Learning Possibilistic Logic Theories

Vi tar opp problemet med å lære tolkbare maskinlæringsmodeller fra usikker og manglende informasjon. Vi utvikler først en ny dyplæringsarkitektur, RIDDLE: Rule InDuction with Deep LEarning (regelinduksjon med dyp læring), basert på egenskapene til mulighetsteori. Med eksperimentelle resultater og sammenligning med FURIA, en eksisterende moderne metode for regelinduksjon, er RIDDLE en lovende regelinduksjonsalgoritme for å finne regler fra data. Deretter undersøker vi læringsoppgaven formelt ved å identifisere regler med konfidensgrad knyttet til dem i exact learning-modellen. Vi definerer formelt teoretiske rammer og viser forhold som må holde for å garantere at en læringsalgoritme vil identifisere reglene som holder i et domene. Til slutt utvikler vi en algoritme som lærer regler med tilhørende konfidensverdier i exact learning-modellen. Vi foreslår også en teknikk for å simulere spørringer i exact learning-modellen fra data. Eksperimenter viser oppmuntrende resultater for å lære et sett med regler som tilnærmer reglene som er kodet i data.We address the problem of learning interpretable machine learning models from uncertain and missing information. We first develop a novel deep learning architecture, named RIDDLE (Rule InDuction with Deep LEarning), based on properties of possibility theory. With experimental results and comparison with FURIA, a state of the art method, RIDDLE is a promising rule induction algorithm for finding rules from data. We then formally investigate the learning task of identifying rules with confidence degree associated to them in the exact learning model. We formally define theoretical frameworks and show conditions that must hold to guarantee that a learning algorithm will identify the rules that hold in a domain. Finally, we develop an algorithm that learns rules with associated confidence values in the exact learning model. We also propose a technique to simulate queries in the exact learning model from data. Experiments show encouraging results to learn a set of rules that approximate rules encoded in data.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Unsupervised Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation: Exploration & Evaluation of Semantic Subgraphs

Hypothetically, if you were told: Apple uses the apple as its logo . You would immediately detect two different senses of the word apple , these being the company and the fruit respectively. Making this distinction is the formidable challenge of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), which is the subtask of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. This thesis is a multi-branched investigation into WSD, that explores and evaluates unsupervised knowledge-based methods that exploit semantic subgraphs. The nature of research covered by this thesis can be broken down to: 1. Mining data from the encyclopedic resource Wikipedia, to visually prove the existence of context embedded in semantic subgraphs 2. Achieving disambiguation in order to merge concepts that originate from heterogeneous semantic graphs 3. Participation in international evaluations of WSD across a range of languages 4. Treating WSD as a classification task, that can be optimised through the iterative construction of semantic subgraphs The contributions of each chapter are ranged, but can be summarised by what has been produced, learnt, and raised throughout the thesis. Furthermore an API and several resources have been developed as a by-product of this research, all of which can be accessed by visiting the author’s home page at http://www.stevemanion.com. This should enable researchers to replicate the results achieved in this thesis and build on them if they wish

Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion

My dissertation proposes a new context for reading early modern devotional writing’s rich engagement with the language of the body in its focus on the relationship between gendered representations of devotional desire and spiritual ability in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. By tracing how somatic speech and bodily conditions are portrayed in the devotional poetry of John Milton, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and An Collins, this project examines how these writers fashion spiritual states through the language of a sometime sorrowful and sometime ecstatic, but always desiring body. My project reveals how early modern authors manipulate or respond to gendered and bodily hierarchies to craft liturgically rich devotional scenes that exceed and overwhelm sensations of spiritual lack written on and within the bodies of the devotional figures presented therein. Through my focus on the body of the text and also the ways in which bodies are represented within devotional texts, I posit a new way of looking at early modern devotional writing: as prosthetics. The term prosthesis is most often associated with a medical appendage supplementing a bodily lack, but my project takes seriously the animating capacity of language as I demonstrate the ways in which early modern devotional writing exhibits a “prosthetic impulse” that blurs mind-body divides via the amplified register of highly affective somatic speech. Far from mere metaphor, this dissertation shows how the prosthetized devotional text materializes and makes known the spiritual abilities of authors who actively frame divine desire around bodies in opposition to the normative cisgendered and ableist body so widely celebrated in religious discourses of the period. Reading devotional texts as prosthetics that supplement the spiritual lack experienced by early modern believers struggling to articulate their relationship with the divine reveals the problematic interplay between self and society in its blurring of the boundaries between immaterial soul, the material body, and the literal pages before us. My project thus demonstrates how the prosthetized text actively reframes dualist constructions of the body and soul, men and women, and also spiritual health and ability

The speculative mode: intersections of literature and the new science in Restoration England

Within the field of Restoration and eighteenth-century studies, critics have investigated the relationship between literature and science for almost a century. Even among specialists, however, there has been insufficient enquiry into epistemological tensions between categories for what now might be called “pre-science” and what was then known as “natural philosophy.” Even less attention has been paid to the relation between natural philosophy and the category of speculation, in which speculation is understood scientifically and literarily. I explore how what I define as speculative writing about natural philosophy assisted in publicizing and spreading new epistemologies during the Restoration and early eighteenth century. In analyzing speculative writing, I investigate the cultural reception of natural philosophy, tracing responses to such changes. I argue that the speculative mode emphasizes a more integrated vision of knowledge formation at that time, a vision that is now divided by the categories of art and science. Emphasizing the contemporary reactions to these various models of knowledge, my methods require a deeply historical approach. To focus this approach, I consider writings in the Restoration that respond to the formation and practices of the early Royal Society: its institutional presence and public mission made it an especially attractive target of speculative writing that would challenge the Society’s official promotion of the experimental method and rejection of the speculative method. I take as evidence both literary and nonliterary documents, representative of a range of genres: these include dictionaries printed at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society and Abraham Cowley’s opening ode, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Blazing World, as well as Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso and Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon. My argument considers the mixed and conflicting strands that informed the broader category of natural philosophy and recognizes the many ways in which the texts concerned with natural philosophy are by no means easily separated into so-called scientific or literary ones. I conclude the study by looking forward, linking the beginnings of the speculative mode in the Restoration period to a popular eighteenth-century text – Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I end with a call to understand the cultural moment of the Restoration better by joining together works of science and art as both valid and necessary avenues toward knowledge and literary history

Annotations in Scholarly Editions and Research

The notion of annotation is associated in the Humanities and Information Sciences with different concepts that vary in coverage, application and direction of impact, but have conceptual parallels as well. This publication reflects on different practices and associated concepts of annotation, puts them in relation to each other and attempts to systematize their commonalities and divergences in an interdisciplinary perspective

Tainted love : AIDS, theory, ethics, elegy

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Paris and Havana: A Century of Mutual Influence

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely on one art-form to describe another, as in paintings of poems), and multi-lingual. Finally, I contend that these translational relationships must be examined within the greater context of twentieth-century modernisms, particularly Surrealism. I apply critical, theoretical and philosophical frameworks articulated by Edouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez Rojo, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to four case studies of inter-genre, inter-national, multilingual dialogues unfolding over the course of the century to reveal dynamic figurations of bodies that are at once visual, poetic and performative

Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. he contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures