30,685 research outputs found
Show Me the Argument: Empirically Testing the Armchair Philosophy Picture
Many philosophers subscribe to the view that philosophy is a priori and in the business of discovering necessary truths from the armchair. This paper sets out to empirically test this picture. If this were the case, we would expect to see this reflected in philosophical practice. In particular, we would expect philosophers to advance mostly deductive, rather than inductive, arguments. The paper shows that the percentage of philosophy articles advancing deductive arguments is higher than those advancing inductive arguments, which is what we would expect from the vantage point of the armchair philosophy picture. The results also show, however, that the percentages of articles advancing deductive arguments and those advancing inductive arguments are converging over time and that the difference between inductive and deductive ratios is declining over time. This trend suggests that deductive arguments are gradually losing their status as the dominant form of argumentation in philosophy
A Bayesian Approach to Discovering Truth from Conflicting Sources for Data Integration
In practical data integration systems, it is common for the data sources
being integrated to provide conflicting information about the same entity.
Consequently, a major challenge for data integration is to derive the most
complete and accurate integrated records from diverse and sometimes conflicting
sources. We term this challenge the truth finding problem. We observe that some
sources are generally more reliable than others, and therefore a good model of
source quality is the key to solving the truth finding problem. In this work,
we propose a probabilistic graphical model that can automatically infer true
records and source quality without any supervision. In contrast to previous
methods, our principled approach leverages a generative process of two types of
errors (false positive and false negative) by modeling two different aspects of
source quality. In so doing, ours is also the first approach designed to merge
multi-valued attribute types. Our method is scalable, due to an efficient
sampling-based inference algorithm that needs very few iterations in practice
and enjoys linear time complexity, with an even faster incremental variant.
Experiments on two real world datasets show that our new method outperforms
existing state-of-the-art approaches to the truth finding problem.Comment: VLDB201
From Data Fusion to Knowledge Fusion
The task of {\em data fusion} is to identify the true values of data items
(eg, the true date of birth for {\em Tom Cruise}) among multiple observed
values drawn from different sources (eg, Web sites) of varying (and unknown)
reliability. A recent survey\cite{LDL+12} has provided a detailed comparison of
various fusion methods on Deep Web data. In this paper, we study the
applicability and limitations of different fusion techniques on a more
challenging problem: {\em knowledge fusion}. Knowledge fusion identifies true
subject-predicate-object triples extracted by multiple information extractors
from multiple information sources. These extractors perform the tasks of entity
linkage and schema alignment, thus introducing an additional source of noise
that is quite different from that traditionally considered in the data fusion
literature, which only focuses on factual errors in the original sources. We
adapt state-of-the-art data fusion techniques and apply them to a knowledge
base with 1.6B unique knowledge triples extracted by 12 extractors from over 1B
Web pages, which is three orders of magnitude larger than the data sets used in
previous data fusion papers. We show great promise of the data fusion
approaches in solving the knowledge fusion problem, and suggest interesting
research directions through a detailed error analysis of the methods.Comment: VLDB'201
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