This work presents the main theories and models formulated with the purpose of offering a global overview on the acquisition of knowledge and skills involved in the initial development of expert competence. Setting from this background, we developed an empirical…

We develop a theory to explain the transition from stagnation to modern growth. We focus on the forces that shaped the evolution of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing across history. More specifically, we build a multisector model of…

The extension to new languages is a well known bottleneck for rule-based systems. Considerable human effort, which typically consists in re-writing from scratch huge amounts of rules, is in fact required to transfer the knowledge available to the system from…

This paper presents the automatic extension to other languages of TERSEO, a knowledge-based system for the recognition and normalization of temporal expressions originally developed for Spanish. TERSEO was first extended to English through the automatic translation of the temporal expressions.…

The Answer Validation Exercise (AVE) is a pilot track within the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2006. The AVE competition provides an evaluation frame-
work for answer validations in Question Answering (QA). In our participation in AVE, we propose a system…

Adaptive websites usually change as effect of user navigational actions. Most current web engineering approaches (which consider personalization) allow to detect basic user browsing behaviour (e.g. user click on a link) but don’t consider the definition of (complex) behaviour events…

Data mining is at the core of the knowledge discovery process. However, an initial preprocessing step is crucial for assuring reliable results within this process. Preprocessing of data is a time-consuming and non-trivial task since data quality issues should be…

This thesis is focused on temporal information processing, which is a task framed in the field of natural language processing. The aim of this task is to obtain the temporal location and ordering of the events expressed in text or…

The underlying assumption of this study is the understanding of a specialized term as a summary of disciplinary knowledge, formalized at a textual level in the contextual relations which structure disciplinary lexical knowledge and are therefore essential for the successful…

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have…