Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Semantics'
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1
Azevedo, Terceiro Antonio Soares de. "Semantics for an algebraic specification language." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/8126.
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Prosoft é um grupo de pesquisa do Instituto de Informática da UFRGS, desenvolvido pelo grupo de pesquisa homônimo e coordenado pelo Professor Daltro José Nunes. O objetivo do projeto é desenvolver um ambiente de desenvolvimento de software completo, o Ambiente Prosoft, que é baseado nos conceitos de Modelos, Cálculo Lambda, Tipos Abstratos de Dados e Orientação a Objetos. Um dos componentes do Ambiente Prosoft é sua linguagem de especificação algébrica: o Prosoft Algébrico. Apesar de ser base e tema de diversos trabalhos no grupo de pesquisa Prosoft, o Prosoft Algébrico não tem sua semântica devidamente definida. Os trabalhos desenvolvidos até agora foram baseados em noções operacionais, e apresentam diferentes interpretações do Prosoft Algébrico. Esta dissertação apresenta uma especificação de semântica denotacional para o Prosoft Algébrico, compreendendo, entre outras características, sua primitiva de comunicação entre tipos de dados, chamada ICS, e sua notação gráfica para representação de instanciação de tipos abstratos de dados. Essa dissertação apresenta também um estudo sobre prototipação semântica usando a linguagem de programação Haskell. O conceito de Literate Programming e a proximidade entre Cálculo Lambda e Haskell foram cruciais no rápido desenvolvimento de uma implementação protótipo do Prosoft Algébrico, baseada na sua semântica especificada. As principais contribuições dessa dissertação incluem: uma interpretação precisa e sem ambiguidades do Prosoft Algébrico, através da especificação da sua semântica; a definição de semântica para a ICS, um conceito único (até o limite do nosso conhecimento) que fornece um mecanismo de passagem de mensagens entre tipos de dados algébricos; uma implementação protótipo do Prosoft Algébrico, que pode realmente ser utilizada para experimentar e testar a definição da linguagem e a especificação da semântica do Prosoft Algébrico; resultados sobre prototipação semântica de especificações tanto de semântica denotacional quanto de semântica operacional usando a linguagem de programação Haskell para desenvolvimento rápido de protótipos de linguagens baseados na sua semântica. Como grande parte do desenvolvimento do Ambiente Prosoft é realizado através de projetos de cooperação internacional e essa dissertação irá influenciar fortemente o seu desenvolvimento futuro, o texto foi escrito em inglês para facilitar a troca de informação entre o grupo Prosoft e seus parceiros estrangeiros.Prosoft is a research project at Instituto de Informática da UFRGS, developed by the research group with the same name and coordinated by Professor Daltro José Nunes. The project’s goal is to develop a full software development environment, the Prosoft Environment, based on the concepts of Models, Lambda Calculus, Abstract Data Types and Object orientation. One of the components of the Prosoft Environment is its algebraic specification language: Algebraic Prosoft. Although being the basis and theme of several works in the Prosoft research group, Algebraic Prosoft doesn’t have its semantics properly defined. Works done up to now were based on operational notions and presented different interpretations of Algebraic Prosoft. This thesis presents a denotational semantics specification for Algebraic Prosoft, comprising, among other features, its “inter-data type” communication primitive, called ICS, and its graphical notation for representing instantiations of abstract data types. This thesis also presents a study of semantic prototyping using the Haskell programming language. The concept of Literate Programing and the proximity between lambda calculus and Haskell were crucial to the rapid development of a prototype implementation of Algebraic Prosoft, based on its specified semantics. This thesis’ main contributions include: a precise and unambiguous interpretation of Algebraic Prosoft, through a semantics specification; the definition of semantics to the ICS, a unique (to the best of our knowledge) concept that provides a messagepassing mechanism between algebraic data types; a prototype implementation of Algebraic Prosoft, which can actually be used to experiment and test the Algebraic Prosoft language definition and semantics specification; results regarding semantics prototyping of both denotational and operational semantics specifications using the Haskell programming language for rapid development of semantics-based prototypes of languages. Since a large portion of Prosoft Environment’s development is done through international cooperation projects and this thesis will strongly influence its future development, the text was written in English in order to facilitate the information exchange between the Prosoft research group and its foreign partners.
2
Verspoor, Cornelia M. "Contextually-dependent lexical semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/515.
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This thesis is an investigation of phenomena at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with the aim of arguing for a view of semantic interpretation as lexically driven yet contextually dependent. I examine regular, generative processes which operate over the lexicon to induce verbal sense shifts, and discuss the interaction of these processes with the linguistic or discourse context. I concentrate on phenomena where only an interaction between all three linguistic knowledge sources can explain the constraints on verb use: conventionalised lexical semantic knowledge constrains productive syntactic processes, while pragmatic reasoning is both constrained by and constrains the potential interpretations given to certain verbs. The phenomena which are closely examined are the behaviour of PP sentential modifiers (specifically dative and directional PPs) with respect to the lexical semantic representation of the verb phrases they modify, resultative constructions, and logical metonymy. The analysis is couched in terms of a lexical semantic representation drawing on Davis (1995), Jackendoff (1983, 1990), and Pustejovsky (1991, 1995) which aims to capture “linguistically relevant” components of meaning. The representation is shown to have utility for modeling of the interaction between the syntactic form of an utterance and its meaning. I introduce a formalisation of the representation within the framework of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), and rely on the model of discourse coherence proposed by Lascarides and Asher (1992), Discourse in Commonsense Entailment. I furthermore discuss the implications of the contextual dependency of semantic interpretation for lexicon design and computational processing in Natural Language Understanding systems.
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Endriss, Cornelia, Stefan Hinterwimmer, and Stavros Skopeteas. "Semantics." Universität Potsdam, 2007. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/2226/.
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The guidelines for semantics comprise a number of layers related to quantificational structures as well as some crucial semantic properties of NPs with respect to information structure: definiteness, countability, and animacy.
4
Vecchi, Eva Maria. "Distributional semantic phrases vs. semantic distributional nonsense: Adjective Modification in Compositional Distributional Semantics." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Trento, 2013. https://hdl.handle.net/11572/369284.
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In this thesis, I study the ability of compositional distributional semantics to model adjective modification. I present three studies that explore the degree to which semantic intuitions are grounded in the distributional representations of adjective-noun phrases, as well as provide insight into various linguistic phenomena by extracting unsupervised cues from these distributional representations. First, I investigate degrees of adjective modification. I contrast three types of adjectival modifiers – intersectively used color terms, subsectively used color terms, and intensional adjectives – and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. Next, I propose an approach to characterize semantic deviance of composite expressions using distributional semantic methods. I present a set of simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and show that they are more significant in determining the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases than measures classically employed in studies of compound processing. Finally, I use compositional distributional semantic methods to investigate restrictions in adjective ordering. Specifically, I focus on properties distinguishing adjective-adjective-noun phrases in which there is flexibility in the adjective ordering from those bound to a rigid order. I explore a number of measures extracted from the distributional representation of such phrases which may indicate a word order restriction. Overall, this work provides strong support for compositional distributional semantics, as it is able to generalize and capture the complex semantic intuition of natural language speakers for adjective-noun phrases, even without being able to rely on co-occurrence relations between the constituents.
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Vecchi, Eva Maria. "Distributional semantic phrases vs. semantic distributional nonsense: Adjective Modification in Compositional Distributional Semantics." Doctoral thesis, University of Trento, 2013. http://eprints-phd.biblio.unitn.it/1060/1/EMVecchi_Thesis.pdf.
