Find your Way by Observing the Sun and Other Semantic Cues

In this paper we present a robust, efficient and affordable approach to self-localization which does not require neither GPS nor knowledge about the appearance of the world. Towards this goal, we utilize freely available cartographic maps and derive a probabilistic model that exploits semantic cues in the form of sun direction, presence of an intersection, road type, speed limit as well as the ego-car trajectory in order to produce very reliable localization results. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach can localize much faster (in terms of driving time) with less computation and more robustly than competing approaches, which ignore semantic information

Methodologies for the Automatic Location of Academic and Educational Texts on the Internet

Traditionally online databases of web resources have been compiled by a human editor, or though the submissions of authors or interested parties. Considerable resources are needed to maintain a constant level of input and relevance in the face of increasing material quantity and quality, and much of what is in databases is of an ephemeral nature. These pressures dictate that many databases stagnate after an initial period of enthusiastic data entry. The solution to this problem would seem to be the automatic harvesting of resources, however, this process necessitates the automatic classification of resources as ‘appropriate’ to a given database, a problem only solved by complex text content analysis. This paper outlines the component methodologies necessary to construct such an automated harvesting system, including a number of novel approaches. In particular this paper looks at the specific problems of automatically identifying academic research work and Higher Education pedagogic materials. Where appropriate, experimental data is presented from searches in the field of Geography as well as the Earth and Environmental Sciences. In addition, appropriate software is reviewed where it exists, and future directions are outlined

Methodologies for the Automatic Location of Academic and Educational Texts on the Internet

Traditionally online databases of web resources have been compiled by a human editor, or though the submissions of authors or interested parties. Considerable resources are needed to maintain a constant level of input and relevance in the face of increasing material quantity and quality, and much of what is in databases is of an ephemeral nature. These pressures dictate that many databases stagnate after an initial period of enthusiastic data entry. The solution to this problem would seem to be the automatic harvesting of resources, however, this process necessitates the automatic classification of resources as ‘appropriate’ to a given database, a problem only solved by complex text content analysis. This paper outlines the component methodologies necessary to construct such an automated harvesting system, including a number of novel approaches. In particular this paper looks at the specific problems of automatically identifying academic research work and Higher Education pedagogic materials. Where appropriate, experimental data is presented from searches in the field of Geography as well as the Earth and Environmental Sciences. In addition, appropriate software is reviewed where it exists, and future directions are outlined

Eliciting Expertise

Since the last edition of this book there have been rapid developments in the use and exploitation of formally elicited knowledge. Previously, (Shadbolt and Burton, 1995) the emphasis was on eliciting knowledge for the purpose of building expert or knowledge-based systems. These systems are computer programs intended to solve real-world problems, achieving the same level of accuracy as human experts. Knowledge engineering is the discipline that has evolved to support the whole process of specifying, developing and deploying knowledge-based systems (Schreiber et al., 2000) This chapter will discuss the problem of knowledge elicitation for knowledge intensive systems in general

Pricing Principles from Psychology for Agricultural Organizations with Market Power

A recent review of food retailer pricing found evidence that much of the behavior was inconsistent with traditional economic models (Li, Sexton & Xia, ARER 2006). These inconsistencies may stem from the theoretical foundation that firms use to guide their pricing. When firms can influence price, they often use pricing principles from psychology, based on buyer behavior instead of utility maximization. These principles have been incorporated into the marketing approach to pricing. A comparison of the economics and marketing approaches toward pricing found important differences and concluded that marketing principles provide: a richer and more empirically based treatment of the pricing issue from the buyer's perspective . . . ' (Skouras, Avlonitis & Indounas, JPBM 2005, p. 362). This paper reviews more than twenty different pricing principles, developed by psychologists and consumer behaviorists, that may appear inconsistent with some traditional economic theories and that could help increase the profits of agricultural organizations that have enough marketing power to affect price. These pricing principles can be grouped into four main categories. The first category is called 'framing.' Framing refers to the way something is depicted or what is emphasized (e.g., telling buyers that hamburger is 25 percent fat or 75 percent lean). Price framing deals with how the price is described to customers. Incorporating 'free' into an offer, describing a price in terms of multiple units (e.g., three for a dollar), specifying purchase limits, adding an anchor (e.g., suggesting a number to buy or a reason to buy more), highlighting the price in terms of spare change, encouraging purchases on credit, and reframing ( e.g., specifying the cost per day, comparing the purchase with other small regular expenses, or using two different currencies) have been shown to increase willingness to pay. The next second category is called 'congruency.' Marketers strive to make all their messages to prospective buyers consistent. Congruency means that the signals sent by the price should match the messages from other sources. Within this category, there are principles dealing with packaging (e.g., size and shape) and with the terminology, font, and typeface size that are used to describe the product and its price. The next group is called 'context.' Researchers have found that the information people see around an item and the sequence they see this information can influence prospect willingness to pay. Adding an external reference price to advertisements or store signage, striving to make key information first or last in the viewing sequence (e.g., primary and recency), separating shipping and handling charges from product costs, and striving to be perceived as the premium product because asymmetric competition may exist are the pricing principles in this group. 'Signaling' is the last category. The principles in this group involve the messages that buyers receive from the price. One pricing principle involves the effect of certain price endings, often called the effect of nines. A common belief in economics is that if all other things are held constant, lowering the price should generate a downward-sloping demand curve. However, at certain price points, the quantity demanded is likely to be sharply higher, and if price is lowered below a price point, the quantity demanded may fall. Instead of being downward sloping, the demand curve may have segments with a positive slope. Other principles within this group involve the sensitivity of buyers to the frequency distribution of past prices, the ability of buyers to recall past prices, the awareness of buyers to the cost of a product, the number of syllables in the price, the ability of higher prices to suggest higher quality, and the ability of higher prices to improve a product's perceived performance (e.g., the price placebo effect). By including these marketing-based principles in their tool kit, applied economists can better understand the pricing behavior they observe in the marketplace and can provide more practical advice to agricultural organizations on what they should consider when developing their pricing strategies.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

Look before you Hop: Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Judicious Context Expansion

Fact-centric information needs are rarely one-shot; users typically ask follow-up questions to explore a topic. In such a conversational setting, the user's inputs are often incomplete, with entities or predicates left out, and ungrammatical phrases. This poses a huge challenge to question answering (QA) systems that typically rely on cues in full-fledged interrogative sentences. As a solution, we develop CONVEX: an unsupervised method that can answer incomplete questions over a knowledge graph (KG) by maintaining conversation context using entities and predicates seen so far and automatically inferring missing or ambiguous pieces for follow-up questions. The core of our method is a graph exploration algorithm that judiciously expands a frontier to find candidate answers for the current question. To evaluate CONVEX, we release ConvQuestions, a crowdsourced benchmark with 11,200 distinct conversations from five different domains. We show that CONVEX: (i) adds conversational support to any stand-alone QA system, and (ii) outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and question completion strategies