Semantic Adaptation Research Articles

FADYRCOS, a semantic interoperability framework for collaborative model-based dynamic reconfiguration of networked services

The increasing interdependence of economies across the world has stimulated the collaborative development of complex products implying wide ranges of groups. In this context, the collaborative development of products provides new challenges in distributed systems. It requires continuous communication and exchanges between teams of collaborators having different roles and using different tools. A global model of collaboration is necessary to guarantee the quality of communication and to ensure adaptability and interoperability between tools within dynamically changing contexts. In this paper, we present a framework for collaborative model-based networked services development that supports a semantic adaptation model enabling the awareness of the presence, roles and tasks of collaborating actors. In this paper, the implementation of the framework FADYRCOS and its conceptual model are presented. Algorithms that implement the dynamic reconfiguration are described. A test case for collaborative software development has been developed to validate the framework.

Validación de un cuestionario para evaluar riesgos psicosociales en el ambiente laboral en Chile

The measurement of psychosocial risk among workers is becoming increasingly important. To adapt, validate and standardize a questionnaire to measure psychosocial risks in the workplace. The Spanish version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire was adapted and evaluated. Its contents were first validated with a panel of experts. Afterwards a semantic adaptation of the questionnaires was carried out applying it to a pilot sample. Finally, it was applied to 1,557 workers (65% men). A preliminary questionnaire containing 97 questions was constructed. A good item-test correlation was found, the factorial structure was similar to the original questionnaire and it had a good internal consistency, convergent validity with the Goldberg Health Questionnaire and test-retest correlation. Ranges for the different dimensions and sub-dimensions of psychosocial risk were calculated by tertiles. The resulting questionnaire is useful for measuring psychosocial risk factors at work, with good psychometric properties.

The Meanings of Sanskrit Loanwords in Thai and Javanese Languages

Through history of nation building, Thai and Javanese people interacted with other language speakers. For example, they interacted with Indian mbrchants who also brought their literature and religions. In their contacts, Thai and Javanese speakers adopted Sanskrit words for enriching their own vocabularies. This article attempts to describe the meanings of Sanskrit loanwords. In comparison between the meanings of Sanskrit loanwords in Thai and Javanese languages, there are 14 categories of semantic adaptations which are found in both languages. These changes reflect the changes of the socio-cultural background of the Thai and Javanese speakers.

The Role of -Ing in Contemporary Slavic Languages

The article deals with words of English origin (with the terminal suffix -ing) which have penetrated into contemporary Slavic languages. The general introduction into the characteristics of -ing lexemes in the English language as well as principles of lexical unit adaptation are provided. The main emphasis is put on orthographic, morphological, word-formation and semantic adaptation of the lexical units in the Slovak, Russian and Czech languages.

Dilettant/Genie. Zur Entstehung einer ästhetischen Unterscheidung

The article deals with a remarkable semantic transformation in the period around 1800, when the term ›dilettantism‹ changes from a category of self-definition, used by serious artists, to a category of external ascription; from a category of inclusion to a category of exclusion and from a marker of social distinction to a genuinely aesthetic category. This transformation culminates in a joint work by Goethe and Schiller, the scheme Uber den Dilettantismus. The article proposes the thesis that the evolution of the term needs to be explained as an adaptation of semantics to the epochal transition from a stratified to a functionally differentiated type of social order. Two main implications of this adaptation concerning both production and reception of art are pointed out: On the one hand the use of ›dilettantism‹ as a combat term is an attempt to restore a boundary between artist and non-artist; on the other hand the concept develops certain pedagogical values to educate the audience — and to prepare it for the benefits of advanced literature.

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The Cardiac Patients Learning Needs Inventory (CPLNI) was constructed to assess the learning needs of patients with cardiac disease. This study aimed to compare the results of semantic validations of the CPLNI version adapted to Portuguese, involving 40 Brazilian and 16 Portuguese patients hospitalized for coronary artery disease treatment. The participants were individually interviewed and answered to sociodemographic and clinic characterization instrument, to the adapted CPLNI, and to the semantic validation instrument. In CPLNI's general assessment, most patients, both Brazilians and Portuguese, considered the instrument adequate, easy to understand and complete. The semantic validation of the CPLNI showed the need for some changes in its writing with a view to the semantic adaptation of the instrument for use in Portugal and Brazil.

