Semantics (Computer Science)

Within the scope of ANSWER, an EC-supported research project, a new artistic notation system, called DirectorNotation, is being developed for describing media content, much like notes are used to document a music composition. Our current research focuses on developing “notation-enabled ” offline authoring tools, but interactive applications are an anticipated extension. Here, we summarise the key aspects of DirectorNotation and the ANSWER project, from the point of view of a multimedia-technology audience interested in content-based manipulation of media. Categories and Subject Descriptors

In literature, texts to be classified are generally represented in the large dimensional Bag of Words space in which every dimension equals to a word or ngram. In this study, firstly the words are placed in a semantic space. The word’s coordinates in semantic spaces needs the similarity of the words according to their meanings. Harris states that two words’ semantic similarity is related to the number of documents which the words are both in. We used his hypothesis for Turkish words. Firstly, we obtained word co-occurrence matrix from a web corpus. Then, the numerical coordinates of the words are calculated by using multi dimensional scaling. Texts coordinates are obtained from word coordinates which passes in the texts. In our experiments, Turkish news texts are classified into 5 classes. We get more successful results than the traditional Bag of Words space. Our approach is not for only Turkish words/texts, but also for all other languages.

The Web of Data is an open environment consisting of a great number of large inter-linked RDF datasets from various do-mains. In this environment, organizations and companies adopt the Linked Data practices utilizing Semantic Web (SW) tech-nologies, in order to publish their data and offer SPARQL endpoints (i.e., SPARQL-based search services). On the other hand, the dominant standard for information exchange in the Web today is XML. Additionally, many international standards (e.g., Dublin Core, MPEG-7, METS, TEI, IEEE LOM) in several domains (e.g., Digital Libraries, GIS, Multimedia, e-Learning) have been expressed in XML Schema. The aforementioned have led to an increasing emphasis on XML data, accessed using the XQuery query language. The SW and XML worlds and their developed infrastructures are based on different data models, semantics and query languages. Thus, it is crucial to develop interoperability mechanisms that allow the Web of Data users to access XML datasets, using SPARQL, from their own working environments. It is unrealistic to expect that all the existing legacy data (e.g., Relational, XML, etc.) will be transformed into SW data. Therefore, publishing legacy data as Linked Data and providing SPARQL endpoints over them has become a major research challenge. In this direction, we introduce the SPARQL2XQuery Framework which creates an interoperable environment, where SPARQL queries are automatically translated to XQuery queries, in order to access XML data across the Web. The SPARQL2XQuery Framework provides a mapping model for the expression of OWL–RDF/S to XML Schema mappings as well as a method for SPARQL to XQuery translation. To this end, our Framework supports both manual and automatic mapping specification between ontologies and XML Schemas. In the automatic mapping specification scenario, the SPARQL2XQuery exploits the XS2OWL component which transforms XML Sche-mas into OWL ontologies. Finally, extensive experiments have been conducted in order to evaluate the schema transfor-mation, mapping generation, query translation and query evaluation efficiency, using both real and synthetic datasets.

In the present paper we explore Ontologies, as a means to capture knowledge of the film-making domain. More specifically, we intend to open a discussion so as to guide the development of DirectorNotation, an under-development open-source tool for representing media content, as of its pre-production and production phases, using a symbolic notation system, in which a film director can formally record his intentions. DirectorNotation’s authors suggest Ontologies for formalizing and reasoning over their notation system. The current paper discusses this technical choice, considering its limitations, and makes suggestions about the work that needs to be performed if these limitations are to be overcome.