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In this thesis, I study the ability of compositional distributional semantics to model adjective modification. I present three studies that explore the degree to which semantic intuitions are grounded in the distributional representations of adjective-noun phrases, as well as provide insight into various linguistic phenomena by extracting unsupervised cues from these distributional representations. First, I investigate degrees of adjective modification. I contrast three types of adjectival modifiers – intersectively used color terms, subsectively used color terms, and intensional adjectives – and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. Next, I propose an approach to characterize semantic deviance of composite expressions using distributional semantic methods. I present a set of simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and show that they are more significant in determining the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases than measures classically employed in studies of compound processing. Finally, I use compositional distributional semantic methods to investigate restrictions in adjective ordering. Specifically, I focus on properties distinguishing adjective-adjective-noun phrases in which there is flexibility in the adjective ordering from those bound to a rigid order. I explore a number of measures extracted from the distributional representation of such phrases which may indicate a word order restriction. Overall, this work provides strong support for compositional distributional semantics, as it is able to generalize and capture the complex semantic intuition of natural language speakers for adjective-noun phrases, even without being able to rely on co-occurrence relations between the constituents.
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Soni, Maya. "Semantics in speech production." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2011. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/semantics-in-speech-production(c446ac01-7c32-468a-816b-04993347e135).html.
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The semantic system contributes to the process of speech production in two major ways. The basic information is contained within semantic representations, and the semantic control system manipulates that knowledge as required by task and context. This thesis explored the evidence for interactivity between semantic and phonological stages of speech production, and examined the role of semantic control within speech production. The data chapters focussed on patients with semantic aphasia or SA, who all have frontal and/or temporoparietal lesions and are thought to have a specific impairment of semantic control. In a novel development, grammatical class and cueing effects in this patient group were compared with healthy participants under tempo naming conditions, a paradigm which is thought to impair normal semantic control by imposing dual task conditions. A basic picture naming paradigm was used throughout, with the addition of different grammatical classes, correct and misleading phonemic cues, and repetition and semantic priming: all these manipulations could be expected to place differing loads on a semantic control system with either permanent or experimentally induced impairment. It was found that stimuli requiring less controlled processing such as high imageability objects, pictures with simultaneous correct cues or repetition primed pictures were named significantly more accurately than items which needed more controlled processing, such as low imageability actions, pictures with misleading phonemic cues and unprimed pictures. The cueing evidence offered support to interactive models of speech production where phonological activation is able to influence semantic selection. The impairment in tasks such as the inhibition of task-irrelevant material seen in SA patients and tempo participants, and the overlap between cortical areas cited in studies looking at both semantic and wider executive control mechanisms suggest that semantic control may be part of a more generalised executive system.
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Fass, D. "Collative semantics : A semantics for natural language processing." Thesis, University of Essex, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.383507.
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Neumaier, Sebastian, and Axel Polleres. "Geo-Semantic Labelling of Open Data. SEMANTiCS 2018-14th International Conference on Semantic Systems." Elsevier, 2018. http://epub.wu.ac.at/6452/1/neum%2Dpoll%2D2018SEMANTiCS.pdf.
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In the past years Open Data has become a trend among governments to increase transparency and public engagement by opening up
national, regional, and local datasets. However, while many of these datasets come in semi-structured file formats, they use di
ff
erent
schemata and lack geo-references or semantically meaningful links and descriptions of the corresponding geo-entities. We aim to
address this by detecting and establishing links to geo-entities in the datasets found in Open Data catalogs and their respective
metadata descriptions and link them to a knowledge graph of geo-entities. This knowledge graph does not yet readily exist, though,
or at least, not a single one: so, we integrate and interlink several datasets to construct our (extensible) base geo-entities knowledge
graph: (i) the openly available geospatial data repository GeoNames, (ii) the map service OpenStreetMap, (iii) country-specific sets
of postal codes, and (iv) the European Union's classification system NUTS. As a second step, this base knowledge graph is used
to add semantic labels to the open datasets, i.e., we heuristically disambiguate the geo-entities in CSV columns using the context
of the labels and the hierarchical graph structure of our base knowledge graph. Finally, in order to interact with and retrieve the
content, we index the datasets and provide a demo user interface. Currently we indexed resources from four Open Data portals, and
allow search queries for geo-entities as well as full-text matches at
http://data.wu.ac.at/odgraph/
.
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Loebe, Frank. "Ontological Semantics." Doctoral thesis, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2015. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-166326.
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The original and still a major purpose of ontologies in computer and information sciences is to serve for the semantic integration of represented content, facilitating information system interoperability. Content can be data, information, and knowledge, and it can be distributed within or across these categories. A myriad of languages is available for representation. Ontologies themselves are artifacts which are expressed in various languages. Different such languages are utilized today, including, as well-known representatives, predicate logic, subsuming first-order (predicate) logic (FOL), in particular, and higher-order (predicate) logic (HOL); the Web Ontology Language (OWL) on the basis of description logics (DL); and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We focus primarily on languages with formally defined syntax and semantics.
This overall picture immediately suggests questions of the following kinds: What is the relationship between an ontology and the language in which it is formalized? Especially, what is the impact of the formal semantics of the language on the formalized ontology? How well understood is the role of ontologies in semantic integration? Can the same ontology be represented in multiple languages and/or in distinct ways within one language? Is there an adequate understanding of whether two expressions are intensionally/conceptually equivalent and whether two ontologies furnish the same ontological commitments?
One may assume that these questions are resolved. Indeed, the development and adoption of ontologies is widespread today. Ontologies are authored in a broad range of different languages, including offering equally named ontologies in distinct languages. Much research is devoted to techniques and technologies that orbit ontologies, for example, ontology matching, modularization, learning, and evolution, to name a few. Ontologies have found numerous beneficial applications, and hundreds of ontologies have been created, considering solely the context of biomedical research. For us, these observations increase the relevance of the stated questions and close relatives thereof, and raise the desire for solid theoretical underpinnings. In the literature of computer and information sciences, we have found only few approaches that tackle the foundations of ontologies and their representation to allow for answering such questions or that actually answer them.
We elaborate an analysis of the subject as the first item of central contributions within this thesis. It mainly results in the identification of a vicious circularity in (i) the intended use of ontologies to mediate between formal representations and (ii) solely exploiting formal semantic notions in representing ontologies and defining ontology-based equivalence as a form of intensional/conceptual equivalence. On this basis and in order to overcome its identified limitations, we contribute a general model-theoretic semantic account, named \\\"ontological semantics\\\". This kind of semantics takes the approach of assigning arbitrary entities as referents of atomic symbols and to link syntactic constructions with corresponding ontological claims and commitments. In particular, ontological semantics targets the avoidance of encoding effects in its definition. Therefore we argue that this semantic account is well suited for interpreting formalized ontologies and for defining languages for the representation of ontologies. It is further proposed as a fundament for envisioned novel definitions of the intensional equivalence of expressions, in potential deviation from only being formally equivalent under set-theoretic semantics. The thesis is defended that a particular usage of a formalism and its respective vocabulary should be accompanied by establishing an ontological semantics that is tailored to that use of the formalism, in parallel to the formal semantics of the language, in order to capture the ontological content of the formal representation for adequate reuse in other formalisms. Accordingly, we advocate ontological semantics as a useful framework for justifying translations on an intensional basis. Despite all deviations of ontological semantics from its set-theoretic blueprint, close relationships between the two can be shown, which allow for using established FOL and DL reasoners while assuming ontological semantics.
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Carrigan, Raymond Sidney John. "General semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/18080.
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Pelczar, Michael Walsh. "Philosophical semantics." Full text, Acrobat Reader required, 2000. http://viva.lib.virginia.edu/etd/diss/ArtsSci/Philosophy/2000/Pelczar/Pelczar.pdf.
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Sung, John Junghoon. "Cognitive semantics of molecular genetics : toward a unified cognitive semantic theory." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.442429.
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Shead, Stephen L. "Radical frame semantics and biblical Hebrew exploring lexical semantics /." Connect to full text, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2016.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2007.Title from title screen (viewed 28 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.
