Digital libraries

A digital or virtual library is a library in which a significant proportion of the information resources are available in the digital format, accessible through the computers, and whose  essential exponent is the Internet. This type of library allows the user to find the documents when he/she needs them, and for doing this, it responds dynamically from its network of information sources.

One of the most important ones is The Darlington Digital Library, set in the University os Pitsburgh. As it´s said in the library´s own page:  ”The Darlington Digital Library was created from the first major collection of books, manuscripts, atlases, and maps donated to the University of Pittsburgh”. This spectacular library was created by Mr. Drlington, who started collecting maps, manuscripts, works of art etc. in the year 1840. All these acquisitions were digitalized in the summer of 2006.

There are some other very important digital libraries, like the Furness Shakespeare Collection (University of Pensylvania), which I should mention at least.

References:

• The Darlington Digital Library. Retrieved 25th October, 2009 at 9.55 from: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/
• Digital library. (2009, October 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 9.58, 25th October, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_library&oldid=321357328
• List of digital library projects. (2009, October 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10.01, October 25, 2009  from: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_digital_library_projects&oldid=321990379

Main differences between the ebook and the paper book.

Writing a text which faces the electronic book and the paper book doesn´t mean to put one of them above the other one. Doing this we only want to see the main differences between them. We must say that the electronic book is not going to abolish the paper book, at least,  by now. Remember that the printed book has had a main function in the growth of any language, and also in their never-ending.

Even if they have some similarities, this two type of books have many other differences between them. The ebook can be easily transferred from one place to another without being forced to do it physically. For doing this you must be surfing the Internet, but that fact is really easy to carry on nowadays. An electronic book may contain more information and the possibility of accessing to any external data, while the printed book works under the equation “to grater content, the greater number of paper and weight”. Ebooks have also the advantage of being easier to distribute through Internet, and that fact makes them cheaper, and sometimes free, which means that its autor has the opportunity  of being read by many surfers. Electronic book’s last advantage is that it allows us to see videos, imagine, sound etc. Finally we should say something in favour to printed books. When the reader wants to take some note of what he has read it is much more difficult to do it with an ebook, even if it is also available.

In short, both types of book have some advantages and also disadvantages, but it would be great for us the endurance of them all.

 

References.

• El libro electrónico. La industria editorial en la era de la revoluciòn digital. (December 26th, 2007 at 2.09 pm).  Jane Camargo. Retrieved 21.32, October 8th, 2009 from: http://libroselectronicos.wordpress.com/category/libro-impreso-vs-libro-electronico/
• El libro electrónico. Carlos Saez. (año 2000). Universidad de Pavia. Retrieved 21.35, October 8th, 2009 from: http://scrineum.unipv.it/saez.htm
• Ebook. Libro electrónico. (8th October, 2009 at 11.14). From Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. Retrieved at 21.38, October 8th, 2009 from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_electr%C3%B3nico
• Libro impreso. (6th October, 2009). From Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. Retrieved at 21.40, October 8th, 2009 from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro

The author and authorship in the digital world.

Since the advent of the printing press untill today, the author´s concept has moved to set the idea of what we now understand as such. The process of setting the text, considering the need for a literate society, recognizing the sovereignty of the author, encouraging the creation of a canon of literary works and the birth of every one of the market and book professionals, was a slow process that took centuries. However, the birth of hypertext has broken with two of the main concepts which were added to author´s figure: the setting of the text and the membership of the same material. This means that the concept of authorship has changed.

The author has lost now part of his power and also of his mastery because once he publishes a document on the internet it becomes available to all the internet surfers. Some critics claim that electronic text, and hypertext in particular, is killing the author, and there are many reasons for thinking so because nowadays anyone can copy a document as if it was his/hers. Other critics don´t think the hypertext carries bad consequences for the authors. They say that now the reader has much more opportunities and that benefits the author´s figure.

