Semantic Mapping

Traditional and modern vocabulary instruction techniques have been introduced in the past few decades to improve the learners’ performance in reading comprehension. Semantic mapping, which entails drawing learners’ attention to the interrelationships among lexical items through graphic organizers, is claimed to enhance vocabulary learning significantly. However, whether this technique suits all types of learners has not been adequately investigated. This study examines the effectiveness of employing semantic mapping in vocabulary instruction to EFL learners with different perceptual modalities. A modified version of Reid’s (1987) perceptual learning style questionnaire was used to determine the learners’ modality types. The results indicate that semantic mapping in comparison with commonplace approaches significantly enhanced EFL learners’ vocabulary achievement. Although visual learners slightly outperformed other types of learners on the posttest, no significant differences were o...

The complex requirements of software systems justify the use of the best existing techniques to guar- antee the quality of speciflcations and to preserve this quality during the programming,phase of a software life-cycle. On the one hand, visual speciflcation lan- guages (such as UML) have been widely used for spec- ifying, visualizing, understanding and documenting software systems, but they

The geospatial domain is influenced by the Web developments; consequently, an increasing number of geospatial web services become available through Internet. A rich description of geospatial web services is required to resolve semantic heterogeneity and achieve semantic interoperability of geospatial web services. However, existing geospatial web services descriptions and semantic mapping approaches employed to reconcile them are not always rich

Whether it is based on philological data or on reconstruction, historical linguistics formulates etymological hypotheses that entail changes both in form and in meaning. Semantic change can be understood as a change in "patterns of lexification", i. e., correspondences between forms and senses. Thus a polysemous word, which once lexified senses s1-s2-s3, evolves so it later encodes s2-s3-s4. Meanings that used to be colexified are now dislexified, and vice versa. Leaning on empirical data from Romance and from Oceanic, this study outlines a general model of historical lexicology, and identifies five types of structural innovations in the lexicon: split, merger, competition, shift, and relexification. The theoretical discussion is made easier by using a visual approach to structural change, in the form of diachronic maps. Semantic maps have already proven useful to represent synchronic patterns of lexification, outlining each language's emic categories against a grid of etic senses. The same principle can be profitably used when analysing lexification patterns in diachrony: lexical change is then viewed as the reconfiguration of sense clusters in a semantic space. Maps help us visualize the "lexical tectonics" at play as words evolve over time, gradually shifting their meaning, gaining or losing semantic territory, colliding with each other, or disappearing forever.  ___________________ 
François, Alexandre. 2022. Lexical tectonics: Mapping structural change in patterns of lexification. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41/1: 89‒123.

В представленной статье рассматриваются случаи выражения определённо- сти русскими неопределёнными местоимениями. В работе анализируются как традици- онно выделяемые местоименные серии, так и так называемые составные местоимения (невесть кто, сколько положено и т. п.). Показываются и анализируются основные типы контекстов, в которых наблюдается описываемое явление. С помощью инструментов метода семантического картирования выдвигается предположение о причинах того, что такие значения возможны лишь для некоторых местоимений разряда.

The article deals with the notion of definiteness expressed by Russian indefinite pronouns. It focuses on traditional groups of pronouns as well as so-called “compound pronouns” (nevest ́ kto, skol ́ko polozheno, etc). In addition, the basic types of context in which the phenomenon in question occurs are presented and analyzed. Using the instruments of semantic mapping, the author makes an assumption regarding the reasons why these types of meaning can only be conveyed by a limited number of indefinite pronouns.

Nursing students at King Saud University (KSU) are considered to be low achieving readers. They face difficulties with understanding medical texts due to the fact that they lack some necessary medical vocabulary knowledge. Thus, the researcher used computer-assisted semantic mapping (CASM) with level-three (114 NAJM) nursing students to map medical terms for the purpose of helping such students in vocabulary acquisition. The present study, therefore, aimed at investigating the efficiency of CASM in improving ESP students' vocabulary knowledge. Participating subjects were of two groups: Group A (n = 32) and Group B (n = 26). The control group (n = 26) received traditional in-class instruction that depends on the textbook only and the experimental group (n = 32) received a combination of traditional in-class instruction and SM instruction using a software (FreeMind 0.8.1). A pre-and post-test were utilized to assess student vocabulary skills before and after the intervention. The semantic-mapping treatment lasted 8 weeks. Results showed that SM expanded student vocabulary. Introduction The process of reading goes beyond simply decoding words on a page. It involves understanding the meaning of individual words and combining their meanings to reach an understanding of a reading text. Thus, knowledge of vocabulary items can aid in reading comprehension. Researchers such as Brown, Waring, Donkaewbua (2008), Waring and Takaki (2003) and Horst (2005) state that there is a strong relationship between students' word knowledge and reading comprehension. People with large vocabulary understand more of a text. As suggested by Davis (1942, 1944), reading, as a skill, is built on a number of sub-skills. He mentions that two of the components, word knowledge and reasoning in reading, account for 89% of students' achievement.

Hébert et Trudel (2011) ont conçu une base de données regroupant toutes les œuvres de Magrittes indexées dans Sylvester et al. (1992-1997), qu'ils ont ensuite analysé suivant un protocole sémiotique rigoureux (Trudel et Hébert, 2011) conçu pour cette occasion. Cette analyse a produit un péritexte de descripteurs associés aux tableaux, que nous avons tenté d’évaluer dans le contexte de l’analyse conceptuelle assistée par ordinateur. L'application de techniques de la méthode LACTAO (Lecture et Analyse Conceptuelle de Texte Assistée par Ordinateur) a permis de trouver jusqu'à 6 classes stables de tableau à partir du péritexte, parmi lesquelles 4 expriment clairement des thèmes particuliers (la mer, l'arbre, le corps nu de la femme et le visage) qui sont situables dans le temps. Enfin, nous avons fait l'analyse du descripteur-concept « femme », ce qui a confirmé la polarisation visage / corps nu, a fait ressortir l'utilisation quasi-exclusive de termes suggérant la violence (blessure, mutilation) sur des corps de femmes, de même que le contraste entre la nudité des corps de femmes et le caractère « très habillé » des représentations d'hommes. Nous en concluons donc que si le système gagnerait à être amélioré et si le protocole, le péritexte lui-même est prometteur, surtout pour l'extraction et représentation de thèmes et pour l'analyse conceptuelle.

In this paper I examine the multifunctional enclitic =go in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Avar. By means of a semantic map I show that its central function is the expression of emphasis and/or contrast. Other uses are the expression of identity, scalar additivity, reflexivity (including local and long-distance reflexives, emphatic reflexive uses), the marking of indefinite pronouns and adverbs, and the derivation of cardinal numerals and converbs. The paper also advances a hypothesis about the origin of =go and argues that it goes back to the copula -ugo. The use of the copula in cleft constructions gave rise to the emphatic/contrastive function, and all other uses can be viewed as extension of this function.

This study represents the first typological investigation of additive and scalar additive markers that correspond to Engl. too, also, as well, and even. It is cross-linguistically common for additives to fulfill a wide range of functions including, among others, (scalar) additivity, the marking of concessive clauses, indefinite pronouns, association with contrastive topics, and constituent coordination. Based on data from 42 languages from all over the world this paper proposes a list of functions that are commonly expressed by additives and provides explanations for how and why these functions relate to each other. The distribution of these functions and their connections are then interpreted by means of categorical and distance-based semantic maps.

В статье описывается применение метода семантического картирования для описания местоименного компонента значения составных местоимений русского языка: единиц типа «кто угодно», «какой бы то ни было», которые можно отнести к разряду неопределенных местоимений. C одной стороны, показываются преимущества использования метода для описания значения составных местоимений, а с другой стороны, приводятся примеры семантических карт, нарушающих принцип смежности (adjacency requirement) и подвергающих сомнению объяснительную силу метода.

The article depicts the use of a semantic mapping method for the description of the pronoun component of meaning in the compound pronouns of the Russian language: such units as «кто угодно» / “anyone”, «какой бы то ни было» / “any whatsoever” that can be classified as indefinite pronouns. On the one hand, the advantages of using the method for the description of compound pronouns meaning are shown, and on the other hand, the examples of semantic maps that violate the adjacency requirement and question the explanatory power of the method are given.

We propose a speech comprehension software architecture to represent the flow of the natural processing of auditory sentences. The computational implementation applies wavelets transforms to speech signal codification and data prosodic extraction, and connectionist models to syntactic parsing and prosodic-semantic mapping.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of two types of semantic mapping strategies (teacher-student interactive semantic mapping strategy and teacher-initiated semantic mapping strategy) on reading comprehension of Iranian intermediate EFL students. The participants of this study were 144 female students at Qazvin Kish-Mehr Language Institute. The instruments used in this study were a Nelson test and a teacher-made reading comprehension test. The latter was utilized in this study at pre-test and post-test phases. The materials consisted of four reading passages. Having established the homogeneity of the students in terms of general language proficiency, 90 students were selected and divided into three groups: one comparison and two experimental groups. During the four instructional sessions, one experimental group received teacher-student interactive semantic mapping strategy instruction, while the other experimental group received teacher-initiated semantic mapping strategy instruction. In the comparison group, however, students were not instructed to use any semantic mapping strategy. Rather, they were instructed to read intensively. At the end of the experiment, the post-test was administered to all groups in the study. In order to carry out the statistical analyses of the study the following techniques were used. To ensure the homogeneity of the groups, a one way ANOVA was used. To investigate the effects of the strategies, another one way ANOVA was run. The results indicated that semantic mapping has a significant impact on the improvement of reading comprehension ability of Iranian intermediate EFL students. The findings of this study may encourage syllabus designers and textbook writers to embody sections related to semantic maps into the materials they develop.

