and in scenarios for achieving sustainable societies. Semantic matching based on logic and rule-based inference was used to quantify the conceptual overlap of semantic statements, which shows the semantic similarity of topics studied by different researchers in sustainability science, similarities that might be unknown to the researchers themselves.   

In quantum computational logics meanings of formulas are identified with quantum information quantities: systems of qubits or, more generally, mixtures of systems of qubits. We consider two kinds of quantum computational semantics: (1) a compositional semantics, where the meaning of a compound formula is determined by the meanings of its parts; (2) a holistic semantics, which makes essential use of the characteristic “holistic” features of the quantum-theoretic formalism. The compositional and the holistic semantics turn out to characterize the same logic. In this framework, one can introduce the notion of quantum-classical truth table, which corresponds to the most natural way for a quantum computer to calculate classical tautologies. Quantum computational logics can be applied to investigate different kinds of semantic phenomena where holistic, contextual and gestaltic patterns play an essential role (from natural languages to musical compositions).

Japanese two-kanji compound words (Jukugo: e.g., ?? “hospital”) have two sets of neighbors: Rear-neighbors that share the same front-kanji and vary in the rear-kanji, and Front-neighbors that share the same rear-kanji and vary in the front-kanji of the Jukugo. We investigated the role of semantic activation of word neighbors in Japanese kanji word recognition. The effects of neighborhood frequency for Rear-neighbors and Front-neighbors (Experiment 1) and semantic similarity between a Jukugo and its Rear-neighbor (Experiment 2) were examined using the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, when a Jukugo and its neighbors were semantically similar, Rear-neighbors of higher frequency produced longer reaction times, whereas Front-neighbors of higher frequency produced shorter reaction times. In Experiment 2, semantic similarity between a Jukugo and its neighbor of higher frequency produced longer reaction times, although no delay was observed for semantically dissimilar Jukugo and neighbors. The results are interpreted within the companion-activation model.   

Semantic knowledge refers to the information that people have about categories of objects and living things. Social psychologists have long debated whether the information that perceivers have about categories of people-i.e. stereotypes-may be a unique form of semantics. Here, we examine this question against well-established findings regarding the neural basis of semantics, which suggest that two brain regions-left inferior frontal gyrus and inferotemporal cortex-are critical for general semantic knowledge. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants answered questions about their knowledge of both non-social and social categories. We reasoned that if stereotypes are a typical form of semantic knowledge, then these same regions should subserve the activation and retrieval o...

Semantic knowledge can be a great asset to natural language processing systems, but it is usually hand-coded for each application. Although some semantic information is available in general-purpose knowledge bases such as WordNet and Cyc, many applications require domain-specific lexicons that represent words and categories for a particular topic. In this paper, we present a corpus-based method that can be used to build semantic lexicons for specific categories. The input to the system is a small set of seed words for a category and a representative text corpus. The output is a ranked list of words that are associated with the category. A user then reviews the top-ranked words and decides which ones should be entered in the semantic lexicon. In experiments with five categories, users typically found about 60 words per category in 10-15 minutes to build a core semantic lexicon.

BACKGROUND: The semantic integration of biomedical resources is still a challenging issue which is required for effective information processing and data analysis. The availability of comprehensive knowledge resources such as biomedical ontologies and integrated thesauri greatly facilitates this integration effort by means of semantic annotation, which allows disparate data formats and contents to be expressed under a common semantic space. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional representation for such a semantic space, where dimensions regard the different perspectives in biomedical research (e.g., population, disease, anatomy and protein/genes). RESULTS: This paper presents a novel method for building multidimensional semantic spaces from semantically annotated biomedical data collections. This method consists of two main processes: knowledge and data normalization. The former one arranges the concepts provided by a reference knowledge resource (e.g., biomedical ontologies and thesauri) into a set of hierarchical dimensions for analysis purposes. The latter one reduces the annotation set associated to each collection item into a set of points of the multidimensional space. Additionally, we have developed a visual tool, called 3D-Browser, which implements OLAP-like operators over the generated multidimensional space. The method and the tool have been tested and evaluated in the context of the Health-e-Child (HeC) project. Automatic semantic annotation was applied to tag three collections of abstracts taken from PubMed, one for each target disease of the project, the Uniprot database, and the HeC patient record database. We adopted the UMLS Meta-thesaurus 2010AA as the reference knowledge resource. CONCLUSIONS: Current knowledge resources and semantic-aware technology make possible the integration of biomedical resources. Such an integration is performed through semantic annotation of the intended biomedical data resources. This paper shows how these annotations can be exploited for integration, exploration, and analysis tasks. Results over a real scenario demonstrate the viability and usefulness of the approach, as well as the quality of the generated multidimensional semantic spaces. PMID:22373409

Neuroimaging tests of sensorimotor theories of semantic memory hinge on the extent to which similar activation patterns are observed during perception and retrieval of objects or object properties. The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that some of the seeming discrepancies across studies reflect flexibility in the systems responsible for conceptual and perceptual processing of color. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that retrieval of color knowledge can be influenced by both context (a task variable) and individual differences in cognitive style (a subject variable). In Experiment 1, we provide fMRI evidence for differential activity during color knowledge retrieval by having subjects perform a verbal task, in which context encouraged subjects to retrieve more- or less-detailed information about the colors of named common objects in a blocked experimental design. In the left fusiform, we found more activity during retrieval of more- versus less-detailed color knowledge. We also assessed preference for verbal or visual cognitive style, finding that brain activity in the left lingual gyrus significantly correlated with preference for a visual cognitive style. We replicated many of these effects in Experiment 2, in which stimuli were presented more quickly, in a random order, and in the auditory modality. This illustration of some of the factors that can influence color knowledge retrieval leads to the conclusion that tests of conceptual and perceptual overlap must consider variation in both of these processes.

