Sign and indexicality:a case study of enhancing alignment of situation models in SCWT

The story continuationwriting task(SCWT)is anewly emerging proficiency test of National Matriculation English Test(NMET)in three provinces in China.Nevertheless,little is known with respect to how test-takers enhance their alignment of situation models in SCWT.This paper reports on a case study of the development of situational alignment of one L2(second language)learner in a senior high school in Jiangsu Province,China,drawing on qualitative data collected via individual faceto-face interviews,and supplemented by face-to-face conversations and email exchanges,over a period of one year.This study investigates how the test-taker enhances her alignment of situation models,and what factors contribute to her development of situational alignment under the framework of a new semiotic research finding,a pan-indexicality model.This paper concludes that test-takers possess the capacity of developing their alignment of situation models,and that a pan-indexicality model,affording opportunities for test-takers to accurately decode the meaning of a linguistic sign at the overall sense level,plays a decisive role in identifying and integrating key dimensions of situation models and eventually enhancing test-takers’situational alignment.This study suggests that a pan-indexicality model can be employed by test-takers to understand the meaning of a linguistic sign at the overall sense level,and test-takers’encyclopedic knowledge,contextual information,and personal emotions regarding a linguistic sign should be highlighted in classroom instruction to help test-takers construct aligned situation models in SCWT.

An Emergency Scenario Reconstruction System Based on ESMM Event Situation Model

In order to keep decision-makers better informed with emergencies, it is useful to retrieve the user-oriented disaster relevant event information in an aggregated results list through meta-search engine. However, emergent event is dynamic which makes it difficult to use fixed search word or word combinations. This paper proposes an event situation monitoring model（ESMM） event detection model, which realizes heuristic query word vector dynamic expanding by adopting emergency fuzzy scenario reasoning ontology cluster. Disaster event facet information automatic searching is discussed as an example in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed method can increase accuracy and extra clues not supplied by commercial search engines, which can be used as a supplement information source for government and individuals.

On-Demand Service in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing provides a new paradigm for hardware and software infrastructure design as well as planning and usage of information systems. It offers flexible, efficient, inexpensive, and quality services. This paper proposes an on-demand service system using the cloud computing architecture and analyzes important issues such as organization, management, and monitoring of distributed service resources; context-aware on-demand service modeling, on-demand automated service composition in large-scale networks, and service system analysis based on complex system theory. Continuous Operating Reference Station （CORS） of a geo-spatial information system is taken as an example, and its architecture is analyzed from the perspective of cloud computing. Some fundamental questions are raised about its service.