Parametrised enumeration

In this thesis, we develop a framework of parametrised enumeration complexity. At first, we provide the reader with preliminary notions such as machine models and complexity classes besides proving them to be well-chosen. Then, we study the interplay and the landscape of these classes and present connections to classical enumeration classes. Afterwards, we translate the fundamental methods of kernelisation and self-reducibility into equivalent techniques in the setting of parametrised enumeration. Subsequently, we illustrate the introduced classes by investigating the parametrised enumeration complexity of Max-Ones-SAT and strong backdoor sets as well as sharpen the first result by presenting a dichotomy theorem for Max-Ones-SAT. After this, we extend the definitions of parametrised enumeration algorithms by allowing orders on the solution space. In this context, we study the relations ``order by size'' and ``lexicographic order'' for graph modification problems and observe a trade-off between enumeration delay and space requirements of enumeration algorithms. These results then yield an enumeration technique for generalised modification problems that is illustrated by applying this method to the problems closest string, weak and strong backdoor sets, and weighted satisfiability. Eventually, we consider the enumeration of satisfying teams of formulas of poor man's propositional dependence logic. There, we present an enumeration algorithm with FPT delay and exponential space which is one of the first enumeration complexity results of a problem in a team logic. Finally, we show how this algorithm can be modified such that only polynomial space is required, however, by increasing the delay to incremental FPT time.In diesem Werk begründen wir die Theorie der parametrisierten Enumeration, präsentieren die grundlegenden Definitionen und prüfen ihre Sinnhaftigkeit. Im nächsten Schritt, untersuchen wir das Zusammenspiel der eingeführten Komplexitätsklassen und zeigen Verbindungen zur klassischen Enumerationskomplexität auf. Anschließend übertragen wir die zwei fundamentalen Techniken der Kernelisierung und Selbstreduzierbarkeit in Entsprechungen in dem Gebiet der parametrisierten Enumeration. Schließlich untersuchen wir das Problem Max-Ones-SAT und das Problem der Aufzählung starker Backdoor-Mengen als typische Probleme in diesen Klassen. Die vorherigen Resultate zu Max-Ones-SAT werden anschließend in einem Dichotomie-Satz vervollständigt. Im nächsten Abschnitt erweitern wir die neuen Definitionen auf Ordnungen (auf dem Lösungsraum) und erforschen insbesondere die zwei Relationen \glqq Größenordnung\grqq\ und \glqq lexikographische Reihenfolge\grqq\ im Kontext von Graphen-Modifikationsproblemen. Hierbei scheint es, als müsste man zwischen Delay und Speicheranforderungen von Aufzählungsalgorithmen abwägen, wobei dies jedoch nicht abschließend gelöst werden kann. Aus den vorherigen Überlegungen wird schließlich ein generisches Enumerationsverfahren für allgemeine Modifikationsprobleme entwickelt und anhand der Probleme Closest String, schwacher und starker Backdoor-Mengen sowie gewichteter Erfüllbarkeit veranschaulicht. Im letzten Abschnitt betrachten wir die parametrisierte Enumerationskomplexität von Erfüllbarkeitsproblemen im Bereich der Poor Man's Propositional Dependence Logic und stellen einen Aufzählungsalgorithmus mit FPT Delay vor, der mit exponentiellem Platz arbeitet. Dies ist einer der ersten Aufzählungsalgorithmen im Bereich der Teamlogiken. Abschließend zeigen wir, wie dieser Algorithmus so modifiziert werden kann, dass nur polynomieller Speicherplatz benötigt wird, bezahlen jedoch diese Einsparung mit einem Anstieg des Delays auf inkrementelle FPT Zeit (IncFPT)