The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical 'pseudo-utterances' were presented to listener groups with and without PD in two separate rating tasks. Task I required participants to rate how confident a speaker sounded from their voice and Task 2 required listeners to rate how polite the speaker sounded for a comparable set of pseudo-utterances. The results showed that PD patients were significantly less able than HC participants to use prosodic cues to differentiate intended levels of speaker confidence in speech, although the patients could accurately detect the politelimpolite attitude of the speaker from prosody in most cases. Our data suggest that many PD patients fail to use vocal cues to effectively infer a speaker's emotions as well as certain attitudes in speech such as confidence, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in the meaningful processing of prosodic sequences in spoken language (Pell & Leonard, 2003). PMID:19824175

Abstract in spanish El trabajo analiza cómo la escolarización produjo mecanismos de diferenciación de los educandos y una semántica para referirse a las formas de desigualdad interna generadas en función de los diversos recorridos escolares. Se adopta una perspectiva de análisis histórico centrada en las trayectorias conceptuales de las categorías: retraso escolar, repetición, reprobación y deserción entre la década del veinte, con el Informe de Torres Quintero, y la década del (more) sesenta, con el Plan de Once Años. Se muestra el desenvolvimiento de estas categorías en ese periodo y se sostiene que, en tanto práctica de gobernación, el Plan de Once Años sistematizó formas de entender y modelar las trayectorias de los educandos así como de regular y administrar la escolarización que perduraron en las décadas siguientes. Abstract in english This article analyzes the ways schooling produced mechanisms of student differentiation and semantics to refer to forms of internal inequality generated as a function of diverse school trajectories. A perspective of historical analysis is adopted to center on conceptual categories: achievement gap, grade repetition, academic failure, and student attrition, from the 1920s, with the Torres Quintero Report, to the 1960s, with the Eleven Year Plan. The categories' development (more) during the period is shown, and the statement is made that as a governance practice, the Eleven Year Plan systematized ways of understanding and modeling students' trajectories, as well as regulating and managing the schooling of the following decades.

This is the first empirical study that focused on attitudes towards two varieties of Tamil, Literary Tamil (LT) and Standard Spoken Tamil (SST), with the multilingual state of Singapore as the backdrop. The attitudes of 46 Singapore Tamil teachers towards speakers of LT and SST were investigated using the matched-guise approach along with four-point semantic differential attitude scales. The scales formed three dimensions--status, solidarity and social attractiveness; and three additional distinct traits--love for language, suitability for Tamil teaching and suitability for media presentation. The teachers' perceptions of LT and SST guises of two out of three speakers were found predominantly comparable for all attitude dimensions (status, solidarity, and social attractiveness) and two discrete attitude items (love for language and suitability for Tamil teaching). Two speakers were rated lower when using SST than when using LT in terms of perceived suitability for media presentation. Tamil teachers' attitudes were influenced by the pitch and pitch variation of the speakers' voice. Differences in teachers' perceptions of SST and LT guises were detected primarily only for the speaker whose voice has the highest pitch and highest pitch variation. The same speaker was rated highest in all measures given above.

Semantic differential instruments are often used to assess fluent speakers' attitudes toward people who stutter (PWS). Such instruments are prone to response bias and often lack the power to explain respondents' general impressions of PWS. To address these concerns 149 fluent university students completed an open-ended questionnaire in which they described PWS and provided an explanation for their descriptions. A mixed model design with a qualitative emphasis allowed for thematic as well as quantitative data analysis. The results suggest that individuals may have simultaneously positive and negative attitudes toward PWS regardless of gender or familiarity with PWS. Multiple explanations were provided and took into account personal and societal reactions to stuttering. Fluent speakers appear to perceive PWS as being likeable individuals who are poor communicators, a combination of high-warmth and low-competence that elicits pity and passive harm from listeners according to social psychologists (Cuddy et al., 2008). The implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed. Educational objectives: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) describe issues of concern related to the measurement of attitudes toward PWS; (2) describe how mixed (qualitative and quantitative) designs can contribute to a deeper understanding of fluent speakers' attitudes toward PWS; and (3) discuss how the ways in which fluent speakers' thoughts about stuttering and PWS can influence their emotions and behaviors when in the presence of someone who stutters. (Contains 5 tables.)

Recently enhancing the visual experience of the user has been a new trend for TV displays. This trend comes from the fact that changes of ambient illuminations while viewing a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) significantly affect human impressions. However, psychological effects caused by the combination of displayed video image and ambient illuminations have not been investigated. In the present research, we clarify the relationship between ambient illuminations and psychological effects while viewing video image displayed on the LCD by using a questionnaire based semantic differential (SD) method and a factor analysis method. Six kinds of video images were displayed under different colors and layouts of illumination conditions and rated by 15 observers. According to the analysis, it became clear that the illumination control around the LCD with displayed video image, the feeling of ‘activity’ and ‘evaluating’ were rated higher than the feeling of fluorescent ceiling condition. In particular, simultaneous illumination control around the display and the ceiling enhanced the feeling of ‘activity,’ and ‘evaluating’ with keeping ‘comfort.’ Moreover, the feeling of ‘activity’ under the illumination control around the LCD and the ceiling condition while viewing music video image was rated clearly higher than that with natural scene video image.   

