Semantic Differences Research Articles

Second Opinion in the Italian Organ Procurement Transplantation: The Pathologist Is In.

Second opinion consultation is a well-established practice in different clinical settings of diagnostic medicine. However, little is known about second opinion consultation activity in transplantation, and even less is known about it concerning donor assessment. The consultations provided by the second opinion service led to the safer and homogeneous management of donors with a history of malignancy or ongoing neoplasm by transplant centers. Indeed, two of the most important aspects are the reduction of semantic differences in cancer reporting and the standardization of procedures, which are mainly due to the different settings and logistics of different pathology services. This article aims to discuss the role and the future of the second opinion in Italy during organ procurement, highlighting the critical issues and areas for improvement.

Linguistic variation within the Northwestern Gheg Albanian dialect

In previous literature and linguistics analysis, the Northwestern Gheg Albanian dialect is classified as one zone that encompasses the area of northwestern Albania and southwestern Montenegro (B. Demiraj 1997: 40, Gjinari 1989: 54-8, Mëniku 2008: vii., Shkurtaj 2016: 26). The area is assumed to form a single subdialect; however, evidence from various levels of linguistic analysis discussed in this paper challenges this assumption. The area of Malsia Madhe in northwestern Albania and southwestern Montenegro exhibits different phonological, syntactic, and lexical patterns than the area of Shkodër. The southernmost point of this Gheg subdialect is Lezhë, which also has its own set of distinct idiosyncratic differences. This analysis provides an overview of the main differences between the areas of Malsia Madhe, Shkodër, and Lezhë, all typically grouped in the northwestern Gheg subdialect. This includes an evaluation of phonological, grammatical, semantic, and lexical differences between the three main areas of northwestern Gheg. Finally, it also offers a diachronic view of how this subdialect contributes to and challenges the history of the Albanian language’s development from Proto-Albanian and Proto-Indo-European.

From Knowledge to Wisdom: Looking beyond the Knowledge Hierarchy

Although there is a long history of searching for the road from knowledge to wisdom, there is no final and clear result. In fact, there are multiple ways of starting from knowledge and reaching wisdom due to the complexity of the semantic domains of both concepts. In addition, there are different perspectives on interpreting these conceptual maps, ranging from philosophy to psychology or management. We are interested in understanding the connecting ideas between knowledge and wisdom from the management perspective, where decision making is the key driving force for transforming knowledge into efficient actions for creating value for customers through products and services. The well-known knowledge pyramid or wisdom pyramid is a good metaphor to start with in understanding the basic concepts of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom (DIKW) and their transformations. We analyze different interpretations of these four basic concepts and focus on the transition from knowledge to wisdom, looking beyond the DIKW pyramid. Additionally, to get a larger view of the multiple connections between knowledge and wisdom, we perform a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer as a specialized software tool. The contribution of the present paper comes from this enlarged framework of searching for links between knowledge and wisdom and analyzing their relevance to business management. The results are relevant to anyone who would like to understand how to manage efficiently knowledge in their organizations. We explain the semantic differences in interpreting the concepts of “information” and “knowledge” in philosophy, information science, and knowledge management, which can be useful both in theory and in practice.

Constructive Properties of Union CHTO… CHTO… and Its Semantics

The article deals with the constructive properties of the union chto ... chto ... and its semantic features due to them. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian studies the union chto ... chto ... is described by analyzing its constructive properties. In this case, the main attention is paid to the morphological and syntactic characteristics of the word forms included in the scope of this union, the principles of their relationship with each other, as well as external links with syntactic structures in which the union construction as a whole is involved. An additional toolkit is the etymological characteristic of chto ... chto ... The theoretical significance lies in the proposed description algorithm, which can be used to characterize similar means of syntactic communication. The results obtained are compared with the constructive properties of the union khot’ … khot’ …, identified earlier using a similar algorithm. Based on this, not only the semantics of both means of syntactic communication is specified. It has been established that, due to its constructive properties, the union chto ... chto ... seeks to level the semantic differences between the composed alternatives, while khot’ … khot’ …, on the contrary, focuses on opposing them to each other.