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Shiu, Simon K. Y. "Type theoretic semantics for semantic networks : an application to natural language engineering." Thesis, Durham University, 1996. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5397/.
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Semantic Networks have long been recognised as an important tool for natural language processing. This research has been a formal analysis of a semantic network using constructive type theory. The particular net studied is SemNet, the internal knowledge representation for LOLITA(^1): a large scale natural language engineering system. SemNet has been designed with large scale, efficiency, integration and expressiveness in mind. It supports many different forms of plausible and valid reasoning, including: epistemic reasoning, causal reasoning and inheritance. The unified theory of types (UTT) integrates two well known type theories, Coquand-Huet's (impredicative) calculus of constructions and Martin-Lof's (predicative) type theory. The result is a strong and expressive language which has been used for formalization of mathematics, program specification and natural language. Motivated by the computational and richly expressive nature of UTT, this research has used it for formalization and semantic analysis of SemNet. Moreover, because of applications to software engineering, type checkers/proof assistants have been built. These tools are ideal for organising and managing the analysis of SemNet. The contribution of the work is twofold. First the semantic model built has led to improved and deeper understanding of SemNet. This is important as many researchers that work on different aspects of LOLITA, now have a clear and un- ambigious interpertation of the meaning of SemNet constructs. The model has also been used to show soundess of the valid reasoning and to give a reasonable semantic account of epistemic reasoning. Secondly the research contributes to NLE generally, both because it demonstrates that UTT is a useful formalization tool and that the good aspects of SemNet have been formally presented.
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Ward, Nick. "The Semantics of ja and ye: Semantic variation in Marathi motion verbs." Thesis, Department of Linguistics, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5837.
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Ja and ye ('go' and 'come' respectively, from the Indian language Marathi) are first semantically examined as basic verbs of physical motion. Then instances which vary from this basic 'sense' of the words are analysed with respect to theories of polysemy via semantic extension (through metaphor and metonymy), and deixis. Some evidence is found to support theories of 'figurative' deixis, utilizing the concept of 'subjectivity' as a primary grounding force in our construction of meaning. Subjectivity is also implicated in the dominant mechanism of semantic shift by 'result' metonymy, wherein the word designating the event is semantically narrowed to designate only the result or outcome of the event. In discussing semantic extension through metaphor, the fundamental problem of distinguishing metaphorical from literal meaning is addressed, and 'image schemas' are invoked in the analysis of ja and ye. Data are chiefly from books on Ayurveda, and hence largely focus on the use of the ja and ye with reference to the human body.
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McDonald, Brian Edison. "Constraint variational semantics." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3274279.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Philosophy, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2977. Adviser: Anil Gupta. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 9, 2008).
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Desharnais, Jules. "Abstract relational semantics." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75986.
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Abstract relational algebra is used to define the semantics of a simple imperative language. In order to carry out this task, various domains are specified by relational axioms. Some specifications define relations on the basic types of the language (Booleans and natural numbers); their presentation stresses the importance of the concept of point. Other specifications construct the relational domains whose relations are used to denote programs. The programming constructs that are defined include expressions, variable declarations, assignment statements, while-program statements and procedures. A particularity of the semantic definitions is that the relations denoting a program fragment depend only on the fragment, and not on its environment (procedure calls excepted). Finally, it is shown how the semantics of a program fragment can be used to prove its correctness relative to a specification. The result is a uniform abstract relational setting for specification, semantics and program derivation.
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Tzevelekos, Nikos. "Nominal game semantics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.497132.
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Delaney, Jesse. "HUSSERL'S DYADIC SEMANTICS." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/philosophy_etds/4.
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Husserl’s Logical Investigations contain an apparent discrepancy in their account of meaning. They first present meanings, contra psychologism, as commonly available, reiterable, invariant, possibly valid, and independent of our “acts of meaning”. They then present meaning, almost psychologistically, as a kind of intentional experience on which all truths and other transcendent meanings depend. I offer a critical developmental study of this problem within Husserl’s semantics. I argue (1) that Husserl had reason to adopt his dyadic account of signification, (2) that this “two-sided” account shaped, and was reciprocally informed by, the two-step phenomenological method, and (3) that Husserl’s proposed resolution to the strain within his semantics, while driven by legitimate motivations, is precarious. I begin with the Logical Investigations and their context. I represent their two sets of semantic claims, recalling how the discord between claims of those sets would have been especially conspicuous when the Investigations were published, amid much debate over psychologism, in 1900-01. I then show why Husserl embraced two discordant views of meaning. I survey the 19th century sources for these views, confirming Jocelyn Benoist’s genealogical thesis that Husserl’s semantics took its psychological and logical sides primarily from Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, respectively. And I present the Bolzanian arguments and Brentanian descriptions that served as grounds for Husserl’s semantics, showing how these pieces of reasoning were appropriated, and weighing their strength.
Next, I trace how Husserl’s two-sided theory of meaning, and its apparent incoherence, both inspired and determined the transcendental and eidetic reductions. I then examine how Husserl subsequently used the phenomenological method to reinforce, to integrate, and to revise his theory of meaning. And I address a methodological criticism that this circular development prompts.
Finally, I assess Husserl’s attempt to explain the division within the phenomenon of meaning by reference to what he called “transcendental subjectivity”. I consider two contrary objections to this explanation. I indicate how Husserl’s explanation is responsive to the insight behind each objection, but contend that it is perhaps not adequately responsive to the insight behind either.
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Heck, Richard Gustave. "Logic, semantics, ontology." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/13940.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1991.Vita.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-197).
by Richard Gustave Heck, Jr.
Ph.D.
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Hayman, Jonathan Mark. "Petri net semantics." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.608768.
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Matthews, Tim. "Semantics of texture." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2016. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/418003/.
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In this thesis we investigate means by which the semantic and visual spaces of texture may be tied together, and argue for the importance of explicit semantic modelling inhuman-centred texture analysis tasks such as retrieval, annotation, synthesis, and zeroshot learning. We take a new approach to semantic texture labelling by adopting a pairwise comparison framework robust to human biases, and within a semantic space consisting of attributes,low-level visual features acting as building blocks for more expressive semantic ontologies. We crowdsource a dataset of approximately 140;000 pairwise comparisons across 319 classes of texture and 98 attributes | to our knowledge the largest of its kind. To aid in learning from sparsely labelled pairwise comparison datasets such as this we derive a new Bayesian probabilistic approach, providing a natural framework in which to incorporate prior knowledge and to measure uncertainty, and outperforming the often used Ranking SVM on incomplete and unreliable data. We demonstrate how the error variance present in our pairwise comparison data may be precisely quantified, allowing us to identify and discard rogue responses in a principled way. Existing texture descriptors are then assessed in terms of their correspondence to the attributes comprising the semantic space. Textures with strong presence of attributes connoting randomness and complexity are shown to be poorly modelled by existing descriptors. These effects are likely due to disparities between human perception of what texture entails, and definitions adopted prior to (or, sometimes, after) the design of computational texture analysis systems. Despite the decifiencies of the visual descriptors they are based upon, we demonstrate the benefit of semantically enriched descriptors in a retrieval experiment. Semantic modelling of texture is shown to provide considerable value in both feature selection and in analysis tasks.
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Avery, Thomas Charles. "Structure and semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29517.