Dealing with the interplay of randomness and continuous time is important for the formal verification of many real systems. Considering both facets is especially important for wireless sensor networks, distributed control applications, and many other systems of growing importance. An important traditional design and verification goal for such systems is to ensure that unsafe states can never be reached. In the stochastic setting, this translates to the question whether the probability to reach unsafe states remains tolerable. In this paper, we consider stochastic hybrid systems where the continuous-time behaviour is given by differential equations, as for usual hybrid systems, but the targets of discrete jumps are chosen by probability distributions. These distributions may be general measures on state sets. Also non-determinism is supported, and the latter is exploited in an abstraction and evaluation method that establishes safe upper bounds on reachability probabilities. To arrive there requires us to solve semantic intricacies as well as practical problems. In particular, we show that measurability of a complete system follows from the measurability of its constituent parts. On the practical side, we enhance tool support to work effectively on such general models. Experimental evidence is provided demonstrating the applicability of our approach on three case studies, tackled using a prototypical implementation.

The effects of the objective physical features of the treatment environment on the well-being of elderly have previously been studied. This type of research continues to contribute to standards of quality for nursing homes, congregate housing, and health-care facilities. However, the perceived qualities of the environment may also be a key element in patient well-being and satisfaction, as well as staff morale. An instrument has been developed to measure these perceptual variables, the Physical Environment Perception Scale (PEP), a 7-point, 48-item semantic differential scale. The PEP asks both patients and staff members to rate the facility based on their perceptions of environmental attributes such as spaciousness, color and lighting, maintenance, organization, style and aesthetics, and mood or affect. The PEP was administered to nine patients and six staff members of an adult day treatment center. Results showed that, overall, patients tended to rate the physical environment more favorably than did staff members. This may represent a genuine difference in perception of the physical environment or expectations, or it may reflect the patients' reluctance to be critical of the program. Staff members may have a greater awareness of environmental problems. Results of the study also indicated a high level of internal consistency for the 48 items. The PEP proved to be feasible to administer to elderly, non-cognitively impaired patients and quick and easy for staff members to complete and return. (ABL)

In Evaluative Conditioning (EC) studies, novel Conditioned Stimuli (CSs) are usually selected so to be neutral. However, in real life, because of the tendency of humans to evaluate novel stimuli automatically, novel CSs are very often initially valenced. From the literature little is known on whether EC can be successful under these conditions. In this contribution we applied a specific EC paradigm, namely self-referencing (SR) task, to new fictitious social groups. We present three studies. The first preliminary study is a pretest for selecting novel CSs. We examined the valence of four fictitious novel groups with both direct (semantic differential) and indirect (IAT) measures. The results showed that one pair was neutral (Lerriani vs. Dattiani) and the other was valenced (Niffiani, CS+ vs. Duppiani, CS-). In the second and third studies, we applied the SR paradigm to the neutral and initially valenced CSs. The results revealed a significant EC effect on both indirect and direct measures, such that the groups associated with the self became more positive and the groups associated with the other became more negative. The effects were found for both neutral and initially valenced groups, therefore showing that neutrality is not a prerequisite for EC effects. If anything, the effects were stronger for the initially valenced groups, especially on the indirect measure. Results are discussed in light of the detection of EC effects for both neutral and initially valenced CSs. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

Children with specific reading impairment may have subtle deficits in speech perception related to difficulties in phonological processing. The aim of this study was to examine brain oscillatory activity related to phonological processing in the context of auditory sentence comprehension using magnetoencephalography to better understand these deficits. Good and poor readers, 16-18 years of age, were tested on speech perception of sentence-terminal incongruent words that were phonologically manipulated to be similar or dissimilar to corresponding congruent target words. Functional coupling between regions was measured using phase-locking values (PLVs). Gamma-band (30-45 Hz) PLV between auditory cortex and superior temporal sulcus in the right hemisphere was differentially modulated in the two groups by the degree of phonological contrast between the congruent and the incongruent target words in the latency range associated with semantic processing. Specifically, the PLV was larger in the phonologically similar than in the phonologically dissimilar condition in the good readers. This pattern was reversed in the poor readers, whose lower PLV in the phonologically similar condition may be indicative of the impaired phonological coding abilities of the group, and consequent vulnerability under perceptually demanding conditions. Overall, the results support the role of gamma oscillations in spoken language processing. PMID:22889887

ABSTRACT: Because schizophrenia is arguably among the most stigmatized health conditions, research assessing correlates of stigma is essential. This study examined factors associated with stigma in predominantly Protestant, low-income, urban African Americans in the Southeastern United States. A survey was distributed to 282 patrons of an inner-city food court/farmers' market. Associations were assessed between two measures of stigma-an adapted version of the Social Distance Scale (SDS) and a Semantic Differential Measure (SDM) of attributes such as dangerousness, dirtiness, and worthlessness-and several key variables addressing sociodemographic characteristics and exposure to/familiarity with mental illnesses. Independent predictors of scores on the two measures were identified using linear regression modeling. Higher stigma (as measured by the SDM) was predicted by a family history of psychiatric treatment, whereas lower stigma (as indicated by the SDS) was predicted by personal psychiatric treatment history and higher annual income. The results suggest special considerations when working with disenfranchised populations, especially family members of individuals with mental illnesses, in treatment settings. PMID:23124176

