Doctoral theses

Doctoral theses 22,006 records found  beginprevious21 - 30nextend  jump to record: Search took 0.02 seconds. 
Acoustic parameters of the speech signal and their intra- and interindividual variability in Czech
Houzar, Alžběta ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Volín, Jan (referee) ; Hes Svobodová, Marie (referee)
The doctoral thesis focuses on the variability of a wide range of acoustic parameters of the speech signal in the Czech language. It summarizes the methodological approaches applied in previous studies on the acoustic characteristics of speech and presents a comprehensive analysis of intra-speaker and inter-speaker variability of an extensive set of selected parameters through original experiments conducted using a unified speech material. The individual experiments examined acoustic parameters that characterize fundamental frequency, vowel formants, short- and long-term frequency spectrum, and the temporal domain of speech, employing a total of 61 metrics. The variability of all parameters was observed within an individual's speech during one type of utterance as well as in relation to speaking style, with recordings of both read and spontaneous speech from thirty speakers being analyzed. Based on the experimental results, information regarding the distribution of parameter values in both speaking styles within the given population was obtained. In the final experiment, a comprehensive analysis of all investigated parameters was conducted, focusing on their mutual relationships and their contribution to the overall variability of the speech signal. The results of this comprehensive analysis...
The Rebelling Material. Jiří Weil's 1920s Journalism and his Doctoral Thesis as a Revolutionary Gesture
Kittlová, Markéta ; Heczková, Libuše (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee) ; Merhaut, Luboš (referee)
This Ph.D. thesis deals with Jiří Weil's affinity with the Russian revolutionary, avant-garde culture and studies the ways the affinity manifested itself in the author's journalism and dissertation. It focuses on various realizations of the revolutionary gesture which Weil's activities linked to the Russian revolutionary culture are accompanied by as well as on the discordance associated with the gesture. Weil's activities are examined from a "rebelling material" point of view defined, following on Bohumil Mathesius' observation, as a conflict between ideology and intuition that is characteristic of Weil's work. The manifestations of the conflict became the focus of the comparative analyses based on the research material consisting of the selected Weil's 1920s and, occasionally, 1930s journalist texts and his dissertation defended in 1928 under the title "Gogol and the 18th Century English Novel" at Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.
Influence of English and American poetry on Pere Gimferrer's work
Kožnerová, Tereza ; Sánchez Fernández, Juan Antonio (advisor) ; Poláková, Dora (referee) ; Prokop, Josef (referee)
The Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer represents a distinctive personality of the poetry group Novísimos, active mainly in the 1970s. His work was influenced by the reality of life in Spain after the Civil War, especially postism and social poetry. Literary postmodernism also played a significant role in his poetic formation. From the multitude of influences that shaped Pere Gimferrer, this thesis aims to map in detail the influence of the (post)modern poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot and Ezra Pound on Gimferrer's work. Pere Gimferrer's poetry approaches his models through literary techniques innovative at the time - intertextuality, metapoetry, culturalism, or the use of popular culture elements within the poetic text. The influence of both poets writing in English is mapped on Gimferrer's two magnificent works, namely the poetry collection Arde el mar and the poem L'espai desert. These two Gimferrer's pieces of work are compared with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's Cantos. Comparing Gimferrer's texts with the poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot using comparative textual analysis convincingly shows that Pere Gimferrer knew the mentioned works of both poets and used similar themes and motifs. At the same time, it can be argued that Pere Gimferrer uses similar images and scenes, harmonizes a...
