Thesaurus – what’s up with it

By Galina Vitkova

A thesaurus (according to the Wikipedia) is a catalogue that contains synonyms and sometimes antonyms even if it shouldn’t be a complete list of all the synonyms or antonyms for a particular word. Besides, its entries are intended to draw up distinctions between similar words, which assist in choosing exactly the right word.

In Information Science, Library Science, and Information Technology, specialized thesauri are designated for information retrieval. They are a type of controlled vocabulary for indexing or tagging purposes. Such a specialized thesaurus can be used as the basis of an index for online material. The specialized thesauri typically focus on one discipline, subject or field of study

Thesauri for information retrieval have their own unique terminology, which specifies different kinds of terms and relationships between them.

Terms are the basic semantic units for conveying concepts (i.e. an abstract idea represented in a language by a word)). Terms are defined within various fields of human activities. They are usually single-word nouns because nouns are the most concrete part of speech. Verbs can be converted to nouns – “cleans” to “cleaning”, “reads” to “reading”, and so on. Adjectives and adverbs, however, seldom express any meaning useful for indexing. When a term is ambiguous (i.e. can be interpreted in more than one way), a “scope note” from the given field of knowledge can be added to give direction on how to interpret the term. For example, the term is placed in context, which allows a user to distinguish e.g. between “bureau” the office and “bureau” the furniture. Not every term needs a scope note, but their presence is of considerable help in using a thesaurus correctly.

“Term relationships” are links between terms. These relationships can be divided into three types: hierarchical, equivalency or associative.

• Hierarchical relationships are used to indicate terms, which are narrower and broader in scope. A “Broader Term” (BT) is a more general term, e.g. “Apparatus” is a generalization of “Computers”. Reciprocally, a Narrower Term (NT) is a more specific term, e.g. “Digital Computer” is a specialization of “Computer”. BT and NT are reciprocals; a broader term necessarily implies at least one other term that is narrower.
• The equivalency relationship is used primarily to connect synonyms and near-synonyms.
• Associative relationships are used to connect two related terms whose relationship is neither hierarchical nor equivalent. This relationship is described by the indicator “Related Term” (RT). Associative relationships should be applied with caution because excessive use of RTs will reduce specificity in searches. For example, if the typical user is searching with term “A”, would he/she also wants resources tagged with term “B”? If the answer is no, then an associative relationship should not be established.

In information technology, moreover, a thesaurus represents a database or a list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys (i.e. search keys that are semantically independent of each other). In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology. In this case the ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain.

Examples of Specialized Thesauri for Information Retrieval

• European Thesaurus on International Relations and Area Studies; ISBN 978-3-927674-11-0
• Eurovoc Thesaurus, (Europa Publications Office)
• GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, (European Environment Agency)

Reasons for enriching your vocabulary

By Galina Vitkova

There are several associated lexicographical terms that we meet when studying languages. Those are a vocabulary, dictionary, thesaurus, lexicon, and glossary. Needless to mention that these terms are often mixed up. That is why I decided to briefly describe them using Wikipedia. Let us start with a vocabulary.

A person’s vocabulary is the set of word they are familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge.

Types of vocabulary

(Listed according to the Wikipedia in order of most ample to most limited)

Reading vocabulary – all the words a person can identify when reading.

Listening vocabulary – all the words a person caneasily recognize when listening to speech. This vocabulary is enhanced in size by context and tone of voice.

Writing vocabulary – all the words a person can employ in writing. The writing vocabulary is stimulated by its user.

Speaking vocabulary – all the words a person can use in speech. Free nature of the speaking vocabulary often leads to misuse of words.

Focal vocabulary – is a specialized set of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to a certain group and reflect experience or activities of this group.

Vocabulary development

In the earlier phase, vocabulary increase needs no effort. Infants hear words and mimic them, finally associating them with objects and actions. This is the listening vocabulary. The speaking vocabulary follows, as a child’s mind becomes more reliant on its ability to express itself without gestures and mere sounds. Once the reading and writing vocabularies are acquired the anomalies and irregularities of the language can be determined.

In the first grade, an advantaged student (i.e. a literate student) knows about twice as many words as a disadvantaged student. This leads into a wide range of a vocabulary size in the fifth and sixth grade, when students know about 2,500–5,000 words. These students have learned an average of 3,000 words per year, approximately eight words per day. After leaving school, vocabulary enhances areally.

Even if we learn a word, we understand it better when we hear the words in combinations with other words in phrases, where it is commonly used.

Native- and foreign-language vocabulary

Native-language vocabulary: Native speakers’ vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker’s education. In 1995 the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers came to about 17,000 word families, while first-year college students had about 12,000.

Foreign-language vocabulary: The vocabulary size influences significantly the language comprehension. The researchers studied texts totalling one million words and found that if one knows the words with the highest frequency, the person will quickly know most of the words in a text.

Vocabulary Size	Written Text Coverage	Vocabulary Size	WrittenText Coverage
0 words	0%	4000	86.8%
1000	72.0%	5000	88.7%
2000	79.7%	6000	89.9%
3000	84.0%	15,851	97.8%

By knowing the 2000 words with the highest frequency, one would know 80% of the words in those texts. These numbers should be encouraging to beginners, especially because the numbers in the table are for word lemmas (i.e. the canonical form of all the forms of the given word with the same meaning), which give even higher coverage. Nevertheless, we need to understand about 95% of a text to be close to full understanding and it looks like one needs to know more than 10,000 words for that.

