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English prepositions take only a small proportion of the language but play a substantial role. Although prepositions are of course also frequently used in English textbooks for secondary school, students fail to incidentally acquire them and often show low achievements in using prepositions correctly. The strategy commonly employed by language instructors is teaching the multiple senses of prepositions by rote which fails to help the students to draw links between the different meanings in usage. New findings in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) suggest a different approach to teaching prepositions and thus might have a strong impact on the methodologies of foreign language teaching and learning on the aspects of meaningful learning. Based on the Theory of Domains (Langacker, 1987), the notions of image schemas (Johnson, 1987) as well as the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the present study developed a CL-inspired approach to teaching prepositions, which was compared to the traditional teaching method by an empirical study conducted in a German school setting. Referring to the participants from the higher track and the medium track, who are at different proficiency levels, the results indicate that the CL-inspired teaching approach improved students" performance significantly more than the traditional approach in all the cases for the higher track and in some cases for the medium track. Thus, these findings open up a new perspective of the CL-inspired meaningful learning approach on language teaching. In addition, the CL-inspired approach demonstrates the unification of the integrated model of text and picture comprehension (the ITPC model) in integrating the new knowledge with related prior knowledge in the cognitive structure. According to the learning procedure of the ITPC model, the image schema as visual image is first perceived through the sensory register, then is processed in the working memory by conceptual metaphor, and finally it is integrated with cognitive schemata in the long term memory. Moreover, deep-seated factors, such as transfer of mother tongue, the difficulty of teaching materials, and the influence of prior knowledge, have strong effects on the acquisition of English prepositions.
Assessment of bat activity in agricultural environments and the evaluation of the risk of pesticides
(2013)
Although agriculture dominates with around 50% area much of Europe- landscape, there is virtually no information on how bats use this farmed environment for foraging. Consequently, little is known about effective conservation measures to compensate potential negative effects of agrarian management practice on the food availability for bats in this habitat. Moreover, there are currently no specific regulatory requirements to include bats in European Union risk assessments for the registration of pesticides since no information about pesticide exposure on this mammal group is available. To evaluate the potential pesticide exposure of bats via ingestion of contaminated insects, information about bat presence and activity in agricultural habitats is required. In order to examine bat activity on a landscape scale it was necessary to establish a suitable survey method. Contrary to capture methods, telemetry, and direct observations, acoustic surveys of bat activity are a logistically feasible and cost-effective way of obtaining bat activity data. However, concerns regarding the methodological designs of many acoustic surveys are expressed in the scientific literature. The reasons are the failing of addressing temporal and spatial variation in bat activity patterns and the limitations of the suitability of the used acoustic detector systems. By comparing different methods and detector systems it was found that the set up of several stationary calibrated detector systems which automatically trigger the ultrasonic recording has the highest potential to produce reliable, unbiased and comparable data sets on the relative activity of bats.
By using the proposed survey method, bat diversity and activity was recorded in different crops and semi-natural habitats in southern Rhineland-Palatinate. Simultaneously, the availability of aerial prey insects was studied by using light and sticky traps. In more than 500 sampling nights about 110,000 call sequences were acoustically recorded and almost 120,000 nocturnal insects were sampled. A total of 14 bat species were recorded, among them the locally rare and critically endangered northern bat (Eptesicus nilssonii) and the barbastelle (Barbastella barbastellum), all of them also occurring over agricultural fields. The agricultural landscape of southern Palatinate is dominated by vineyards, a habitat that was shown to be of low quality for most bat species because of the demonstrated low availability of small aerial insects. By surveying bat activity and food availably in a pair-wise design on several rain water retention ponds and neighbouring vineyards it was demonstrated that aquatic insect emergence in artificial wetlands can provide an important resource subsidy for bats. The creation of artificial wetlands would be a possibility to create important foraging habitats for bats and mitigate negative effects of management practice in the agricultural landscape.