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Algebraic theories describe mathematical structures that are defined in terms of operations and equations, and are extremely important throughout mathematics. Many generalisations of the classical notion of an algebraic theory have sprung up for use in different mathematical contexts; some examples include Lawvere theories, monads, PROPs and operads. The first central notion of this thesis is a common generalisation of these, which we call a proto-theory. The purpose of an algebraic theory is to describe its models, which are structures in which each of the abstract operations of the theory is given a concrete interpretation such that the equations of the theory hold. The process of going from a theory to its models is called semantics, and is encapsulated in a semantics functor. In order to define a model of a theory in a given category, it is necessary to have some structure that relates the arities of the operations in the theory with the objects of the category. This leads to the second central notion of this thesis, that of an interpretation of arities, or aritation for short. We show that any aritation gives rise to a semantics functor from the appropriate category of proto-theories, and that this functor has a left adjoint called the structure functor, giving rise to a structure{semantics adjunction. Furthermore, we show that the usual semantics for many existing notions of algebraic theory arises in this way by choosing an appropriate aritation. Another aim of this thesis is to find a convenient category of monads in the following sense. Every right adjoint into a category gives rise to a monad on that category, and in fact some functors that are not right adjoints do too, namely their codensity monads. This is the structure part of the structure{semantics adjunction for monads. However, the fact that not every functor has a codensity monad means that the structure functor is not defined on the category of all functors into the base category, but only on a full subcategory of it. This deficiency is solved when passing to general proto-theories with a canonical choice of aritation whose structure{semantics adjunction restricts to the usual one for monads. However, this comes at a cost: the semantics functor for general proto-theories is not full and faithful, unlike the one for monads. The condition that a semantics functor be full and faithful can be thought of as a kind of completeness theorem | it says that no information is lost when passing from a theory to its models. It is therefore desirable to retain this property of the semantics of monads if possible. The goal then, is to find a notion of algebraic theory that generalises monads for which the semantics functor is full and faithful with a left adjoint; equivalently the semantics functor should exhibit the category of theories as a re ective subcategory of the category of all functors into the base category. We achieve this (for well-behaved base categories) with a special kind of proto-theory enriched in topological spaces, which we call a complete topological proto-theory. We also pursue an analogy between the theory of proto-theories and that of groups. Under this analogy, monads correspond to finite groups, and complete topological proto-theories correspond to profinite groups. We give several characterisations of complete topological proto-theories in terms of monads, mirroring characterisations of profinite groups in terms of finite groups.
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Girka, Thibaut. "Differential program semantics." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018USPCC147/document.
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Les programmes informatiques sont rarement écrits d'un seul coup, et sont au contraire composés de changements successifs. Il est également fréquent qu'un logiciel soit mis à jour après sa sortie initiale. De tels changements peuvent avoir lieu pour diverses raisons, comme l'ajout de fonctionnalités ou la correction de bugs. Il est en tout cas important d'être capable de représenter ces changements et de raisonner à leur propos pour s'assurer qu'ils implémentent les changements voulus.En pratique, les différences entre programmes sont très souvent représentées comme des différences textuelles sur le code source, listant les lignes de textes ajoutées, supprimées ou modifiées. Cette représentation, bien qu'exacte, ne dit rien de leurs conséquences sémantiques. Pour cette raison, il existe un besoin pour de meilleures représentations des différences sémantiques entre programmes.Notre première contribution est un algorithme de construction de programmes de corrélation, c'est-à-dire, des programmes entrelaçant les instructions de deux autres programmes de telle sorte qu'ils simulent leur sémantiques. Ces programmes de corrélation peuvent alors être analysés pour calculer une sur-approximation des différences sémantiques entre les deux programmes d'entrée. Ce travail est directement inspiré d'un article de Partush et Yahav, qui décrit un algorithme similaire, mais incorrect en présence de boucles avec des instructions `break` ou `continue`. Pour garantir la correction de notre algorithme, nous l'avons formalisé et prouvé à l'aide de l'assistant de preuve Coq.Notre seconde et plus importante contribution est un cadre formel permettant de décrire précisément et de formellement vérifier des différences sémantiques. Ce cadre, complètement formalisé en Coq, représente la différence entre deux programmes à l'aide d'un troisième programme que nous appelons oracle. Contrairement à un programme de corrélation, un oracle n'entrelace pas nécessairement les instructions des deux programmes à comparer, et peut « sauter » des calculs intermédiaires.Un tel oracle est généralement écrit dans un langage de programmation différent des programmes à comparer, ce qui permet de concevoir des langages d'oracles spécifiques à certaines classes de différences, capables de mettre en relation des programmes qui plantent avec des programmes qui s'exécutent correctement.Nous avons conçu de tels langages d'oracles pour couvrir un large éventail de différences sur un langage impératif jouet. Nous avons également prouvé que notre cadre est au moins aussi expressif que celui de la Logique Relationnelle de Hoare en encodant plusieurs variantes de cette dernière sous forme de langages d'oracles, prouvant leur correction dans la fouléeComputer programs are rarely written in one fell swoop. Instead, they are written in a series of incremental changes.It is also frequent for software to get updated after its initial release. Such changes can occur for various reasons, such as adding features, fixing bugs, or improving performances for instance. It is therefore important to be able to represent and reason about those changes, making sure that they indeed implement the intended modifications.In practice, program differences are very commonly represented as textual differences between a pair of source files, listing text lines that have been deleted, inserted or modified. This representation, while exact, does not address the semantic implications of those textual changes. Therefore, there is a need for better representations of the semantics of program differences.Our first contribution is an algorithm for the construction of a correlating program, that is, a program interleaving the instructions of two input programs in such a way that it simulates theirsemantics. Further static analysis can be performed on such correlating programs to compute an over-approximation of the semantic differences between the two input programs. This work draws direct inspiration from an article by Partush and Yahav, that describes a correlating program construction algorithm which we show to be unsound on loops that include `break` or `continue`statements. To guarantee its soundness, our alternative algorithm is formalized and mechanically checked within the Coq proof assistant.Our second and most important contribution is a formal framework allowing to precisely describe and formally verify semantic changes.This framework, fully formalized in Coq, represents the difference between two programs by a third program called an oracle.Unlike a correlating program, such an oracle is not required to interleave instructions of the programs under comparison, and may “skip” intermediate computation steps. In fact, such an oracle is typically written in a different programming language than the programs it relates, which allows designing correlating oracle languages specific to certain classes of program differences, andcapable of relating crashing programs with non-crashing ones.We design such oracle languages to cover a wide range of program differences on a toy imperative language. We also prove that our framework is at least as expressive as Relational Hoare Logic by encoding several variants as correlating oracle languages, proving their soundness in the process
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Bruni, Elia. "Multimodal Distributional Semantics." Doctoral thesis, University of Trento, 2013. http://eprints-phd.biblio.unitn.it/1075/1/EliaBruniThesis.pdf.
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Although being one very simple statement, the distributional hypothesis - namely, words that occur in similar contexts are semantically similar - has been granted the role of main assumption in many computational linguistic techniques. This is mostly due to the fact that it allows to easily and automatically construct a representation of word meaning from a large textual input.
Among the computational linguistic techniques that are corpus-based and adopt the distributional hypothesis, Distributional semantic models (DSMs) have been shown to be a very effective method in many semantic-related tasks. DSMs approximate word meaning by vectors that keep track of the patterns of co-occurrence of words in the processed corpora. In addition, DSMs have been shown to be a very plausible computational model for human concept cognition, since they are able to simulate several psychological phenomena.
Despite their success, one of their strongest limitations is that they entirely represent word meaning in terms of connections with other words. Cognitive scientists have argued that, in this way, DSMs neglect that humans rely also on non-verbal experiences and have access to rich sources of perceptual knowledge when they learn the meaning of words.
In this work, the lack of perceptual grounding of distributional models is addressed by exploiting computer vision techniques that automatically identify discrete "visual words" in images, so that the distributional representation of a word can be extended to also encompass its co-occurrence with the visual words of images it is associated with.
A flexible architecture to integrate text- and image-based distributional information is introduced and tested on a set of empirical evaluations, showing that an integrated model is superior to a purely text-based approach, and it provides somewhat complementary semantic information with respect to the latter.
