74,569 research outputs found
Comprehensibility of UML-based Formal Model â A Series of Controlled Experiments
This paper summarises two controlled experiments conducted on a model that integrates the use of semi-formal notation, the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and a formal notation, B. The experiments assessed the comprehensibility of the model, namely UML-B. The first experiment compared the comprehensibility of a UML-B model and a B model. In the second experiment, the model was compared with an Event-B model, a new generation of B. The experiments assessed the ability of the model to present information and to promote problem domain understanding. The measurement focused on the efficiency in performing the comprehension tasks. The experiments employed a cross-over design and were conducted on third-year and masters students. The results suggest that the integration of semi-formal and formal notations expedites the subjectsâ comprehension tasks with accuracy even with limited hours of training
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Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines
Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly
observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments
with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they
should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own
individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects:
some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting
cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this
heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We
have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as
a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else
beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous
Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity
aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of
people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with
cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and
cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour
makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think
malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more
STARC: Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension
We present STARC (Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension), a new
annotation framework for assessing reading comprehension with multiple choice
questions. Our framework introduces a principled structure for the answer
choices and ties them to textual span annotations. The framework is implemented
in OneStopQA, a new high-quality dataset for evaluation and analysis of reading
comprehension in English. We use this dataset to demonstrate that STARC can be
leveraged for a key new application for the development of SAT-like reading
comprehension materials: automatic annotation quality probing via span ablation
experiments. We further show that it enables in-depth analyses and comparisons
between machine and human reading comprehension behavior, including error
distributions and guessing ability. Our experiments also reveal that the
standard multiple choice dataset in NLP, RACE, is limited in its ability to
measure reading comprehension. 47% of its questions can be guessed by machines
without accessing the passage, and 18% are unanimously judged by humans as not
having a unique correct answer. OneStopQA provides an alternative test set for
reading comprehension which alleviates these shortcomings and has a
substantially higher human ceiling performance.Comment: ACL 2020. OneStopQA dataset, STARC guidelines and human experiments
data are available at https://github.com/berzak/onestop-q
Warnings and Disclosures
This chapter reviews nearly six decades of research on warnings and disclosures, including common misperceptions and their importance to public health policy, and offers an answer to the key question, âDo warnings and disclosures really work?â Supporting theory and research applications are discussed
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Some shortcomings of long-term working memory
Within the framework of their long-term working memory theory, Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) propose that experts rapidly store information in long-term memory through two mechanisms: elaboration of long-term memory patterns and schemas and use of retrieval structures. They use chess playersâ memory as one of their most compelling sources of empirical evidence. In this paper, I show that evidence from chess memory, far from supporting their theory, limits its generality. Evidence from other domains reviewed by Ericsson and Kintsch, such as medical expertise, is not as strong as claimed, and sometimes contradicts the theory outright. I argue that Ericsson and Kintschâs concept of retrieval structure conflates three different types of memory structures that possess quite different properties. One of these types of structuresâgeneric, general-purpose retrieval structuresâhas a narrower use than proposed by Ericsson and Kintsch: it applies only in domains where there is a conscious, deliberate intent by individuals to improve their memory. Other mechanisms, including specific retrieval structures, exist that permit a rapid encoding into long-term memory under other circumstances
Beyond âInteractionâ: How to Understand Social Effects on Social Cognition
In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an âinteractive turnâ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of âinteractionâ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the âinteractionistâ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of âinteractionâ, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition
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