Logic and lattices for a statistics advisor

The work partially reported here concerned the development ot a prototype Expert System for giving advice about Statistics experiments, called ASA, and an inference engine to support ASA, called ABASE.This involved discovering what knowledge was necessary for performing the task at a satis¬ factory level of competence, working out how to represent this knowledge in a computer, and how to process the representations efficiently.Two areas of Statistical knowledge are described in detail: the classification of measure¬ ments and statistical variables, and the structure of elementary statistical experiments. A knowledge representation system based on lattices is proposed, and it is shown that such representations are learnable by computer programs, and lend themselves to particularly efficient implementation.ABASE was influenced by MBASE, the inference engine of MECHO [Bundy et al 79a]. Both are theorem provers working on typed function-free Horn clauses, with controlled creation of new entities. Their type systems and proof procedures are radically different, though, and ABASE is "conversational" while MBASE is not

Disestablishing Environmentalism

The debate over environmental policy is increasingly conducted in language with strong religious overtones. Both proponents and opponents of various environmental policies appeal to religious doctrine to support their positions: Those who question human-caused global warming are labeled heretics, while appeals for environmental stewardship echo Biblical texts. Religious groups play an important role in defining environmental policy issues, and both supporters and critics of specific environmental policy views have labeled particular sets of beliefs about the environment a religion. In this Article we engage in a thought experiment, arguing that there are valuable lessons to be learned from treating Environmentalism as if it were a religion and therefore subject to the First Amendment\u27s prohibition on laws respecting an establishment of religion. In particular, the consideration of the economics of the Establishment Clause--perhaps better termed the economics of disestablishment-offers important insights into how to structure environmental policies in a way that can improve environmental quality

A conceptual model for megaprogramming

Megaprogramming is component-based software engineering and life-cycle management. Magaprogramming and its relationship to other research initiatives (common prototyping system/common prototyping language, domain specific software architectures, and software understanding) are analyzed. The desirable attributes of megaprogramming software components are identified and a software development model and resulting prototype megaprogramming system (library interconnection language extended by annotated Ada) are described

The Original Understanding of the Takings Clause and the Political Process

The original understanding of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment was clear on two points. The clause required compensation when the federal government physically took private property, but not when government regulations limited the ways in which property could be used. In 1922, however, the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon established a new takings regime. In an opinion by Justice Holmes, the Court held that compensation must be provided when government regulation goes too far in diminishing the value of private property. Since that decision, the Supreme Court has been unable to define clearly what kind of regulations run afoul of Holmes\u27s vague standard. Attempts to do so, including the Court\u27s recent decisions in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council and Dolan v. City of Tigard, have created a body of law that more than one recent commentator has described as a mess.” The Court and leading commentators have not seriously considered the possibility that there was an underlying rationale, worth reviving, that explains why the Takings Clause and its state counterparts originally protected property against physical seizures, but not against regulations affecting value. This article contends that the limited scope of the takings clauses reflected the fact that, for a variety of reasons, members of the framing generation believed that physical possession of property was particularly vulnerable to process failure. The article then argues on both originalist and non-originalist grounds for a process-based theory of the Takings Clause that departs dramatically from current takings jurisprudence