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Pichetpan, Nitipong. "Verbs of Caused-Separation in Thai and Khmer: Lexical Semantics and Language Convergence in Mainland Southeast Asia." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/25661.
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This dissertation investigates the question of whether and to what extent language convergence within a linguistic area may extend into the domain of lexical semantics. To investigate this question, it examines similarities and differences among verbs of separation in Thai and Khmer – two genealogically unrelated languages that both fall within the Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) linguistic area. Descriptions of caused separation events were first elicited from native speakers of the languages. Cluster analyses (Jaccard’s index and average linkage) were performed to determine the domain’s categorisation—together with analyses of the verb distributional patterns. A comparison was made to uncover (dis)similarity in semantic categorisation and provide input for discussion on areal semantics. The findings reveal that Thai and Khmer are both parallel and different from each other at the lexical semantic level. The two languages have comparable but not identical numbers of semantic categories. Also, in their organisation of caused-separation events, Thai and Khmer are sometimes similar and sometimes different. The groupings present cross-linguistic trends (cf. Majid et al., 2004, 2008), parallel distinctions not widely reported in the cross-linguistic research, and language-specific differentiation. Further, parallelism specific to Thai and Khmer is evaluated as evidence of area-specific convergence, thus enhancing MSEA’s status as a linguistic area at the lexical semantic level. To assess the evidence of convergence, a method of triangulation with languages outside the immediate area is utilised. The study opens the way for further research regarding general context and specific mechanisms associated with patterns of Thai-Khmer semantic convergence.
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Bremer, Manuel. "Philosophische Semantik /." Frankfurt [u.a.] : Ontos-Verl, 2005. http://www.ontos-verlag.de/Buchreihen-LOGOS-Bremer.html.
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Šinušienė, Aurika. "Semantics of mental verbs in English." Bachelor's thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2011. http://vddb.laba.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2011~D_20110802_144428-02964.
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Analyzed clasification of English mental process verbs, their semantic structure; the process of subjectivization; experiencer's position in a sentence.Mentalinio proceso veiksmažodžių klasifikacijos analizė, jų semantinė struktūra; subjektyvizacijos procesas; patirtį gaunančio asmens pozicija pateikta sakinyje.
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Dalglish, Steven Jack William. "Accepting Defeat: A Solution to Semantic Paradox with Defeasible Principles for Truth." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1597757494987204.
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Zemtsova, Valeriia. "The structure of the lexico-semantic field "Sport" in modern English." Thesis, Київський національний університет технологій та дизайну, 2019. https://er.knutd.edu.ua/handle/123456789/14353.
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Nivre, Joakim. "Situations, meaning, and communication a situation theoretic approach to meaning in language and communication /." Göteborg, Sweden : Dept. of Linguistics, University of Göteborg, 1992. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/31171651.html.
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Elbourne, Paul. "The Semantics of Ellipsis." Universität Potsdam, 2005. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2006/872/.
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There are four phenomena that are particularly troublesome for theories
of ellipsis: the existence of sloppy readings when the relevant pronouns cannot possibly be bound; an ellipsis being resolved in such a way that an ellipsis site in the antecedent is not understood in the way it was there; an ellipsis site drawing material from two or more separate antecedents; and ellipsis with no linguistic antecedent.
These cases are accounted for by means of a new theory that involves copying syntactically incomplete antecedent material and an analysis of silent VPs and NPs that makes them into higher order definite descriptions that can be bound into.
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Renans, Agata, Malte Zimmermann, and Markus Greif. "Questionnaire on focus semantics." Universität Potsdam, 2010. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2010/3682/.
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This is the 15th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. This online version contains the Questionnaire on Focus Semantics contributed by Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann and Markus Greif, members of Project D2 investigating information structural phenomena from a typological perspective. The present issue provides a tool for collecting and analyzing natural data with respect to relevant linguistic questions concerning focus types, focus sensitive particles, and the effects of quantificational adverbs and presupposition on focus semantics. This volume is a supplementation to the Reference manual of the Questionnaire on Information Structure, issued by Project D2 in ISIS 4 (2006).
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Hope, James. "The semantics of psychospace." Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/17574.
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Traditionally, in the landscape profession, landscape analysis has been concerned with the physical aspects of place. Properties like shape, amount, use, colour and content have been surveyed, identified and classed in their various combinations to describe ' place character '. With few exceptions, (Appleton 1998), the psychological aspects of place as criteria for classification have been largely ignored. One of the reasons for this, has been the argument that such data are' subjective' and personal, when what is required is,' objective', verifiable and subject to 'constancy'. Another equally valid objection has been the difficulty in defining and identifying the psychological properties of place. The proposed method of analysing places by their psychological properties depends on people being able to verbally describe their feelings and states of mind. To define the survey parameters, these personal, emotional and mental properties have been identified and arranged in spectrums. By selecting the appropriate terms to describe their feelings in place, psychological profiles can be prepared, describing person-place relationships. With many such profiles, linked to personal details, like age, activity, sex and culture, factor analysis allows statistical examinations to be made of these person-place relationships. These reveal consistent patterns, relating particular combinations of feelings to particular combinations of perceivable place properties. Language is the medium of analysis and a linguistic examination of the data allows its classification into different types of place property. Those which are tangible, nominals and nouns, like apples, beds and chairs, and those which are intangible and descriptors, like abnormality, banality and chaos. Linguistics also offers, through concepts like antonymy, the ability to express opposites or contrasts in design terms, like, alien-friendly, bold-weak, chaotic-ordered. Certain combinations of emotions and perceivable, intangible place properties indicate places of particular significance. These are defined as archetypes. Thus, Arcadia is emotionally peaceful, restful and tranquil, and perceivably fertile, productive and beautiful. Battlefield is tense, shocking, stressful and perceivably brutal, chaotic and dramatic. CG Jung, (1968) asserted that anthropomorphic archetypes exist in the 'collective unconscious' of society and that this innate knowledge prepares the mind for future encounters. His archetypes included concepts like Mother and Father, Superman and Hero. By extension, it is postulated that places are also archetypal. To relate people to places objectively, the concept of 'objective relativity' is evoked ( G H Mead. 1932), allowing personal properties like awe, beauty and calmness to be logically attributed to place, relative to particular people. The main concept on which the thesis is based, is 'Psychospace', a linguistic model of the total psychological experience of place. New concepts are created to describe further people-place relationships. Prattles are property feelings of people attributed to place and Percies are properties of place perceived by some people and not others, and therefore 'subjective', like order, chaos and formality. Also included in 'subjective' judgements are those of assessment. Procons are personal properties, like quality and value, good, bad and satisfactory, but also objectively relative. Methods are proposed for the analysis of places and people and the identification of concepts which are employed in the processes of design. Examples are shown and discussed of how the formulated principles work in practice.
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Pi, Chia-Yi Tony. "Mereology in event semantics." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ64644.pdf.
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Thijs, Albert Marchienus. "Simulation and fixpoint semantics." [Groningen : [Groningen] : Rijksuniversiteit Groningen] ; [University Library Groningen] [Host], 1996. http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/152889566.
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Pi, Chia-Yi Tony 1970. "Mereology in event semantics." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36681.
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This thesis investigates verbal and prepositional representations of change under a non-localistic analysis based on the mereology of events, i.e., a system of aspect that uses event parts as primitives in lieu of path parts. Localistic analyses, developed from motional concepts (e.g., Verkuyl 1993, Asher & Sablayrolles 1994), do not extend to non-motional data (e.g., changes of state or possession) except via metaphor, thereby bypassing essential generalizations about change.It is argued that, instead of modeling change after the tripartite source-route-goal divisions of a spatial path, the various combinations of two eventive primitives---distinguished point and distinguished process---are sufficient and necessary in accounting for abstract and concrete data, including the four aspectual verb classes of states, activities, achievements and accomplishments (Vendler 1967). The medial lexical specification, route, is shown to be unnecessary, being an epiphenomenon of two distinguished points interacting, or inferable through pragmatic considerations. This is shown by examples from English and French.
