Several Languages (several + languages)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


An expressive and efficient language for XML information retrieval

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 6 2002
Taurai Tapiwa Chinenyanga
Several languages for querying and transforming XML, including XML-QL, Quilt, and XQL, have been proposed. However, these languages do not support ranked queries based on textual similarity, in the spirit of traditional IR. Several extensions to these XML query languages to support keyword search have been made, but the resulting languages cannot express IR-style queries such as "find books and CDs with similar titles." In some of these languages keywords are used merely as boolean filters without support for true ranked retrieval; others permit similarity calculations only between a data value and a constant, and thus cannot express the above query. WHIRL avoids both problems, but assumes relational data. We propose ELIXIR, an expressive and efficient language for XML information retrieval that extends XML-QL with a textual similarity operator that can be used for similarity joins, so ELIXIR is sufficiently expressive to handle the sample query above. ELIXIR thus qualifies as a general-purpose XML IR query language. Our central contribution is an efficient algorithm for answering ELIXIR queries that rewrites the original ELIXIR query into a series of XML-QL queries to generate intermediate relational data, and uses WHIRL to efficiently evaluate the similarity operators on this intermediate data, yielding an XML document with nodes ranked by similarity. Our experiments demonstrate that our prototype scales well with the size of the query and the XML data. [source]


Toolkits for automatic web service and GUI generation: KWATT

CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE, Issue 12 2010
Yenan Qu
In a previous paper, we explained how to translate an input script into a functional web service, independent of the script language. We extend this work by considering the automatic creation of graphical user interfaces to allow interaction between a user and the web service generated by KWATT. The key aspects of this work are three-fold. First, comment lines inserted into the script provide hints to the interface generator regarding the interface widgets. Second, the structure of the GUI is encoded into an XML file, and third, a plugin architecture permits the interface to be the output in one of several languages. We present an example interface to illustrate the concepts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Portuguese version of Corah's Dental Anxiety Scale: transcultural adaptation and reliability analysis

DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, Issue 7 2007
Li Wen Hu Ms.C.
Abstract This study explores the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of Corah's Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS), an instrument designed to assess the manifestations of dental anxiety. The DAS has been translated into several languages, but no adaptation and reliability analysis of the Portuguese version of the scale has yet been carried out. A total of 747 Brazilian undergraduate students participated in this study. The instrument proved to have good internal consistency and test,retest reliability. Furthermore, we observed that women are more anxious during dental treatment routines compared to men. Our findings suggest that the Portuguese version of DAS is a reliable instrument for assessing adults' dental anxiety traits, and can be used for both clinical and research purposes. Depression Anxiety 24:467,471, 2007. © 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


The anatomy of language: contributions from functional neuroimaging

JOURNAL OF ANATOMY, Issue 3 2000
CATHY J. PRICE
This article illustrates how functional neuroimaging can be used to test the validity of neurological and cognitive models of language. Three models of language are described: the 19th Century neurological model which describes both the anatomy and cognitive components of auditory and visual word processing, and 2 20th Century cognitive models that are not constrained by anatomy but emphasise 2 different routes to reading that are not present in the neurological model. A series of functional imaging studies are then presented which show that, as predicted by the 19th Century neurologists, auditory and visual word repetition engage the left posterior superior temporal and posterior inferior frontal cortices. More specifically, the roles Wernicke and Broca assigned to these regions lie respectively in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the anterior insula. In addition, a region in the left posterior inferior temporal cortex is activated for word retrieval, thereby providing a second route to reading, as predicted by the 20th Century cognitive models. This region and its function may have been missed by the 19th Century neurologists because selective damage is rare. The angular gyrus, previously linked to the visual word form system, is shown to be part of a distributed semantic system that can be accessed by objects and faces as well as speech. Other components of the semantic system include several regions in the inferior and middle temporal lobes. From these functional imaging results, a new anatomically constrained model of word processing is proposed which reconciles the anatomical ambitions of the 19th Century neurologists and the cognitive finesse of the 20th Century cognitive models. The review focuses on single word processing and does not attempt to discuss how words are combined to generate sentences or how several languages are learned and interchanged. Progress in unravelling these and other related issues will depend on the integration of behavioural, computational and neurophysiological approaches, including neuroimaging. [source]


Early reading in Kannada: the pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic awareness

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 1 2007
Sonali Nag
Acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity are processes that are central to early reading development in several languages. The language-specific characteristics of the alphasyllabaries (Bright, 1996), however, challenge the constructs of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity as discussed in the context of alphabetic scripts. This paper reports a study of 5,10-year-olds in Kannada, an alphasyllabary that represents print in units called akshara. It was hypothesised that in Kannada, when compared with the developmental pace reported in English early reading, (a) akshara knowledge acquisition would take longer and (b) phoneme awareness would be slower to emerge. The study found these hypotheses to hold true across grades and in both low-achieving and effective schools. The paper discusses the nature of the cognitive demands in akshara reading and the akshara -specific characteristics that set a pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity that is quite at variance from what has been documented in the alphabetic scripts. [source]