Area Contrast Distribution Loss for Underwater Image Enhancement

In this paper, we aim to design a lightweight underwater image enhancement algorithm that can effectively solve the problem of color distortion and low contrast in underwater images. Recently, enhancement methods typically optimize a perceptual loss function, using high-level features extracted from pre-trained networks to train a feed-forward network for image enhancement tasks. This loss function measures the perceptual and semantic differences between images, but it is applied globally across the entire image and does not consider semantic information within the image, which limits the effectiveness of the perceptual loss. Therefore, we propose an area contrast distribution loss (ACDL), which trains a flow model to achieve real-time optimization of the difference between output and reference in training. Additionally, we propose a novel lightweight neural network. Because underwater image acquisition is difficult, our experiments have shown that our model training can use only half the amount of data and half the image size compared to Shallow-UWnet. The RepNet network reduces the parameter size by at least 48% compared to previous algorithms, and the inference time is 5 times faster than before. After incorporating ACDL, SSIM increased by 2.70% and PSNR increased by 9.72%.

Formula omitted]-Net: Medical image segmentation using efficient and effective deep supervision

Although the existing deep supervised solutions have achieved some great successes in medical image segmentation, they have the following shortcomings; (i) semantic difference problem: since they are obtained by very different convolution or deconvolution processes, the intermediate masks and predictions in deep supervised baselines usually contain semantics with different depth, which thus hinders the models’ learning capabilities; (ii) low learning efficiency problem: additional supervision signals will inevitably make the training of the models more time-consuming. Therefore, in this work, we first propose two deep supervised learning strategies, U-Net-Deep and U-Net-Auto, to overcome the semantic difference problem. Then, to resolve the low learning efficiency problem, upon the above two strategies, we further propose a new deep supervised segmentation model, called μ-Net, to achieve not only effective but also efficient deep supervised medical image segmentation by introducing a tied-weight decoder to generate pseudo-labels with more diverse information and also speed up the convergence in training. Finally, three different types of μ-Net-based deep supervision strategies are explored and a Similarity Principle of Deep Supervision is further derived to guide future research in deep supervised learning. Experimental studies on four public benchmark datasets show that μ-Net greatly outperforms all the state-of-the-art baselines, including the state-of-the-art deeply supervised segmentation models, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Ablation studies sufficiently prove the soundness of the proposed Similarity Principle of Deep Supervision, the necessity and effectiveness of the tied-weight decoder, and using both the segmentation and reconstruction pseudo-labels for deep supervised learning.

Counter-stereotype intervention for construction and demolition waste recycling products: A functional near infrared spectroscopy study

The generation and stock of construction and demolition (C&D) waste is increasing, which makes the environmental and economic problems serious. In recent years, China has also launched many policies to encourage and guide C&D waste recycling. However, most of these policies are aimed at contractors and recycling utilization parties, while the lack of publicity and promotion has led to the acceptance in the market is generally low. People may have a negative stereotype of this recycled material recycled from C&D waste.In order to explore a measure that can alleviate this problem, this study used experimental research methods from psychology and neuroscience to investigate the mechanisms of different presentation forms of counter-stereotype intervention materials. This study included two experiments: the pretest experiment verified the implicit-explicit stereotype and neuronal image representation of C&D recycling products through single category implicit association test (SC-IAT), semantic difference scale and functional near-infrared (fNIRS). The posttest experiment was based on the counter-stereotype intervention method and intergroup contact theory. A within-participants design was used to investigate the effectiveness of counter-stereotype intervention and the differences in two intervene presentation forms based on the pretest experiment.The results showed that the counter-stereotype intervention was effective in suppressing the activation of stereotypes. The effects of the intervention were similar for both the video and graphic formats. In the neuron imaging representation of the posttest experiment, the significantly activated brain region shifted from the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (R-dlPFC) to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (L-dlPFC). L-dlPFC is highly associated with the modulation of cognition, indicating that after the counter-stereotype intervention, the necessity of C&D waste recycling and the credibility of the recycling product influenced the participants. So when the stereotype was reactivated, the signal in the L-dlPFC was suppressed, weakening the expression of the stereotype. This also suggests that the mechanism of counter-stereotype intervention is to strengthen the brain regulatory system rather than to inhibit the activation of stereotypes at the source.