Event mereology unifies concrete with abstract change under a single system of features for verbs (e.g., arrive and inherit ), prepositions, and their associated phrases (in the house and in debt). Underspecification and complementation further economize the lexical representations while accounting for cases of semantic ambiguity. Such issues as homogeneity in states/processes, resultatives, aspectual verbs (continue, stop), agentivity, and the effects of aspectual coercion by English aspectual morphemes (-ed, -ing) are examined and re-formulated where necessary.
The event-mereological approach is demonstrated to be compatible with various current syntactic analyses, and one such analysis (Travis 1999) is investigated in detail. Event mereology is also shown to extend to more complex aspectual patterns observed of serial verb constructions in Edo (Stewart 1998).
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Livingstone, G. M. "Semantics, understanding and knowledge." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.234326.
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Chroboczek, Juliusz. "Game semantics and subtyping." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/365.
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Game Semantics is a relatively new framework for the description of the semantics of programming languages. By combining the mathematical elegance of Denotational Semantics with explicitly operational concepts, Game Semantics has made possible the direct and intuitive modelling of a large range of programming constructs. In this thesis, we show how Game Semantics is able to model subtyping. We start by designing an untyped λ-calculus with ground values that explicitly internalises the notion of typing error. We then equip this calculus with a rich typing system that includes quantification (both universal and existential) as well as recursive types. In a second part, we show how to interpret the untyped calculus; after equipping the domain of the interpretation with an ordering --- the liveness ordering --- loosely inspired from implication on process specifications, we show how our interpretation is both sound and computationally adequate. In a third part, we introduce a notion of game which we use for interpreting types, and show how the liveness ordering on games is suitable for interpreting subtyping. Finally, we prove that under the (unproved) assumption that recursive types are compatible with quantification, our interpretation is sound with respect to both subtyping and typing.
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Horton, Michael Brady. "INFLATIONARY TRUTH-THEORETIC SEMANTICS." UKnowledge, 2012. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/philosophy_etds/1.
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I argue that satisfaction and reference—and therefore, truth—are multiply realizable properties. I advocate a novel approach motivated by a commitment to the robustness and fruitfulness of truth-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics.
DEFLATIONISM: Philosophers keen on deflating the metaphysical pretensions of truth theories claim that we need not appeal to a substantive truth-property. Recently, however, some philosophers have sought to combine deflationism about truth with the view that our concept of truth or the truth-predicate can play an important role in natural language semantics.
TRUTH-THEORETIC SEMANTICS: The goal of a formal semantic theory of a natural language is to provide both the semantic values of that language’s lexically primitive items as well as the semantically significant modes of combining those basic elements into meaningful and more complex expressions. Most approaches have in common a commitment to finite stateability and compositionality as well as a commitment to something like Davidson’s “Convention T.”
PLURALISM: Pluralists about truth argue that different areas of discourse have different truth-properties. Can pluralism successfully be combined with a commitment to truth-theoretic semantics?
OPEN SEMANTIC FUNCTIONALISM: The pluralist approaches to truth are unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. The only option, I argue, is to regard truth as multiply-realizable. Specifically, we should view the set of truth’s realizers as possessing non-actual members—as being “open.” Truth is defined in the usual way in terms of reference and satisfaction, but these latter two relations are to be understood as multiply realizable but open. The property of truth can be specified using the Ramsey/Lewis method. My final view—Open Semantic Functionalism—respects compositionality and finite stateability, avoids triviality, handles plurality, and fits with robust, explanatorily significant natural language semantic theories.
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Heider, Paul M. "The Semantics of Optionality." Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3683040.
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For every participant role filler in an utterance, speakers must choose to leave it bare (e.g., "the interviewer") or to modify it (e.g., "the interviewer on Fresh Air"). Their decision is the end result of a combination of complex factors ranging from the original message to how distracted the speaker is. When we use corpora to create language models, part of our job is understanding the observable properties in and around an event description that allow us to predict these decisions. A considerable body of work on language production and discourse pragmatics concentrates on measuring noun phrase predictability and other forms of shared knowledge that help determine the balance point between over- and under-specification of a participant role filler. Although the importance of predictability as measured by long-term probabilities has long been recognized, I present a novel quantitative analysis of participant role filler predictability, the structure of the mental lexicon, and how the interaction of these two inform a speaker's internal perception of informativity. Standard Gricean assumptions tend to be efficiency oriented. Speakers will be informative enough but not wastefully so. Using these to model corpus distributions predict that noun phrase modification rates are directly proportional to predictability in order to satisfy the speaker's obligation to always be informative. In contrast, standard Firthian models (built around the idea that "you know a word by the company it keeps") assume spreading activation—and not efficiency—is the dominant predictor of usage. Sensitivity to activation's effect predicts that noun phrase modification rates are inversely proportional to predictability. Strongly connected participant role fillers could be easily activated for production while weakly connected participant role fillers would either be mentioned less often or themselves trigger strongly connected features (not normally associated with the head verb) to be primed for production.
To distinguish between these competing assumptions, I analyze participant role filler modification rates in event descriptions with respect to three indicators: the syntactic and semantic optionality of the role filler, the general predictability of the verb's role fillers, and the predictability of individual pairs of verb/participant role fillers. First, I use insights from linguistic theory to classify verbs and their participant roles into classes of syntactic optionality and semantic optionality. Second, I quantify over a large corpus the general predictability of a verb's participant roles and the specific predictability of each pair of verb/participant role filler. Finally, I model the relationship between the three indicators and modification in order to ascertain whether speakers have a stronger tendency to modify the more predictable participant role fillers, as Grice's Maxim of Relevancy predicts, or a tendency to modify the less predictable participant role fillers, as a Firthian activation-based model predicts.
I present descriptive statistical models to chart the relationship between predictability, syntactic optionality of a participant role, and semantic optionality of a participant role. In general, verb classes with stronger mental lexicon connections to their participant role fillers according to theory also have more predictable participant role fillers in the British National Corpus. Specifically, syntactically optional direct object verbs and semantically obligatory instrument verbs have more predictable participant role fillers than the opposite, comparable verb class. I also present several linear mixed-effect models to determine how predictive of modification the independent variables of syntactic verb class, semantic verb class, and verb/participant role filler predictability are. According to these models, speakers are significantly more likely to modify the less predicted participant role fillers even when taking into account individual verb and verb class differences. I conclude that mental lexicon accessibility modulates noun phrase realization according to a Firthian activation-based model. For each factor, I discuss possible explanations for the correlations between modification, predictability, and optionality and how these correlations make sense within a larger production model.
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Ó, Séaghdha Diarmuid Donncha. "Learning compound noun semantics." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.611452.
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Gomadam, Karthik Rajagopal. "Semantics Enriched Service Environments." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1251246445.
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Scontras, Gregory Charles. "The Semantics of Measurement." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064988.
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This thesis examines linguistic phenomena that implicate measurement in the nominal domain. The first is morphological number, as in one book vs. two books. Intuitively, the contrast between singular and plural forms of nouns finds its basis in whether or not some thing measures 1. Chapter 2 develops a formal account of morphological number centered around this measurement. Different classes of words and different languages employ different criteria to determine whether or not something measures 1 for the purpose of morphological singularity.
The second component of the project takes a closer look at the semantics of quantizing nouns, or words that allow for the measurement or counting of individuals. Chapter 3 develops a typology of these quantizing nouns, identifying three classes of words: measure terms (e.g., kilo), container nouns (e.g., glass), and atomizers (e.g., grain), showing that each class yields a distinct interpretation on the basis of diverging structures and semantics.
