8,012 research outputs found
Cooperative answers in database systems
A major concern of researchers who seek to improve human-computer communication involves how to move beyond literal interpretations of queries to a level of responsiveness that takes the user's misconceptions, expectations, desires, and interests into consideration. At Maryland, we are investigating how to better meet a user's needs within the framework of the cooperative answering system of Gal and Minker. We have been exploring how to use semantic information about the database to formulate coherent and informative answers. The work has two main thrusts: (1) the construction of a logic formula which embodies the content of a cooperative answer; and (2) the presentation of the logic formula to the user in a natural language form. The information that is available in a deductive database system for building cooperative answers includes integrity constraints, user constraints, the search tree for answers to the query, and false presuppositions that are present in the query. The basic cooperative answering theory of Gal and Minker forms the foundation of a cooperative answering system that integrates the new construction and presentation methods. This paper provides an overview of the cooperative answering strategies used in the CARMIN cooperative answering system, an ongoing research effort at Maryland. Section 2 gives some useful background definitions. Section 3 describes techniques for collecting cooperative logical formulae. Section 4 discusses which natural language generation techniques are useful for presenting the logic formula in natural language text. Section 5 presents a diagram of the system
Diverse Weighted Bipartite b-Matching
Bipartite matching, where agents on one side of a market are matched to
agents or items on the other, is a classical problem in computer science and
economics, with widespread application in healthcare, education, advertising,
and general resource allocation. A practitioner's goal is typically to maximize
a matching market's economic efficiency, possibly subject to some fairness
requirements that promote equal access to resources. A natural balancing act
exists between fairness and efficiency in matching markets, and has been the
subject of much research.
In this paper, we study a complementary goal---balancing diversity and
efficiency---in a generalization of bipartite matching where agents on one side
of the market can be matched to sets of agents on the other. Adapting a
classical definition of the diversity of a set, we propose a quadratic
programming-based approach to solving a supermodular minimization problem that
balances diversity and total weight of the solution. We also provide a scalable
greedy algorithm with theoretical performance bounds. We then define the price
of diversity, a measure of the efficiency loss due to enforcing diversity, and
give a worst-case theoretical bound. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of
our methods on three real-world datasets, and show that the price of diversity
is not bad in practice
- …