Background: Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients at risk for
developing Alzheimer’s disease frequently show subtle semantic
memory deficits. The aim of this study is to investigate how early
semantic impairments extend to words having recently entered
the lexicon, in order to provide new clinical cues to discriminate
between patients with MCI, AD and controls.
Method: Semantic abilities of patients with AD (n ¼ 12), amnestic
MCI (n ¼ 12) as well as healthy controls (n ¼ 12) were measured
with the NewWord Questionnaire (NWQ), including 22 words that
entered the French dictionary 2 or 12 years ago. The NWQ assesses
the abilities (1) to give definitions for these words, (2) to decide
which of three definitions is accurate, and (3) to choose which of
two sentences containing the word is correct. Quantitative and
qualitative analysis of responses were carried out by distinguishing
conceptual definitions from operational definitions in terms of use
and quotations from examples.
Results: Patients with MCI demonstrate lower performance than
controls in the 3 tasks. Their pattern of performance is characterized
by difficulties discriminating the accurate definition rather than
selecting the correct context. This difference increases in patients
with AD. In addition, patients with MCI often provide examples in
order to compensate for their conceptual difficulties, whereas
patients with AD fail to use this strategy. Finally, the transition to AD changes the pattern of correlations between performance in the
NWQ, episodic memory, and executive functioning.
Conclusion: The NWQ may be useful to characterize the cognitive
profile associated with MCI and to assess AD conversion.

Most humans have not been taught logical thinking, but most humans are still intelligent. Most of our daily actions such as walking, talking, and understanding the world are based on Intuition, not Logic.

I will attempt to show that it is implausible that the brain should be based on Logic. I believe Intelligence emerges from millions of nested micro-intuitions, and that true Artificial Intelligence requires Artificial Intuition.

Intuition is surprisingly easy to implement in computers, but requires a lot of memory.

David Chalmers' two-dimensionalism is an ambitious philosophical program that aims to "ground" or "construct" Fregean meanings and restore "the golden triangle" of apriority, necessity, and meaning that Kripke seemingly broke. This paper aims to examine critically what Chalmers' theory can in reality achieve. It is argued that the theory faces severe challenges. There are some gaps in the overall arguments, and the reasoning is in some places somewhat circular. Chalmers' theory is effectively founded on certain strong philosophical assumptions. It is concluded that it is unclear whether the theory can deliver all it promises.

Knjiga nastoji cjelovito prikazati i obrazložiti znanstvenu disciplinu kao sto je semantika. Obuhvaca prikaze razlicitih razdoblja razvoja semantike kao lingvisticke discipline, prikazuje temeljne modele opisa znacenja te obrazlaže temeljne pojmove lekiscke semantike kao sto su sinonimija, polisemija, homonimija itd. Pokusava također obuhvatiti i dati prikaz hrvatski istraživanja u okviru te discipline.

Complex software systems typically involve features like time, concurrency and probability, where probabilistic computations play an increasing role. It is challenging to formalize languages comprising all these features. We have proposed a language, which integrates probability with time and shared-variable concurrency. We also explored its operational semantics, where a set of algebraic laws has been investigated via bisimulation. In this paper, we consider the inverse work, the derivation of operational semantics from algebraic semantics for our probabilistic language. This approach can be understood as the soundness investigation of operational semantics from the viewpoint of algebraic semantics. Firstly we present the algebraic laws for our probabilistic language. Every program can be expressed as either a guarded choice, or the summation of a set of processes which are deterministic initially. This can model the execution of a program. Secondly we investigate the derivation of an operational semantics from its algebraic semantics. A set of transition rules are derived from the given derivation strategy. Thirdly we explore the equivalence of the derived transition system and the derivation strategy. This indicates the completeness of our operational semantics from the viewpoint of algebraic semantics. Meanwhile, we also investigate the observation-oriented semantic model and its derivation from algebraic semantics.

This dissertation argues for the existence of functional attitude predicates, light attitudes, such as light say and light see. Two phenomena are identified as functional attitudes: evidentiality and logophoric say-complementizers. I propose that reportative evidential markers and logophoric licensing complementizers are cross-linguistic variations of overt morphosyntactic realizations of the same light attitude: a functionalized predicate say. The parallel between evidentiality and logophoricity drawn here highlights their properties that have not been discussed or formally accounted for until now, and explains why they are in a typological complementary distribution across the world’s languages. At the same time, direct and reportative evidentials even within the same language exhibit a number of syntactic and semantic differences that have not been noticed in the literature before. I derive them from the analysis of reportative and direct evidentials as different kinds of functio...