The third component of the project investigates our representations of measurement, modeled formally by degrees in the semantics. Chapter 4 accesses these representations of measurement through a case study of the word amount, which is shown to inhabit yet another class of quantizing noun: degree nouns. This case study motivates a new semantics for degrees. Formally, degrees are treated as kinds; both are nominalizations of properties. The properties that beget degrees are quantity-uniform, formed via a measure. Treating degrees as kinds ensures that they contain information about the objects that instantiate them.
This new semantics for degrees highlights the four basic elements of the semantics of measurement. First, and perhaps most obviously, we have measure functions in our semantics. These measure functions translate objects onto a scale, allowing for the encoding of gradability. Scales are composed of the second element in our measurement semantics: numbers. Numbers, specifically non-negative real numbers, are taken as semantic primitives. The third element, kinds, often provides the objects of measurement. Kinds are abstract, intensional entities, so the fourth element in our measurement semantics, partitions, delivers maximal instances of the kind (i.e., real-world objects) to be measured. With measures, numbers, kinds, and partitions, we have a semantics of measurement.Linguistics
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Prinz, Andreas. "Formal Semantics for SDL." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät II, 2001. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/13752.
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In dieser Habilitationsschrift wird die formale Semantik der standardisierten Spezifikationssprache SDL (Specification and Description Language) beschrieben. Da SDL eine sehr umfangreiche Sprache ist, wurde eine repräsentative eingeschränkte Sprache RSDL (Restricted SDL) ausgewählt, um die Konzepte der formalen Definition von SDL darzustellen. Die vorliegende Habilitationsschrift umfaßt zwei große Teile: die Definition der formalen Semantik von RSDL und ihre Implementierung. Die formale Definition der Semantik von RSDL ist verständlich, leicht mit der informalen Beschreibung zu vergleichen und repräsentiert die grundsätzliche Vorstellung von RSDL. Für die Beschreibung werden zwei Teile unterschieden, nämlich die statische Semantik und die dynamische Semantik. Die statische formale Sprachdefinition besteht aus einer konkreten Syntax, einer Menge von Korrektheitsbedingungen, einer Menge von Transformationsregeln und einer abstrakten Syntax als Basis für die dynamische Semantik. Das Ergebnis der statischen Beschreibung ist eine Repräsentation der Spezifikation in abstrakter Syntax. Die Formalisierung der dynamischen Semantik beginnt mit der abstrakten Syntax. Aus dieser abstrakten Syntax wird ein Verhaltensmodell abgeleitet, das auf der mathematischen Theorie der Abstrakten Zustandmaschinen ASM (Abstract State Machines) basiert. Um die Definition der Semantik besonders übersichtlich zu gestalten, wird eine Spezielle Abstrakte Maschine (SAM) unter Nutzung von ASM definiert. Diese abstrakte Maschine stellt eine abstrakte SDL-Maschine dar. Die formale Semantik beschreibt die Eigenschaften von SDL exakt. Um jedoch herauszufinden, ob die Semantik korrekt ist, muß sie mit der Sprachbeschreibung und den Intentionen der Sprachentwickler verglichen werden. Dies geschieht am einfachsten durch eine korrekte Implementierung der Semantik. Die Implementierung der formalen Semantik basiert auf einer Repräsentation der Eingabe als abstrakter Syntaxbaum. Um die Semantik mit minimalem Aufwand zu implementieren, werden existierende Werkzeuge verwendet. Der Compiler wird mit den Standardwerkzeugen lex und yacc generiert. Nach der Syntaxanalyse wird die weitere Verarbeitung über dem abstrakten Syntaxbaum der Eingabe definiert. Die Verarbeitung von abstrakten Syntaxbäumen wird durch ein Werkzeug namens kimwitu erledigt. Mit der hier vorgestellten Technologie wurde die formale Semantik von RSDL implementiert. Entsprechend wird die formale Semantik von SDL implementiert.In this habilitation thesis the formal semantics of the standardised specification language SDL (Specification and Description Language) is described. Because of the size of the language SDL a representative subset of the language called RSDL (Restricted SDL) was selected to present the concepts of the formal definition. In this thesis two major parts are covered: the definition of the formal semantics and its implementation. The RSDL formal semantics is intelligible, easily comparable with the informal description and represents the general understanding of RSDL. We distinguish between two phases of the definition, namely the static semantics and the dynamic semantics. The static semantics comprises the definition of a concrete grammar, a set of correctness constraints, a set of transformation rules and an abstract syntax as basis for the dynamic semantics. The result of the static semantics is a representation of the specification in abstract syntax. The dynamic semantics starts with the abstract syntax. From here a behaviour model is derived based on the theory of Abstract State Machines (ASM). In order to keep the presentation intelligible a special abstract machine is defined using ASM. This abstract machine in fact represents an abstract SDL-machine. The formal semantics describes the properties of SDL exactly. However, in order to check the correctness of the formalisation, it has to be compared with the informal language description and the intentions of the language designers. This is most easily done using a correct implementation of the semantics. The implementation of the semantics is based on a representation of the input as an abstract syntax tree. For implementing the semantics with minimal effort existing tools are used. The compiler is produced using the standard tools lex and yacc. After parsing the remaining processing is defined over abstract syntax trees, which is covered by a tool called kimwitu. The formal semantics of RSDL is implemented using these tools. The same approach is applicable for SDL.
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Gardy, Patrick. "Semantics of Strategy Logic." Thesis, Université Paris-Saclay (ComUE), 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017SACLN022/document.
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De nombreux bugs informatiques ont mis en lumière le besoin de certifier les programmes informatiques et la vérification de programmes a connu un développement important au cours des quarante dernières années. Parmi les méthodes possibles, on trouve le model-checking, développé par Clarke et Emerson dans les années 80. Le model-checking consiste à trouver un modèle abstrait pour le système et un formalisme logique pour le comportement puis à vérifier si le modèle vérifie la propriété exprimée dans la logique. La difficulté consiste alors à développer des algorithmes efficaces pour les différents formalismes. Nous nous intéresserons en particulier au formalisme logique de strategy Logic SL, utilisée sur les systèmes multiagents. SL est particulièrement expressif de par son traitement des stratégies (comportements possibles pour les agents du système) comme des objets du premier ordre. Dans sa définition, divers choix sémantiques sont faits et, bien que ces choix se justifient, d'autres possibilités n'en sont pas plus absurdes: tel ou tel choix donne telle ou telle logique et chacune permet d'exprimer des propriétés différentes. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions les différentes implications des différents choix sémantiques. Nous commencerons par introduire SL et préciserons l'étendue des connaissances actuelles. Nous nous intéresserons ensuite aux possibilités non explorées par la sémantique originale. Nous étudierons aussi la logique sur des systèmes quantitatifs (ajout de contraintes d'énergie et de contraintes de compteurs). Finalement, nous examinerons la question des dépendances dans SL[BG] (un fragment de SL)With the proliferation of computerised devices, software verification is more prevalent than ever. Since the 80's, multiple costly software failures have forced both private and public actors to invest in software verification. Among the main procedures we find the model-checking, developed by Clarke and Emerson in the 80's. It consists in abstracting both the system into a formal model and the property of expected behaviour in some logical formalism, then checking if the property's abstraction holds on the system's abstraction. The difficulty lies in finding appropriate models and efficient algorithms. In this thesis, we focus on one particular logical formalism: the Strategy Logic SL, used to express multi-objectives properties of multi-agents systems. Strategy Logic is a powerful and expressive formalism that treats strategies (i.e. potential behaviours of the agents) like first-order objects. It can be seen as an analogue to first-order logic for multi-agents systems. Many semantic choices were made in its definition without much discussion. Our main contributions are relative to the possibilities left behind by the original definition. We first introduce SL and present some complexity results (including some of our owns). We then outline some other semantic choices within SL's definition and study their influence. Third, we study the logic's behaviour under quantitative multi-agents systems (games with energy and counter constraints). Finally, we address the problem of dependencies within SL[BG], a fragment of SL
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Antoniazzi, Francesco <1991>. "Semantics Driven Agent Programming." Doctoral thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2020. http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/9197/1/tesi.pdf.
