107 research outputs found
Linguistics
Contains research objectives and reports on three research projects.National Institute of Mental Health (Grant 5 P01 MH-13390-05)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 TO1 HD-00111-07
Organizational Chart Inference
Nowadays, to facilitate the communication and cooperation among employees, a
new family of online social networks has been adopted in many companies, which
are called the "enterprise social networks" (ESNs). ESNs can provide employees
with various professional services to help them deal with daily work issues.
Meanwhile, employees in companies are usually organized into different
hierarchies according to the relative ranks of their positions. The company
internal management structure can be outlined with the organizational chart
visually, which is normally confidential to the public out of the privacy and
security concerns. In this paper, we want to study the IOC (Inference of
Organizational Chart) problem to identify company internal organizational chart
based on the heterogeneous online ESN launched in it. IOC is very challenging
to address as, to guarantee smooth operations, the internal organizational
charts of companies need to meet certain structural requirements (about its
depth and width). To solve the IOC problem, a novel unsupervised method Create
(ChArT REcovEr) is proposed in this paper, which consists of 3 steps: (1)
social stratification of ESN users into different social classes, (2)
supervision link inference from managers to subordinates, and (3) consecutive
social classes matching to prune the redundant supervision links. Extensive
experiments conducted on real-world online ESN dataset demonstrate that Create
can perform very well in addressing the IOC problem.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. The paper is accepted by KDD 201
The equivalence of four extensions of context-free grammars
There is currently considerable interest among computational linguists in grammatical formalisms with highly restricted generative power. This paper concerns the relationship between the class of string languages generated by several such formalisms, namely, combinatory categorial grammars, head grammars, linear indexed grammars, and tree adjoining grammars. Each of these formalisms is known to generate a larger class of languages than context-free grammars. The four formalisms under consideration were developed independently and appear superficially to be quite different from one another. The result presented in this paper is that all four of the formalisms under consideration generate exactly the same class of string languages
Procedural control and the proper balance between public and private interests in defamation claims
Claims in defamation involve courts in balancing of a number of interests. The Claimant’s interest in their reputation must be balanced with the Defendant’s interest in free expression. The Court’s interest in fair, efficient and proportionate adjudication must be balanced against the Claimant’s interest in vindicating their reputation. Much of the literature examining this balance has focused on the substantive law. This article seeks to consider how these interests have been balanced through procedural control mechanisms, such as summary judgment and strike out. In particular, the development of the court’s ability to strike out a claim as an abuse of process is been considered. It is argued that the ability to strike out in such cases performs an important role, but should not be used to prevent reputational vindication where this is worthwhile. Further, it is argued that whilst substantive and procedural changes may reduce the need for strike out, the courts should not remove this important tool from their toolbox
Morbidity, outcomes and cost-benefit analysis of wildlife rehabilitation in Catalonia (Spain)
Background There are few studies of careful examination of wildlife casualties in Wildlife Rehabilitation Centers. These studies are essential for detecting menaces to wild species and providing objective criteria about cost-benefit of treatments in those centers. The release rate is considered the main outcome indicator, but other parameters such as length of stay at the center and a cost-benefit index expressed as number of released animals per euro and day, could be used as reliable estimators of the rehabilitation costs. Methodology A retrospective study based on 54772 admissions recorded from 1995-2013 in the database of the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Torreferrussa (Catalonia, NW Spain) assessed the morbidity, outcomes and cost-benefits of the rehabilitation practices. Results Three hundred and two species were included: 232 birds (n = 48633), 37 mammals (n = 3293), 20 reptiles (n = 2705) and 13 amphibians (n = 141). The most frequent causes of admission were: 39.8% confiscation of protected species (89.4% passerines), 31.8% orphaned young animals (35.3% swifts, 21.7% diurnal raptors and owls) and 17.4% trauma casualties (46.7% raptors and owls). The highest proportion of releases was found in the captivity confiscation category [87.4% passerines (median time of stay: 12 days)], followed by the orphaned category [78% owls (66 days), 76.5% diurnal birds of prey (43 days), 75.6% hedgehogs (49 days), 52.7% swifts (19 days) and 52% bats (55 days)]. For the trauma group, 46.8% of releases were hedgehogs (44 days) and 25.6% owls (103 days). As regards the cost-benefit index, the trauma casualties and infectious diseases had the worse values with 1.3 and 1.4 released animals/euro/day respectively, and were particularly low in raptors, waders, marine birds and chiroptera. On the contrary, captivity (4.6) and misplacement (4.1) had the best index, particulary in amphibian, reptiles and passerines. Conclusions/significance Cost-benefit studies including the release rate, the time of stay at the center and the costbenefit index should be implemented for improving management efficiency of the Wildlife Rehabilitation Centers
When Learners Surpass Their Models: Mathematical Modeling of Learning from an Inconsistent Source
It has been reported in the literature that both adults and children can, to a different degree, modify and regularize the often-inconsistent linguistic input they receive. We present a new algorithm to model and investigate the learning process of a learner mastering a set of (grammatical or lexical) forms from an inconsistent source. The algorithm is related to reinforcement learning and drift-diffusion models of decision making, and possesses several psychologically relevant properties such as fidelity, robustness, discounting, and computational simplicity. It demonstrates how a learner can successfully learn from or even surpass its imperfect source. We use the data collected by Singleton and Newport (Cognit Psychol 49(4):370-407, 2004) on the performance of a 7-year-boy Simon, who mastered the American Sign Language (ASL) by learning it from his parents, both of whom were imperfect speakers of ASL. We show that the algorithm possesses a frequency boosting property, whereby the frequency of the most common form of the source is increased by the learner. We also explain several key features of Simon's ASL. © 2014 Society for Mathematical Biology
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