Abstract: The present paper aims to discuss the concept of concession and the various senses in which it has been used in the literature. The fact that the term concessive has acquired many different senses is not to mean however that we have been dealing with a terminological ...

Within the scope of ANSWER, an EC-supported research project, a new artistic notation system, called DirectorNotation, is being developed for describing media content, much like notes are used to document a music composition. Our current research focuses on developing “notation-enabled” offline authoring tools, but interactive applications are an anticipated extension. Here, we summarise the key aspects of DirectorNotation and the ANSWER project, from the point of view of a multimedia-technology audience interested in content-based manipulation of media.

This paper presents an approach to GWS (GeospatialWeb Service) discovery through the semantic annotation of WPS (Web Processing Service) service descriptions. The rationale behind this work is that search engines that use appropriate semantic-based similarity measures in the matching process are more accurate in terms of precision and recall than those based on syntactic matching alone. The lack of semantics in the description of services using a standard such as WPS prevents the use of such a matching process and is considered a limitation of GWS discovery. The GWS discovery approach presented is based on the consideration of semantics in the service description method and in the matching process. The description of services is based on a semantic lightweight meta-model instantiated in the WPS 2.0 standard, extending the description of the service through metadata tags. The matching process is performed in three steps (functionality matching step, I/O (Input/Output) matching step a...

Within the scope of ANSWER, an EC-supported research project, a new artistic notation system, called DirectorNotation, is being developed for describing media content, much like notes are used to document a music composition. Our current research focuses on developing “notation-enabled” offline authoring tools, but interactive applications are an anticipated extension. Here, we summarise the key aspects of DirectorNotation and the ANSWER project, from the point of view of a multimedia-technology audience interested in content-based manipulation of media.

The adoption of semantic technologies holds the promise for better data management and greater exploration and publication of your data. However, the semantic landscape is cluttered with evolving markup languages for modeling data, query languages, competing data stores, and new applications to present the data. There are even new job titles and new project management models. It is no wonder many enterprises do not know where to start. This presentation will help enterprises understand some best practices about getting started with semantics including: selecting semantic projects, ontology modeling, selection of a semantic language, ontology software tools, data triple stores, application development, maintenance of a semantic effort, finding semantic specialists, and project management.

This paper presents a new version of the sequence semantics presented at DEON 2014. This new version allows us for a capturing the distinction between logic of obligations and logic of norms. Several axiom schemata are discussed, while soundness and completeness results are proved.

Older adults process emotions in speech differently than do young adults. However, it is unclear whether these age-related changes impact all speech channels to the same extent, and whether they originate from a sensory or a cognitive source. The current study adopted a psychophysical approach to directly compare young and older adults’ sensory thresholds for emotion recognition in two channels of spoken-emotions: prosody (tone) and semantics (words). A total of 29 young adults and 26 older adults listened to 50 spoken sentences presenting different combinations of emotions across prosody and semantics. They were asked to recognize the prosodic or semantic emotion, in separate tasks. Sentences were presented on the background of speech-spectrum noise ranging from SNR of −15 dB (difficult) to +5 dB (easy). Individual recognition thresholds were calculated (by fitting psychometric functions) separately for prosodic and semantic recognition. Results indicated that: (1). recognition thr...

A monitor is a widely-used concurrent programming abstraction that encapsulates all shared state between threads. Monitors can be classified as being either implicit or explicit depending on the primitives they provide. Implicit monitors are much easier to program but typically not as efficient. To address this gap, there has been recent research on automatically synthesizing explicit-signal monitors from an implicit specification, but prior work does not exploit all paralellization opportunities due to the use of a single lock for the entire monitor. This paper presents a new technique for synthesizing fine-grained explicit-synchronization protocols from implicit monitors. Our method is based on two key innovations: First, we present a new static analysis for inferring safe interleavings that allow violating mutual exclusion of monitor operations without changing its semantics. Second, we use the results of this static analysis to generate a MaxSAT instance whose models correspond ...

... Yannis Christodoulou, Nikoletta Mavrogeorgi, Petros Kalogirou National Technical University of Athens Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Zografou 157 73, Athens, Greeceyannis@telecom.ntua.gr, nikimav@telecom.ntua.gr Abstract ... 1] A.Yannopoulos, K.Savrami ...