In several other agricultural crops, however, high abundances of suitable prey insects and high bat activity levels, comparable or even higher than in the nearby forests and meadows known to be used as foraging habitats were demonstrated. Especially high bat activity levels were recorded over several fruit orchards and vegetable fields where insects were also present. Both crops are known for high pesticide inputs, and, therefore, a pesticide exposure through ingestion of contaminated insects can not be excluded. To follow the current risk assessment approach for birds and mammals pesticide residues were measured on bat-specific food items in an apple orchard following insecticide applications and bat activity was recorded in parallel. The highest residue values were measured on foliage-dwelling arthropods which may results in a reproductive risk for all bat species that, even to a small extent, include this prey group in their diet. The presence of bats in agricultural landscapes that form a majority of the land area in Europe but also on a global scale leads to exposure of bats by contaminated food and depletion of their food resources by pesticide use. So far conservation efforts for bats focussed on securing hibernation sites and the creation of artificial roost sites since especially the latter were thought to be limiting population growth. However the potential pesticide effects might be also crucial for the population persistence in agricultural landscapes of bats and need to be addressed adequately, especially in risk assessment procedures for the regulation of pesticides.
Agricultural pesticides, especially insecticides, are an integral part of modern farming. However, these may often leave their target ecosystems and cause adverse effects in non- target, especially freshwater ecosystems, leading to their deterioration. In this thesis, the focus will be on Insect Growth Regulators (IGRs) that can in many ways cause disruption of the endocrine system of invertebrates. Freshwater invertebrates play important ecological, economic and medical roles, and disruption of their endocrine systems may be crucial, considering the important role hormones play in the developmental and reproductive processes in organisms. Although Endocrine Disruption Chemicals (EDCs) can affect moulting, behaviour, morphology, sexual maturity, time to first brood, egg development time, brood size (fecundity), and sex determination in invertebrates, there is currently no agreement upon how to characterize and assess endocrine disruption (ED). Current traditional ecotoxicity tests for Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) show limitations on generating data at the population level that may be relevant for the assessment of EDCs, which effects may be sublethal, latent and persist for several generations of species (transgenerational).
It is therefore the primary objective of this thesis to use a test method to investigate adverse effects of EDCs on endpoints concerning development and reproduction in freshwater invertebrates. The full life-cycle test over two generations that includes all sensitive life stages of C. riparius (a sexual reproductive organism) allows an assessment of its reproduction and should be suitable for the investigation of long-term toxicity of EDCs in freshwater invertebrates. C. riparius is appropriate for this purpose because of its short life cycle that enables the assessment of functional endpoints of the organism over several generations. Moreover, the chironomid life cycle consists of a complete metamorphosis controlled by a well-known endocrine mechanism and the endocrine system of insects has been most investigated in great detail among invertebrates. Hence, the full life-cycle test with C. riparius provides an approach to assess functional endpoints (e.g. reproduction, sex ratio) that are population-relevant as a useful amendment to the ERA of EDCs. In the laboratory, C. riparius was exposed to environmentally-relevant concentrations of the selected IGRs in either spiked water or spiked sediment scenario over two subsequent generations.
The results reported in this thesis revealed significant effects of the IGRs on the development and the reproduction of C. riparius with the second (F1) generation showing greater sensitivity. These findings indicated for the first time the suitability of multigenerational testing for various groups of EDCs and strongly suggested considering the full life-cycle of C. riparius as an appropriate test method for a better assessment of EDCs in the freshwater environment. In conclusion, this thesis helps to detect additional information that can be extrapolated at population level and, thus, might contribute to better protection of freshwater ecosystems against the risks of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs.) It may furthermore contribute to changes in the ERA process that are necessary for a real implementation of the new European chemical legislation, REACH (Registration, Evaluation Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals). Finally, significant interactions between temperature, chemical exposure and generation were reported for the first time and, may help predict impacts that may occur in the future, in the field, under predicted climate change scenarios.
This dissertation investigates the usage of theorem provers in automated question answering (QA). QA systems attempt to compute correct answers for questions phrased in a natural language. Commonly they utilize a multitude of methods from computational linguistics and knowledge representation to process the questions and to obtain the answers from extensive knowledge bases. These methods are often syntax-based, and they cannot derive implicit knowledge. Automated theorem provers (ATP) on the other hand can compute logical derivations with millions of inference steps. By integrating a prover into a QA system this reasoning strength could be harnessed to deduce new knowledge from the facts in the knowledge base and thereby improve the QA capabilities. This involves challenges in that the contrary approaches of QA and automated reasoning must be combined: QA methods normally aim for speed and robustness to obtain useful results even from incomplete of faulty data, whereas ATP systems employ logical calculi to derive unambiguous and rigorous proofs. The latter approach is difficult to reconcile with the quantity and the quality of the knowledge bases in QA. The dissertation describes modifications to ATP systems in order to overcome these obstacles. The central example is the theorem prover E-KRHyper which was developed by the author at the Universität Koblenz-Landau. As part of the research work for this dissertation E-KRHyper was embedded into a framework of components for natural language processing, information retrieval and knowledge representation, together forming the QA system LogAnswer.