Event-Based Semantic Image Adaptation for User-Centric Mobile Display Devices

This paper proposes a semantic image adaptation scheme for heterogeneous mobile display devices. This scheme aims to provide mobile users with the most desired image content by integrating the content semantic importance with user preferences under limited mobile display constraints. The main contributions of the proposed scheme are: 1) seamless integration of mobile user supplied query information with low level image features to identify semantically important image contents; 2) integration of semantic importance and user feedback to dynamically update mobile user preferences; and 3) perceptually optimized adaptation for image display on mobile devices. In order to bridge the semantic gap for adaptation, we design a Bayesian fusion approach to properly integrate low level features with high level semantics. To accommodate the variation of user preferences, the system involves mobile users in the adaptation process with only a few simple feedbacks so as to present to the users most interesting content on mobile devices. Eventually, perceptually optimized adaptation is performed to present the best image content for mobile users according to mobile display capacities. Extensive experiments have been carried out based on several common events defined in Kodak's consumer image database. These experiments show that by utilizing the proposed semantic adaptation scheme with integration of the semantics and mobile user preferences, perceptually relevant adaptation can be effectively carried out to tailor the image towards user intentions under the mobile environment constraints.

Local closed world reasoning with description logics under the well-founded semantics

An important question for the upcoming Semantic Web is how to best combine open world ontology languages, such as the OWL-based ones, with closed world rule-based languages. One of the most mature proposals for this combination is known as hybrid MKNF knowledge bases (Motik and Rosati, 2010 [52]), and it is based on an adaptation of the Stable Model Semantics to knowledge bases consisting of ontology axioms and rules. In this paper we propose a well-founded semantics for nondisjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases that promises to provide better efficiency of reasoning, and that is compatible with both the OWL-based semantics and the traditional Well-Founded Semantics for logic programs. Moreover, our proposal allows for the detection of inconsistencies, possibly occurring in tightly integrated ontology axioms and rules, with only little additional effort. We also identify tractable fragments of the resulting language.

Semantic Mastering: content adaptation in the creative drama production workflow

In order to provide audiences with a proper universal multimedia experience, all classes of media consumption devices, from high definition displays to mobile media players, must receive a product that is not only adapted to their capabilities and usage environments, but also conveys the semantics and cinematography behind the narrative in an optimal way. This paper introduces a semantic video adaptation system that incorporates the media adaptation process in the center of the drama production process. Producers, directors and other creative staff instruct the semantic adaptation system using common cinematographic terminology and vocabulary, thereby seamlessly extending the drama production process into the realm of content adaptation. The multitude of production metadata obtained from various steps in the production process provides a valuable context of narrative semantics that is exploited by the adaptation process. As such, high definition imagery can be intelligently adapted to smaller resolutions while optimally fulfilling the filmmaker's dramatic intentions with respect to the original narrative and obeying various rules of cinematographic grammar.

Tradução e adaptação semântica da Compulsive Buying Scale para o português brasileiro

OBJETIVO: A Compulsive Buying Scale (Escala de Compras Compulsivas), instrumento breve e de fácil aplicação, apresenta como vantagem abarcar as principais dimensões do transtorno, sendo elas a compulsão pelas compras e o comportamento impulsivo. O presente estudo tem como objetivo a adaptação transcultural para o português do Brasil da Escala de Compras Compulsivas. MÉTODOS: Para a etapa de adaptação semântica, dois psicólogos bilíngues e um tradutor fluente em português e inglês traduziram a escala de seu idioma de origem, o inglês, para o português. Em um segundo momento, foi realizada a retrotradução da escala por dois tradutores e um psicólogo. Finalmente, a escala foi aplicada em 20 participantes, de modo que pudessem ser feitos ajustes semânticos no instrumento em questão. RESULTADOS: A colaboração entre profissionais especialistas em tradução bilíngue fluentes nos idiomas inglês e português brasileiro, e psicólogos clínicos capacitados à avaliação sobre o constructo a ser mensurado, possibilitou o ajuste dos termos utilizados na versão final da escala para o idioma português, assegurando adequação semântica do instrumento. Assim, todos os itens obtiveram aprovação superior a 90% em sua aplicação experimental. CONCLUSÃO: A versão da escala de compras compulsivas adaptada para o idioma português foi elaborada com êxito.

Tradução e adaptação transcultural para o português brasileiro da Scale for Quality of Sexual Function (QSF)

INTRODUÇÃO: Apesar do papel fundamental da função sexual na qualidade de vida da população, há uma escassez na literatura brasileira de instrumentos específicos para sua avaliação e que possam ser utilizados tanto para homens quanto para mulheres. A adaptação da Scale for Quality of Sexual Function (QSF), uma escala unissex, é um passo importante na obtenção de instrumentos que permitam a comparação de resultados entre diferentes populações. OBJETIVO: Descrever o processo de tradução e adaptação semântica da QSF para o português brasileiro. MÉTODOS: A adaptação do instrumento envolveu cinco fases: 1) duas traduções independentes, 2) uma versão de consenso realizada por tradutores e especialistas, 3) avaliação da versão gerada por mais um especialista que não participou das etapas anteriores, 4) retrotradução com avaliação do autor da escala original e, por fim, 5) aplicação da versão obtida em um grupo experimental. RESULTADOS: São descritas todas as etapas de adaptação do instrumento. A participação de especialistas tanto da área de saúde mental quanto de sexualidade humana, desde a primeira fase do processo, contribuiu para discussões amplas, que permitiram a melhor adequação dos itens, tanto conceitual quanto culturalmente. Participaram da aplicação experimental sujeitos de diferentes níveis de escolaridade de ambos os sexos, não sendo detectadas dificuldades na compreensão dos itens. CONCLUSÃO: Por meio dos procedimentos adotados, foi possível elaborar uma versão da QSF em português brasileiro.

