Semantic Perspective Research Articles

A Study of Narrative Techniques in Surah Yusuf: Semantic and Communicative Perspectives

A Study of Narrative Techniques in Surah Yusuf: Semantic and Communicative Perspectives

An inclusive framework for automated web content accessibility evaluation

AbstractSince 1996, web accessibility evaluation has been an important aspect of web development to increase social inclusion for people with special needs. Several web accessibility evaluation and testing tools have been developed to automatically evaluate websites in order to identify barriers for people with disabilities. The developed tools are significant since their aim is to effectively represent accessibility issues. However, a few issues with website accessibility cannot be identified through the existing accessibility testing tools due to several limitations, including (i) inappropriate guideline selection, (ii) ambiguities in guideline understanding, (iii) avoiding user and expert suggestions as evaluation criteria, (iv) limited consideration of semantic perspectives, and (iv) unwillingness to incorporate the updated engineering methods. Therefore, reported results may be unclear and inappropriate for some users. Such limitations are critical factors that reduce the effectiveness of the developed tools. These issues cause unwillingness to use a particular tool or possible adoption of other tools. In this situation, we must identify which aspects are important to incorporate in the development in order to make the developed solution more effective as it allows users to make their website accessible to people with disabilities. In this paper, first, we present a literature review of different existing solutions for web accessibility testing to identify their challenges and limitations. Following the reported findings, we propose an automated web accessibility evaluation framework addressing several accessibility aspects to improve the evaluation results by mitigating the limitations of existing solutions. The proposed framework is validated by comparing it with existing automated solutions considering their functional properties. The proposed accessibility framework might be beneficial for web developers, accessibility engineers, and other practitioners to incorporate into their development and research.

A formal approach to reanalysis and the Early Semantic Stability Hypothesis: exploring the test case of the negative counterfactual marker ʾilmale in Hebrew and Aramaic

Abstract This study delves into the intricate process of reanalysis, wherein linguistic expressions undergo grammatical or semantic changes, or sometimes both. The primary objective of this study is to explore the theoretical aspects surrounding historical changes of this nature. To facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the topic, we provide a formal description of reanalysis as an analytical tool. Our formal description allows for the differentiation of various change scenarios, enabling us to identify distinct types of shifts from one analysis to another. This approach not only focuses on what has been reanalyzed, be it the morphology, syntax, or the semantics, but also emphasizes the interplay between all three linguistic modules (Form, Grammar, and Meaning) and their relationships. This holistic perspective enables a systematic examination of the significance of what remains constant at both points in time during the reanalysis process. The key insight arising from this analysis leads us to propose and substantiate the Early Semantic Stability Hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that the truth-conditional semantics of the original proposition remain unchanged throughout reanalysis, either in all contexts or in specific “bridging contexts” where the reanalysis occurs. To demonstrate these phenomena, we present a compelling test case, focusing on the development of the counterfactual conditional marker ʾilmale in Hebrew and Aramaic. Through a detailed examination of the syntactic and semantic reanalyses it underwent, we observe the emergence of unique semantic features. By adopting a formal semantic perspective, we address fundamental questions such as the level of ambiguity required for reanalysis to take place, the potential existence of universal constraints on reanalysis, and potential motivations driving these linguistic changes. This investigation provides valuable insights into the intricate mechanisms at play during reanalysis and contributes to the broader understanding of linguistic evolution and development.

Topics in Relevant Logic: A Semantic Perspective

Topics in Relevant Logic: A Semantic Perspective

Language of the SMO in its historical and cultural context

This article analyzes the language used in special military operations from a functional and semantic perspective. Nowadays, the language used by the military (the SVO as the special military operation in Ukraine) extends beyond the professional group and, thanks to media and social networks, has become understandable to most Russian speakers. The military jargon has a history dating back three hundred years, influenced by various military campaigns in which Russia and the USSR participated. The jargonisms from the early XX century, developed during the First World War, and the active development of military language in the twentieth century, are still present in modern military language. This is due to events such as the Great Patriotic War and the war in Afghanistan. Currently, there is a growing use of military terminology, alongside well-established slang terms that refer to aspects of military life, clothing, weapons, operations, orders, etc. New terms have emerged due to advancements in science and technology, as well as changes in the military-political situation. The lexemes and phrasemes used in the military sphere serve nominative, characterizing, emotional-evaluative, and gaming functions. These terms form thematic groups that make up the semantic field of military operations, based on the denotative meaning of slang words and their possible connotations. The language of the SVO reflects the historically formed and evolving military sociolect of the national language, primarily through Russian vocabulary and phraseological units, specialized terminology, and everyday slang. A small number of foreign terms, mainly related to weapons, have been adapted to fit the phonetic and grammatical rules of the Russian language. Overall, the language of the SMO used in military-political communication reflects the national and cultural characteristics of the military.