Also presented are additional extensions to the prover implementation and the underlying calculi which go beyond enhancing the reasoning strength of QA systems by giving access to external knowledge sources like web services. These allow the prover to fill gaps in the knowledge during the derivation, or to use external ontologies in other ways, for example for abductive reasoning. While the modifications and extensions detailed in the dissertation are a direct result of adapting an ATP system to QA, some of them can be useful for automated reasoning in general. Evaluation results from experiments and competition participations demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods under discussion.
Autonomous systems such as robots already are part of our daily life. In contrast to these machines, humans an react appropriately to their counterparts. People can hear and interpret human speech, and interpret facial expressions of other people.
This thesis presents a system for automatic facial expression recognition with emotion mapping. The system is image-based and employs feature-based feature extraction. This thesis analyzes the common steps of an emotion recognition system and presents state-of-the-art methods. The approach presented is based on 2D features. These features are detected in the face. No neutral face is needed as reference. The system extracts two types of facial parameters. The first type consists of distances between the feature points. The second type comprises angles between lines connecting the feature points. Both types of parameters are implemented and tested. The parameters which provide the best results for expression recognition are used to compare the system with state-of-the-art approaches. A multiclass Support Vector Machine classifies the parameters.
The results are codes of Action Units of the Facial Action Coding System. These codes are mapped to a facial emotion. This thesis addresses the six basic emotions (happy, surprised, sad, fearful, angry, and disgusted) plus the neutral facial expression. The system presented is implemented in C++ and is provided with an interface to the Robot Operating System (ROS).
Concept for a Knowledge Base on ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling regarding eGovPoliNet
(2013)
Abstract The EU project eGovPoliNet is engaged in research and development in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) for governance and policy modelling. Numerous communities pursue similar goals in this field of IT-based, strategic decision making and simulation of social problem areas. Though, the existing research approaches and results so far are quite fragmented. The aim of eGovPoliNet is to overcome the fragmentation across disciplines and to establish an international, open dialogue by fostering the cooperation between research and practice. This dialogue will advance the discussion and development of various problem areas with the help of researchers from different disciplines, who share knowledge, expertise and best practice supporting policy analysis, modelling and governance. To support this dialogue, eGovPoliNet will provide a knowledge base, which's conceptual development is the subject of this thesis. The knowledge base is to be filled with content from the area of ICT for strategic decision making and social simulation, such as publications, ICT solutions and project descriptions. This content needs to be structured, organised and managed in a way, so that it generates added value and the knowledge base is used as source of accumulated knowledge, which consolidates the previously fragmented research and development results in a central location.
The aim of this thesis is the development of a concept for a knowledge base, which provides the structure and the necessary functionalities to gather and process knowledge concerning ICT solutions for governance and policy modelling. This knowledge needs to be made available to users and thereby motivate them to contribute to the development and maintenance of the knowledge base.
Large amounts of qualitative data make the utilization of computer-assisted methods for their analysis inevitable. In this thesis Text Mining as an interdisciplinary approach, as well as the methods established in the empirical social sciences for analyzing written utterances are introduced. On this basis a process of extracting concept networks from texts is outlined and the possibilities of utilitzing natural language processing methods within are highlighted. The core of this process is text processing, to whose execution software solutions supporting manual as well as automated work are necessary. The requirements to be met by these solutions, against the background of the initiating project GLODERS, which is devoted to investigating extortion racket systems as part of the global fiσnancial system, are presented, and their fulσlment by the two most preeminent candidates reviewed. The gap between theory and pratical application is closed by a prototypical application of the method to a data set of the research project utilizing the two given software solutions.
We present the conceptual and technological foundations of a distributed natural language interface employing a graph-based parsing approach. The parsing model developed in this thesis generates a semantic representation of a natural language query in a 3-staged, transition-based process using probabilistic patterns. The semantic representation of a natural language query is modeled in terms of a graph, which represents entities as nodes connected by edges representing relations between entities. The presented system architecture provides the concept of a natural language interface that is both independent in terms of the included vocabularies for parsing the syntax and semantics of the input query, as well as the knowledge sources that are consulted for retrieving search results. This functionality is achieved by modularizing the system's components, addressing external data sources by flexible modules which can be modified at runtime. We evaluate the system's performance by testing the accuracy of the syntactic parser, the precision of the retrieved search results as well as the speed of the prototype.