Semantic adaptation of multimedia documents

Multimedia documents have to be played on multiple device types. Hence, usage and platform diversity requires document adaptation according to execution contexts, not generally predictable at design time. In an earlier work, a semantic framework for multimedia document adaptation was proposed. In this framework, a multimedia document is interpreted as a set of potential executions corresponding to the author specification. To each target device corresponds a set of possible executions complying with the device constraints. In this context, adapting requires to select an execution that satisfies the target device constraints and which is as close as possible from the initial composition. This theoretical adaptation framework does not specifically consider the main multimedia document dimensions, i.e., temporal, spatial and hypermedia. In this paper, we propose a concrete application of this framework on standard multimedia documents. For that purpose, we first define an abstract structure that captures the spatio-temporal and hypermedia dimensions of multimedia documents, and we develop an adaptation algorithm which transforms in a minimal way such a structure according to device constraints. Then, we show how this can be used for adapting concrete multimedia documents in SMIL through converting the documents in the abstract structure, using the adaptation algorithm, and converting it back in SMIL. This can be used for other document formats without modifying the adaptation algorithm.

Validação do National College Health Risk Behavior Survey para utilização com universitários brasileiros

The objective of this article is to translate, to adapt and to validate the National College Health Risk Behavior Survey to apply at Brazilian college students. 208 college students from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and University of Pernambuco (UPE) participated in the study. The validation was carried through in five stages: (1) translation; (2) retrotranslation; (3) correction and semantic adaptation (cultural adaptation); (4) face validation; (5) test-retest. Adaptations were done to deal with any semantic disagreements found between translation and retrotranslation. After face validation, the questionnaire was reduced from 96 to 52 questions. From the 11 items analyzed, the majority presented good and perfect Kappa: security and violence (Kappa=0.89); suicide (Kappa=1.00); use of the tobacco (Kappa=0.90); drinking consumption (Kappa=0.78); cocaine and other drugs consumption (Kappa=0.70); sexual behavior (Kappa=0,88) and corporal weight (Kappa=0.89). Only the item about feeding presented weak Inter-examiner Kappa (Kappa = 0.26) and the topic on health information presented moderate Kappa (Kappa=0.56). The average Kappa for all items was good (0.76). The instrument may be considered validated in the Portuguese language in Brazil with acceptable reproducibility.

The Integration of English Loanwords in Russian: An Overview of Recent Borrowings

The aim of this study is to analyze the main tendencies prevailing in the orthographic, phonological, morphological as well as semantic adaptation of loanwords of English origin that entered the Russian language in the past two and a half decades, i.e. between the mid-1980s and now. Fully adapted English borrowings are excluded from the analysis, the aim of which is to give a detailed account of the dynamics of the borrowing process and ways in which borrowing mechanisms work. In addition to the linguistic description of the data, it is essential to discuss the role of monolingual and bilingual speakers in borrowing (the social background that initiates and determines the adoption of English loanwords), along with the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of the process. The latter include the description of motivations (i.e. which non-linguistic factors affect and explain the influx of elements of English origin). The main emphasis of the paper is on the linguistic analysis of English borrowings in a contact linguistic and lexicological framework.

Enhancing the precision of content analysis in content adaptation using entropy-based fuzzy reasoning

Content adaptation is a well-known technique to help portable devices present Web pages as smoothly as desktops do. Because of limited I/O and weak transmission capability, adaptations are usually performed by either transcoding or resizing multimedia components. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic coherence-retained content adaptation approach, namely functionality sense-based content adaptation (FSCA). Our goal is to avoid semantic distortions when rearranging a Web page on different screen sizes. Simulating entropy-based fuzzy reasoning in human cognition, we introduce Relevance of Functionality (RoF) to quantitatively represent the similarity intensity between two presentation objects (groups) based on their functionalities. We present an algorithm of calculating RoF and a procedure that uses RoF to decide content adaptation degree. Our experiments verify the feasibility and effectiveness of FSCA.