References:

• María Jesús Lamarca (15th February, 2009). El autor y la autoría en el mundo digital. Retrieved 27th September, 2009 at 21.22 from: http://artesadigital.blogspot.com/2009/02/el-autor-y-la-autoria-en-el-mundo.html
• Jakob Nielsen. Multimedia and hypertext: the internet and beyond. (1995). Retrieved 27th September, 2009 at 21.25 from: http://books.google.es/books?id=KgZXCCfP0rQC&dq=Jakob+Nielsen.+Multimedia+and+hypertext:+the+internet+and+beyond&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=OEqm_1KoDq&sig=6_7ZpZ3mMyKQ-h9jquw2o9ZAEds&hl=es&ei=z7u_SuOjIMHajQf8gf1F&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
• Author. (2009, September 4 at 05.34). In Wikipedia, The free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 27th Sepember, 2009 at 21.30 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author
• Authorship (December 17, 1999). Authorship guidelines. Retrieved 27th September, 2009 at 21.34 from: http://www.hms.harvard.edu/integrity/authorship.html
• “Hypertext and the role of the reader and writer”. Part of the examination for the doctoral program in English at Michigan State University. Retrieved 27th September, 2009 at 21.38 from: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/patterna/hyperreading.html

Natural language processing (3rd questionnaire).

The Natural Language Processing (NLP or PLN),  is a sub Artificial Intelligence and engineering branch of the computational linguistics. The PLN is responsible for the formulation and research of effective mechanisms computationally for communication between people or between individuals and machines by means of natural languages. It has much to do with the field of computational linguistics.

This system involves both text and speech, but the work done in the speech processing belongs now to another field which is separated from Natural Language Processing. This new technology is being developed by some companies, which pay high sums of money in order to carry out they purpose. They are trying to design a software that can analyze, understand and also generate a language naturally used by humans .

 

References:

• Natural Language Processing (17th June 2009 at 17:41). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2153, 21st June, 2009 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
• Aitopics. Natural Language. What is NLP (December 13th,2008 at 12.26 PM). Retrieved 21.55, 21st June, 2009 from: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/NaturalLanguage
• Natural language processing. Microsoft Research Site. Retrieved 21.58, 21st June, 2009 from: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/nlp/

Question answering systems (3rd questionnaire).

The main purpose of question answering is to answer automatically to those questions which are  made in a natural language.

The search for answers, called in English Question Answering (QA) is a type of information retrieval. Given a certain amount of documents (such as World Wide Web), the system should be able to recover answers to questions raised in natural language.  A system of question answering is one of the most complex systems around the retrieval of information. We must take into account that a system based on the question-answering is much more difficult than a normal system which is responsible for seeking some information in a much more or less large documents, since these should draw from these documents a fragment of text  to respond to a question given in natural language. These systems are closely linked to the seekers web.

There can be two types of questions answered:

• The first of them are called close-domain questions and can be easily answered because they belong to a topic which can be found on the Internet without any problem.
• The second ones are called open-domain questions and are harder to answer because they rely on world knowledge.

Even if many questions can be answered due to this system, a hard work must be done in the future in order to be able of answering all of them.

 

References:

• Question answering (13th June 2009 at 19:00). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17.20, 19th June, 2009 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering
• Sistemas de busqueda Question-Answering (20th April, 2006). Retrieved 17.23, 19th June, 2009 from: http://usuarios.lycos.es/questionanswering/
• PIQASso: Pisa Question Answering System (Giuseppe Attardi, Antonio Cisternino, Francesco Formica, Maria Simi, Alessandro Tommasi). Retrieved 17.28, 19th June, 2009 from: http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec10/papers/piqasso.pdf

Computational Semantics (2nd questionnaire).

The computational semantics is a very well done study about the automating of the process of reasoning and constructing withnatural language expressions and also with meaning representations. It is also extremely important in computational linguistics and natural language processing. It has some topics of interest and some of them are: construction of meaning representations, semantic underspecification and anaphora resolution. There are some other traditional topics, but we are not going to talk about them now.

If there is something that must be said about natural language is that it has meaning. There are no doubts about this. And Semantics is the study of that meaning. The Semantics conducts this study in a formal way and in Computational ones the interest is in using the results of that study.

This is a relatively new discipline and as we have said before it combines formal semantics with computational linguistics and also with automated reasoning.  But we require a fully specified syntax for the fragment to guide the process of constructing semantic representations for that fragment of English.