Worldwide one third to one half of the freshwater crayfish species are threatened with population decline or extinction. Besides habitat deterioration, pollution, and other man-made environmental changes, invasive species and pathogens are major threats to the survival of European crayfish species. Freshwater crayfish are the largest freshwater invertebrates and strongly influence the structure of food webs. The disappearance of crayfish from a water body may change the food web and could have dramatic consequences for an ecosystem.rnOne goal in modern species conservation strategies is the conservation of genetic diversity, since genetic diversity is an advantage for the long-term survival of a species. The main aim of my thesis was to reveal the genetic structure and to identify genetic hotspots of the endangered noble crayfish (Astacus astacus) throughout Europe (part 1 of my thesis). Since the most significant threat to biodiversity of European crayfish species is the crayfish plague pathogen Aphanomyces astaci I studied new aspects in the distribution of A. astaci (part two of my thesis). The results serve as a basis for future conservation programs for freshwater crayfish. In the first part of my thesis I conducted a phylogeographic analysis of noble crayfish using mitochondrial DNA and nuclear microsatellite data. With these methods I aimed to identify its genetic hotspots and to reconstruct the recolonization history of central Europe by this species. I detected high genetic diversities in southestern Europe indicating that noble crayfish outlasted the cold climate phases during the Pleistocene in this region (Appendix 1). Because of the high genetic diversity found there, southeastern Europe is of particular importance for the conservation of noble crayfish. The mitochondrial DNA analysis points to a bifurcated colonization process from the eastern Black Sea basin to a) the North Sea and to b) the Baltic Sea basin (Appendix 2). A second independent refugium that was localized on the Western Balkans did not contribute to the colonization of central Europe. Furthermore, I found that the natural genetic structure is dissolved, probably due to the high human impact on the distribution of noble crayfish (e.g. artificial translocation). In the second part of this thesis using real-time PCR I identified calico crayfish (Orconectes immunis) as the fourth North American crayfish species to be carrier of the agent of the crayfish plague (Appendix 3). Furthermore I detected the crayfish plague pathogen in American spiny-cheek crayfish (Orconectes limosus) and native narrow-clawed crayfish (Astacus leptodactylus) in the lower Danube in Romania (Appendix 4). The distribution of infected spiny-cheek crayfish poses a threat to the native biodiversity in southeastern Europe and shows the high invasion potential of this crayfish species. Moreover, I found that even the native narrow-clawed crayfish in the Danube Delta, about 970 km downstream of the current invasion front of American crayfish, is a carrier of A. astaci (Appendix 5). This finding is of high importance, as the native species do not seem to suffer from the infection. In Appendix 6 I elucidate demonstrate that the absence of the crayfish plague agent is the most likely explanation for the coexistence of populations of European and American crayfish in central Europe. In my thesis I show that the common assumption that all North American crayfish are carrier of A. astaci and that all native crayfish species die when infected with A. astaci does not hold true. The studies presented in my thesis reveal new aspects that are crucial for native crayfish conservation: 1) The genetic diversity of noble crayfish is highest in southeastern Europe where noble crayfish outlasted the last glacial maximum in at least two different refugia. 2) Not all American crayfish populations are carrier of A. astaci and 3) not all Europen crayish populations die shortly after being infected with the crayfish plague pathogen.rnTo conserve native crayfish species and their (genetic) diversity in the long term, further introductions of American crayfish into European waters must be avoided. However, the introduction will only decrease if the commercial trade with non-indigenous crayfish species is prohibited.
E-KRHyper is a versatile theorem prover and model generator for firstorder logic that natively supports equality. Inequality of constants, however, has to be given by explicitly adding facts. As the amount of these facts grows quadratically in the number of these distinct constants, the knowledge base is blown up. This makes it harder for a human reader to focus on the actual problem, and impairs the reasoning process. We extend E-Hyper- underlying E-KRhyper tableau calculus to avoid this blow-up by implementing a native handling for inequality of constants. This is done by introducing the unique name assumption for a subset of the constants (the so called distinct object identifiers). The obtained calculus is shown to be sound and complete and is implemented into the E-KRHyper system. Synthetic benchmarks, situated in the theory of arrays, are used to back up the benefits of the new calculus.