Complex software systems typically involve features like time, concurrency and probability, with probabilistic computations playing an increasing role. However, it is currently challenging to formalize languages incorporating all those features. Recently, the language PTSC has been proposed to integrate probability and time with shared-variable concurrency (Zhu et al. (2006, 2009)  and ), where the operational semantics has been explored and a set of algebraic laws has been investigated via bisimulation. This paper investigates the link between the operational and algebraic semantics of PTSC, highlighting both its theoretical and practical aspects.

The link is obtained by deriving the operational semantics from the algebraic semantics, an approach that may be understood as establishing soundness of the operational semantics with respect to the algebraic semantics. Algebraic laws are provided that suffice to convert any PTSC program into a form consisting of a guarded choice or an internal choice between programs, which are initially deterministic. That form corresponds to a simple execution of the program, so it is used as a basis for an operational semantics. In that way, the operational semantics is derived from the algebraic semantics, with transition rules resulting from the derivation strategy. In fact the derived transition rules and the derivation strategy are shown to be equivalent, which may be understood as establishing completeness of the operational semantics with respect to the algebraic semantics.

That theoretical approach to the link is complemented by a practical one, which animates the link using Prolog. The link between the two semantics proceeds via head normal form. Firstly, the generation of head normal form is explored, in particular animating the expansion laws for probabilistic interleaving. Then the derivation of the operational semantics is animated using a strategy that exploits head normal form. The operational semantics is also animated. These animations, which again supports to claim soundness and completeness of the operational semantics with respect to the algebraic, are interesting because they provide a practical demonstration of the theoretical results.

Relaying of information from technical documentation by contact center workers to assist clients is limited by industry standard storage formats and query mechanisms. Here we present and evaluate a new methodology for processing technical documents and tagging them against a Telecommunications Hardware domain ontology. We deploy classical ontological NLP approaches to extract information from both text segments and tables, identifying text segments, named entities and relations between named entities described by an existing T-Box. We describe a method for scoring candidate object property assertions derived from text before populating the Telecom Hardware ontology. In our algorithm, we leverage customized gazetteer lists, including lists specific to object property synonyms, and use functions of distance between co-occurring terms to score candidate A-box object property assertions. We review the performance of this approach with a use case involving Tier 1 and Tier 2 call centre agents using a visual query tool, Top Braid Live, to interrogate the instantiated Telecom Hardware ontology for information relevant to the needs of clients.

Funded by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and the Atlantic Innovation Foundation, Innovatia Inc. have pioneered the design and testing of semantic technologies for use by Contact Centre agents who provide Technical Support to customers in the Telecommunications sector. This is in response to increasing contact center costs for companies whose products and information support services must rapidly evolve. Numerous opportunities exist for increasing the productivity of knowledge workers involved in searching separate and disconnected product-specific knowledge bases, case resolution databases, training manuals and technical documentation. Our technical solution comprises of OWL-DL knowledge base populated from a wide variety of document formats with sentence-triples generated by a telecommunications-specific text mining pipeline that leverages document segmentation techniques to instantiate with state of the art precision and recall. This talk will outline critical features of the platform and the performance of agents using the prototype with various user interface tools from commercial vendors with customized features to test this search paradigm. Pilot studies required agents to troubleshoot customer queries from fault symptoms to root causes and to identify procedures to resolve the causes of faults. During testing agents used visual queries, advanced dynamic form-based search, and SPARQL queries saved as frequently asked questions. In particular we have validated that Tier 1 agents can navigate a sequence of workflows resulting in an increase in findability from 75 to 100% under real time conditions and overall search time has been reduced by 50%. Moreover, time savings can be made at the critical junction of case handoff from Tier 1 to Tier 2 agents, such that Tier 1 agents can achieve better performance. We review contact center performance metrics and comment the on the suitability of Semantic Technologies for this business process as well as issues related to rollout and adoption of this platform across the enterprise. Video Presenation: http://videolectures.net/estc2010_baker_ttfcc/