Discussion on Comparative Research and Teaching of the Adverbs Shizhong(始终),Zaowan (早晚),Chizao (迟早) for Vietnamese Students

Adverb“始终（shizhong）、早晚（zaowan）、迟早（chizao）” in Chinese and Vietnamese are equivalent compound words composed of two monosyllabic morphemes, and these two morphemes have opposite meanings. This article analyzes and compares three adverbs from two semantic and grammatical perspectives, conducts comparative analysis, and thereby finds the similarities and differences between these three words in Chinese and Vietnamese. At the same time, finding the causes and proposing teaching methods to solve the problem of Vietnamese students often misusing these words when learning Chinese in Vietnam. We have found very few studies on teaching and comparing adverbs in these two languages, so this article hopes to help Vietnamese students understand more deeply the characteristics of this group of words, as well as avoid misusing this group of words.

Research on Translation Strategies of Sports Terminology from a Semantic Perspective: A Case Study of Ball Game News

Please refer to the URL that includes this article for the abstract.

Contrastive Enhanced Learning for Multi-Label Text Classification

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) aims to assign appropriate labels to each document from a given set. Prior research has acknowledged the significance of label information, but its utilization remains insufficient. Existing approaches often focus on either label correlation or label textual semantics, without fully leveraging the information contained within labels. In this paper, we propose a multi-perspective contrastive model (MPCM) with an attention mechanism to integrate labels and documents, utilizing contrastive methods to enhance label information from both textual semantic and correlation perspectives. Additionally, we introduce techniques for contrastive global representation learning and positive label representation alignment to improve the model’s perception of accurate labels. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves superior performance compared to existing methods when evaluated on the AAPD and RCV1-V2 datasets.

Informed sampling and recommendation of cycling routes: leveraging crowd-sourced trajectories with weighted-latent Dirichlet allocation

Attractive cycling routes can effectively promote active mobility, thus reducing the twin pressures of the population boom and the greenhouse effect. However, the existing approaches for cycling route recommendation primarily concentrate on identifying the most efficient routes while ignoring the urban spatial context, which is essential to meet the user’s particular preferences. This article proposes a novel method for informed sampling and recommending cycling routes leveraging crowd-sourced trajectories with weighted-latent Dirichlet allocation (WLDA). Precisely, spatial context mapping, incorporating a weighting mechanism into LDA, latent topics mining, and cycling route recommendation based on informed sampling are introduced. We collected 1,016 cycling trajectories around Cologne, Germany, for experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the three latent topics within the trajectories, leisure, city, and green tours, are clearly presented in the line density analysis. The insightful recommendation for unfamiliar cyclists could also be actively sampled upon the WLDA model. These findings suggest that our approach could shift the route recommendation paradigm from GIS analysis to a semantic mining perspective, yielding highly interpretable results and offering novel research avenues for applying machine learning in route planning.

A Cognitive Semantic Account of the Preposition “‘bra” in Modern Standard Arabic with Reference to the English “Through”

Prepositions are crucial grammatical devices for indicating location, movement, time, and other meanings. A case in point is the Arabic preposition “‘abra,” which expresses different spatial, temporal, and abstract meanings. Adopting a cognitive semantic perspective, this study investigates ‘abra, its diverse spatial meanings, and metaphorical extensions. It also uses cognitive constructs such as image schemas, prototypes, and conceptual metaphor to demonstrate how various senses of ‘abra can be described based on perceptual properties and cognitive characteristics. In addition, this study compares the meanings of ‘abra with those of its English equivalent (through). This research uses authentic examples from Modern Standard Arabic available through the Sketch Engine website and illustrations created by the researcher. The analytical description involves the basic schema, the prototypical meaning, and the metaphorical extensions. The findings reveal that ‘abra and “through” share a basic image schema and prototypical sense with slight differences resulting from varying conceptualizations. The metaphorical extensions are also similar. The distinctions between the two mostly pertain to the semantic scope in addition to the fact that ‘abra also covers the meaning of the preposition “across.” Generally, this analysis asserts that prepositional meanings are best described using a cognitive semantic framework. The results may be useful in the fields of lexicon, second learning and teaching, as well as translation.

