Psychological evidence for assumptions of path-based inheritance reasoning

The psychological validity of inheritance reasoners is clarified. Elio and Pelletier (1993) presented the first pilot experiment exploring some of these issues. We investigate other foundational assumptions of inheritance reasoning with defaults: transitivity, blocking of transitivity by negative defaults, pre-emption in terms of structurally defined specificity and structurally defined redundancy of information. Responses were in accord with the assumption of at least limited transitivity, however, reasoning with negative information and structurally defined specificity conditions did not support the predictions of the literature. 'Preemptive' links were found to provide additional information leading to indeterminacy, rather than providing completely overriding information as the literature predicts. On the other hand, results support the structural identification of certain links as redundant. Other findings suggest that inheritance proof-theory might be excessively guided by its syntax

Large Demographic Shocks and Small Changes in the Marriage Market

This paper provides non-parametric estimates of the total effects of famine in China on marital behavior of famine affected cohorts in rural areas of Sichuan and Anhui. The reduced form estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects, two important components of equilibrium marital behavior. Next the paper uses a structural model of the marriage market to decomposed observed marital outcomes into quantity and quality effects. The structural estimates show that the famine reduced the marital attractiveness of the famine-born cohort. The conclusion is that the small observed changes in marriage rates of the famine born cohort are due to a significant decline in marital attractiveness.marriage market, famine

Large Shocks and Small Changes in the Marriage Market for Famine Born Cohorts in China

Between 1958 and 1961, China experienced one of its worst famines in history. Birth rates plummeted during these years, but recovered immediately afterwards. The famine-born cohorts were relatively scarce in the marriage and labor markets. The famine also adversely affected the health of these cohorts. This paper decomposes these two effects on the marital outcomes of the famine-born and adjacent cohorts in the rural areas of two hard hit provinces, Sichuan and Anhui. Individuals born pre and post-famine, who were in surplus relative to their customary spouses, were able to marry. Using the Choo Siow model of marriage matching, the paper shows that the famine substantially reduced the marital attractiveness of the famine born cohort. The modest decline in educational attainment of the famine born cohort does not explain the change in spousal quality of that cohort. Thus, the famine-born cohort, who were relatively scarce compared with their customary spouses, did not have significant above average marriage rates.famine, marriage market, Choo Siow, China

Large Demographic Shocks and Small Changes in the Marriage Market

Between 1958 and 1961, China experienced one of the worse famines in her history. Birth rates fell during these years and recovered immediately afterwards. The famine also adversely affected the health of these cohorts. This paper provides nonparametric estimates of the total effects of the famine on the marital behaviour of famine-affected cohorts in the rural areas of Sichuan and Anhui. These reduced from estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects, two important components of equilibrium marital behaviour. Next, the paper uses a structural model of the marriage market, the Choo-Siow model, to decompose observed marital outcomes into quantity and quality effects of the famine. The structural estimates show that the famine substantially reduced the marital attractiveness of the famine born cohort. The conclusion is that the small observed changes in marriage rates of the famine born cohorts are due to a substantial decline in their marital attractiveness. Controlling for changes in educational attainment does not change the conclusion.famine, marriage market, Choo Siow, China

The Proof is in the Pudding: Using Automated Theorem Proving to Generate Cooking Recipes

This paper presents FASTFOOD, a rule-based natural language generation (NLG) program for cooking recipes. We consider the representation of cooking recipes as discourse representation, because the meaning of each sentence needs to consider the context of the others. Our discourse representation system is based on states of affairs and transtions between states of affairs, and does not use discourse referents. Recipes are generated by using an automated theorem-proving procedure to select the ingredients and instructions, with ingredients corresponding to axioms and instructions to implications. FASTFOOD also contains a temporal optimization module which can rearrange the recipe to make it more time efficient for the user, e.g. the recipe specifies to chop the vegetables while the rice is boiling. The system is described in detail, including the decision to forgo discourse referents and how plausible representations of nouns and verbs emerge purely as a by-product of the practical requirements of efficiently representing recipe content. A comparison is then made with existing recipe generation systems, NLG systems more generally, and automated theorem provers

Who framed Roger Rabbit? Multiple choice questions answering about movie plot

This paper introduces an approach to the task of multiple-choice question answering based on a combination of string similarities. The main idea of this work is to run a logistic regression over the concatenation of different similarity measures. Evaluating our model on the MovieQA plot data-set we obtain 79.76% accuracy, outperforming prior state-of-the-art results