A systematic comparison and evaluation of building ontologies for deploying data-driven analytics in smart buildings

Ontologies play a critical role in data exchange, information integration, and knowledge sharing across diverse smart building applications. Yet, semantic differences between the prevailing building ontologies hamper their purpose of bringing data interoperability and restrict the ability to reuse building ontologies in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose and adopt a framework to conduct a systematic comparison and evaluation of four popular building ontologies (Brick Schema, RealEstateCore, Project Haystack, and Digital Buildings) from both axiomatic design and assertions in a use case, namely the Terminological Box (TBox) evaluation and the Assertion Box (ABox) evaluation. In the TBox evaluation, we use the SQuaRE-based Ontology Quality Evaluation (OQuaRE) framework and concede that Project Haystack and Brick Schema are more compact with respect to the ontology axiomatic design. In the ABox evaluation, we apply an empirical study with sample building data that suggests Brick Schema and RealEstateCore have greater completeness and expressiveness in capturing the main concepts and relations within the building domain. The results indicate that there is no universal building ontology for integrating Linked Building Data (LBD). We also discuss ontology compatibility and investigate building ontology design patterns (ODPs) to support ontology matching, alignment, and harmonisation.

THE PECULIARITY OF LANDSCAPE AND METEOROLOGICAL VOCABULARY OF RUSSIAN DIALECTS OF UDMURTIA

The article discusses the features of the composition of landscape and meteorological vocabulary in the Russian dialects of Udmurtia. The words of this subject recorded in the corpus of Russian dialects of Udmurtia, as well as in the records made by researchers of individual dialects on the territory of the republic, are analyzed. During the lexicographic analysis with the involvement of dialect dictionaries, it was revealed that most of the names of landscape features and natural phenomena in the Russian dialects of Udmurtia are commonly used words, as well as dialect designations known in Vyatka and Perm dialects. This conclusion is natural, since Udmurtia borders with the Kirov region in the north and west and with the Perm Region in the east, is located in the same natural zone with these regions, as well as at the intersection of the areas of the corresponding dialects. In addition, the study revealed a number of words that were not marked in the dialect dictionaries of neighboring regions or in Russian vernacular dialects in general. Such lexemes, fixed in this meaning only in the Russian dialects of Udmurtia, are formed from the all-Russian or dialect bases, but have phonetic, word-formation or semantic differences from the same-root words noted in lexicographic sources.

Verbs of the Emotional States of Shame and Embarrassment in Russian: A Diachronic Aspect

This article is devoted to the description of verbs of the emotional states of shame, embarrassment, and shyness in the diachronic aspect. The relevance of the research is due to the need to expand knowledge about the dynamic changes in the vocabulary of emotions, and the impact of cultural and political transformations on these changes. Although semantic differences in Russian expressions for shame-like emotional states have been well studied, diachronic changes in the meanings of these expressions have received little attention. The scholarly novelty of this work is determined by the fact that it examines the diachronic development of the verbs for these emotional states, which occurred in the Russian language in the eleventh–twenty-first centuries, and the factors that caused these changes. The data have been collected from explanatory dictionaries of the modern Russian language, etymological dictionaries, and historical dictionaries of different ages and coverage, as well as the National Russian electronic corpora. The material for the study was data from explanatory dictionaries of the modern Russian language, historical, and etymological dictionaries of the Russian language, as well as data from the National Corpus of the Russian language. The theoretical basis of this research was formed by works in the field of the linguistics of emotions and linguistic culture. The main research methods were the contextual-functional method, as well as etymological analysis. This study demonstrates that in the process of the semantic development of the verbs of shame and embarrassment in the Russian language, both general tendencies towards a decrease in the polysemy of semantically overloaded linguistic structures and tendencies towards a more accurate and precise labelling of various aspects of emotional states play an important role. It is shown that during the semantic development of words denoting shame and embarrassment, the polysemy “to be shameful” / “to feel shame” was gradually lost and the polysemy “to be ashamed” / “to be embarrassed” decreased in use. The article also describes the main patterns of semantic derivation that are typical of verbs of shame and embarrassment, which appear in the Russian language of different centuries.

