Concrete Domain Research Articles

Partial colexifications reveal directional tendencies in object naming

Abstract Expressions in which the word for a body part is also used for objects can be found in many languages. Some languages use body part terms to refer to object parts, while others have only a few idiosyncratic examples in their vocabulary. Studying the word forms referring to body and object concepts, i.e., colexifications, across languages, offers insights into cognitive principles facilitating such usage. Previous studies focused on full colexifications in which the same word form expresses two distinct concepts. Here, we utilize a new approach that allows us to analyze partial colexifications in which a concept is built out of the word forms for two separate concepts, like river mouth. Based on a large lexical database, we identified body and object concepts and analyzed 39 colexifications across 329 languages. The results show that word forms for body concepts are used slightly more frequently as a source for object names. However, the detailed examination of directional tendencies and colexifications of word forms between body and object concepts reveals linguistic variation. The study sheds light on meaning extensions between two concrete domains and showcases the synergies that arise through the combination of existing data and methods.

Research Progress on the Activity Stimulation of Lithium Slag in Concrete

Lithium slag (LS), an industrial waste byproduct generated during lithium salt production, is characterized by its harmful trace elements, significant stockpiles and low pozzolanic activity. By 2003, the annual discharge of lithium slag in China surpassed 15 million tons, creating an urgent need for established large-scale disposal technologies. One of the primary strategies for the effective utilization of LS is its application as an auxiliary cementitious material in concrete. However, the low reactivity of LS and challenges associated with its large-scale application impede its effective utilization. Enhancing the pozzolanic activity of LS is pivotal for its substantial incorporation into concrete. This study begins by analyzing the physicochemical properties and volcanic ash reactivity of LS derived from various lithium extraction techniques. It subsequently explores the diverse activation techniques aimed at improving the reactivity of LS within concrete. Ultimately, this paper highlights the significance of synergistic activation strategies, particularly physicochemical co-excitation and multi-exciter composite excitation. These approaches are identified as critical pathways for enhancing the activity of LS. Through this exploration, this study aims to unveil innovative strategies that bolster the resource utilization efficiency of LS, thereby facilitating its effective application in the concrete domain.

Systems of fixpoint equations: Abstraction, games, up-to techniques and local algorithms

Systems of fixpoint equations over complete lattices, consisting of (mixed) least and greatest fixpoint equations, allow one to express many verification tasks such as model-checking of various kinds of specification logics or the check of coinductive behavioural equivalences. In this paper we develop a theory of approximation for systems of fixpoint equations in the style of abstract interpretation: a system over some concrete domain is abstracted to a system in a suitable abstract domain, with conditions ensuring that the abstract solution represents a sound/complete overapproximation of the concrete solution. Interestingly, up-to techniques, a classical approach used in coinductive settings to obtain easier or feasible proofs, can be interpreted as abstractions in a way that they naturally fit into our framework and extend to systems of equations. Additionally, relying on the approximation theory, we can characterise the solution of systems of fixpoint equations over complete lattices in terms of a suitable parity game, generalising some recent work that was restricted to continuous lattices. The game view opens the way for the development of local algorithms for characterising the solution of such equation systems. We describe a local algorithm for checking the winner on specific game positions. This corresponds to answering the associated verification question (i.e., for model checking, whether a state satisfies a formula or, for equivalence checking, whether two states are behaviourally equivalent). The algorithm can be combined with abstraction and up-to techniques, thus providing ways of speeding up the computation.

Evolution of the Moral Lexicon.

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by analyzing semantic change and formation of over 800 words from the English Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years. Across historical text corpora and dictionaries, we discover concrete-to-abstract shifts as words acquire moral meaning, in contrast with the broad observation that words become more concrete over time. Furthermore, we find that compound moral words tend to be derived from a concrete-to-abstract shift from their constituents, and this derivational property is more prominent in moral words compared to alternative compound words when word frequency is controlled for. We suggest that evolution of the moral lexicon depends on systematic metaphorical mappings from concrete domains to the moral domain. Our results provide large-scale evidence for the role of metaphor in shaping the historical development of the English moral lexicon.