Two experiments investigated the effects of characteristic features of concept mapping used for prior knowledge activation. Characteristic demands of concept mapping include connecting lines representing the relationships between concepts and labeling these lines, specifying the type of the semantic relationships. In the first experiment, employing a within-subjects design, 20 psychology students completed a label-provided-lines economics mapping task and then a create-and-label-lines meteorology mapping task or vice versa. The analysis of 40 think-aloud protocols indicated more elaboration processes for the label-provided-lines task than for the create-and-label-lines task. On the other hand, the protocols indicated more model-construction and organization processes in the create-and-label-lines task. The second experiment used the same variation but focused on learning outcomes and perceived self-efficacy as dependent measures. Forty-two psychology students were randomly assigned to either a label-provided-lines mapping task or a create-and-label-lines mapping task. Subsequently, both groups completed a learning phase in a hypertext environment and a posttest. Results showed substantial differences in learning outcomes and perceived self-efficacy in favor of the label-provided-lines prior knowledge activation task. The findings are congruent with coherence effects found in text-comprehension research and support the position that concept mapping should not be seen as a unitary method but be differentiated according to the specific tasks to be completed.

Autobiographical memory (AM) is episodic memory for personally experienced events. The brain areas underlying AM retrieval are known to include several prefrontal cortical and medial temporal lobe regions. Sex differences in AM recall have been reported in several behavioral studies, but the functional anatomical correlates underlying such differences remain unclear. This study used fMRI to compare the neural correlates of AM recall between healthy male and female participants (n = 20 per group). AM recall in response to positive, negative, and neutral cue words was compared to a semantic memory task involving the generation of examples from a category using emotionally valenced cues. Behaviorally, females recalled more negative and fewer positive AMs compared with males, while ratings of arousal, vividness, and memory age did not differ significantly between sexes. Males and females also did not differ significantly in their performance on control tasks. Neurophysiologically, females showed increased hemodynamic activity compared to males in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), dorsal anterior insula, and precuneus while recalling specific AMs (all valences combined); increased activity in the DLPFC, transverse temporal gyrus, and precuneus while recalling positive AMs; and increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, amygdala, and temporopolar cortex when recalling negative AMs. When comparing positive to negative AMs directly, males and females differed in their BOLD responses in the hippocampus and DLPFC. We propose that the differential hemodynamic changes may reflect sex-specific cognitive strategies during recall of AMs irrespective of the phenomenological properties of those memories. Hum Brain Mapp, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. PMID:22807028

For those with true near-death experiences (NDEs), Greyson's (1983, 1990) NDE Scale satisfactorily fits the Rasch rating scale model, thus yielding a unidimensional measure with interval-level scaling properties. With increasing intensity, NDEs reflect peace, joy and harmony, followed by insight and mystical or religious experiences, while the most intense NDEs involve an awareness of things occurring in a different place or time. The semantics of this variable are invariant across True-NDErs' gender, current age, age at time of NDE, and latency and intensity of the NDE, thus identifying NDEs as 'core' experiences whose meaning is unaffected by external variables, regardless of variations in NDEs' intensity. Significant qualitative and quantitative differences were observed between True-NDErs and other respondent groups, mostly revolving around the differential emphasis on paranormal/mystical/religious experiences vs. standard reactions to threat. The findings further suggest that False-Positive respondents reinterpret other profound psychological states as NDEs. Accordingly, the Rasch validation of the typology proposed by Greyson (1983) also provides new insights into previous research, including the possibility of embellishment over time (as indicated by the finding of positive, as well as negative, latency effects) and the potential roles of religious affiliation and religiosity (as indicated by the qualitative differences surrounding paranormal/mystical/religious issues). PMID:15142300

With the growing amount of health information and continuous outbreaks of diseases, the retrieval of health information is given more concern. Machine understanding of spatial information can improve the interpretation of health data semantics. Most of the current research focused on the non-spatial semantics of health data, using ontologies and rules. Utilizing the spatial component of health data can assist in the understanding of health phenomena. This research proposes a semantic health information query architecture that allows the incorporation of both non-spatial semantics and geospatial semantics in health information integration and retrieval. Ontologies and rules in this architecture are used to support several functionalities, such as matching the data with the same semantics from various sources and reasoning in the spatial dimension through spatial relations and spatial operations. The geospatial component in the health data is incorporated in this study, and a geospatial-enabled approach has been proposed for semantic health information retrieval. The architecture we proposed applies ontologies, facts, and rules in health information reasoning and deduction from both geospatial and non-spatial dimensions. Ontologies and rules have been explored for the basic representation of health data from various sources in the Semantic Web. We enable the representation of spatial component in the Rule Markup Language (RuleML), and a RuleML engine OO jDREW has been customized to support geospatial semantic query of health information. Spatial relation and operation operators are also enabled in the OO jDREW engine for spatial reasoning and knowledge discovery. This ontology and rule based health information integration and retrieval architecture provides initial exploration on how to utilize both non-spatial and geospatial semantics for health information retrieval and the case studies has demonstrated how the semantic query system works. Our case study on respiratory diseases has demonstrated the use of ontologies and rules to support automatic health information retrieval. Our future work will be on the enrichment of human knowledge as ontologies and rules for health data reasoning and deduction to make semantic query systems ready for real health applications. The development of Semantic Web will further promote the representation of human knowledge as ontologies and rules for effective query of health information.

