Experimental evidence on the "insidious" illiquidity risk

This paper brings experimental evidence on investors' behavior subject to an "illiquidity" constraint, where the success of a risky project depends on the participation of a minimum number of investors. The experiment is set up as a frameless coordination game that replicates the investment context. Results confirm the insidious nature of the illiquidity risk: as long as a first illiquidity default does not occur, investors do not seem able to fully internalize it. After several defaults, agents manage to coordinate on a default probability above which they refuse to participate to the project. This default probability is lower than the default probability of the first illiquidity default

Proposal for an Extension of Traditional Named Entitites: from Guidelines to Evaluation, an Overview

International audienceWithin the framework of the construction of a fact database, we defined guidelines to extract named entities, using a taxonomy based on an extension of the usual named entities defini- tion. We thus defined new types of entities with broader coverage including substantive- based expressions. These extended named en- tities are hierarchical (with types and compo- nents) and compositional (with recursive type inclusion and metonymy annotation). Human annotators used these guidelines to annotate a 1.3M word broadcast news corpus in French. This article presents the definition and novelty of extended named entity annotation guide- lines, the human annotation of a global corpus and of a mini reference corpus, and the evalu- ation of annotations through the computation of inter-annotator agreement. Finally, we dis- cuss our approach and the computed results, and outline further work

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine ?

International audienceRecently heard at a tutorial in our field: “It cost me less than one hundred bucks to annotate this using Amazon Mechanical Turk!” Assertions like this are increasingly common, but we believe they should not be stated so proudly; they ignore the ethical consequences of using MTurk (Amazon Mechanical Turk) as a source of labour. Manually annotating corpora or manually developing any other linguistic resource, such as a set of judgments about system outputs, represents such a high cost that many researchers are looking for alternative solutions to the standard approach. MTurk is becoming a popular one. However, as in any scientific endeavor involving humans, there is an unspoken ethical dimension involved in resource construction and system evaluation, and this is especially true of MTurk. We would like here to raise some questions about the use of MTurk. To do so, we will define precisely what MTurk is and what it is not, highlighting the issues raised by the system. We hope that this will point out opportunities for our community to deliberately value ethics above cost savings

Counting occurrences for a finite set of words: combinatorial methods

28 pagesInternational audienceIn this article, we give the multivariate generating function counting texts according to their length and to the number of occurrences of words from a finite set. The application of the inclusion- exclusion principle to word counting due to Goulden and Jackson (1979, 1983) is used to derive the result. Unlike some other techniques which suppose that the set of words is reduced (i.e., where no two words are factor of one another), the finite set can be chosen arbitrarily. Noonan and Zeilberger (1999) already provided a Maple package treating the non-reduced case, without giving an expression of the generating function or a detailed proof. We provide a complete proof validating the use of the inclusion-exclusion principle. We also restate in modern terms the normal limit laws theorems of Bender and Kochman (1993), emphasising on the underlying analytic mean shifting method

Abstract Concept Lattices

International audienceWe present a view of abstraction based on a structure preserving reduction of the Galois connection between a language of terms and the powerset of a set of instances O. Such a relation is materialized as an extension-intension lattice, namely a concept lattice when L is the powerset of a set P of attributes. We define and characterize an abstraction A as some part of either the language or the powerset of O, defined in such a way that the extension-intension latticial structure is preserved. Such a structure is denoted for short as an abstract lattice. We discuss the extensional abstract lattices obtained by so reducing the powerset of O, together together with the corresponding abstract implications, and discuss alpha lattices as particular abstract lattices. Finally we give formal framework allowing to define a generalized abstract lattice whose language is made of terms mixing abstract and non abstract conjunctions of properties

The Role of CSR in the Governance of the "New firm": an Empirical Study of the French Telecommunications Industry

The aim of this paper is to propose an instrumental analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR). After underlining the corporate governance issues raised by the "new firm", which is vertically disintegrated and intensive in specific human capital, we argue that CSR can be useful as a means to regulate power relationships between key productive partners of the firm. Based on the analysis of official reports and interviews of the four major French operators of telecommunications, we show that CSR is voluntarily used by firms to maintain long-term wealth-creative employment and subcontracting relationships, through the deployment of formal and informal mechanisms

Soft Session Types

Long version of the EXPRESS 2011 paperWe show how systems of sessions types can enforce interaction to be bounded for all typable processes. The type system we propose is based on Lafont's soft linear logic and is strongly inspired by recent works about session types as intuitionistic linear logic formulas. Our main result is the existence, for every typable process, of a polynomial bound on the length of any reduction sequence starting from it and on the size of any of its reducts

Computing Fine-grained Semantic Annotations of Texts

http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00623681/PDF/2634-10636-1-SM.pdfInternational audienceThe challenge in computing fine-grained semantic annotation exists in the complexity of combining the deep natural language processing and advanced ontological reasoning. For this, we propose in this paper a reasoning based approach to controlling and refining semantic annotations, which is an easy and intuitive way to manage the complex information involved. We illustrate this approach over two policy regulation corpora, which shows an encouraging result

An exact renormalization formula for Gaussian exponential sums and applications

In the present paper, we derive a renormalization formula ``à la Hardy-Littlewood'' for the Gaussian exponential sums with an exact formula for the remainder term. We use this formula to describe the typical growth of the Gaussian exponential sums

Commerce électronique et régulation des échanges internationaux

La principale particularité du commerce international est que la notion de frontière reste pertinente car les pays peuvent toujours protéger leurs offreurs domestiques derrière des barrières tarifaires (droits de douane) et non tarifaires (normes, restrictions quantitatives...). Depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale, la tendance est à la réduction du protectionnisme mais les Etats-Nations gardent un rôle non négligeable dans la régulation des échanges internationaux au travers en particulier des politiques tarifaires, fiscales et commerciales