 

References:

• Computational Semantics (9th March 2009, at 07:44). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 02.56, 19th June, 2009 from:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_semantics
• Computational Semantics information (Nov, 2003). Retrieved 03.02, 19th June, 2009 from:  http://www.cog.jhu.edu/~rawlins/clsbib/
• Computational semantics by: Aljoscha Burchardt, Stephan Walter, Alexander Koller, Michael Cohlhase, Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos (12th February, 2003). Retrieved 03.08, 19 th June 2009 from: http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/milca/courses/comsem/html/
• Books on Computational Semantics by Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos (6th November, 2006). Retrieved 03.11, 19th June from: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jbos/comsem/

The Semantic Web (2nd questionnaire).

When we talk about the Semantic Web, we  are referring to an extension of the World Wide Web. Here, the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, and it makes possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who percuted this idea, tried since the beggining to include some semantic information in his creation, but finally it became impossible for him. That was the main reason for his including of the semantic concept.

It has been described in some different ways  such as: ” an utopic vision”, “a web of data” or “a natural paradigm shift”. It has had a great development and has helped creating many different tools like “Wikidsmart”.

 

References:

• Semantic Web (12th May 2009). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13.21, 18th May, 2009 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
• Human Language Technologies (HLT). From Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz. Retrieved 13.25, 18th May, 2009 from: http://www.dfki.de/lt/projects.php
• Semantic Web main page. (2009, March 25). In Wiki. Retrieved 13.30, 19th May, 2009 from: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page

Project´s list (2nd questionnaire).

Here we have the list of projects I have chosen for this article:

1. Computational semantics. (Language technology world).

2. Language checking. (Language technology world).

3. Knowledge Discovery. (Language technology world).

4. Semantic web. (DFKI).

5. Music Information Retrieval. (DFKI).

6. Collaborating Using Diagrams. (Language Technology Group).

7. Crossmarc. (Language Technology Group).

8. Shallow Semantic Parsing. (SNLP).

9. Detecting contradictions in Text. (SNLP).

10. Document indexing for German and English. (DFKILT).

References:

•  Language Technology Lab (Gerrmany). Retrieved 13.18, May 11, 2009 from: http://www.dfki.de/lt/projects.php
•  Edinburgh Language Technology Group (Scotland, UK). Retrieved 13.23, May 11, 2009 from: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/
•  The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. Retrieved 13.26, May 11, 2009 from: http://nlp.stanford.edu/
•  Language Technololy World. Retrieved 13.30, May 11, 2009 from: http://www.lt-world.org/

Yorick Wilks (1st Questionnaire).

Yorick Wilks works as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. There he directs the Institute for Language, Speech and Hearing. He received his MA and PhD (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief.

He was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers, and he has won many prizes, specially during this last years. Here we have some of that prizes or awards:

• 1991 Elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
• 1998 Elected Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence.
• 2004 Elected to UK Computing Research Council.
• 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award. (Columbus).
• 2008 Zampolli Prize. (Morocco).

 

References:

• Yorick Wilks. In Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved 20:44, March 4, 2009, from http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/yorick/
• Yorick Wilks. In The University of Sheffield. Retrieved 20:31, March 4, 2009, from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/cv.html
• Yorick Wilks. Yorick Wilks’s profile. Retrieved 9th March, 2009 from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/

Martin Kay (1st questionnaire).

Martin Kay is a computer scientist. He is known for his work in computational linguistics. In the year 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit , which is one of the earliest centers for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. Then, he moved to Santa Monica and became head of research in linguistics and machine translation. He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.  Now, he is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

He has achieved on the development of  chart parsing and functional unification grammar and major contributions to the application of finite state automata in computational phonology and morphology. He is also thought  as a leading authority on machine translation.

He´s said that: “The computer is a tool that can be used to magnify human productivity. Used properly, it has not to be dehumanizing, with the stamp of his seal Orwellian, the works of the human work and creativity, but to appropriate what is mechanical and routine, can be released to engage fully in the works that are essentially human.”

 

References:

• Martin Kay, In Stanford University. (Oct 21, 2004). Retrieved 13.05, March 23, 2009 from: http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/people/pages/kay.shtml
• Martin Kay, short biography. Retrieved: 23 March 2009 21:30. From http://www.stanford.edu/~mjkay/bio_page.html
• Martin Kay. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 8 March 2009 17:50. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kay