Current Search:  World Wide Web (x)

View All Items

  • CSV Spreadsheet
(1 - 2 of 2)
THE ACQUISITION OF LEXICAL KNOWLEDGE FROM THE WEB FOR ASPECTS OF SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION
Title
THE ACQUISITION OF LEXICAL KNOWLEDGE FROM THE WEB FOR ASPECTS OF SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION.
Creator
Schwartz, Hansen, Gomez, Fernando, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description
This work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Novel approaches are presented for both the acquisition of this knowledge and use of the knowledge in...
Show moreThis work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Novel approaches are presented for both the acquisition of this knowledge and use of the knowledge in semantic interpretation algorithms. The goal is to increase accuracy over other automatic semantic interpretation systems, and in turn enable stronger real world applications such as machine translation, advanced Web search, sentiment analysis, and question answering. The major contributions of this dissertation consist of two methods of acquiring lexical knowledge from the Web, namely a database of common sense knowledge and Web selectors. The first method is a framework for acquiring a database of concept relationships. To acquire this knowledge, relationships between nouns are found on the Web and analyzed over WordNet using information-theory, producing information about concepts rather than ambiguous words. For the second contribution, words called Web selectors are retrieved which take the place of an instance of a target word in its local context. The selectors serve for the system to learn the types of concepts that the sense of a target word should be similar. Web selectors are acquired dynamically as part of a semantic interpretation algorithm, while the relationships in the database are useful to stand-alone programs. A final contribution of this dissertation concerns a novel semantic similarity measure and an evaluation of similarity and relatedness measures on tasks of concept similarity. Such tasks are useful when applying acquired knowledge to semantic interpretation. Applications to word sense disambiguation, an aspect of semantic interpretation, are used to evaluate the contributions. Disambiguation systems which utilize semantically annotated training data are considered supervised. The algorithms of this dissertation are considered minimally-supervised; they do not require training data created by humans, though they may use human-created data sources. In the case of evaluating a database of common sense knowledge, integrating the knowledge into an existing minimally-supervised disambiguation system significantly improved results -- a 20.5\% error reduction. Similarly, the Web selectors disambiguation system, which acquires knowledge directly as part of the algorithm, achieved results comparable with top minimally-supervised systems, an F-score of 80.2\% on a standard noun disambiguation task. This work enables the study of many subsequent related tasks for improving semantic interpretation and its application to real-world technologies. Other aspects of semantic interpretation, such as semantic role labeling could utilize the same methods presented here for word sense disambiguation. As the Web continues to grow, the capabilities of the systems in this dissertation are expected to increase. Although the Web selectors system achieves great results, a study in this dissertation shows likely improvements from acquiring more data. Furthermore, the methods for acquiring a database of common sense knowledge could be applied in a more exhaustive fashion for other types of common sense knowledge. Finally, perhaps the greatest benefits from this work will come from the enabling of real world technologies that utilize semantic interpretation.
Show less
Date Issued
2011
Identifier
CFE0003688, ucf:48805
Format
Document (PDF)
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0003688
The Modern Church Communicates: Rhetoric and Hypertext in Church Website Design
Title
The Modern Church Communicates: Rhetoric and Hypertext in Church Website Design.
Creator
Palmer, Edward, Applen, John, Jones, Dan, Stephens, Sonia, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description
The Internet and the World Wide Web have supplanted many paper-based information systems. People turn to the web to locate local services in the same way they find ecommerce sites such as Amazon. Churches of all sizes must develop effective and attractive websites to attract new members and inform existing members. These two groups form distinct audiences that must be correctly targeted by the website content. Other churches may visit to gather ideas for their programs; they are a third group...
Show moreThe Internet and the World Wide Web have supplanted many paper-based information systems. People turn to the web to locate local services in the same way they find ecommerce sites such as Amazon. Churches of all sizes must develop effective and attractive websites to attract new members and inform existing members. These two groups form distinct audiences that must be correctly targeted by the website content. Other churches may visit to gather ideas for their programs; they are a third group of site visitors. Organization of hypertext on the web requires skills that are different than writing for print. Technical communicators possess those skills and can help others write better hypertext. This research examines eight churches that cross three categories: denomination, size, and location. The websites of the churches are analyzed from the standpoint of the reader and the technical communicator to determine their effectiveness in content, organization, and underlying structure of the webpages, and then consider if geography, size, or denomination account for the observed differences. Audience and message are lesser issues than organization of information and navigational guidance for the reader. No remarkable differences were observed based on size, geography, or denomination. The technical communicator can assist non-technical content producers in developing skills in organization and classification.
Show less
Date Issued
2017
Identifier
CFE0006635, ucf:51218
Format
Document (PDF)
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006635