2,548 research outputs found
A Plausibility Semantics for Abstract Argumentation Frameworks
We propose and investigate a simple ranking-measure-based extension semantics
for abstract argumentation frameworks based on their generic instantiation by
default knowledge bases and the ranking construction semantics for default
reasoning. In this context, we consider the path from structured to logical to
shallow semantic instantiations. The resulting well-justified JZ-extension
semantics diverges from more traditional approaches.Comment: Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic
Reasoning (NMR 2014). This is an improved and extended version of the
author's ECSQARU 2013 pape
External Validity: From Do-Calculus to Transportability Across Populations
The generalizability of empirical findings to new environments, settings or
populations, often called "external validity," is essential in most scientific
explorations. This paper treats a particular problem of generalizability,
called "transportability," defined as a license to transfer causal effects
learned in experimental studies to a new population, in which only
observational studies can be conducted. We introduce a formal representation
called "selection diagrams" for expressing knowledge about differences and
commonalities between populations of interest and, using this representation,
we reduce questions of transportability to symbolic derivations in the
do-calculus. This reduction yields graph-based procedures for deciding, prior
to observing any data, whether causal effects in the target population can be
inferred from experimental findings in the study population. When the answer is
affirmative, the procedures identify what experimental and observational
findings need be obtained from the two populations, and how they can be
combined to ensure bias-free transport.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-STS486 the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1312.748
Complete Additivity and Modal Incompleteness
In this paper, we tell a story about incompleteness in modal logic. The story
weaves together a paper of van Benthem, `Syntactic aspects of modal
incompleteness theorems,' and a longstanding open question: whether every
normal modal logic can be characterized by a class of completely additive modal
algebras, or as we call them, V-BAOs. Using a first-order reformulation of the
property of complete additivity, we prove that the modal logic that starred in
van Benthem's paper resolves the open question in the negative. In addition,
for the case of bimodal logic, we show that there is a naturally occurring
logic that is incomplete with respect to V-BAOs, namely the provability logic
GLB. We also show that even logics that are unsound with respect to such
algebras do not have to be more complex than the classical propositional
calculus. On the other hand, we observe that it is undecidable whether a
syntactically defined logic is V-complete. After these results, we generalize
the Blok Dichotomy to degrees of V-incompleteness. In the end, we return to van
Benthem's theme of syntactic aspects of modal incompleteness
On the Mental State of Consciousness of Wrongdoing
Mistake about or ignorance of the law does not exculpate in criminal law, except in limited circumstances. Doctrine and theory cognate to this principle are, by now, well developed and understood. But might an actor\u27s awareness of the illegality or wrongfulness of her conduct inculpate — that is, constitute a form of mens rea that establishes or aggravates liability? Trends in recent adjudication in white collar crime suggest that the answer is yes. This article, part of a symposium issue on Adjudicating the Guilty Mind, takes the first pass at describing the mental state of “consciousness of wrongdoing,” assessing its fit with the conceptual architecture of substantive criminal law, and uncovering the many challenges of proof and adjudication that this concept poses. Three conclusions broadly emerge from this initial, and somewhat truncated, inquiry: first, inculpating an actor for adverting to the legal or normative significance of her conduct is an attractive means of dealing with difficult line-drawing problems presented by many white collar offenses; second, the method can be justified on both retributive and deterrent grounds; and third, the practice requires much more thought and precision at the operational level, lest problems inherent in the structure of criminal adjudication be exacerbated in cases in which liability depends on the idea that an actor “knew what she was doing was wrong
An Introduction to Mechanized Reasoning
Mechanized reasoning uses computers to verify proofs and to help discover new
theorems. Computer scientists have applied mechanized reasoning to economic
problems but -- to date -- this work has not yet been properly presented in
economics journals. We introduce mechanized reasoning to economists in three
ways. First, we introduce mechanized reasoning in general, describing both the
techniques and their successful applications. Second, we explain how mechanized
reasoning has been applied to economic problems, concentrating on the two
domains that have attracted the most attention: social choice theory and
auction theory. Finally, we present a detailed example of mechanized reasoning
in practice by means of a proof of Vickrey's familiar theorem on second-price
auctions
On the Mental State of Consciousness of Wrongdoing
Mistake about or ignorance of the law does not exculpate in criminal law, except in limited circumstances. Doctrine and theory cognate to this principle are, by now, well developed and understood. But might an actor\u27s awareness of the illegality or wrongfulness of her conduct inculpate — that is, constitute a form of mens rea that establishes or aggravates liability? Trends in recent adjudication in white collar crime suggest that the answer is yes. This article, part of a symposium issue on Adjudicating the Guilty Mind, takes the first pass at describing the mental state of “consciousness of wrongdoing,” assessing its fit with the conceptual architecture of substantive criminal law, and uncovering the many challenges of proof and adjudication that this concept poses. Three conclusions broadly emerge from this initial, and somewhat truncated, inquiry: first, inculpating an actor for adverting to the legal or normative significance of her conduct is an attractive means of dealing with difficult line-drawing problems presented by many white collar offenses; second, the method can be justified on both retributive and deterrent grounds; and third, the practice requires much more thought and precision at the operational level, lest problems inherent in the structure of criminal adjudication be exacerbated in cases in which liability depends on the idea that an actor “knew what she was doing was wrong