There is a discrepancy between the brain regions revealed by functional neuroimaging techniques and those brain regions where a loss of function, either by lesion or by electrocortical stimulation, induces language disorders. To differentiate between essential and non-essential language-related processes, we investigated the effects of linguistic control tasks and different analysis methods for functional MRI data. Twelve subjects solved two linguistic generation tasks: (1) a verb generation task and (2) an antonym generation task (each with a linguistic control task on the phonological level) as well as two decision tasks of semantic congruency (each with a cognitive high-level control task). Differential contrasts and conjunction analyses were carried out on the single-subject level and an individual lateralization index (LI) was computed. On the group level we determined the percent signal change in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG: BA 44 and BA 45). The conjunction analysis of multiple language tasks led to significantly greater absolute LIs than the LIs based on the single task versus fixation contrasts. A further significant increase of the magnitude of the LIs could be achieved by using the phonological control conditions. Although the decision tasks appear to be more robust to changes in the statistical threshold, the combined generation tasks had an advantage over the decision tasks both for assessing language dominance and locating Broca's area. These results underline the need for conjunction analysis based on several language tasks to suppress highly task-specific processes. They also point to the need for high-level cognitive control tasks to partial out general, language supporting but not language critical processes. Higher absolute LIs, which reflect unambiguously hemispheric language dominance, can be thus obtained. (Contains 6 figures and 1 table.)

A number of cognitive abnormalities have been identified as putative diagnostic markers in neurodegenerative parkinsonism based on statistically significant differences between diseases. The effect sizes of these differences frequently have not been reported, making practical interpretation of the results difficult. The objective of this study was to assess the potential contribution of cognitive testing to the diagnosis of parkinsonian disorders by quantifying effect size of previously identified significant differentiating cognitive features. A Medline search identified 1038 articles. Nineteen studies directly comparing at least 2 of Parkinson's disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, multiple system atrophy, and corticobasal syndrome/degeneration were selected. Cohen's d and positive likelihood ratio were calculated as appropriate for cognitive tests showing statistically significant differences between diseases. Clinically useful differences were considered present when Cohen's d > 1 or the positive likelihood ratio > 2 and were considered high when Cohen's d > 1.94 or the positive likelihood ratio > 10. Only 16 of 141 cognitive tests were found to be highly useful. Cognitive testing was only moderately helpful in separating Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy. Inferior performance on phonemic (d = 1.56-2.13) and semantic (d = 1.43-2.13) verbal fluency, the Trail-Making Test (d = 1.63-1.95) and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (d = 1.63-2.22) were moderately to very useful in separating progressive supranuclear palsy from Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy. Cognitive testing could not differentiate corticobasal syndrome from other parkinsonian disorders, although sequential orobuccal apraxia was very useful (d = 2.01-2.23). Few of the cognitive tests separating parkinsonian disorders identified from previous studies have sufficient effect size to be practically useful. Even these features must be interpreted in conjunction with other clinical characteristics to be helpful diagnostically. © 2012 Movement Disorder Society. PMID:22890580

With the aim to improve the effectiveness of SAWSDL service discovery, this paper proposes a novel discovery method for SAWSDL services, which is based on the matchmaking of so-called fine-grained data semantics that is defined via sets of atomic elements with built-in data types. The fine-grained data semantics can be obtained by a transformation algorithm that decomposes parameters at message level into a set of atomic elements, considering the characteristics of SAWSDL service structure and semantic annotations. Then, a matchmaking algorithm is proposed for the matching of fine-grained data semantics, which avoids the complex and expensive structural matching at the message level. The fine-grained data semantics is transparent to the specific data structure of message-level parameters, therefore, it can help to match successfully similar Web services with different data structures of parameters. Moreover, a comprehensive measure is proposed by considering together several important components of SAWSDL service descriptions at the same time. Finally, this method is evaluated on SAWSDL service discovery test collection SAWSDL-TC2 and compared with other SAWSDL matchmakers. The experimental results show that our method can improve the effectiveness of SAWSDL service discovery with low average query response time. The results imply that fine-grained parameters fit to represent the data semantics of SAWSDL services, especially when data structures of parameters are not important for semantics.   

This study examined the time course of object naming in 21 individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) (8 agrammatic (PPA-G); 13 logopenic (PPA-L)) and healthy age-matched speakers (n=17) using a semantic interference paradigm with related and unrelated interfering stimuli presented at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of -1000, -500, -100 and 0ms. Results showed semantic interference (SI) (i.e. significantly slower RTs in related compared to unrelated conditions) for all groups at -500, -100 and 0ms, indicating timely spreading activation to semantic competitors. However, both PPA groups showed a greater magnitude of SI than normal across SOAs. The PPA-L group and six PPA-G participants also evinced SI at -1000ms, suggesting an abnormal time course of semantic interference resolution, and concomitant left hemisphere cortical atrophy in brain regions associated with semantic processing. These subtle semantic mapping impairments in non-semantic variants of PPA may contribute to the anomia of these patients. (Contains 7 tables and 4 figures.)