Logics with Concrete Domains: First-Order Properties, Abstract Expressive Power, and (Un)Decidability

Concrete domains have been introduced in description logic (DL) to enable reference to concrete objects (such as numbers) and predefined predicates on these objects (such as numerical comparisons) when defining concepts. The primary research goal in this context was to find restrictions on the concrete domain such that its integration into certain DLs preserves decidability or tractability. In this article, we complement these investigations by studying the abstract expressive power of both first-order and description logics extended with concrete domains, i.e., we analyze which classes of first-order interpretations can be expressed using these logics, compared to what their counterparts without concrete domains can express. We demonstrate that, under natural conditions on the concrete domain D (which also play a role for decidability), extensions of first-order logic (FOL) or the well-known DL ALC with D share important formal characteristics with FOL, such as the compactness and the Löwenheim-Skolem properties. Nevertheless, these conditions do not ensure that the abstract expressive power of the extensions we consider is contained in that of FOL, though in some cases it is. To be more precise, we show, on the one hand, that unary concrete domains leave the abstract expressive power within FOL if we are allowed to introduce auxiliary predicates. As a by-product, we obtain (semi-)decidability results for some fragments of FOL extended with the concrete domains considered in this article. On the other hand, we show that the ability to express equality between elements of D , another condition employed in the context of showing decidability of ALC ( D ), is sufficient to push the abstract expressive power of most first-order fragments with concrete domains beyond that of FOL. While for such concrete domains D decidability is retained for ALC ( D ), we show that the availability of equality in D causes undecidability of the two-variable fragment of FOL( D ), although the two-variable fragment of FOL is decidable.

REAL ESTATE, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND CAPITALIST ABSTRACTION. ON EDGAR MARTINS’ THIS IS NOT A HOUSE, DANIEL SHEA’S 43-35 10TH STREET, AND LEWIS BUSH’S METROPOLE

The paper analyses three photographic bodies of work — Edgar Martins’ This Is Not a House, Daniel Shea’s 43-35 10th Street, and Lewis Bush’s Metropole — looking at various aspects of the real estate market: real estate collapse and the 2008 financial crisis in the USA, as well as real estate boom and gentrification in New York City and London. The case studies depict the real estate industry as an example of how invisible and abstract market processes shape visible and concrete domains of everyday life, such as, income inequalities, social relationships, or public space aesthetics. The artists in question use photography as a tool to deconstruct the abstractions of neoliberal capitalism through an attempt to visualise the invisible. By examining the three case studies in the light of economic theory on the real estate market, the paper defines links between neoliberal capitalism and the medium of photography using the idea of abstraction, and shows how photography is used to dissect the complexity of economic processes taking place within the realm of neoliberal capitalism.

Terminological Metaphor: Ontology, Gnoseology, Deontology

The communion between man and the universe is a benchmark for meditation on existential values, reflecting human complexity: body, soul, and spirit. Metaphor, present in all fields, indicates intellectual performance, being a distinct characteristic of the human spirit. Terminological metaphor, a relatively new concept, transfers meaning from a concrete domain to an abstract one, based on analogy (association) and conceptual differences. Researchers identify the cognitive and structural functions of conceptual metaphor. In the language system, metaphors impose their own conceptual models, providing terms with functional capacity. Metaphorization is a universal cognitive phenomenon. The article proposes to approach terminological metaphor from ontological, epistemological, and deontological perspectives in elucidating the phenomenon of specialized metaphorization, using as benchmarks loan terms from modern languages of scholarly formation, Greek and Latin.

Eigenvalue estimates for Fourier concentration operators on two domains

We study concentration operators associated with either the discrete or the continuous Fourier transform, that is, operators that incorporate a spatial cut-off and a subsequent frequency cut-off to the Fourier inversion formula. The spectral profiles of these operators describe the number of prominent degrees of freedom in problems where functions are assumed to be supported on a certain domain and their Fourier transforms are known or measured on a second domain. We derive eigenvalue estimates that quantify the extent to which Fourier concentration operators deviate from orthogonal projectors, by bounding the number of eigenvalues that are away from 0 and 1 in terms of the geometry of the spatial and frequency domains, and a factor that grows at most poly-logarithmically on the inverse of the spectral margin. The estimates are non-asymptotic in the sense that they are applicable to concrete domains and spectral thresholds, and almost match asymptotic benchmarks. Our work covers, for the first time, non-convex and non-symmetric spatial and frequency concentration domains, as demanded by numerous applications that exploit the expected approximate low dimensionality of the modeled phenomena. The proofs build on Israel’s work on one dimensional intervals arXiv:1502.04404v1. The new ingredients are the use of redundant wave-packet expansions and a dyadic decomposition argument to obtain Schatten norm estimates for Hankel operators.

COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC METAPHORS

Today many metaphor researchers work in the framework of cognitive linguistics. The cognitive linguistics revolution began in 1980 with the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. In their book, Lakoff and Johnson amassed an amazing number of examples showing that the way we talk about abstract domains appears to be systematically structured by the way wetalk about certain more concrete domains. Thus, we talk about theories and arguments as if they were buildings: theories can have support and arguments can be demolished. These observations gave rise to the theory of conceptual metaphor which moved metaphor out of language into our conceptual organization. According to Lakoff and Johnson, linguistic expressions such as ‘to demolish a theory’ or ‘the foundation of a theory’ are not isolated expressions but parts of the conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS.

Conceptual Metaphor in Kurdish Economic News Reports

When conceptual metaphor theory developed, new perspectives have been opened into the way language can be manipulated in our world of the immediate and faraway surroundings of which economic news reports. This report is one of the most pervasive types we constantly encounter in our daily interactions. Additionally, conceptual metaphor has a significant role in comprehending abstract and complicated economic expressions since it depends on the act of mapping between two domains; the concrete domain is mapped onto the abstract domain. The former is the source domain and the latter is the target domain. The present study highlights conceptual metaphor’s salient roles and implications in selected Kurdish economic news reports. It aims to identify, qualify and quantify the classifications of conceptual metaphor; structural, ontological and orientational, adopted in Kurdish economic news reports; therefore, three economic news reports have been selected from Rudaw and Kurdstat News which are two Kurdish news websites in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The data has been chosen randomly for each type of conceptual metaphor and has been analysed accordingly. The results indicate that the most dominant pattern is structural metaphor and the least frequent is orientational.

Recurrent gestures in organic chemistry in tertiary education: creating emblems through material and embodied actions

ABSTRACT Background Science teaching and learning, as discursive practices, occur through the utilization of various semiotic modes. Gestures play a pivotal role as an embodied mode that acts in conjunction with speech in oral communication settings, such as classrooms. Previous research on gestures in chemistry and science education has illuminated how interactions involving different types of gestures can enhance learning opportunities for students. However, the investigation of recurrent gestures and their potential function as emblems in classroom discourse remains unexplored. Purpose The objective of this article is to illustrate how catchments or recurrent gestures were constructed, used, and, to some extent, evolved into emblems within the interaction between an organic chemistry teacher and her students throughout an entire semester. Sample, design and methods For the duration of an entire semester, we non-intrusively observed and recorded video footage of one class from an introductory organic chemistry course taught by an experienced university teacher. Our analysis to identify recurrent gestures involved a thorough examination of the lesson recordings. In addition, we scrutinized other semiotic modes that coincided with the recurrent gestures and assessed the metafunction of the words spoken during gesturing. Results During our observation, we noted the occurrence of 23 catchments, with four of them recurring more than 100 times throughout the semester. These four recurrent gestures were closely tied to fundamental concepts considered crucial in the realm of organic chemistry. Remarkably, three out of these four catchments were consistently associated with visual representations. Conclusion Recurrent gestures serve as a means to embody and impart materiality to exceedingly abstract content. By employing such gestures, the teacher managed to associate unfamiliar and abstract domains with familiar and concrete domains. This process of materialization and embodiment aids in perceiving these concepts as tangible entities that can be manipulated in accordance with their own rules.

Advanced numerical modelling of the nonlinear mechanical behaviour of a laterally loaded pile embedded in stiff unsaturated clay

Capturing and understanding the ultimate limit state behaviour of reinforced concrete piles embedded in soil requires the use of advanced tools or the performance of expensive tests. An experiment was performed where reinforced concrete piles embedded in a stiff unsaturated clay profile were load-tested on-site. However, even though in-situ experiments can provide engineers with valuable insight, their cost and time limitations come with restrictions, especially when dealing with a parametric investigation on the soil's material properties, the size of the piles, or the piles' material properties. The objective of this research work was to numerically model the nonlinear mechanical behaviour of laterally loaded full-scale piles through detailed 3D modelling, and perform an in-depth parametric investigation to provide answers to unknown factors that the actual physical experiment could not answer. Furthermore, this work serves as a pilot project that will be used to pave the way in developing multiple soil-structure interaction models that will be used to generate a dataset that helps the creation of predictive models through machine learning algorithms. For the needs of this research work, the reinforced concrete piles were discretised with 8-noded isoparametric hexahedral elements that accounted for cracking through the smeared crack approach. Steel reinforcement bars and stirrups were simulated as embedded rebar elements, while the soil domain was also discretised through 8-noded hexahedral elements. Most of the required material properties assumed during the nonlinear analyses were defined according to relevant laboratory experiments. According to the numerical investigation, it was found that the proposed numerical model has the ability to reproduce the experimental results with high accuracy, while providing in-depth insight on the failure mechanisms for both the soil and reinforced concrete domains.

