42,183 research outputs found
(No. 12) -- The Real Truth About the Surplus of Dogs and Cats
The real truth about the surplus of dogs and cats Great interest in euthanasia article Our Officers\u27 Corner On pets left in overheated car
Development and Management of Canine Adverse Food Reactions and its Connections to the Grain-Free Dog Food Movement
Canine Adverse Food Reactions include immunologically-mediated food allergies as well as non-immunological food intolerances. Although popular belief holds grains are responsible for AFR, the majority are aggravated by the common protein sources found in commercial dog foods. Elimination diets, a time-intensive method in which suspected allergens are removed from the dog’s diet, are the most effective form of diagnosis, though alternative techniques including patch testing and serum antibody tests have been explored. Presently, avoidance of allergens is the recommended management approach. The erroneous association of grains with AFR has led to the rise of grain-free dog food. However, these nontraditional diets have been connected with a surge in diagnoses of dilated cardiomyopathy, hinting at a detrimental nutritional deficit
Contrastivism Rather Than Something Else? On The Limits Of Epistemic Contrastivism
One of the most recent trends in epistemology is contrastivism. It can be characterized as the thesis that knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition known and a contrast proposition. According to contrastivism, knowledge attributions have the form “S knows that p, rather than q”. In this paper I raise several problems for contrastivism: it lacks plausibility for many cases of knowledge, is too narrow concerning the third relatum, and overlooks a further relativity of the knowledge relation
Illusions of gunk
The possibility of gunk has been used to argue against mereological nihilism. This paper explores two responses on the part of the microphysical mereological nihilist: (1) the contingency defence, which maintains that nihilism is true of the actual world; but that at other worlds, composition occurs; (2) the impossibility defence, which maintains that nihilism is necessary true, and so gunk worlds are impossible. The former is argued to be ultimately unstable; the latter faces the explanatorily burden of explaining the illusion that gunk is possible. It is argued that we can discharge this burden by focussing on the contingency of the microphysicalist aspect of microphysical mereological nihilism. The upshot is that gunk-based arguments against microphysical mereological nihilism can be resisted
Negation, expressivism, and intentionality
Many think that expressivists have a special problem with negation. I disagree. For if there is a problem with negation, I argue, it is a problem shared by those who accept some plausible claims about the nature of intentionality. Whether there is any special problem for expressivists turns, I will argue, on whether facts about what truth-conditions beliefs have can explain facts about basic inferential relations among those beliefs. And I will suggest that the answer to this last question is, on most plausible attempts at solving the problem of intentionality, ‘no’
Information structure
The guidelines for Information Structure include instructions for the annotation of Information Status (or ‘givenness’), Topic, and Focus, building upon a basic syntactic annotation of nominal phrases and sentences. A procedure for the annotation of these features is proposed
Deep learning from crowds
Over the last few years, deep learning has revolutionized the field of
machine learning by dramatically improving the state-of-the-art in various
domains. However, as the size of supervised artificial neural networks grows,
typically so does the need for larger labeled datasets. Recently, crowdsourcing
has established itself as an efficient and cost-effective solution for labeling
large sets of data in a scalable manner, but it often requires aggregating
labels from multiple noisy contributors with different levels of expertise. In
this paper, we address the problem of learning deep neural networks from
crowds. We begin by describing an EM algorithm for jointly learning the
parameters of the network and the reliabilities of the annotators. Then, a
novel general-purpose crowd layer is proposed, which allows us to train deep
neural networks end-to-end, directly from the noisy labels of multiple
annotators, using only backpropagation. We empirically show that the proposed
approach is able to internally capture the reliability and biases of different
annotators and achieve new state-of-the-art results for various crowdsourced
datasets across different settings, namely classification, regression and
sequence labeling.Comment: 10 pages, The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI), 201
A Generalised Quantifier Theory of Natural Language in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics with Bialgebras
Categorical compositional distributional semantics is a model of natural
language; it combines the statistical vector space models of words with the
compositional models of grammar. We formalise in this model the generalised
quantifier theory of natural language, due to Barwise and Cooper. The
underlying setting is a compact closed category with bialgebras. We start from
a generative grammar formalisation and develop an abstract categorical
compositional semantics for it, then instantiate the abstract setting to sets
and relations and to finite dimensional vector spaces and linear maps. We prove
the equivalence of the relational instantiation to the truth theoretic
semantics of generalised quantifiers. The vector space instantiation formalises
the statistical usages of words and enables us to, for the first time, reason
about quantified phrases and sentences compositionally in distributional
semantics
Evaluational adjectives
This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions
Quantum Structure in Cognition, Origins, Developments, Successes and Expectations
We provide an overview of the results we have attained in the last decade on
the identification of quantum structures in cognition and, more specifically,
in the formalization and representation of natural concepts. We firstly discuss
the quantum foundational reasons that led us to investigate the mechanisms of
formation and combination of concepts in human reasoning, starting from the
empirically observed deviations from classical logical and probabilistic
structures. We then develop our quantum-theoretic perspective in Fock space
which allows successful modeling of various sets of cognitive experiments
collected by different scientists, including ourselves. In addition, we
formulate a unified explanatory hypothesis for the presence of quantum
structures in cognitive processes, and discuss our recent discovery of further
quantum aspects in concept combinations, namely, 'entanglement' and
'indistinguishability'. We finally illustrate perspectives for future research.Comment: 25 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1412.870
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