The configurable and extensible semantic eScience framework (SESF) has begun development and implementation of several semantic application components. Extensions and improvements to several ontologies have been made based on distinct interdisciplinary use cases ranging from solar physics, to biologicl and chemical oceanography. Importantly, these semantic representations mediate access to a diverse set of existing and emerging cyberinfrastructure. Among the advances are the population of triple stores with web accessible query services. A triple store is akin to a relational data store where the basic stored unit is a subject-predicate-object tuple. Access via a query is provided by the W3 Recommendation language specification SPARQL. Upon this middle tier of semantic cyberinfrastructure, we have developed several forms of semantic faceted search, including provenance-awareness. We report on the rapid advances in semantic technologies and tools and how we are sustaining the software path for the required technical advances as well as the ontology improvements and increased functionality of the semantic applications including how they are integrated into web-based portals (e.g. Drupal) and web services. Lastly, we indicate future work direction and opportunities for collaboration.

We present 4 experiments investigating dynamic and flexible aspects of semantic activation spread during speech planning. In a semantic blocking paradigm, pictures of objects were presented in categorically homogeneous blocks consisting of semantic category members (e.g., foods), in blocks consisting of seemingly unrelated objects that could potentially be integrated into a common theme (e.g., fishing trip), or in heterogeneous blocks consisting of entirely unrelated objects. In Experiment 1 we observed a classic semantic interference effect for the categorically homogeneous condition but no effect for the thematically homogeneous condition. In Experiment 2 the blocks were preceded once by visually presented title words. When titles were presented that referred to the semantic category or theme of the block, interference was observed not only in the categorically homogeneous condition but also in the thematically homogeneous condition. The ad hoc semantic interference effects for thematic relations were replicated with a different set of materials in Experiments 3 and 4. These observations reveal the dynamic nature of the speech production system, shaped by context and formations of flexible ad hoc categories and semantic relations. (Contains 3 footnotes, 4 tables and 3 figures.)

Abstract in portuguese No paradigma de priming semântico, mede-se a acurácia e velocidade de resposta ao estímulo-alvo, precedido por palavra semanticamente relacionada ou não relacionada (primes). Este trabalho apresenta um estudo pré-experimental de normas de associação semântica de palavras em 156 crianças e um estudo experimental, que avalia o efeito de priming semântico em 24 crianças em uma tarefa de decisão lexical. O experimento mostrou que as decisões lexicais para alvos r (more) eais foram significativamente mais lentas e menos precisas na condição prime não relacionado comparado à condição prime relacionado. Conclui-se que houve efeitos de priming semântico no reconhecimento visual de palavras em crianças, ou seja, o contexto semântico pré-ativou a representação da palavra alvo, facilitando a decisão lexical na condição de relação semântica. Abstract in english In the semantic priming paradigm, accuracy and reaction time to a target-stimulus that is preceded by a prime (semantic related or unrelated to the target) are measured. This paper presents a pre-experimental study on word semantic association norms with 156 children and an experimental study that evaluated the effect of semantic priming in 24 children during a lexical decision task. Results showed that the lexical decisions for real targets were significantly slower and (more) less accurate in the unrelated prime condition than in the related one. It means that there were semantic priming effects in children during visual recognition of words, that is, the semantic context pre-activated the target word representation, facilitating the lexical decision in the semantic related condition.

The right hemisphere's role in language comprehension is supported by results from several neuropsychology and neuroimaging studies. Special interest surrounds right temporoparietal structures, which are thought to be involved in processing novel metaphorical expressions, primarily due to the coarse semantic coding of concepts. In this event related fMRI experiment we aimed at assessing the extent of semantic distance processing in the comprehension of figurative meaning to clarify the role of the right hemisphere. Four categories of German noun noun compound words were presented in a semantic decision task: a) conventional metaphors; b) novel metaphors; c) conventional literal, and; d) novel literal expressions, controlled for length, frequency, imageability, arousal, and emotional valenc...

Emotions can be recognized whether conveyed by facial expressions, linguistic cues (semantics), or prosody (voice tone). However, few studies have empirically documented the extent to which multi-modal emotion perception differs from uni-modal emotion perception. Here, we tested whether emotion recognition is more accurate for multi-modal stimuli by presenting stimuli with different combinations of facial, semantic, and prosodic cues. Participants judged the emotion conveyed by short utterances in six channel conditions. Results indicated that emotion recognition is significantly better in response to multi-modal versus uni-modal stimuli. When stimuli contained only one emotional channel, recognition tended to be higher in the visual modality (i.e., facial expressions, semantic information...

Pervasive computing environments are populated with networked software and hardware resources providing various functionalities that are abstracted, thanks to the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, as services. Within these environments, service discovery enabled by service discovery protocols (SDPs) is a critical functionality for establishing ad hoc associations between service providers and service requesters. Furthermore, the dynamics, the openness and the user-centric vision aimed at by the pervasive computing paradigm call for solutions that enable rich, semantic, context- and QoS-aware service discovery. Although the semantic Web paradigm envisions to achieve such support, current solutions are hardly deployable in the pervasive environment due to the costly underlying semantic...

It is difficult for security experts to generate polymorphic signatures by using traditional string mining and matching techniques. A semantic-aware method is presented to generate a kind of two-level signature that includes both polymorphic semantics and string patterns. It first analyzes the characteristics of polymorphic engines and categorizes the data flows into different clusters and then uses static data flow methods to extract invariable semantic instructions. And then, it combines traditional string methods to generate the signature. In comparison with other methods, experimental results show that it may effectively reduce false positives and false negatives.

