Sensitivity of the chiral phase transition of QCD to the scalar meson sector

Gribov's theory of light quark confinement implies the existence of two kinds of scalar bound states. The phase diagram of the three-flavor QCD is mapped out in the (m_pi-m_K)-plane with help of the SU_L(3)xSU_R(3) linear sigma model supplemented with the assumption that the masses of the so-called superbound scalars do not change under the variation of the pion and kaon mass. The phase boundary along the m_pi=m_K line is found in the interval 15 MeV<m_crit<25 MeV, irrespective which f_0-sigma linear combination is identified with the pure superbound state.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, presented at the Gribov-75 Memorial Workshop on Quarks, Hadrons, and Strong Interactions, Budapest, Hungary, 22-24 May 200

A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Framework for Comments on the Social Web

Users' reviews, comments and votes on the Social Web form the modern version of word-of-mouth communication, which has a huge impact on people’s habits and businesses. Nonetheless, there are only few attempts to formally model and analyze them using Computational Models of Argument, which achieved a first significant step in bringing these two fields closer. In this paper, we attempt their further integration by formalizing standard features of the Social Web, such as commentary and social voting, and by proposing methods for the evaluation of the comments' quality and acceptance

REWARD : ontology for reward schemes

Rewarding people is common in several contexts, such as human resource management and crowdsourcing applications. However, designing a reward strategy is not straightforward, as it requires considering different parameters. These parameters include, for example, management of rewarding tasks and identifying critical features, such as the type of rewards and possibilities such as gamification. Moreover, the lack of a common terminology introduces the problem of communication among experts and prevents integration among different reward strategies. An ontology can offer a common understanding among domain experts and flexible management of rewarding parameters. Apart from that, an ontology can also help in the interrelationship and integration between different reward schemes employed by different service providers. In this paper, we present REWARD, a general-purpose ontology for capturing various common features of diverse reward schemes. This ontology is a result of the CAP-A European project and its application to the crowdsourcing domain, but it is designed to cover different needs and domains

Preliminary notions of arguments from commonsense knowledge

The field of Computational Argumentation is well-tailored to approach commonsense reasoning, due to its ability to model contradictory information. In this paper, we present preliminary work on how an argumentation framework can explicitly model commonsense knowledge, both at a logically structured and at an abstract level. We discuss the correlation with current research and present interesting future directions

Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments

Argumentative discourse rarely consists of opinions whose claims apply universally. As with logical statements, an argument applies to specific objects in the universe or relations among them, and may have exceptions. In this paper, we propose an argumentation formalism that allows associating arguments with a domain of application. Appropriate semantics are given, which formalise the notion of partial argument acceptance, i.e., the set of objects or relations that an argument can be applied to. We show that our proposal is in fact equivalent to the standard Argumentation Frameworks of Dung, but allows a more intuitive and compact expression of some core concepts of commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning, such as the scope of an argument, exceptions, relevance and others

A Multi Attack Argumentation Framework

This paper presents a novel abstract argumentation framework, called Multi-Attack Argumentation Framework (MAAF), which supports different types of attacks. The introduction of types gives rise to a new family of non-standard semantics which can support applications that classical approaches cannot, while also allowing classical semantics as a special case. The main novelty of the proposed semantics is the discrimination among two different roles that attacks play, namely an attack as a generator of conflicts, and an attack as a means to defend an argument. These two roles have traditionally been considered together in the argumentation literature. Allowing some attack types to serve one of those roles only, gives rise to the different semantics presented here

Methinks: Enabling Sophisticated Comment Management in the Social Web

User reviews, comments and votes on the Social Web form the modern version of word-of-mouth communication, which has a huge impact on people’s shopping habits, businesses and the overall market. Despite that, systems have so far limited practical success in helping consumers and businesses analysing, managing and understanding Social Web content. In this paper, we present a new tool that leverages a combination of techniques from Semantic Web, Computational Argumentation and Crowdsourcing to support this activity, through an intuitive and functional user interface

Spectral functions in the sigma-channel near the critical end point

Spectral functions in the $\sigma$-channel are investigated near the chiral critical end point (CEP), that is, the point where the chiral phase transition ceases to be first-ordered in the $(\mu,T)$-plane of the QCD phase diagram. At that point the $\sigma$ meson becomes massless in spite of explicit breaking of the chiral symmetry. It is expected that experimental signatures peculiar to CEP can be observed through spectral changes in the presence of abnormally light $\sigma$ mesons. As a candidate, the invariant-mass spectrum for diphoton emission is estimated with the chiral quark model incorporated. The results show the characteristic shape with a peak in the low energy region, which may serve as a signal for CEP. However, we find that the diphoton multiplicity is highly suppressed by infrared behaviors of the $\sigma$ meson. Experimentally, in such a low energy region below the threshold of two pions, photons from $\pi^0\to2\gamma$ are major sources of the background for the signal.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 1 figure replaced, minor modification