A serpente e o bezerro. A idolatria como patologia simbólica. Um ponto de vista bíblico

Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called syntactic information, which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. By contrast, the concept of 'semantic information' refers to those correlations which carry significance or 'meaning' for a given system. Semantic information plays an important role in many fields, including biology, cognitive science and philosophy, and there has been a long-standing interest in formulating a broadly applicable and formal theory of semantic information. In this paper, we introduce such a theory. We define semantic information as the syntactic information that a physical system has about its environment which is causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence. 'Causal necessity' is defined in terms of counter-factual interventions which scramble correlations between the system and its environment, while 'maintaining existence' is defined in terms of the system's ability to keep itself in a low entropy state. We also use recent results in non-equilibrium statistical physics to analyse semantic information from a thermodynamic point of view. Our framework is grounded in the intrinsic dynamics of a system coupled to an environment, and is applicable to any physical system, living or otherwise. It leads to formal definitions of several concepts that have been intuitively understood to be related to semantic information, including 'value of information', 'semantic content' and 'agency'.

In this study, the goal is multifold. At first we present a summarized review of terms and facts regarding the branch of ecoinformatics, web mining and the semantic web. In Section 2 we provide some related work derived from the current literature upon the web mining and the production of semantic content. The main part of our work follows presenting a notional model for building semantic content through 2-level web mining. This is achieved in web sites containing environmental data. We conclude mentioning the importance of this contribution from different points of view.

Personal values play a vital role while utilizing learning approaches by individuals through their studies. Especially in higher education, those values substantially affect individuals' character in their learning community and eventually influence their academic accomplishments. Values manifest themselves in all elements of practical culture. In cognitive activity, they play the role of a reference point: it is more natural for a person to learn what is vitally important for him/her. The purpose of the research is to identify the life priorities and value orientations of modern students and its influence on learning process and student accomplishments. As a research method, the method of unfinished sentences was used, as a method of collecting information that allows us to identify various aspects related to the life values of students. The article considers the specifics of life values’ semantic content among young people, defines the terminal and instrumental values of students. The study novelty and originality lie in the fact that for the first time life values are considered in the representation of first-year students. It is proved that material security, as a value is practically not represented in students. For the first time, it was determined that the structure of young students’ terminal values includes family, education, and later career. It is revealed that success, as a value, from the point of view of students, directly depends on responsibility, performance, self-control. It is considered that the best job for first-year students is the one that corresponds to their emotional mood, is highly paid, and is associated with helping other people.

This paper illustrates some of the semantic Web techniques used in the framework of the EU project EUFORBIA, which deals with the rating and filtering of `questionable' Web sites concerned with racism, violence, pornography, etc. The rationale for using a high-level semantic approach in this domain is linked with the assumption that an in-depth description of the `semantic content' of Web sites should allow the implementation of filtering strategies more flexible, accurate and (neatly) sophisticated than the current ones. From a technical point of view, the final result of the project consists of two integrated prototypes that communicate through a common ontology

The article examines a number of basic concepts of the philosophical discourse of the Russian philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century I. Ilyin. The semantic content and linguistic means of expressing the concepts of GOD, MAN and the WORLD in the book by I. Ilyin «Hegel’s philosophy as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and man» are analyzed. It is concluded that the discursive features of Russian philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century are fully manifested in the work of the Russian philosopher: a combination of thorough knowledge of Western European philosophical discourse with a high culture of Russian literary speech. It is shown that the concepts like GOD, MAN, the WORLD are the most essential and representative for describing the conceptual field. These concepts express the main ideas of the book, express its theme and idea, which consists in the analysis of Hegel’s philosophy from the point of view of the embodiment of God in the existence of the world and man. The highlighted concepts confirm the presence of the nuclear field in the conceptual field of Ivan Ilyin’s philosophical discourse. The analysis of the text gave grounds to assert that each of the selected concepts has a complex structure of its semantic content, realized through its connections with other concepts in certain syntactic constructions. The attachment of predicates of identification, state, action indicates the definitive signs of the corresponding concepts. The inclusion of verbalizers of nuclear concepts in a subordinate position in syntactic constructions characterizes nuclear concepts from the point of view of their attribution as essential qualities of objects described in the text of Ivan Ilyin – phenomena and facts of nature, society and culture. The article highlights the ontological and mental semantic features of the main concepts, which are revealed in their relations with other concepts. Ontological features are the existence, reality, movement, activity, freedom, spirituality, order, chaos, space, time ascribed to objects expressed by nuclear concepts. Mental signs include various aspects of thinking, knowledge, vision, denial, empirical, sensory, rational knowledge, science.