Integrity constraints are semantic conditions that a database should satisfy in order to be an appropriate model of external reality. In practice, and for many reasons, a database may not satisfy those integrity constraints, and for that reason it is said to be inconsistent. However, and most likely, a large portion of the database is still semantically correct, in a sense that has to be made precise. After having provided a formal characterization of consistent data in an inconsistent database, the natural problem emerges of extracting that semantically correct data, as query answers. The con

Natural language understanding applications such as interactive planning and face-to-face translation require extensive inferencing. Many of these inferences are based on the meaning of particular open class words. Providing a representation that can support such lexically-based inferences is a primary concern of lexical semantics. The representation language of first order logic has well-understood semantics and a multitude of inferencing systems have been implemented for it. Thus it is a prime candidate to serve as a lexical semantics representation. However, we argue that FOL, although a good starting point, needs to be extended before it can efficiently and concisely support all the lexically-based inferences needed.

This study investigated the effect of semantic inconsistency of roots on morphological processing to explore the development of morphological representations within the mental lexicon. We examined masked priming of Hebrew words of changing semantic transparency at two reading levels. The results revealed a disparity in the performance of fourth graders and seventh graders, suggesting that morphological representations within the mental lexicon of more skilled readers become abstract and depend more on the formal morphological structure of the root rather than its semantic properties. The results suggest a gradual development of generalized morphological representations in the mental lexicon. (Contains 2 tables.)

Resilient readers are characterized by impaired phonological processing despite skilled text comprehension. We investigated orthographic and semantic processing in resilient readers to examine mechanisms of compensation for poor phonological decoding. Performance on phonological (phoneme deletion, pseudoword reading), orthographic (orthographic choice, orthographic analogy), and semantic (semantic priming, homograph resolution) tasks was compared between resilient, poor and proficient readers. Asymmetry of the planum temporale was investigated in order to determine whether atypical readers showed unusual morphology in this language-relevant region. Resilient readers showed deficits on phonological tasks similar to those shown by poor readers. We obtained no evidence that resilient readers ...

Universal Networking Language (UNL) is a declarative formal language that is used to represent semantic data extracted from natural language texts. This paper presents a novel approach to converting Bangla natural language text into UNL using a method known as Predicate Preserving Parser (PPP) technique. PPP performs morphological, syntactic and semantic, and lexical analysis of text synchronously. This analysis produces a semantic-net like structure represented using UNL. We demonstrate how Bangla texts are analyzed following the PPP technique to produce UNL documents which can then be translated into any other suitable natural language facilitating the opportunity to develop a universal language translation method via UNL.

eLearning educative processes are a challenge for educative institutions and education professionals. In an environment in which learning resources are being produced, catalogued and stored using innovative ways, SOLE provides a platform in which exam questions can be produced supported by Web 2.0 tools, catalogued and labeled via semantic web and stored and distributed using eLearning standards. This paper presents, SOLE, a social network of exam questions sharing particularized for Software Engineering domain, based on semantics and built using semantic web and eLearning standards, such as IMS Question and Test Interoperability specification 2.1.

Best practice frameworks focused on the integration of business and IT, such as ITIL, help organizations create and share effective service management. However, guidelines and models are commonly specified using natural language or graphical representations, both lacking the computational semantics needed to enable their automated validation, simulation or execution. This paper presents an ontology approach, which can help service providers add semantics to their service management process models and detect semantic ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions. The proposed ontology draws its knowledge from good practice guidance for ITSM, enabling the current business gap that exists in many IT service providers to be overcome. To do so, service management processes are formalized in ter...

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding schemes and description standards provide enough foundation and structure? The emerging semantic Web 3.0 environment presents new challenges. Ontology, formalizations, semantic annotations, and effective machine processing are of immediate and practical importance. To begin exploring these concepts within the context of archival description, a new semantic archives model is proposed.

We discuss the use of model building for temporal representations. We chose Polish to illustrate our discussion because it has an interesting aspectual system, but the points we wish to make are not language specific. Rather, our goal is to develop theoretical and computational tools for temporal model building tasks in computational semantics. To this end, we present a first-order theory of time and events which is rich enough to capture interesting semantic distinctions, and an algorithm which takes minimal models for first-order theories and systematically attempts to ``perturb'' their temporal component to provide non-minimal, but semantically significant, models.

The Semantic Web represents a vision for how to make the huge amount of information on the Web automatically processable by machines on a large scale. For this purpose, a whole suite of standards, technologies and related tools have been specified and developed over the last couple of years, and they have now become the foundation for numerous new applications. A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web helps the reader to learn the core standards, key components, and underlying concepts. It provides in-depth coverage of both the what-is and how-to aspects of the Semantic Web. From Yu's presentat

Understanding and using the data and knowledge encoded in semantic web documents requires an inference engine. F-OWL is an inference engine for the semantic web language OWL language based on F-logic, an approach to defining frame-based systems in logic. F-OWL is implemented using XSB and Flora-2 and takes full advantage of their features. We describe how F-OWL computes ontology entailment and compare it with other description logic based approaches. We also describe TAGA, a trading agent environment that we have used as a test bed for F-OWL and to explore how multiagent systems can use semantic web concepts and technology.

The speech signal is inherently ambiguous and all computational and behavioral research on speech perception has implicitly or explicitly investigated the mechanism of resolution of this ambiguity. It is clear that context and prior probability (i.e., frequency) play central roles in resolving ambiguities between possible speech sounds and spoken words (speech perception) as well as between meanings and senses of a word (semantic ambiguity resolution). However, the mechanisms of these effects are still under debate. Recent advances in understanding context and frequency effects in speech perception suggest promising approaches to investigating semantic ambiguity resolution. This review begins by motivating the use of insights from speech perception to understand the mechanisms of semantic ...