Basic English vocabulary

Several word lists have been developed to provide people with a limited vocabulary as an effective means of communication or of gaining quick language proficiency. In 1930, Charles Kay Ogden created Basic English (850 words). Other lists include Simplified English (1000 words) and Special English (1500 words). The General Service List 2000 high frequency words was compiled by Michael West from a 5,000,000 word corpus. It has been used to create adapted reading texts for English language learners.

How to write a good essay

(Recommendations for students)

By Galina Vitkova

I believe that every intermediate student is able to write a good essay. Nevertheless, there are several aspects that you should take into consideration to be successful in writing. Some of them are as follows:

1. Study carefully the topic (e.g. a given technical text). Sometimes it is not so easy. If you are going to write an essay about computers or the Internet, use as much as possible the dictionaries Definitions of technical terms and general computing terminology and Internet technical terms.

2. Resolve about main ideas, based on an original text, which you would like to expose. Reserve for each idea one paragraph. One idea means one paragraph.

3. Write shorter sentences. Avoid long phrases widespread through the entire paragraph. You can always divide a long sentence into 2 or 3 shorter sentences. Connect these short sentences with the help of connectors like however, moreover, furthermore, nevertheless, so that etc.

4. Use synonyms as much as possible. Employ a thesaurus or a dictionary to find synonyms. Repeating of the same words and expressions in your writing as, for example, “so”, “use”, “in my opinion”, “I think” etc is annoying and doesn´t give the quality to any essay.

5. Don´t forget about articles. Check thoughtfully your essay from this point of view (see e.g. Students do not care about articles, Some details concerning a (an) and the) and prepositions (Prepositions in English).

6. When writing, remember English sentences have the fixed word order and do your best to keep it. If you aren´t sure about your English grammar, consult Ask about English,http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/askaboutenglish/

7. Reread the text and make improvements if necessary.

Good luck!

Web Design Technologies

Presented by Pavel Macenauer

Introduction

Web design is a process of creating the visual side of a web-based presentation, but it isn’t only the look that matters. There are lots of other factors such as search engine optimisation, usability or ensuring the same web site look in each possible browser.

Short overview of the www history

The first website was published by Tim Berners-Lee in August 1990. It was written in a language called HTML (hypertext markup language). It didn’t always look like sites most of you have already seen. This pre-HTML as we may call it only contained the simplest pieces of information, such as what a paragraph of a header is. It might have been comparable to the development of Windows and MS DOS. Since then it has evolved into the form you may see nowadays.

Technologies / Coding languages

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, which can be translated as a language, which marks ‘what is what’ in the code. It’s an essential part of every web site, doesn’t matter if it’s a flash presentation or a website only containing one picture. You must always state, what you want to put onto the web and this is the tool to do so.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) (“+HTML”)

CSS is a language, which was invented to help web designers easily manage the look of their website. It allows saving all the information, such as how the headers will look like or that quoted text should be written in gray colour or that all the images, appearing on the right side of the web site, should have a black border, into one file. Then this information is applied to the whole web site. So if you want to change the look of all the main headers you’ll simply change it in this single file. Of course the layout of the web site must be written in HTML.

In the beginning not many browsers supported this technology and so it hadn’t been used much. Later on with the Internet Explorer becoming dominant and supporting CSS, it started to be seen or even to spread in such a way that today it’s almost impossible to imagine a professional website without the use of CSS.

Web standards

Today CSS combined with HTML (XHTML – advanced HTML) is considered to be the official web design standard. Yet, it still faces many difficulties. Every browser has its own way of interpreting the code. The interpretation of most modern browsers (FireFox, Opera, Safari) is based on what we may call W3C standards. W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) is an organization, which develops guidelines mainly for web design, in order to gain the web full potential (enabling the use of the most up-to-date technologies) and making the web designer’s life easier. The Internet Explorer tried always to act as a Consortium by itself making up its own standards. Today it’s getting a lot better, so websites look the same in divers browsers.

Flash

Flash is another of the newer technologies. Originally it was used only as a more advanced method of animation. Later on these animations advanced so much that whole websites were made just by making an interactive animation. Even though these websites may look very attractively, they have quite a few disadvantages compared to the more frequently used HTML+CSS.

First of all, just like with Java, you must have Flash installed on your computer. 2% of Internet users don’t have it, so they can’t access these sites. Also, Flash presentations tend to be large and thus it takes longer to load them, which can be quite painful for people with slower connections. Other disadvantages might be the fact, they are hard to be found via search engines or they are not able to use the history buttons in your browser.

Search engines operate like a person reading a book. When a book contains a clear structure of paragraphs or headers, then it will only help to rank this book better. On the other hand you may imagine a flash website only like a line of text telling you the location of the whole presentation, thus saying nothing at all to the reader himself.

Types of web-based languages

In the end, to clear things up a little bit let’s consider two types of www languages, which take care of two major website areas. The first area is the visual part, also called Web Design. Languages taking part in displaying the website belong to the ones mentioned above.

The second area languages take care of communication with databases or solution of different mathematical equations. These server-based languages are PHP, ASP, Python, etc. Such languages are similar to C, C++ or Java in their function.

You may imagine this as a theater play. Web design languages are the actors on the podium, whereas the server based languages take care of all the stuff behind the scenes, such as preparing costumes etc.

There are of course a lot of other languages available (mostly used for more specialized purposes), but these are the simplest ones. So that should give you an idea about what is hidden behind the site you look at.