Automatic Taxonomy Generation - A Use-Case in the Legal Domain

A key challenge in the legal domain is the adaptation and representation of the legal knowledge expressed through texts, in order for legal practitioners and researchers to access this information easier and faster to help with compliance related issues. One way to approach this goal is in the form of a taxonomy of legal concepts. While this task usually requires a manual construction of terms and their relations by domain experts, this paper describes a methodology to automatically generate a taxonomy of legal noun concepts. We apply and compare two approaches on a corpus consisting of statutory instruments for UK, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland laws.Comment: 9 page

Performance Management in Portfolio School Districts

Explores the challenges of performance-based oversight of portfolio districts -- districts trying to provide diverse types of schools with common standards and accountability -- and the capacities needed. Includes profiles and best practices

Excluded minors in cubic graphs

Let G be a cubic graph, with girth at least five, such that for every partition X,Y of its vertex set with |X|,|Y|>6 there are at least six edges between X and Y. We prove that if there is no homeomorphic embedding of the Petersen graph in G, and G is not one particular 20-vertex graph, then either G\v is planar for some vertex v, or G can be drawn with crossings in the plane, but with only two crossings, both on the infinite region. We also prove several other theorems of the same kind.Comment: 62 pages, 17 figure

Pruned Continuous Haar Transform of 2D Polygonal Patterns with Application to VLSI Layouts

We introduce an algorithm for the efficient computation of the continuous Haar transform of 2D patterns that can be described by polygons. These patterns are ubiquitous in VLSI processes where they are used to describe design and mask layouts. There, speed is of paramount importance due to the magnitude of the problems to be solved and hence very fast algorithms are needed. We show that by techniques borrowed from computational geometry we are not only able to compute the continuous Haar transform directly, but also to do it quickly. This is achieved by massively pruning the transform tree and thus dramatically decreasing the computational load when the number of vertices is small, as is the case for VLSI layouts. We call this new algorithm the pruned continuous Haar transform. We implement this algorithm and show that for patterns found in VLSI layouts the proposed algorithm was in the worst case as fast as its discrete counterpart and up to 12 times faster.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, 1 algorith

Regulation and the Provision of Quality to Heterogenous Consumers: The Case of Prospective Pricing of Medical Services

This gaper analyzes the welfare implications of fixed price regulation in a model in which consumers are heterogeneous and a firm can endogenously quality discriminate. The motivation for this analysis is the current move of third party payors (governmental and private insurors) toward prospective pricing of medical services. Our major result is that prospective pricing causes a distributional welfare loss. Specifically, in our model, prospective pricing induces a profit maximizing medical care provider to simultaneously provide a smaller than socially optimal level of quality to more severely ill patients and, surprisingly, a greater than socially optimal amount of quality to less severely ill patients. Further, the distributional welfare loss does not disappear when ethically motivated deviation from profit maximization is allowed. The inefficient distribution of quality occurs because prospective payment regulation fixes the price across patients with different severities of illness but allows providers to quality discriminate. More complicated DRG pricing rules do not appear to be able to completely avoid this problem. Alternatively, vertical integration of third party payors into the direct provision of medical care is shown to be able to bypass the problem completely. This implies that the recent proliferation of vertically integrated health care organizations such health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations, and managed care plans by self-insuring employers are welfare improving.

The Explicit Economics of Knowledge Codification and Tacitness

not availableeconomics of technology ;