Some views on information fusion and logic based approaches in decision making under uncertainty

Decision making under uncertainty is a key issue in information fusion and logic based reasoning approaches. The aim of this paper is to show noteworthy theoretical and applicational issues in the area of decision making under uncertainty that have been already done and raise new open research related to these topics pointing out promising and challenging research gaps that should be addressed in the coming future in order to improve the resolution of decision making problems under uncertainty

A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF HEDGES AND BOOSTERS IN ENGLISH ACADEMIC ARTICLES

The present study examined research articles from eight academic disciplines to measure the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters. The quantitative results showed that hedges exceeded boosters, with philosophy articles showing a significant use of hedges and boosters. The natural science papers were underrepresented in the number of hedges and boosters. Moreover, the results indicated that the choices the writers make seem to be constrained by the discourse norms and rhetorical styles of each discipline and reflect the nature of different disciplinary characteristics. The humanities and social sciences are basically more interpretative and less abstract, a style that requires more hedges and boosters and opts for subjectivity, whereas natural sciences are typically more fact-oriented and more impersonal, which is accompanied by fewer hedges and boosters and opts for objectivity. This was confirmed by a further analysis that showed that the relative incidence of hedges of the possibility/ probability category in adjectives and adverbs was the highest in humanities and the lowest in natural sciences. Moreover, the relative incidence of hedges of the tentative cognition category in nouns and verbs was the highest in humanities and social sciences and the lowest in natural sciences.

Supporting Complex Business Decisions with a Fuzzy Mobile Assistant

Researchers have recognized the importance of semantic expressiveness in understanding and solving complex problems and have identified a need to incorporate reasoning about uncertainty into decision tools that assist business managers. This study extends current approaches and develops new tools to allow artificial mobile assistants to manage rule-driven consultations by capturing and recommending problem solutions through natural language interfaces. A prototype assistant is described to support fuzzy knowledge representations and fuzzy rule-based consultations. The prototype’s application is implemented in a Windows 8 mobile device and applied in a case study of business outsourcing decisions

Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study

One area in language and gender research that has so far received only little attention is the extent to which the sexes make use of what recent corpus research has termed “conversational grammar.” The author’s initial findings have suggested that the majority of features distinctive of conversational grammar may be used predominantly by female speakers. This article reports on a study designed to test the hypothesis that conversational grammar is “feminine grammar” in the sense that women’s conversational language is more adapted to the conversational situation than men’s. Based on data from the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus and following the situational framework for the description of conversational features elaborated in the author’s previous research, features distinctive of conversational grammar are grouped into five functional categories and their normed frequencies compared across the sexes. The functional categories distinguish features that can be seen as adaptations to constraints set by the situational factors of (1) Shared Context, (2) Co-Construction, (3) Real-Time Processing, (4) Discourse Management, and (5) Relation Management. The study’s results, described in detail in relation to the biological category of speaker sex and cultural notions of gender, suggest that the feminine grammar hypothesis is valid

I believe it's possible it might be so.... : Exploiting Lexical Clues for the Automatic Generation of Evidentiality Weights for Information Extracted from English Text

Information formulated in natural language is being created at an incredible pace, far more quickly than we can make sense of it. Thus, computer algorithms for various kinds of text analytics have been developed to try to find nuggets of new, pertinent and useful information. However, information extracted from text is not always credible or reliable; often buried in sentences are lexical and grammatical structures that indicate the uncertainty of the proposition. Such clues include hedges such as modal adverbs and adjectives, as well as hearsay markers, indicators of inference or belief (”mindsay”), and verb forms identifying future actions which may not take place. In this thesis, we demonstrate how analysis of these lexical and grammatical forms of uncertainty can be automatically analyzed to provide a method of determining an evidential weight to the proposition, which can be used to assess the credibility of the information extracted from English text