Philip Massinger: the man and the playwright

Little apology is necessary by way of preface to a critical study of Messinger. No full -length, detailed study of the playwright has eve appeared in English. All that we have of what might be called 'book length' is a very brief work by Professor Cruickshank that was published over thirty years ago, and this can scarcely now be considered adequate. Even critical essays on Messinger are rare, and comments and asides on the playwright which have appeared in the more general studies of the Jacobean- Caroline period have not usually been notable either for their perspicacity or for the knowledge they reveal of his work. It is in some measure as an attempt to fill this gap that this thesis has been written.I have not, however, attempted to claim for Massinger a position or an importance that does not accord with his worth. He is not, it must be admitted, a great, or even always a very good, dramatist. Nevertheless, his plays are of considerable interest as samples of the romantic tragi- comedies that held the stage after the death of Shakespeare. In addition, it must be remembered that Messinger was the principal writer for the public theatres from 1625 to 1640 -- a fact that in itself argues for his claim to closer examination. Thus the first object of this thesis has been an examination and appraisal of certain aspects of Messinger's dramatic technique.Of additional, and perhaps in some respects even greater, interest, however, is the character of Massinger himself; a character that emerges with extraordinary clarity and precision of detail from a reading of his plays. Therefore, my second object has been to reveal or deduce something of the nature of i;iassinger's mind and character; to attempt, if you like, to see Messinger plain. Both of these objects are comprehended in the title of this thesis.Perhaps something of the eclipse which Massinger's work has undergone amongst students can be explained by the fact that he is deeply involved in the tangled undergrowth of collaboration which surrounds the Beaumont- Fletcher corpus. The reader will find little discussion of such matters in this thesis. Many scholars have laboured on the problems of the Jacobean collaborators, and their work forms an extensive literature in itself, embracing studies in ,eaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Field, Shirley, Heywood, and practically every other writer of the period as well as the vast mass of documentary material pertaining to the stage of the times. I have felt, then, that to deal adequately with such material would have celled for a preliminary volume quite away from my immediate purposes, and that the consideration of such problems here would have confused the reader and obscured the object of my study, Massinger himself. It has seemed to iv me preferable to approach the Jacobean situation from the other end, and, by considering Massinger in the plays which are definitely his, to make my work absolute as far as he is concerned, but at the same time make it a ground -work to the wider study of the dramatic collaboration of Fletcher and his group by establishing the Massingerian technique and method of approach. It follows, therefore, that the plays with which I am almost solely concerned in this thesis are the fifteen plays which Massinger wrote on his own.Of course, in a general critical study of any playwright as prolific as Messinger, it is essential, in order to contain the subject within reasonable bounds, that a certain amount of material should be allowed to 6o by the board. This is perhaps rather a negative way of saying that I have consciously and deliberately dealt only briefly with one or two topics which are sometimes considered important in a study of a playwright. My deliberate intention in this respect will be better understood when I say that I consider such topics as jetsam rather than as flotsam. My dismissal of questions of collaboration and attribution has already been explained. Similarly, I have considered that questions of the sources of Massinger's plays have already been exhaustively covered by the industrious researches of German scholars at the beginning of this century, and that the more technical aspects of versification are, in Massinger's case, of interest chiefly in connexion with problems of collaboration. I have chosen to concentrate chiefly (though not by any means exclusively) on matters which have become prominent largely within the last thirty or forty years -- such matters as stagecraft, dramatic structure, the dramatist's view of the world, and blank -verse style. I have endeavoured to deal with such matters in ways that, while they have become commoner in studies of Shakespeare, have not yet been applied at all extensively to other writers -- and have certainly never been applied to Massinger before. I have also endeavoured to suggest new methods of approach (in particular in respect of matters of style) which might be applied with profit to other Jacobean dramatists. Throughout the thesis I have constantly compared and contrasted Massinger with Shakespeare; with Shakespeare, that is to say, both as a yardstick of dramatic excellence whose work is universally known and admired, and as the only other writer of the period with whom Massinger can be fully and fairly contrasted. In addition, in the general biographical introduction which comprises my first chapter I have re- examined and re- assessed the many conjectures and speculations which surround the facts of Massinger's life and have added some new facts and deductions. of my own.It is perhaps not out of place here to make a plea for a full and modern edition of the plays of Massinger. Gifford's edition, which I have had perforce to use for this thesis, is a remarkable piece of work for its period but is now quite out -of -date and hopelessly inadequate. Several of the plays have been published in individual and fairly modern editions (See Bibliography), but this is not sufficient. What is required is a complete edition which will give the reader (I am not so concerned for the student of textual or bibliographical matters) a text which he can both study and enjoy and from which the scholar can draw his line-references, similar to those which we now possess for Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Of course, such an edition would have to part of a wider plan which embodied an edition of all the Beaumont and Fletcher plays. At the moment it is not possible to obtain Beaumont and Fletcher in an edition which is either convenient or reliable. Such an edition, the Variorum Edition, under the general editorship of A.H.Bullen, was started in 1904, but for some reason or other only four volumes of the projected twelve appeared.. Scholars will never be able to start properly on all the problems of the Jacobean theatre until such editions become generally available. Until then, there must remain much research into this interesting period of the drama which it will be difficult, or even impossible, to carry out

