OntoTouTra: Tourist Traceability Ontology Based on Big Data Analytics

Tourist traceability is the analysis of the set of actions, procedures, and technical measures that allows us to identify and record the space–time causality of the tourist’s touring, from the beginning to the end of the chain of the tourist product. Besides, the traceability of tourists has implications for infrastructure, transport, products, marketing, the commercial viability of the industry, and the management of the destination’s social, environmental, and cultural impact. To this end, a tourist traceability system requires a knowledge base for processing elements, such as functions, objects, events, and logical connectors among them. A knowledge base provides us with information on the preparation, planning, and implementation or operation stages. In this regard, unifying tourism terminology in a traceability system is a challenge because we need a central repository that promotes standards for tourists and suppliers in forming a formal body of knowledge representation. Some studies are related to the construction of ontologies in tourism, but none focus on tourist traceability systems. For the above, we propose OntoTouTra, an ontology that uses formal specifications to represent knowledge of tourist traceability systems. This paper outlines the development of the OntoTouTra ontology and how we gathered and processed data from ubiquitous computing using Big Data analysis techniques.

Coherence in mediation activities at B1 and B2 levels

The aim of this article is to analyze the issue of textual consistency in the context of mediation activities at B1 and B2 levels (in the context of French as Foreign Language). First, we look at the question of text coherence that we analyze from both linguistic and didactic perspectives because the latter draws a lot from the contributions of pragmatics. As our research is in the context of teaching/learning foreign languages, we treat cohesion as one of the linguistic phenomena impacting coherence. In the following, our text deals with mediation as one of the activities to be developed in the language class. We are convinced that this type of language activity requires the learner to master logical connectors, which could make the mediated text coherent and - consequently - faithful to the source text. It is in this perspective that our research is situated, which concludes the article. We analyzed students' certification exams in French (at B1 and B2 levels) to see which logical connectors they used to mediate an oral and written. To do this, we developed a corpus that was submitted for analysis. The results of our study show that the list of logical connectors to which the students used is far from being representative for the given levels (B1 and B2 in this case), which allowed us to formulate pedagogical guidelines and questions for future research.

Democratic Procedures Are Not Inherently Democratic

In his latest opus, The New Despotism, John Keane continues to challenge existing wisdom in the field of democratic theory and comparative political studies. One of the key insights of the book is that there is nothing inherently democratic about democratic innovations and procedures, and thus they can be used to prop up despotisms, rather than usher in democracy. While this insight comports with existing misgivings about elections, the book stands out in the way it explains the sustainability of using the democratic procedures in the new despotisms. For democratic procedures to further the aims of the new despotisms, the condition of “voluntary servitude” needs to be met. “Voluntary servitude” means that people willingly give in to political slavery, and become accomplices in maintaining the illusion that democratic procedures are implemented (215–222). Keane’s achievement is that he creates an analytical ecosystem of interlinked assumptions, observations, conditions, and other logical connectors, which make his model of the new despotism so robust.

The Study of Chinese to English (C-E) Translation of Chinese Network Fantasy Novel from the Perspective of Eco-translatology: A Case Study on Battle Through the Heavens

<p>Taking the English version of Dou Po Cang Qiong as the research object, guided by Hu Gengshen’s eco-translatology theory, the study analyzes how the translator adapted to the eco-environment of the C-E translation. The conclusions are as follows: the translator adapted to the eco-environment by adding logical connectors, taking omit means, combining sentences, paying attention to cultural-loaded words, highlighting or obscuring cultural information, and adjusting the information density. The translator’s strategies can effectively convey the features of Chinese network fantasy novels which may help other translators when they translate similar genre novels. <em></em></p>

ITE: A Lightweight Implementation of Stratified Reasoning for Constructive Logical Operators