Several consumer electronic devices that allow capturing digital multimedia content (like mp3 recorders, digital cameras, DVD camcorders, smart phones etc.) are available today. These devices have allowed both the amateur and the professional users to produce large volumes of digital multimedia material, which, together with the traditional media objects digitized recently (using scanners, audio and video digitization devices) form a huge distributed multimedia information source. The multimedia material that is available today is usually organized in independent multimedia information sources, developed on top of different software platforms. The Internet, the emergence of advanced network infrastructures that allow for the fast, efficient and reliable transmission of multimedia content and the development of digital multimedia content services on top of them form an open multimedia consumption environment. In this environment, the users access the multimedia material either through computers or through cheap consumer electronic devices that allow the consumption and management of multimedia content. The users of such an open environment need to be able to access the services offered by the different vendors in a transparent way and to be able to compose the different atomic services (like, for example, multimedia content filtering) into new, composite ones. In order to fulfill this requirement, interoperability between the multimedia content services offered is necessary. Interoperability is achieved, at the syntactic level, through the adoption of standards. At the semantic level, interoperability is achieved through the integration of domain knowledge expressed in the form of domain ontologies. An ontology is a logical theory accounting for the intended meaning of a formal vocabulary, i.e. its ontological commitment to a particular conceptualization of the world (Guarino, 1998). The standard that dominates in multimedia content description is the MPEG-7 (Salembier, 2001), formally known as Multimedia Content Description Interface. It supports multimedia content description from several points of view, including media information, creation information, structure, usage information, textual annotations, media semantics, and low-level visual and audio features. Since the MPEG-7 allows the structured description of the multimedia content semantics, rich and accurate semantic descriptions can be created and powerful semantic retrieval and filtering services can be built on top of them. It has been shown, in our previous research (Tsinaraki, Fatourou and Christodoulakis, 2003), that domain ontologies capturing domain knowledge can be expressed using pure MPEG-7 constructs. This way, domain knowledge can be integrated in the MPEG-7 semantic descriptions. The domain knowledge is subsequently utilized for supporting semantic personalization, retrieval and filtering and has been shown to enhance the retrieval precision (Tsinaraki, Polydoros and Christodoulakis, 2007). Although multimedia content description is now standardized through the adoption of the MPEG-7 and semantic multimedia content annotation is possible, multimedia content retrieval and filtering (especially semantic multimedia content retrieval and filtering), which form the basis of the multimedia content services, are far from being successfully standardized.