Definition and learning of logic-based kernels for categorical data, and application to collaborative filtering

The continuous pursuit of better prediction quality has gradually led to the development of increasingly complex machine learning models, e.g., deep neural networks. Despite the great success in many domains, the black-box nature of these models makes them not suitable for applications in which the model understanding is at least as important as the prediction accuracy, such as medical applications. On the other hand, more interpretable models, as decision trees, are in general much less accurate. In this thesis, we try to merge the positive aspects of these two realities, by injecting interpretable elements inside complex methods. We focus on kernel methods which have an elegant framework that decouples learning algorithms from data representations. In particular, the first main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of a new family of Boolean kernels, i.e., kernels defined on binary data, with the aim of creating interpretable feature spaces. Assuming binary input vectors, the core idea is to build embedding spaces in which the dimensions represent logical formulas (of a specific form) of the input variables. As a result the solution of a kernel machine can be represented as a weighted sum of logical propositions, and this allows to extract from it human-readable rules. Our framework provides a constructive and efficient way to calculate Boolean kernels of different forms (e.g., disjunctive, conjunctive, DNF, CNF). We show that on binary classification tasks over categorical datasets the proposed kernels achieve state-of-the-art performances. We also provide some theoretical properties about the expressiveness of such kernels. The second main contribution consists in the development of a new multiple kernel learning algorithm to automatically learn the best representation (avoiding the validation). We start from a theoretical result which states that, under mild conditions, any dot-product kernel can be seen as a linear non-negative combination of Boolean conjunctive kernels. Then, from this combination, our MKL algorithm learns non-parametrically the best combination of the conjunctive kernels. This algorithm is designed to optimize the radius-margin ratio of the combined kernel, which has been demonstrated of being an upper bound of the Leave-One-Out error. An extensive empirical evaluation, on several binary classification tasks, shows how our MKL technique is able to outperform state-of-the-art MKL approaches. A third contribution is the proposal of another kernel family for binary input data, which aims to overcome the limitations of the Boolean kernels. In this case the focus is not exclusively on the interpretability, but also on the expressivity. With this new framework, that we dubbed propositional kernel framework, is possible to build kernel functions able to create feature spaces containing almost any kind of logical propositions. Finally, the last contribution is the application of the Boolean kernels to Recommender Systems, specifically, on top-N recommendation tasks. First of all, we propose a novel kernel-based collaborative filtering method and we apply on top of it our Boolean kernels. Empirical results on several collaborative filtering datasets show how less expressive kernels can alleviate the sparsity issue, which is peculiar in this kind of applications

The Impact of a Visual Approach Used in the Teaching of Grammar When Embedded into Writing Instruction: A Study on the Writing Development of Chinese First Year University Students in a British University in China

Born into a visual culture, today’s generation of learners generally prefer a visually-rich multimodal learning environment. Tapping into the potential of visuals in language pedagogy, this study was aimed at discovering the impact of a visual presentation of grammatical concepts related to sentence structure on student writing. The study used a mixed methods design to analyse the impact of the visual approach first by statistically measuring sentence variety and syntactic complexity of student pre and post intervention texts and then using interviews to explain the nature of the impact of visuals on student conceptual understanding and its effect on their writing development. Statistical findings reveal that the experimental groups of Chinese students who were taught grammatical concepts in the context of writing instruction using a visual approach outperformed the students in the control groups who were given similar lessons in the context of writing instruction but using traditional printed hand-outs. Qualitative findings suggest that the visuals seems to have increased these students’ conceptual understanding of grammatical items that were taught, and this resulted in more sophisticated and syntactically complex texts after the intervention. The study supports the theory of contextualized teaching of grammar and proposes the use of external visuals that lead to internal visualization based on the cognitive theory of multimodal learning. In so doing, it extends the use of visual learning to grammar pedagogy. However, the findings also suggest that the visual approach would not work effectively in cultures that promote rote learning and decontextualized exercises in grammar with the sole aim of passing the exams. A shift in attitude towards grammar pedagogy in China is deemed necessary