Versão brasileira da Impact of Event Scale (IES): tradução e adaptação transcultural

INTRODUÇÃO: A Impact of Event Scale (IES) tem como proposta avaliar o estresse subjetivo relacionado a eventos de vida, não estando focada em uma situação específica, mas nas características particulares que envolvem tais eventos. OBJETIVO: Descrever a tradução e adaptação semântica da IES para o português brasileiro. MÉTODO: O processo foi realizado por meio de duas traduções e retrotraduções, elaboradas por quatro avaliadores independentes e sem conhecimento prévio da escala original. A elaboração da versão sintética foi realizada por especialista em saúde mental bilíngue. Procedeu-se a posterior aplicação em grupo experimental para avaliação dos itens. A versão gerada foi enviada para aprovação do autor do instrumento original, obtendo-se resposta positiva. RESULTADOS: Todas as etapas do processo, incluindo traduções, retrotraduções e a versão sintética elaborada, são apresentadas para cada um dos 15 itens do instrumento original. O especialista em saúde mental colaborou para a adequação dos termos utilizados em relação ao construto medido. Através da aplicação experimental, foi possível identificar potenciais pontos de dificuldade para o entendimento de itens específicos e realizar ajustes posteriores. Foram obtidos 15 itens em português brasileiro para compor essa versão da escala. CONCLUSÕES: A partir da metodologia utilizada, foi possível elaborar a adaptação transcultural da IES para o português brasileiro.

Adaptacije germanizama u međimurskom dijalektu

In this paper the author analyzes a corpus of Germanisms that have been collected in field research of the dialect of Međimurje. The corpus is analyzed in terms of parts of speech, in terms of extralinguistic reality to which the words belong and in terms of their phonological, morphological and semantic adaptations. A special effort is made to include the variations of replicas at different local points of the dialect of Međimurje in terms of expression and contents. In the chapter on semantic adaptations, a special emphasis is made on the analysis of the seven different kinds of recent secondary semantic adaptations by means of which all the Germanism that have their equivalents in the standard Croatian prolong their presence in the active vocabulary of the speakers of the dialect of Međimurje.

Versão brasileira do questionário "estilo de vida fantástico": tradução e validação para adultos jovens

Inappropriate lifestyles have been responsible for the leading causes of mortality. The purpose of the Fantastic Lifestyle Questionnaire is to help physicians involved in health prevention to identify and assess their patients' lifestyles. To translate and validate the Fantastic Lifestyle Questionnaire for use with young adults. The process of translation into Portuguese and validation consisted of four steps: 1) translation; 2) correction and semantic adaptation by professional experts (judges); 3) content validation; and 4) a final evaluation by the target population. The statistical analyses used were Cronbach's alpha to measure internal consistency reliability, intra-class correlation coefficient (R) for external consistency, and the Kappa index to test construct validity. Cronbach's alpha coefficient measured the correlation between items and the total was 0.69, which is considered reasonable for an instrument designed to evaluate a latent variable that can only be estimated and not measured. When the items were grouped into domains, it was possible to verify that they all contributed equally to the stability of the questionnaire (alpha=0.60). The external consistency evaluated by intra-class correlation was R=0.92 (p=0.2), which demonstrates a high degree of reproducibility; the construct validity of 4 and 3 categories was 75 and 80.7% with Kappa indices of 0.58 and 0.7, respectively, which show an excellent discriminatory classificatory capacity. The Fantastic Lifestyle Questionnaire has an adequate internal and external consistency for evaluating young adult lifestyles, and it can be recommended for primary care and epidemiological studies.

System architecture for semantic annotation and adaptation in content sharing environments

This paper describes a system architecture, which enables the automatic semantic annotation and adaptation of multimedia content in context-aware content sharing environments. The discussed architecture is the result of research done in the EU FP6 IST INTERMEDIA project. Generating a common vision on user-centric multimedia services in shared content environments to provide users with content personalized to their user preferences and usage environment is one of the objectives of the project. The work presented in this paper describes how media formats with their related metadata are automatically annotated and dynamically adapted. Based on the architecture, a full-featured demonstrator is built.

Tradução e adaptação da versão brasileira do Night Eating Questionnaire

The goal of this study was to translate and adapt the Night Eating Questionnaire to Portuguese and assess the reliability of the Portuguese-language version. The study included two phases. The first consisted of: (1) translation into Portuguese; (2) back-translation into English; (3) correction and semantic adaptation; (4) content validation; and (5) assessment of the understanding of the questionnaire by means of 10 cm Visual Analogue Scales with 30 adult users of a nutritional support clinic. In the second phase, the questionnaire's reliability was assessed in 100 subjects with similar demographic characteristics to the first sample. In the fifth step, understanding of the instrument assessed by the visual analogue scales was 8.20+/-1.55 cm. The instrument showed satisfactory internal consistency, with an overall Cronbach alpha of 0.78. The Portuguese version proved to be easily understandable, with good semantic validation and consistency, suggesting that the questionnaire may be a good instrument for screening the night eating syndrome. However, other psychometric characteristics of this instrument need to be assessed in samples with different social and educational levels.