Several consumer electronic devices that allow capturing digital multimedia content (like mp3 recorders, digital cameras, DVD camcorders, smart phones etc.) are available today. These devices have allowed both the amateur and the professional users to produce large volumes of digital multimedia material, which, together with the traditional media objects digitized recently (using scanners, audio and video digitization devices) form a huge distributed multimedia information source. The multimedia material that is available today is usually organized in independent multimedia information sources, developed on top of different software platforms. The Internet, the emergence of advanced network infrastructures that allow for the fast, efficient and reliable transmission of multimedia content and the development of digital multimedia content services on top of them form an open multimedia consumption environment. In this environment, the users access the multimedia material either through computers or through cheap consumer electronic devices that allow the consumption and management of multimedia content. The users of such an open environment need to be able to access the services offered by the different vendors in a transparent way and to be able to compose the different atomic services (like, for example, multimedia content filtering) into new, composite ones. In order to fulfill this requirement, interoperability between the multimedia content services offered is necessary. Interoperability is achieved, at the syntactic level, through the adoption of standards. At the semantic level, interoperability is achieved through the integration of domain knowledge expressed in the form of domain ontologies. An ontology is a logical theory accounting for the intended meaning of a formal vocabulary, i.e. its ontological commitment to a particular conceptualization of the world (Guarino, 1998). The standard that dominates in multimedia content description is the MPEG-7 (Salembier, 2001), formally known as Multimedia Content Description Interface. It supports multimedia content description from several points of view, including media information, creation information, structure, usage information, textual annotations, media semantics, and low-level visual and audio features. Since the MPEG-7 allows the structured description of the multimedia content semantics, rich and accurate semantic descriptions can be created and powerful semantic retrieval and filtering services can be built on top of them. It has been shown, in our previous research (Tsinaraki, Fatourou and Christodoulakis, 2003), that domain ontologies capturing domain knowledge can be expressed using pure MPEG-7 constructs. This way, domain knowledge can be integrated in the MPEG-7 semantic descriptions. The domain knowledge is subsequently utilized for supporting semantic personalization, retrieval and filtering and has been shown to enhance the retrieval precision (Tsinaraki, Polydoros and Christodoulakis, 2007). Although multimedia content description is now standardized through the adoption of the MPEG-7 and semantic multimedia content annotation is possible, multimedia content retrieval and filtering (especially semantic multimedia content retrieval and filtering), which form the basis of the multimedia content services, are far from being successfully standardized.

It is well known that utterances convey a great deal of information about the speaker in addition to their semantic content. One such type of information consists of cues to the speaker's personality traits, the most fundamental dimension of variation between humans. Recent work explores the automatic detection of other types of pragmatic variation in text and conversation, such as emotion, deception, speaker charisma, dominance, point of view, subjectivity, opinion and sentiment. Personality affects these other aspects of linguistic production, and thus personality recognition may be useful for these tasks, in addition to many other potential applications. However, to date, there is little work on the automatic recognition of personality traits. This article reports experimental results for recognition of all Big Five personality traits, in both conversation and text, utilising both self and observer ratings of personality. While other work reports classification results, we experiment with classification, regression and ranking models. For each model, we analyse the effect of different feature sets on accuracy. Results show that for some traits, any type of statistical model performs significantly better than the baseline, but ranking models perform best overall. We also present an experiment suggesting that ranking models are more accurate than multi-class classifiers for modelling personality. In addition, recognition models trained on observed personality perform better than models trained using self-reports, and the optimal feature set depends on the personality trait. A qualitative analysis of the learned models confirms previous findings linking language and personality, while revealing many new linguistic markers.

Chapter 1. Noel Burton-Roberts, Meaning, semantics and semiotics.- Chapter 2. Louise Cummings, Clinical pragmatics and theory of mind.- Chapter 3. Nicholas Allott, Relevance Theory.- Chapter 4. Alison Hall, Relevance theory, semantic content and pragmatic enrichment.- Chapter 5. Alessandro Capone, Explicatures are NOT cancellable.- Chapter 6. Alessandro, Capone, The pragmatics of indirect reports and slurring.- Chapter 7. Eleni Gregoromichelaki and Ruth Kempson, Grammars as processes for interactive language use: incrementality and the emergence of joint intentionality.- Chapter 8. Yan Huang, Logophoricity and neo-Gricean truth-conditional pragmatics.- Chapter 9. Eros Corazza, Some notes on point of view.- Chapter 10. Keith Allan, Referring to what counts as the referent.- Chapter 11. Keith Allan, What is common ground?.- Chapter 12. Bart Geurts and Emar Maier Layered Discourse Representation Theory.- Chapter 13. Mandy Simons, On the conversational basis of some presuppositions.- Chapter 14. Klaus von Heusinger, The salience theory of definiteness.- Chapter 15. Istvan Kecskes and Fenghui Zhang, On the dynamic relationship between common ground and presupposition.- Chapter 16. Alan Libert, What can pragmaticists learn from studying artificial languages?.- Chapter 17. Sorin Stati, Implicit propositions in an argumentative approach.- Chapter 18. Marco Mazzone, Automatic and controlled processes in pragmatics.- Chapter 19. Dorota Zielinska, The mechanism of the form-content correlation process in the paradigm of empirical sciences.- Chapter 20. Marco Carapezza and Pierluigi Biancini, Language game: calcolus or pragmatic act?