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In the last two decades the Information Technology changed substantially the life of people all around the World. Just a few years ago, for instance, paper support was needed to exchange all kind of data, while now electronics is indeed the main instrument of communication. This mutation was originally due mostly to the efficiency, while now it is, hopefully, also due to an increased attention towards environmental issues.
Information and data have proved over the time the importance of their role, contributing to a plethora of applications that allow the physical world to interact with mankind by the means of services dispatched pervasively and freely accessible. The Internet is the kernel of such complex setup that is called Internet of Things (IoT).
The IoT inherited from the Internet a chaotic interface. Protocols, conventions, mechanisms are different from an application to the other, and it is difficult and expensive to discover and make applications compatible with one another. From this consideration two exceptional ideas were born, namely the Semantic Web and the Web of Things (WoT). The latter would unify the IoT on an application level shared view, enabling standard discovery mechanisms and definitions. The former, on the other hand, intents to provide the tools to formalize the knowledge contents of the World Wide Web in a simultaneously human and machine understandable way.
This Thesis aims to explore both these two concepts and merge them into the Semantic Web of Things using the best of each. Therefore we hereby propose, describe, evaluate and use two ontologies: the Internet of Musical Things ontology, aiming to outline a semantic description of IoT; and a Semantic WoT ontology, aiming to push further the state of the art of IoT unification and standardization through a dynamic semantic approach.Negli ultimi due decenni le nuove Tecnologie dell'Informazione hanno cambiato radicalmente la vita delle persone in tutto il mondo. Soltanto qualche anno fa, per esempio, lo scambio di informazione era necessariamente effettuato sotto forma cartacea in quasi ogni ambito. Oggi, invece, il mezzo elettronico viene privilegiato sempre più per questioni di efficienza nonch\'e, recentemente, si spera anche per motivi legati alla sostenibilità ambientale. L'informazione ha dato prova, nel corso del tempo, della sua importanza. Ha contribuito a rendere possibili numerosissime applicazioni in grado di far interagire l'umanità con il mondo fisico attraverso un'astrazione composta da servizi facilmente accessibili e distribuiti ovunque. Internet è il cuore di questo grande sistema chiamato Internet of Things (IoT). L'IoT ha in comune con Internet la sua interfaccia caotica e la mancanza di ordine. I protocolli, le convenzioni, i meccanismi cambiano da una applicazione all'altra, rendendo difficile e costoso scoprire e creare sistemi compatibili. Da queste considerazioni ormai accettate dalla comunità traggono origine due concetti eccezionali: il Semantic Web e il Web of Things (WoT). Quest'ultimo ha come fine quello di unificare l'IoT ad un livello applicativo condiviso rendendo disponibili definizioni e meccanismi standard per la scoperta dei dispositivi. Il primo, invece, fornisce degli strumenti per formalizzare la conoscenza distribuita nel World Wide Web in modo che sia contemporanemante fruibile all'uomo e alle macchine. Questa Tesi si accinge ad esplorare i due concetti appena descritti, ed a riunirli usando il meglio di entrambi nel Semantic Web Of Things. Per fare ciò si proporranno, descriveranno, valuteranno ed useranno due ontologie: l'ontologia dell'Internet of Musical Things, che servirà per mostrare una definizione semantica dell'IoT; e l'ontologia del Semantic WoT, il cui scopo è di spingere oltre lo Stato dell'Arte nell'unificazione dell'IoT e nella sua standardizzazione attraverso un approccio semantico e dinamico.
Les deux dernières décennies ont vu les nouvelles Technologies de l'Information changer de manière radicale la vie des gens partout dans le monde. Il n'y a que quelques années, par exemple, des supports en papier étaient nécessaires pour l'échange des données, alors qu'à présent l'instrument principal est l'électronique. Ce changement était dû à l' origine à l'efficacité de la communication. Maintenant, on l'espère, la raison est aussi liée à la tutelle de l'environnement. Il a été largement démontré que l'information joue un rôle essentiel: innombrables applications ont été développées pour connecter le monde physique et l'humanité à travers des services distribués partout et librement accessibles. Internet est au centre de toute cette infrastructure, qui n'est autre que l'Internet des Objets (IoT). L'IoT et Internet ont en commun leur organisation chaotique. Les protocoles, les conventions, les fonctionnements internes peuvent être très différents d'une application à l'autre: il est souvent difficile et coûteux de découvrir et créer des applications compatibles avec le reste des systèmes qui sont à disposition. Ce concept est à l'origine de deux idées exceptionnelles: le Web Sémantique, et le Web des Objets (WoT). Celui-ci a pour but d'unifier l'IoT à un niveau applicatif commun avec des mécanismes de découverte et un vocabulaire standard. Le premier, d'autre part, propose les instruments pour mettre de l'ordre dans la connaissance du World Wide Web, de façon à la rendre à la fois compréhensible à l'être humain, et aux machines. Cette Thèse explore donc les deux idées à peine présentées, et additionne leurs meilleures qualités pour obtenir le Web des Objets Sémantiques. Ainsi sont proposées, décrites, évaluées et utilisées deux ontologies: celle de l'Internet des Objets Musicaux, pour produire une description sémantique de l'IoT; et celle du WoT Sémantique, qui voudrait avancer l'état de l'art de la recherche sur l'unification de l'IoT.
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PASINI, ANDREA. "Semantics-aware image understanding." Doctoral thesis, Politecnico di Torino, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/11583/2934670.
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De, Vine Lance N. "Some extensions to representation and encoding of structure in models of distributional semantics." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2013. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/61228/1/Lance_De_Vine_Thesis.pdf.
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This thesis makes several contributions towards improved methods for encoding structure in computational models of word meaning. New methods are proposed and evaluated which address the requirement of being able to easily encode linguistic structural features within a computational representation while retaining the ability to scale to large volumes of textual data. Various methods are implemented and evaluated on a range of evaluation tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
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Marcellino, Erasmo Roberto [UNESP]. "Construção de um ontoléxico para o universo léxico-conceitual da indústria do bordado de Ibitinga." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/93947.
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Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)
A cidade de Ibitinga destaca-se nacionalmente no ramo dos bordados, com sua economia voltada quase que exclusivamente à produção dessas peças. Tendo esse contexto como pano de fundo, esta dissertação discute todo o processo linguístico e linguístico-computacional de construção de ontoléxicos – constructos formais cuja natureza léxico-conceitual possibilita o desenvolvimento de investigações teóricas (estudos lexicogramaticais) e aplicadas (construção de recursos lexicográficos e para o processamento computacional de informação textual disponível na Web). Em particular, constrói um ontoléxico exploratório que entrelaça conceitos e itens lexicais do domínio léxico-conceitual da Indústria do Bordado de Ibitinga. O embasamento teórico-metodológico assenta-se nos estudos de semântica lexical (wordnets) e de frames (framenets), pura e computacional, de processamento automático de língua natural e de ontologias.
Ibitinga, which is a Brazilian town nationally known for its outstanding position in the embroidery business, has its economy almost totally based on the production of a broad selection of embroideries. With this embroidery industry in the backdrop, this master thesis describes the whole linguistic and computational-linguistic process of construction of ontolexicons – formal constructs whose lexical-conceptual nature allows for both theoretical (lexical-grammar construction) and applied (lexicographical and ontolexical resource construction) research. In particular, the study focuses on the design and implementation of a toy ontolexicon for the Ibitinga Embroydery Industry lexical-conceptual domain. Its theoretical foundations have drawn heavily on lexical semantics (wordnets), frame semantics (framenets), natural language processing, and ontologies.