A relational background knowledge boosting based topic model for Chinese poems

Classical Chinese poetry has been increasingly popular in recent years, and modeling its topic is quite a promising area of research. Chinese poems have the characteristic of short in length, but traditional topic models perform poorly when faced with short texts due to the text sparsity. Therefore, topic model should be improved to satisfy the scenario of classical Chinese poems. In this paper, a relational background knowledge boosting based topic model (RBKBTM) was proposed to overcome the text sparsity of Chinese poems. We incorporated background information into the model, which expanded the text content from the semantic perspective. The background knowledge was combined using word embedding and TextRank and was then fed into the core computing process. Subsequently, a new sampling formula was derived. Our proposed model was tested on three different tasks using three different datasets. The results demonstrate that the incorporated background knowledge can effectively overcomes text sparsity, improving the performance and effectiveness of the topic model.

Homonym in Chinese Advertising Slogan from A Semantic Perspective

The opposition and unity of sound, meaning, and form constitute the three elements of language, that is, each language symbol contains three aspects: sound, meaning, and form. Due to the arbitrariness of language and certain contradiction caused by "less sound, fewer forms, and more meaning", the relationship between these elements in the language system is not one-to-one, leading to the phenomenon of polysemy and homonym in languages. Ambiguity is a common linguistic phenomenon that exists in both ancient and modern languages, both locally and across languages. It is a special relationship between language structure and meaning. Linguists believe that the phenomenon of ambiguity in the meaning of a word or sentence, or the existence of two or more interpretations for one expression, is called linguistic ambiguity. In this theoretical context, homonym is a type of lexical ambiguity widely used in modern advertising. The present study attempts to analyze the linguistic significance of homophones in advertisements through specific examples, so that people can better understand the wit, humor, and richness of languages, while paying attention to its impact on language development and adolescents. Through these measures, it can be expected that more benefits and less harm will be achieved in the long run.

Culmination phenomena across languages

AbstractThis article examines culmination phenomena from a cross‐linguistic perspective. It provides an overview of various (non‐)culmination readings that sentences in different languages may receive in light of much prior literature on this topic, especially from the past 2 decades. An important goal is to showcase facts of defeasible versus entailed culmination and discuss how scholars have dealt with these facts in recent analyses. Although (non‐)culmination phenomena are often approached from a semantic perspective in the literature, in the second part of the paper, I also address questions of syntactic representation regarding verbal predicates associated with maximal versus non‐maximal event interpretations. This survey of the empirical landscape ultimately shows that, despite the plethora of works on event culmination, there are still numerous puzzles in need of explanation, especially when culmination is examined from a cross‐linguistic angle.

Uncovering the Meaning of Yad in the Qur'an from a Semantic Perspective Toshihiko Izutsu

This article discusses the semantic meaning of the word yad in the Qur'an. The author uses a semantic approach, namely an analytical study of the key terms of a language with a view that ultimately arrives at a conceptual understanding or world view. This research uses a qualitative research method with a descriptive analytical discussion method with a type of library research. The word yad in the Qur'an is repeated 113 times, and is found in 103 verses, with various forms, namely mufrad (singular) 16 times, mutsanna (double) 33 times, and plural (compound) 64 times. Based on Toshihiko Izutsu's semantics, the author concludes that the basic meaning of the word yad is the hand, part of the human body, while the relational meaning from the syntagmatic analysis of the word yad is kudrah, strength, in front and gift. Among the paradigmatic relational meanings are Al Kaff and Al Dzira. In the pre-Qur'anic period, the word yad meant hands, part of the human body. In the Qur'anic period, the hand can shift to meanings that have spiritual value (bakhil, benefactor). Meanwhile, in the post-Quranic period, the word yad did not experience a significant change in meaning. From several analyzes that have been carried out above, it can be seen that the waltanschauung or worldview of the word yad, namely the hand, is materially part of the human body and also yad which has a shift in meaning in the spiritual realm such as generosity, piety, grace and strength.

Predicates of Gratification in English and Polish. A Semantic Syntactic Perspective

Predicates of Gratification in English and Polish. A Semantic Syntactic Perspective

CGKPN: Cross-Graph Knowledge Propagation Network with Adaptive Connection for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension

The task of machine reading comprehension (MRC) is to enable machine to read and understand a piece of text and then answer the corresponding question correctly. This task requires machine to not only be able to perform semantic understanding but also possess logical reasoning capabilities. Just like human reading, it involves thinking about the text from two interacting perspectives of semantics and logic. However, previous methods based on reading comprehension either consider only the logical structure of the text or only the semantic structure of the text and cannot simultaneously balance semantic understanding and logical reasoning. This single form of reasoning cannot make the machine fully understand the meaning of the text. Additionally, the issue of sparsity in composition presents a significant challenge for models that rely on graph-based reasoning. To this end, a cross-graph knowledge propagation network (CGKPN) with adaptive connection is presented to address the above issues. The model first performs self-view node embedding on the constructed logical graph and semantic graph to update the representations of the graphs. Specifically, a relevance matrix between nodes is introduced to adaptively adjust node connections in response to the challenge posed by sparse graph. Subsequently, CGKPN conducts cross-graph knowledge propagation on nodes that are identical in both graphs, effectively resolving conflicts arising from identical nodes in different views, and enabling the model to better integrate the logical and semantic relationships of the text through efficient interaction. Experiments on the two MRC datasets ReClor and LogiQA indicate the superior performance of our proposed model CGKPN compared to other existing baselines.