Background: A central purpose of narration is to convey one's point of view about a narrated event. One's expressed evaluation of a narrated event (modalising language) is often differentiated from one's expression of the time, place, person, and event proper (referential language). Use of narrative evaluative devices highlights information in narratives. Previous findings provide evidence that the frequency of use, co-occurrence and distribution of evaluative devices are similar for narratives of speakers with and without aphasia, suggesting a preservation of evaluative or modalising language in aphasia. Aims: This study complements prior research on structural aspects of evaluative devices by examining the distribution and overall coherence of the content emphasised by evaluative devices in the personal narratives of speakers with aphasia, as compared to that of narratives produced by demographically similar speakers without aphasia. Methods & Procedures: Participants were 33 demographically matched, English-speaking, middle-aged adults. Of these, 17 had aphasia, and 16 had no neurological disorder. Each group included similar proportions of three demographic subgroups: African-American males, African-American females, and Caucasian females. Each participant told a personal narrative of a frightening experience. Narrative evaluative content was analysed for its proportion of use on and off the main event line, and for its overall coherence. Outcomes & Results: The distribution and coherence of highlighted/evaluated semantic content were similar for narratives of individuals with and without aphasia. Notably, some aphasic participants produced coherent evaluative/modalising content with incoherent referential content. Conclusions: The relatively intact ability of individuals with aphasia to assign prominence to information in narratives sheds light on the neurological underpinnings of modalising language, and suggests possible skills associated with the ability of aphasic persons to “communicate better than they talk” (Holland, 1977). The clinical potential for assessment and treatment that incorporates narrative evaluative devices and modalising language needs to be further explored.

The paper presents a detailed school linguistic and literary analysis of A. Pushkin’s poem Arion . The purpose of the study is to theoretically justify and describe the methodology for conducting an in-depth discussion of this poem in the classroom, including highlighting the key stages of the discussion, as well as providing questions and tasks on the text. In the course of the study, methods of linguistic and literary analysis, theoretical generalization, and project planning were used. From the perspective of the psychodidactic approach, the main stages of the discussion of the poem Arion by A. Pushkin with students are highlighted; questions and tasks are formulated aimed at developing schoolchildren’s understanding of this work, increasing the reader’s perception, enhancing the research attention and cognitive interest, and forming a thoughtful attitude towards the lyric text. Three semantic plans of the poem Arion are considered, distinguished by the degree of explicitness and semantic content: explicitly-implicit, implicit and contextual (background). Different points of view regarding the possible political context of this work are presented, the role of the mythological context is analysed; the features of the compositional structure, which is built on the «climax – resolution» principle, are revealed. The author concludes that, in order to develop an understanding of lyrics among adolescents, it is necessary to conduct a detailed analytical and synthesizing work with a poem and to build a conversation lesson based on the creative interaction of students with both the lyric composition and other readers, which involves taking into account the possibilities of different readings of the text and respect for the other opinions, which can be used as a springboard for students’ empathy and understanding.

A social network is modeled as a graph of nodes connected through interactions among users, an important medium for the information spreading and influence on users dynamically. Modeling information diffusion is still key problem to predict influences of information on users. In recent years, numerous literatures have proposed models to solve this problem. However, each of models is coming from different points of view. Based on differential equations and with a real mechanism of transferring, exchanging information in network, in this paper, it is proposed a model of temporal-spatial information diffusion, named differential information diffusion or DID model. This model is setup in accordance with topological structure of network, semantic content and interactive activities of users in network. Experimental computations show the feasibility of the proposed model, conformity with network topology and with prospects of scalability for large networks.