Distributed Graph Query Engine Improvements for Big Data Graphs
Faltín, Tomáš ; Yaghob, Jakub (advisor) ; Tommasini, Riccardo (referee) ; Vora, Keval (referee)
Graph pattern matching queries enable flexible graph exploration, similar to what SQL provides for relational databases. In this thesis, we design and improve key compo- nents of a distributed in-memory graph querying engine. First, we optimize a distributed depth-first search (DFS) asynchronous pattern matching algorithm by combining it with breadth-first search (BFS), thus improving the overall engine performance by leveraging strengths of both approaches: ability to strictly bound the consumed memory of DFS and better parallelization, locality, and load balancing of BFS. Second, we further ex- tend the distributed pattern matching with a novel solution for reachability regular path queries (RPQs) that supports variable-length patterns based on regular expressions. Our design retains the underlying runtime characteristics, allowing for efficient memory con- trol during path exploration with great performance and scalability. Third, we improve query planning, which is one of the most crucial aspects impacting the performance of any querying system. Choosing the "best" query plan is challenging due to the many aspects influencing the performance, especially in a distributed system. We present a lightweight mechanism for gathering runtime information, which can be used to select the most effective query plan...
Myths and Metamorphoses: Fantastic Worlds in Contemporary Japanese Fiction
Koníček, Marcel ; Šebek, Josef (advisor) ; Bílek, Petr (referee) ; Abbasová, Veronika (referee)
This dissertation is concerned with fantastic elements in contemporary Japanese literature. Fantastic elements function in it as a productive narrative tool. However, sufficient attention has not been given to them in this context. The goal of this thesis is to map the meaning and functions of these elements through detailed analysis of literary works using a comprehensive theoretical and analytical framework. These analyses are performed on selected works of four contemporary Japanese authors - Murakami Haruki, Ōe Kenzaburō, Medoruma Shun and Tawada Yōko. Fantasy is in the context of this thesis perceived as a modification of alethic modality of the fictional world, of what is possible and impossible in said world, and as a means of expression utilising the opposition between natural and supernatural domains of the world. The relationship between these domains therefore becomes an object of my inquiry. Because of this the analytic framework of the thesis is based on the theory of fictional worlds represented by Lubomír Doležel, Nancy Traill, Umberto Eco and Thomas Pavel. The fictional world theory allows me to describe the structure of the domains of the fictional world of a novel, characterise the relationship between these domains and to what extent is the existence of supernatural in this world...
Diversity of CD8+ T-cell adaptive immune responses
Paprčková, Darina ; Štěpánek, Ondřej (advisor) ; Dobeš, Jan (referee) ; Gerrard, Audrey (referee)
CD8+ T cells are specialized immune cells that recognize and eliminate infected or malignant cells by directly attacking and destroying them. Moreover, their ability to form long-lasting memory responses ensures a rapid immune defense upon subsequent encounters with the same pathogens, making them indispensable for overall immune system function and maintaining health. Despite all of this, many aspects of their biology are still not well understood. The main objective of this thesis is to delve deeply into the adaptive immune responses of CD8+ T cells, focusing on elucidating several critical aspects. Firstly, we conducted a review and a research study of T-cell receptor (TCR) self-reactivity to understand its influence on immune responses. Intriguingly, experimental findings revealed that the degree of TCR self-reactivity did not impact the magnitude or type of the immune response. Instead, it played a decisive role in determining the fate commitment of CD8+ T cells in the periphery during homeostasis, shedding light on a nuanced regulatory mechanism. Another part of the research probed into per-cell differences of activated naïve and memory T cells. This investigation unveiled the remarkable potency of memory T cells to generate long- lived effector memory T cells. In contrast, naïve T cells...
Relation between Evaluativity and Indefiniteness on the Example of Compound Indefinite Pronouns in Czech
Rybová, Martina ; Martínek, František (advisor) ; Berger, Tilman (referee) ; Šimík, Radek (referee)
1 Abstract (English) The thesis deals with the relation between the complex semantic concepts of evaluativity and indefiniteness. The core of the thesis is a corpus-based case study of indefinite pronouns in Czech. Whether or not the indefinite pronouns serve except as indefinite markers also as markers of evaluative meaning, is left aside in the relevant literature. The present studies are only restricted to a few notices about this possible relation. The discovering of such relation follows an assertion of many evaluativity researchers that the expressions with such a function can accumulate in a clause or in a context. As a result, a new methodological approach, so-called lexicography-driven collocation analysis, is proposed here. This approach is based on the comparison between the definition of meaning, which is offered by a monolingual dictionary, and between meaning which a collocate obtains in contact with an in- definite pronoun. With respect to both the collocate is marked with a value from the evaluativity scale. These values enable a comparison, both regarding the evaluative or neutral meaning of the item and regarding the polarity of the evaluative meaning (positive vs. negative). The assignment of these values is subject to criteria defined in advance. In addition, morphosyntactic construc-...
