Description
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This thesis presents an initial application of the Evolving Transformation System(ETS) formalism to the structural representation of Russian fairy tales. This workwas motivated by the needs of information retrieval (IR) in general, but specificallyconcentrates on proposing a new type of document representation. The new representationis based on the temporal or constructive process of events that occur in themind of the generic fairy tale listener/reader.Representing documents in this way yields several advantages to using ETS overtraditional IR techniques, such as being able to retrieve partial information from adocument (i.e. a single sentence or paragraph), fast searching by traversing the multilevelhierarchial class structure generated by the ETS intelligent process, and locatingsimilar documents based on structural similarity rather than key words. Moreover, theETS formalism suggests an explanation for the mechanism behind plot anticipationby an experienced reader as well as various levels of fairy tale conceptualization.
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Falconer, Sean Sean completed his Masters degree in Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick and will be completing his PhD in Spring 2009. His research interests include data/schema mapping, human computer interaction, decision support, information visualization, and information retrieval.