A semantic data-driven knowledge base construction method to assist designers in design inspiration based on traditional motifs

Directing at the problem of inaccurate expression of tacit knowledge and low heuristic of retrieval results in the design inspiration drawing process of designers based on traditional motifs, a semantic data representation method of traditional motifs knowledge is put forward, and an effective knowledge base construction and knowledge retrieval method for traditional motifs are described. First, the connotation of traditional motifs is deeply explored based on the theory of symbol semantics, realizing the interpretation and transfer of the semantic features in traditional motifs. Second, shape grammar is adopted for fractal traditional motifs, the hierarchical structure of traditional motifs is built, and the parametric coding of semantic features of traditional motifs is completed, providing the semantic data representation method of traditional motifs knowledge. Third, based on the clustering algorithm, the construction method of the traditional motifs knowledge base is explained, and a traditional motifs knowledge retrieval method taking into account the user's perceptual preference is proposed. Finally, setting the traditional Chinese motifs as an example, with a tea set as the designed product, the construction process of a small traditional motif knowledge base is shown in detail, proving the feasibility of this paper’s theory. Compared with the traditional theory, the semantic data representation method of traditional pattern knowledge is greatly advantageous in semantic differences elimination and computational efficiency.

Lexico-Semantic Features of the Most Popular Tiktok Videos in Pakistan

This research aims to conduct a stylistic analysis of selected content from TikTok using both lexical and semantic approaches. The study analyzes the meanings of sentences and phrases used by content creators on TikTok, as well as various figurative devices employed. A qualitative method was used to conduct the analysis, and the selected content was categorized under various stylistic analysis categories, including semantic parallelism, semantic deviation, lexical deviation, lexical parallelism, and code mixing. Neologism, lexical parallelism, and code mixing were examined under lexical stylistics analysis. Two content creators and five videos from each were selected for the analysis. The study found that both content creators used semantic and lexical parallelism to emphasize specific ideas and create humorous effects in their videos. Additionally, specific stylistic devices were used to convey subliminal messages, including taunting politics, highlighting an increase in robbery cases, and criticizing married life.

On generalization of the sense retrofitting model

AbstractWith the aid of recently proposed word embedding algorithms, the study of semantic relatedness has progressed rapidly. However, word-level representations are still lacking for many natural language processing tasks. Various sense-level embedding learning algorithms have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we present a generalized model derived from existing sense retrofitting models. In this generalization, we take into account semantic relations between the senses, relation strength, and semantic strength. Experimental results show that the generalized model outperforms previous approaches on four tasks: semantic relatedness, contextual word similarity, semantic difference, and synonym selection. Based on the generalized sense retrofitting model, we also propose a standardization process on the dimensions with four settings, a neighbor expansion process from the nearest neighbors, and combinations of these two approaches. Finally, we propose a Procrustes analysis approach that inspired from bilingual mapping models for learning representations that outside of the ontology. The experimental results show the advantages of these approaches on semantic relatedness tasks.

Optimization strategies for the German version of the soundscape affective quality instrument

Semantic differences in the soundscape circumplex instrument may have an impact on affective quality assessments of acoustic environments, hampering comparison in cross-cultural settings. Although an adopted version of the ISO/TS 12913-2 exists in Germany, it has not yet been sufficiently validated. In a listening experiment conducted as part of an international round-robin test, a total of 27 soundscapes were evaluated using alternate German translations of the English instrument. Results from two different optimiziation strategies were compared: (1) maximized circumplexity of the German scale version and (2) language invariance between German and English scale versions. Confirmatory factor analyses and invariance testing were employed to determine optimal translations and calculate resulting goodness of fit. Results demonstrate that strategy 1, with two new item translations, yields better results in terms of circumplexity and language invariance than the current DIN ISO/TS 12913-2 version. However, to allow fully unbiased cross-cultural comparisons of soundscape impressions, drawing on the instrument developed with strategy 2 is more suitable, since it produces scores strictly corresponding to those of the English scale. As the analysis demonstrates, this seemingly paradox finding results from a lack of empirical circumplexity of the English original.

Speech Genre of <i>Congratulation</i> in Asymmetric Communication

The article describes the pragmatic, semantic, and axiological features of the speech genre of congratulation complement in pedagogical discourse with asymmetric communicants. The research material included 170 fragments. The research revealed two groups based on semantic, axiological, pragmatic, and linguistic differences: personal informal internet congratulations made by teaching staff to students and formal public speeches given by university rectors and teaching staff to students published on official websites of universities. The analysis relied on the factor of formality / informality. The differences between formal and informal congratulations manifested themselves in the content, language, and tactics. Both types were detailed and poly-intentional. The informal congratulations touched upon the addressee's personality, hobbies, achievements, and character traits. The formal congratulations showed a much greater distance between the sender and the addressee. They focused on the addressee's status, not personality. The texts often reflected current events, e.g., in 2019–2020 they touched upon the COVID-2019 pandemic.