On adaptive decision rules and decision parameter adaptation for automatic speech recognition
Recent advances in automatic speech recognition are accomplished by designing a plug-in maximum a posteriori decision rule such that the forms of the acoustic and language model distributions are specified and the parameters of the assumed distributions are estimated from a collection of speech and language training corpora. Maximum-likelihood point estimation is by far the most prevailing training method. However, due to the problems of unknown speech distributions, sparse training data, high spectral and temporal variabilities in speech, and possible mismatch between training and testing conditions, a dynamic training strategy is needed. To cope with the changing speakers and speaking conditions in real operational conditions for high-performance speech recognition, such paradigms incorporate a small amount of speaker and environment specific adaptation data into the training process. Bayesian adaptive learning is an optimal way to combine prior knowledge in an existing collection of general models with a new set of condition-specific adaptation data. In this paper, the mathematical framework for Bayesian adaptation of acoustic and language model parameters is first described. Maximum a posteriori point estimation is then developed for hidden Markov models and a number of useful parameters densities commonly used in automatic speech recognition and natural language processing.published_or_final_versio
Geometry from divergence functions and complex structures
Motivated by the geometrical structures of quantum mechanics, we introduce an
almost-complex structure on the product of any parallelizable
statistical manifold . Then, we use to extract a pre-symplectic form and
a metric-like tensor on from a divergence function. These tensors
may be pulled back to , and we compute them in the case of an N-dimensional
symplex with respect to the Kullback-Leibler relative entropy, and in the case
of (a suitable unfolding space of) the manifold of faithful density operators
with respect to the von Neumann-Umegaki relative entropy.Comment: 19 pages, comments are welcome
The Meaning of Probative Value and Prejudice in Federal Rule of Evidence 403: Can Rule 403 Be Used to Resurrect the Common Law of Evidence?
In the common law system of evidence, logically relevant evidence is presumptively admissible. The logical relevance of an item of evidence, however, does not guarantee its admission. The common law has developed a number of rules that exclude logically relevant evidence. In some cases, the common law excludes evidence because of doubts about the credibility or reliability of that type of evidence. For example, the best evidence rule rests primarily on skepticism about the trustworthiness of secondary evidence concerning a document\u27s contents.- When the issue is the content of a document, the common law prefers that the document itself be produced in court, because the production of the document is obviously the most reliable method of establishing its contents. The common law enforces this preference by excluding other evidence of the document\u27s contents, such as oral testimony describing the document, unless there is an adequate excuse for the nonproduction of the document. In other cases, the common law excludes evidence to promote a social policy. The common-law privileges for confidential relationships are illustrative. For example, the attorney-client privilege often bars the admission of relevant, trustworthy evidence in order to encourage the flow of information between client and attorney.
The Federal Rules of Evidence became effective on June 1, 1975.The Rules are now in effect not only in federal court, but also in the thirty-one states that have adopted evidence codes patterned after the Federal Rules.6 While the Federal Rules codify most of the common-law exclusionary rules of evidence, the Rules omit others. For example,almost all jurisdictions require that a prosecutor corroborate any confession by the defendant.\u27 In order to introduce a defendant\u27s confession, the prosecutor must present independent, corroborating evidence that a criminal act has occurred. The rationale for the corroboration requirement is doubt about the credibility of confession evidence; confessions are sometimes coerced, and even when there is no police coercion, an innocent person may have an ulterior motive or psychological compulsion to confess to a crime., The corroboration requirement is one of the common-law doctrines omitted from the Federal Rules of Evidence. In other jurisdictions, as a matter of decisional law the courts decided to exclude generally any statements made by a defendant during plea bargaining. These courts did so to further the social policy of encouraging plea bargaining, which eases the burden on the criminal justice system. Under this case law doctrine, if the police questioned the defendant and the defendant reasonably believed that he could bar-gain for concessions during the questioning, the defendant\u27s statement to the police might be excludible. Like the corroboration rule, how-ever, this doctrine has been omitted from the Federal Rules; the only exclusionary rule recognized by the Federal Rules is restricted to plea discussions with an attorney for the prosecuting authority ...
Quasi-Polish Spaces
We investigate some basic descriptive set theory for countably based
completely quasi-metrizable topological spaces, which we refer to as
quasi-Polish spaces. These spaces naturally generalize much of the classical
descriptive set theory of Polish spaces to the non-Hausdorff setting. We show
that a subspace of a quasi-Polish space is quasi-Polish if and only if it is
level \Pi_2 in the Borel hierarchy. Quasi-Polish spaces can be characterized
within the framework of Type-2 Theory of Effectivity as precisely the countably
based spaces that have an admissible representation with a Polish domain. They
can also be characterized domain theoretically as precisely the spaces that are
homeomorphic to the subspace of all non-compact elements of an
\omega-continuous domain. Every countably based locally compact sober space is
quasi-Polish, hence every \omega-continuous domain is quasi-Polish. A
metrizable space is quasi-Polish if and only if it is Polish. We show that the
Borel hierarchy on an uncountable quasi-Polish space does not collapse, and
that the Hausdorff-Kuratowski theorem generalizes to all quasi-Polish spaces
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