Metaphoric expressions and temporality in Telugu

Abstract The tendency for the abstract domain of time to be lexicalized in terms of the relatively concrete domain of space has been extensively researched with reference to languages spoken in the Western hemisphere. That such cross-domain mappings in the conceptual system give rise to metaphors is also a well-established fact. The surface realization of metaphors known as “metaphoric expressions” are said to be language and culture specific and tend to play an important role in expressing inter-subjective communication needs. There is limited published literature on this topic with reference to the languages of South Asia, and especially those of India. Drawing on some insights gathered from previously published research on this topic, this corpus-based study examines aspects of temporality encoded in a set of 105 metaphoric expressions in Telugu. The results revealed that metaphoric expressions containing reduplicated spatial terms encode “time-as-such” temporality and are greater in number compared to both temporal terms expressing “matrix-sense”, and onomatopes expressing “event-based time”. These results are discussed with the help of examples and some suggestions are made for future research.

Застосування дескриптивних логік з конкретними доменами до вирішення задач виявлення та композиції семантичних веб сервісів

This research is one of the branches of a general scientific and applied problem, namely, the problem of using and developing ontological approaches with descriptive logics (DL) apparatus to obtain the effective automated solution of complex business task based on service-oriented architecture. The base idea of the proposed method is the maximal ontologization, that is, all aspects of the task are determined by means of DL ontologies. The proposed ontology system is based on five basic types of ontologies, namely: (1) an ontology of general entities for defining the characteristics of the service’s context, (2) an ontology of the application domain to formalize and unify semantical descriptions of web services, (3) the top-level ontology of web services for the DL formalization of the definition of the web services in general, (4) the ontologies of the web services tasks, which provide a formal representation of the tasks on all stages of web services life cycle, and (5) the ontologies of specific web services. All listed ontologies are related. Such, ontologies of the last type include links to all other above-mentioned ontologies and, together with them, provide a unified formally defined semantic resource, which enables the automatic solution of web service tasks. The focus of this study is the applying descriptive logics with concrete domains to the formalization of such basic semantic web services tasks as the web services discovery and composition. In this article, the ontologies of the web services tasks are defined as an extension of the general top-level web service ontology with special complex concepts. Their elements are pairs of “web service-goal (request)”/”web service-web service”, which are compared according to the task being solved. Also, on their basis, special complex concepts are determined, which specify a set of found similarities between existing services and a goal in the discovery task, or «predecessor-follower» type responsibilities of web services to build a composite service. The proposed TBox statements are constructed using descriptive logic with concrete domains 𝓐𝓛𝓒(𝓓). For this purpose, a concrete domain is defined as a pair of sets: (1) the union of sets of possible subsets of the set of individuals of the Parameter concept and possible subsets of the set of individuals of the Context concept, and (2) a set of predicates defined on it. Such definition of the concrete domain provides possibility of using only functional roles to construct the DL statements of complex concepts DiscoveryServices and CompositionObject for determining corresponding web services tasks. Note, the defined tasks and web services ontologies cover only simplified model of the representation of web services, in particular, functional Input/Output model extended by contexts descriptions. They provide the basis for further improvement by expanding this model and involving additional characteristics of both functional and process models of representation to the specified task ontologies. This will certainly increase the accuracy of the obtained result, but is the subject of further research.

Compression and Noise

ABSTRACT Compression is an essential technique used across diverse information systems, one in which supposedly redundant or superfluous information is minimized or eliminated in order to make the storage, transmission, or reception of other information more legible or efficient. Compression is involved in everything from computer data storage (encoding) and efficient computational processes (floating point arithmetic) to the formatting of media (telephony, radio, streaming) or the engineering and circulation of sound and image (dynamic compression of volume, jpeg resolution). Beyond any particular technical implementation, though, compression names the peculiar perceptual regime of late modernity—it is our percepteme, our episteme. As Galloway and LaRivière (2017) have noted—everything is compressed, from the logic of digital computers to our attention spans. Yet, if compression designates the essence of experience today, it is precisely in response to a complementary concept of noise. Noise is the lived affect of our material conditions which cannot be made significant to us: not only the literal acoustic noise of late modernity (the waste-product of technologies which hang over perceptual spaces like smog hangs over cities) but, perhaps more critically, compression emerges to cope with a new, properly “cognitive complexity” embodied in the unprecedented entanglement and mediation of social relations through the technical/computational unfolding of the value-form of capital. Such complexity—lying beyond the grasp of any human individual—is logistically offloaded onto the nootechnical externalizations associated with, for instance, AI algorithms. On the other hand, it is individuated in experience as noise. Because such noise is perceptually intractable, compression becomes the necessary shape of our aesthesis, one that rigorously flattens the available modalities of experience/value—yet giving birth to new forms of abstraction, perception, and thought. While several thinkers—notably, Jason LaRivière and Cécile Malaspina—have brilliantly elaborated each concept on its own, I argue that they can only be properly situated through each other. In order to do this, I combine computational and information theory, philosophy, media and cultural theory, as well as political economy with concrete domains where compression and noise articulate the phenomenological stakes for aesthetics today.