REAL-TIME INTERACTION OVER THE INTERNET: MODEL FOR QOS ADAPTATION

Current video database systems are able to manipulate syntactic aspects of temporal media like video and audio. However, few of these systems are able to manipulate video information according to its semantic content. Furthermore, manually describing video content is tedious and not practical for the video data due to the temporal, spatial, and massive characteristic of the video, meanwhile content description always depends on user interpretation. Our video description model is based on model based on which is proposed in the object-oriented programming field. A prototype is a prefabricated object with a predefined structure, content and behavior from which new objects can be constructed from other prototypes. By using prototypes, the user is able to describe video stories easily implementing and modifying prototypes of typical scenes that usually appear in several stories. Our method uses two hierarchical structures, one based on prototypes' inheritance structure and another based on prototype internal structure. From this point of view, our system includes a hierarchical prototype menu, which guides the user to reach easily requested prototypes; hence, the story remains the same regardless of different user interpretation.

Background. Since the 1960s Ukrainian artistic textile has been researched by S.Sydorovych, A.Zhuk, Ya.Zapasko, Z.Chehuseva, T.Pecheniuk, H.Kusko, Ye.Shymchuk, Z.Shulha, D.Bobiak, O.Yamborko, O.Nykorak, T.Lupii, O.Lukovska, O.Moisiuk studied regional features of folk weaving in history aspect. The fifth volume of The History of Ukrainian ornamental art published by M. T. Rylsky Institute of Art, Folklore Studies and Ethnology Institute of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is the important fundamental study where the researched issues are considered (2016). This volume presents the contribution of Rivne and Lviv artists Marta Tokar, Ivanna Tokar, Tetiana Lukashevych, and Olena Okhrymyk in general features. Separate aspects of Rivne artists’ creative work and school development are considered by A.Nikolaieva, N.Kosmolinska, O.Stashuk, I.Tokar etc. In modern times the complex research of Rivne art textile establishment and the issues of school development have not been presented that proves the importance of this paper. This study aims to outline social and cultural preconditions and features of Rivne Artistic Textile School establishment, give a short characteristic of its outstanding people creative work, and determine basic issues and ways of the development. The methodology is based on the complex approach including cultural, structural analysis and art study interpretation. This has provided the possibility using a system way to consider Rivne cloth art of the last decades as a complete art phenomenon. The scientific novelty concerns with regional characteristics of Rivne modern textile art. Results. Since last decades artistic textile having huge variety of its presentation has been becoming the field for new esthetic research and new point of view according to the surrounding on Rivne artistic map. This traditional ornamental branch is getting closer to pictorial art and in perfect manifestations it can even pretend to research modern social and human being conditions. The implementation and function of vocational art education were the important motivation to develop Rivne region artistic textile despite of weak institutional support especially in recent years. This paper studies beginnings and current issues of Rivne Cloth Art School becoming. New artistic senses are polished in the process of democratic competition through craftswomen creative ideas of different generations. This fact demonstrates the formation of Rivne Artistic Textile School. It is textile that is presented at international exhibitions among other kinds of arts including contribution of younger generation craftswomen. Simultaneously the author points out the issue of weak institutionalization of Ukrainian modern art on the local level. First of all it is revealed on the level of artifacts museification as the representation issue becomes the main one in the modern world. According to Rivne regional textile art the issue of centralized accumulation absence of modern works kept in artists’ studios is the most important one. This makes art utterances function more complicated for its research and interpretation. Artistic textile vocational school cooperation with Rivne Linen Factory (that existed till the 1990s) has interesting potential possibilities under the conditions of factors appearance that would let reanimate it or develop a new one. The author states that it can be the development of flax culture in Ukraine, expanding of enterprise ranges and other strategic structural initiatives. Conclusions. Rivne Artistic Textile School became the original branch of Lviv Arts and Crafts School. Focusing on regional folk weaving traditions Rivne modern craftswomen developed a new and unique artistic phenomenon characterized by the variety of its expressions in the semantic content and shape-created aspect. Rivne art-space analysis through the decentralization of artistic processes demonstrates that the leading role definitely belongs to art fabric in this process. Moreover this trend is powerful enough and artistic textile is a counterweight factor to the traditional painting centrism of Ukrainian art (including art-market). The next stage of the research aims to highlight imaginary system of separate art personalities. The study can be interpreted in such interdisciplinary aspects as cultural analysis, methodological points etc.