Decoupled Unbiased Teacher for Source-Free Domain Adaptive Medical Object Detection.

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a lightweight pretrained source model to unlabeled new domains without the original labeled source data. Due to the privacy of patients and storage consumption concerns, SFDA is a more practical setting for building a generalized model in medical object detection. Existing methods usually apply the vanilla pseudo-labeling technique, while neglecting the bias issues in SFDA, leading to limited adaptation performance. To this end, we systematically analyze the biases in SFDA medical object detection by constructing a structural causal model (SCM) and propose an unbiased SFDA framework dubbed decoupled unbiased teacher (DUT). Based on the SCM, we derive that the confounding effect causes biases in the SFDA medical object detection task at the sample level, feature level, and prediction level. To prevent the model from emphasizing easy object patterns in the biased dataset, a dual invariance assessment (DIA) strategy is devised to generate counterfactual synthetics. The synthetics are based on unbiased invariant samples in both discrimination and semantic perspectives. To alleviate overfitting to domain-specific features in SFDA, we design a cross-domain feature intervention (CFI) module to explicitly deconfound the domain-specific prior with feature intervention and obtain unbiased features. Besides, we establish a correspondence supervision prioritization (CSP) strategy for addressing the prediction bias caused by coarse pseudo-labels by sample prioritizing and robust box supervision. Through extensive experiments on multiple SFDA medical object detection scenarios, DUT yields superior performance over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and SFDA counterparts, demonstrating the significance of addressing the bias issues in this challenging task. The code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/Decoupled-Unbiased-Teacher.

A Cognitive Semantic Study of the Arabic Preposition “khilāl”

This study aims to demonstrate the concept of the Arabic preposition "khilāl" from a cognitive semantic perspective. Prototype theory, image schema, and metaphor theory are used to analyze the data Some of the Arabic expressions are chosen to be analyzed. It has been found that the spatial meaning of the preposition "khilāl" is its prototype meaning. The source-path-goal schema and the spatial metaphor are used to extend the meaning of the word from the spatial to non-spatial domains. These results lead to the conclusion that a given preposition's prototype meaning, "khilāl" is the source of all of its non-prototypical meanings.

Exploring the Impact of Online Medical Team Engagement on Patient Satisfaction: A Semantic Features Perspective.

Online medical teams (OMTs), a new mode of online healthcare service, have emerged in online health communities (OHCs) in China. This study attempts to explore the underlying mechanism of how OMTs' engagement influences patient satisfaction through the lens of semantic features. This study also scrutinizes the moderating effect of multiple specializations on the link between OMTs' engagement and semantic features. We utilized a linear model that had fixed effects controlled at the team level for analysis. A bootstrapping approach using 5000 samples was employed to test the mediation effects. The findings reveal that OMTs' engagement significantly improves language concreteness in online team consultations, which subsequently enhances patient satisfaction. OMT engagement has a negative impact on emotional intensity, ultimately decreasing patient satisfaction. Multiple specializations strengthen the impact of OMT engagement on both language concreteness and emotional intensity. This study contributes to the literature on OMTs and patient satisfaction, providing insights into patients' perceptions of OMTs' engagement during online team consultation. This study also generates several implications for the practice of OHCs and OMTs.

Qian Xuesen's question I: Collectivism's influence on serial order effect in divergent thinking

Westerners are better at divergent thinking than Easterners, and previous studies have found this difference relates to collectivism-individualism, however, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between individualism-collectivism and divergent thinking from the perspective of semantic networks. A total of 158 participants were measured with the scale of collectivism-individualism tendencies and divergent thinking. Results showed that collectivism and individualism were not significantly associated with the performance of divergent thinking in figural task. And collectivism, rather than individualism, exhibited a negative correlation with originality but a positive correlation with appropriateness in verbal task. Furthermore, collectivism moderated the serial order of originality and appropriateness in verbal task. This study provides preliminary insights into the impact of culture on creativity from semantic network perspectives.