Using Model Theory to Find Decidable and Tractable Description Logics with Concrete Domains

Concrete domains have been introduced in the area of Description Logic to enable reference to concrete objects (such as numbers) and predefined predicates on these objects (such as numerical comparisons) when defining concepts. Unfortunately, in the presence of general concept inclusions (GCIs), which are supported by all modern DL systems, adding concrete domains may easily lead to undecidability. To regain decidability of the DL mathcal {ALC} in the presence of GCIs, quite strong restrictions, in sum called omega -admissibility, were imposed on the concrete domain. On the one hand, we generalize the notion of omega -admissibility from concrete domains with only binary predicates to concrete domains with predicates of arbitrary arity. On the other hand, we relate omega -admissibility to well-known notions from model theory. In particular, we show that finitely bounded homogeneous structures yield omega -admissible concrete domains. This allows us to show omega -admissibility of concrete domains using existing results from model theory. When integrating concrete domains into lightweight DLs of the mathcal {EL} family, achieving decidability is not enough. One wants reasoning in the resulting DL to be tractable. This can be achieved by using so-called p-admissible concrete domains and restricting the interaction between the DL and the concrete domain. We investigate p-admissibility from an algebraic point of view. Again, this yields strong algebraic tools for demonstrating p-admissibility. In particular, we obtain an expressive numerical p-admissible concrete domain based on the rational numbers. Although omega -admissibility and p-admissibility are orthogonal conditions that are almost exclusive, our algebraic characterizations of these two properties allow us to locate an infinite class of p-admissible concrete domains whose integration into mathcal {ALC} yields decidable DLs.

Social and emotion dimensional organizations in the abstract semantic space: the neuropsychological evidence

An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., “honor”, “relationship”, “direction”). While decades of research showed that the neural organization of conceptual knowledge referring to concrete words respects domains of evolutionary salience and sensorimotor attributes, the organization principles of abstract word meanings are poorly understood. Here, we provide neuropsychological evidence for a domain (sociality) and attribute (emotion) structure in abstract word processing. Testing 34 brain-damaged patients on a word-semantic judgment task, we observed double dissociations between social and nonsocial words and a single dissociation of sparing of emotional (relative to non-emotional) words. The lesion profiles of patients with specific dissociations suggest potential neural correlates positively or negatively associated with each dimension. These results unravel a general domain-attribute architecture of word meanings and highlight the roles of the social domain and the emotional attribute in the non-object semantic space.

A new damage factor for seismic assessment of deficient bare and FRP-retrofitted RC structures

The seismic assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) structures before and after retrofitting is a challenging task, mainly because existing numerical tools cannot accurately model the evolution of concrete damage. This article proposes an innovative numerical method suitable to model and assess the ultimate carrying capacity of RC structures. The modelling approach proposes a steel constitutive material model with a damage factor that accounts for accumulated damage within the surrounding concrete domain, which effectively captures bar slippage. The proposed method is validated with experimental results from full-scale cyclic tests on deficient bare and CFRP-retrofitted RC joints tested previously by the authors. The results indicate that the proposed simulation method captures the extreme nonlinearities observed in the tested RC joints, with acceptable accuracy and computational robustness. The results of this study are expected to contribute towards the development of more reliable numerical tools and design guidelines for efficient seismic assessment of RC structures before and after earthquakes.

Concrete domains in logics

In this short survey, we present logical formalisms in which reasoning about concrete domains is embedded in formulae at the atomic level. These include temporal logics with concrete domains, description logics with concrete domains as well as variant formalisms. We discuss several proof techniques to solve logical decision problems for such formalisms, including those based on constrained automata or on translation into decidable second-order logics. We also present recent results mainly related to decidability and complexity as well as a selection of open problems.

Verification column

Given the extensive applications of logics with concrete domains in verification and related areas, the shortage of an accessible survey on the topic is quite surprising. This article does much more than fill the gap, providing also useful and inspiring pointers for future work.