Constraint Programming (CP) is a powerful declarative programming paradigm where inference and search are interleaved to find feasible and optimal solutions to various type of constraint systems. However, handling logical connectors with constructive information in CP is notoriously difficult. This paper presents If Then Else (ITE), a lightweight implementation of stratified constructive reasoning for logical connectives. Stratification is introduced to cope with the risk of combinatorial explosion of constructing information from nested and combined logical operators. ITE is an open-source library built on top of SICStus Prolog clpfd, which proposes various operators, including constructive disjunction and negation, constructive implication and conditional. These operators can be used to express global constraints and to benefit from constructive reasoning for more domain pruning during constraint filtering. Even though ITE is not competitive with specialized filtering algorithms available in some global constraints implementations, its expressiveness allows users to easily define well-tuned constraints with powerful deduction capabilities. Our extended experimental results show that ITE is more efficient than available generic approaches that handle logical constraint systems over finite domains.

Rhetorical Strategy and Linguistics Features in E-Petition Through Change.org

The research explored what types and how rhetorical strategy correlated with the linguistics features in e-petitions through Change.org entitled “KPK dalam Bahaya”. The data were e-petitions collected through Change.org. The analysis was holistically descriptive and included in qualitative research. The approach used critical discourse analysis by Fairclough that was using Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and the strategy of rhetoric by Aristotle. Those theories helped the researcher to find out how the rhetorical strategy and the linguistics features created persuasive meaning. The findings indicate that euphemism, metaphor, connectives, logical connectors, rhetorical questions, and modality support the rhetoric strategy constructing the meaning beyond the words. Through one of the rhetoric strategies, pathos persuades the readers to agree to the argument and sign the e-petitions. Due to the emotional appeals, all of these language instruments help the rhetoric to provoke the readers significantly.

A Corpus-based Analysis of TESOL EFL Students’ Use of Logical Connectors in Spoken English

In the past several decades, the compilation of learner corpora and the application of corpus linguistics have been extensively employed to improve learners’ use of logical connectors. However, the use of logical connectors in EFL learners’ spoken discourse remains under-researched. To investigate this field, the researcher built an EFL TESOL student spoken English corpus consisting of 27 spoken English samples of 12,241 words in total. Then, this study adopts corpus-based contrastive analysis and computer-aided error analysis to compare the tokens and the frequencies of the logical connectors with those in the native spoken English corpus of MICASE. Finally, underuse, overuse, and misuse in the TESOL student corpus were exemplified and explained.Findings reveal that the TESOL students tended to use a smaller set of logical connectors but used them more frequently than the English native speakers. Additive coordinating conjunctions such as and, so, and but were the most overused logical connectors. Moreover, the underuse of if, when, so that, and though shows that adverbial clauses were less frequently employed in their spoken discourse. A detailed explanation and pedagogical implications are also listed to help learners understand how to contextualize logical connectors at both syntactic and discourse level.

Exploring logical connectors in journals with different indexing levels: A comparison between international and national indexed journals

Research to date has witnessed the mounting significance of logical connectors in writing including scientific journal articles; however, little is known as to whether the usage of such connectors may correspond to a varying degree of journal quality. This qualitative study fills in the void by exploring the use of logical connectors in journals with different indexing levels, national and international. Sixty articles were collected from two journals, thirty articles from each. Implicit behind this study is an assumption that differing journal indexing entails differing journal quality. Nineteen connectors that belong to the most frequently used conjunctive adverbials in academic prose were searched using Laurence Anthony’s concordance program (AntConc). The findings reveal that the top-two most frequently CAs used in both corpora are adversative however and causal therefore. Based on these results, the analysis is centered on these two CAs by investigating the coherence relations in order to see the underlying logical relationships between two sentences. The findings show that the illogical uses of CA however and therefore were equally found in both corpora although the percentages for the illogical use in the international journal articles are less than those in the national ones. In conclusion, not only do articles in the two journals share the same tendencies in the logical use, they also evince the same patterns of problem, namely failure in recognizing logical relationships and overuse of connectors. Of importance is that the purported relationship between journal indexation and logical use of connectors may be at best weak, and at worst absent, for both journals in question dominantly exhibit a logical usage of connectors. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.