Information Extraction from structured business documents by learning from similarity
Holeček, Martin ; Maršík, František (advisor) ; Liwicki, Marcus (referee) ; Mesiti, Marco (referee)
The automation of document processing is gaining recent attention due to the great potential to reduce manual work through improved methods and hardware. In this area, neural networks have been applied before - even though they have been trained only on relatively small datasets with hundreds of documents so far. To successfully explore deep learning techniques and improve the information ex- traction results, a dataset with more than twenty-five thousand documents (pro forma invoices, invoices and debit note documents) has been compiled, anonymized and is published as a complement of this work. In the first part of the research, we will examine the documents from the point of view of table detection, present a survey on table detection methods and ultimately rephrase the table detection as a text box labelling problem to optimize micro F1 score of per-word classification. We will show that we can extract specific information from structurally different tables or table-like structures with one trainable model that features a comprehen- sive representation of a page using graph over word-boxes, positional embeddings and trainable textual features. The first part is concluded with a novel neural network model that beats multiple baselines and achieves strong, practical results on the presented dataset....
Postmodern Philosophy and its Influence in Russia
Karela, Jan ; Krámský, David (advisor) ; Hogenová, Anna (referee) ; Blažková, Miloslava (referee)
The first part of this thesis describes the development of philosophy in Russia up to the so- called diamat, that is, to the period of Lenin's philosophy of dialectical materialism. In the second part it is described postmodern issues in contemporary Western thought, including the contexts in historical development. The last part deals first with the general features of Russian postmodern thought. Next part of the last chapter deals in more detail with the thought of M. N. Epstein and his view of the development and state of postmodern thought in Russia. Russian thought was marked by a long isolation from Western thought. In an effort to quickly catch up with the West, features of messianism are emerging. Russia is convinced that the West will quickly catch up and has the potential to overtake the West and become the thought leader of Europe. Said leads to the acceptance of the idea of communism and the subsequent further isolation of Russia. Nevertheless, in 1991 is rapidly coming to terms with postmodern thinking. M. N. Epstein concludes from this that there are identical features in communist ideology with postmodern thought, and therefore it was postmodernism in Russia much earlier than in Europe. KEYWORDS Ideology, information explosion, communism, postmodern thought, freedom, Russia, the West.
By the Paths Through the Text: Didactic Interpretation and Interpretive Tasks in Secondary School Literature Teaching
Vojtíšek, Ondřej ; Králíková, Andrea (advisor) ; Koten, Jiří (referee) ; Vojtěch, Daniel (referee)
Literary work as a landscape - interpretation of text as setting a path in it - a didactic interpretation as providing a map. This (largely familiar and well-established) metaphor is at the heart of the work entitled By the Paths Through the Text: Didactic Interpretation and Interpretive Tasks in Secondary School Literature Teaching. Even with the help of that image (but mainly underpinned by reception and semiotic literary theories), the text in its first chapters establishes and elaborates such a conception of interpretation (the formulation of meaning in relation to a particular reader) and its didactic attribute (its own potential to teach interpretation), which seems to be advantageous for thinking about interpretation- oriented teaching (and interpretation taking place in dialogue more generally) and about the possibilities to assess (especially with closed tasks) the degree of students' acquisition of the process of interpretation, in the last chapters. To this end, it puts the theoretical concept of 'interpretation skills' - the possibility of segmenting the act of the journey towards interpretation into potential steps that can be intelligibly named, taught and (relatively separately) tested - at the centre, and even attempts a tentative enumeration of these. This list, then, is not meant...

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