The paper discusses the use of computer interactive visualisations to develop a system that allowsthe sharing of a concept space for information discovering. The proposed system presents a 3Dinteractive visualisation using direct manipulation techniques to support a shared construct basedin a structured description of a concept space as an extension of a semantic map. The system design is briefly presented and lessons learned from prototype development arediscussed in order to report requirements that could be used to change ...

In this paper we present pddl+, a planning domain description language for modelling mixed discrete-continuous planning domains. We describe the syntax and modelling style of pddl+, showing that the language makes convenient the modelling of complex time-dependent effects. We provide a formal semantics for pddl+ by mapping planning instances into constructs of hybrid automata. Using the syntax of HAs as our semantic model we construct a semantic mapping to labelled transition systems to complete the formal interpretation of pddl+ planning instances. An advantage of building a mapping from pddl+ to HA theory is that it forms a bridge between the Planning and Real Time Systems research communities. One consequence is that we can expect to make use of some of the theoretical properties of HAs. For example, for a restricted class of HAs the Reachability problem (which is equivalent to Plan Existence) is decidable. pddl+ provides an alternative to the continuous durative action model of pddl2.1, adding a more flexible and robust model of time-dependent behaviour.

This paper presents a three-step approach to enhance interoperability between heterogeneous semantic resources. Firstly, we construct homogeneous representations of these resources in a pivot format, namely OWL DL, with respect to the semantics expressed by the original representation languages. Secondly, mappings are established between concepts of these standardised resources and stored in a so-called articulation ontology. Thirdly, an approach for ranking those mappings
is suggested in order to best fit users’ needs. This approach is currently being implemented in the Semantic Resources “Interoperabilisation” and Linking System (SRILS). The mapping results as well as the work to be done are discussed.

Consider a mobile robot exploring an initially unknown school building and assume that it has already discovered some classrooms, offices, and bathrooms. What can the robot infer about the presence and the locations of other classrooms and offices in the school building? This thesis makes a step toward providing an answer to the above question by proposing a system based on a generative model that is able to represent the topological structures and the semantic labeling schemas of buildings and to predict the structure and the schema for the unexplored portions of these environments. Buildings are  represented as undirected graphs, whose nodes are labeled with names of rooms and edges are physical connections between them. Given an initial knowledge base of graphs, the proposed approach, relying on a spectral analysis of these graphs, segments each graph for finding significant subgraphs, which are then clustered according to their similarity. A graph representing a new building or an unvisited part of a building is eventually generated by sampling subgraphs from clusters and connecting them.

Background Because of the increasing number of electronic resources, designing efficient tools to retrieve and exploit them is a major challenge. Some improvements have been offered by semantic Web technologies and applications based on domain ontologies. In life science, for instance, the Gene Ontology is widely exploited in genomic applications and the Medical Subject Headings is the basis of biomedical publications indexation and information retrieval process proposed by PubMed. However current search engines suffer from two main drawbacks: there is limited user interaction with the list of retrieved resources and no explanation for their adequacy to the query is provided. Users may thus be confused by the selection and have no idea on how to adapt their queries so that the results match their expectations. Results This paper describes an information retrieval system that relies on domain ontology to widen the set of relevant documents that is retrieved and that uses a graphical ...

We report a cross-modal translation system from Hindi strings to Indian Sign Language (ISL) for possible use in the Indian Railways reservation counters. INGIT adopts a semantically mediated formulaic framework for Hindi-ISL mapping. An in-depth investigation into the structure of ISL forms the groundwork for INGIT. Some representational and mapping issues concerning cross-modal translation are identified and an implementation design is evolved. We adopt the Construction Grammar approach for handling formulaic inputs in terms of a construction lexicon with single constituents as well as larger phrases, with direct semantic mappings at each level. We present results based on a small corpus collected at a railway counter, for which translations were validated from native ISL signers. The work builds upon a semantic module worked out for Hindi and ISL.