Sufficient or adequate evidence? Using corpus data to distinguish between near-synonymous adjectives in academic prose

Using the British Academic Written English Corpus as data, this study attempts to reveal the semantic and usage differences between adequate and sufficient, two near-synonymous adjectives often used in academic texts. The distributional patterns examined include overall and discipline frequency, syntactic functions, typical noun collocates and modifying adverbs. The results show a preference for sufficient in academic prose, where it is distinguished from adequate by a more frequent predicative use; an inclination towards it-extraposed constructions, and the VPto and pp_for patterns; the tendency to express more absolute and more specialized meanings; and a close collocational relationship with nouns relating to information. Adequate, which is less frequent, tends to more often modify abstract nouns and co-occur with the definite uses of its modifiees, and its uses may involve comparison. Insights from the study can support scholars in their lexical choices in English academic writing.

Topic-Based Unsupervised and Supervised Dictionary Induction

Word translation is a natural language processing task that provides translation between the words of a source and a target language. As a task, it reduces to the induction of a bilingual dictionary, which is typically performed by aligning word embeddings of the source language to word embeddings of the target language. To date, all the existing approaches have focused on performing a single, global alignment in word embedding space. However, semantic differences between the various languages, in addition to differences in the content of the corpora used for training the word embeddings, can hinder the effectiveness of such a global alignment. For this reason, in this article we propose conducting the alignment between the source and target embedding spaces by multiple mappings at topic level. The experimental results show that our approach has been able to achieve an average accuracy improvement of +3.30 percentage points over a state-of-the-art approach in unsupervised dictionary induction from languages as diverse as German, French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, and Chinese to English, and +3.95 points average improvement in supervised dictionary induction.

A Semantic Review of Qur’ānic Near-Synonyms, English and French Translations

This study examines the nuances among the chosen near-synonyms and the extent to which the translators considered such nuances in the selected translations of the Qur’an. It seeks to identify the meanings of two sets of near-synonyms in their Qur’anic contexts based on the Qur’ānic exegeses. It also highlights the differences in meaning that exist among these near-synonyms and the extent to which the semantic differences among those near-synonyms are preserved in translation. This study is grounded on the RC-S approach by Murphy as a theoretical framework for data analysis. The obtained results show that there are some differences in meaning among the chosen near-synonyms and that some of such nuances are not preserved in the English and French translations. Thus, the study recommends that the differences in meaning among the near-synonyms should be identified before translating the Qur’ānic texts, and subsequently, the identified differences should be reflected in the translation.

A Semantic Review of Qur’ānic Near-Synonyms, English and French Translations

This study examines the nuances among the chosen near-synonyms and the extent to which the translators considered such nuances in the selected translations of the Qur’an. It seeks to identify the meanings of two sets of near-synonyms in their Qur’anic contexts based on the Qur’ānic exegeses. It also highlights the differences in meaning that exist among these near-synonyms and the extent to which the semantic differences among those near-synonyms are preserved in translation. This study is grounded on the RC-S approach by Murphy as a theoretical framework for data analysis. The obtained results show that there are some differences in meaning among the chosen near-synonyms and that some of such nuances are not preserved in the English and French translations. Thus, the study recommends that the differences in meaning among the near-synonyms should be identified before translating the Qur’ānic texts, and subsequently, the identified differences should be reflected in the translation.

A Semantic review of Qur’ānic Near-Synonyms, English and French Translations

This study examines the nuances among the chosen near-synonyms and the extent to which the translators considered such nuances in the selected translations of the Qur’an. It seeks to identify the meanings of two sets of near-synonyms in their Qur’anic contexts based on the Qur’ānic exegeses. It also highlights the differences in meaning that exist among these near-synonyms and the extent to which the semantic differences among those near-synonyms are preserved in translation. This study is grounded on the RC-S approach by Murphy as a theoretical framework for data analysis. The obtained results show that there are some differences in meaning among the chosen near-synonyms and that some of such nuances are not preserved in the English and French translations. Thus, the study recommends that the differences in meaning among the near-synonyms should be identified before translating the Qur’ānic texts, and subsequently, the identified differences should be reflected in the translation.