Reusing and integrating Business Components in a new Information System requires detection and resolution of semantic conflicts. Moreover, most of integration and semantic conflict resolution systems rely on ontology alignment methods based on domain ontology. This work is positioned at the intersection of two research areas: Integration of reusable B C and alignment of ontologies for semantic conflict resolution. Our contribution concerns both the proposal of a BC integration solution based on ontologies alignment and a method for enriching the domain ontology used as a support for alignment

Domain ontologies facilitate the organization, sharing and reuse of domain knowledge, and enable various vertical domain applications to operate successfully. Most methods for automatically constructing ontologies focus on taxonomic relations, such as is-kind-of and is-part-of relations. However, much of the domain-specific semantics is ignored. This work proposes a semi-unsupervised approach for extracting semantic relations from domain-specific text documents. The approach effectively utilizes text mining and existing taxonomic relations in domain ontologies to discover candidate keywords that can represent semantic relations. A preliminary experiment on the natural science domain (Taiwan K9 education) indicates that the proposed method yields valuable recommendations. This work enriches...

There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment, a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds. Significant interactions between constituent-frequencies, headedness and semantic transparency emerged, indicating facilitatory frequency effects for transparent and head-final compounds, thus highlighting the importance of the semantic and structural properties of the compounds in lexical access. In a second experiment, converging evidence was sought in an eye-tracking study. The compounds were embedded into sentence contexts, and fixation durations were measured. The results did in fact confirm the effect observed in the first experiment. The results are consistent with a multi-route model of compound processing, but also indicate the importance of a semantic route dedicated to the conceptual combination of constituent meanings. (Contains 10 tables and 7 figures.)

This article describes the formal verification of a compilation algorithm that transforms parallel moves (parallel assignments between variables) into a semantically-equivalent sequence of elementary moves. Two different specifications of the algorithm are given: an inductive specification and a fun...

Analogies between quantum mechanics and sociology lead to the hypothesis that quantum objects are complex products of evolution. Like biological objects they are able to receive, to work on, and to spread semantic information.

This article presents methods of using visual analysis to visually represent large amounts of massive, dynamic, ambiguous data allocated in a repository of learning objects. These methods are based on the semantic representation of these resources. We use a graphical model represented as a semantic graph. The formalization of the semantic graph has been intuitively built to solve a real problem which is browsing and searching for lectures in a vast repository of colleges/courses located at Western Kentucky University ( External Reference Not Shown ). This study combines Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) with Semantic Factoring to decompose complex, vast concepts into their primitives in order to develop knowledge representation for the HyperManyMedia [we proposed this term to refer to any educ...

This paper criticizes Soames?s main argument against a variant of two-dimensionalism that he calls strong two-dimensionalism. The idea of Soames?s argument is to show that the strong two-dimensionalist?s semantics for belief ascriptions delivers wrong semantic verdicts about certain complex modal sentences that contain both such ascriptions and claims about the truth of the ascribed beliefs. A closer look at the formal semantics underlying strong two-dimensionalism reveals that there are two feasible ways of specifying the truth conditions for claims of the latter sort. Only one of the two yields the problematic semantic verdicts, so strong two-dimensionalists can avoid Soames?s argument by settling for the other way.

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word pairs that were semantically related were judged more quickly when the form of the ASL translation was also similar whereas word pairs that were semantically unrelated were judged more slowly when the form of the ASL translation was similar. A control group of hearing bilinguals without any knowledge of ASL produced an entirely different pattern of results. Taken together, these results constitute the first demonstration that deaf readers activat...

both the relational model utilizing SQL queries and the object oriented, semantic ... mismatch problem and take advantage of these two popular database models, commercial .... table at the specified time the guess was made. By comparison ...

This article presents a methodological approach for the semantic description of patrimony buildings based both on theoretical reflections and on research experiences. To develop this approach, a first process of extraction and formalisation of architectural knowle...

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a neurodegenerative disorder which presents with either behavioral or language impairment. The two language syndromes are known as progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) and semantic dementia (SEMD). While cross-sectional imaging patterns of brain atrophy ar...

In this paper, we propose a mapping from low level feature space to the semantic space drawn by the users through relevance feedback to enhance the performance of current content based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. The proposed approach makes a rule base for its inference and configures it using the feedbacks gathered from users during the life cycle of the system. Each rule makes a hypercube (HC) in the feature space corresponding to a semantic concept in the semantic space. Both short and long term strategies are taken to improve the accuracy of the system in response to each feedback of the user and gradually bridge the semantic gap. A scoring paradigm is designed to determine the effective rules and suppress the inefficient ones. For improving the response time, an HC merging approac...

In this paper we describe a framework for exploiting the semantics of Web services through UDDI registries. As a part of this framework, we extend the DAML-S upper ontology to describe the functionality we find essential for e-businesses. This functionality includes relating the services with electronic catalogs, describing the complementary services and finding services according to the properties of products or services. Once the semantics is defined, there is a need for a mechanism in the service registry to relate it with the service advertised. The ontology model developed is general enough to be used with any service registry. However when it comes to relating the semantics with services advertised, the capabilities provided by the registry effects how this is achieved. We demonstrate how to integrate the described service semantics to UDDI registries.