Provably robust decisions based on potentially malicious sources of information

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

MELODI : Semantic Similarity of Words and Compositional Phrases using Latent Vector Weighting

International audienceIn this paper we present our system for the SemEval 2013 Task 5a on semantic similar- ity of words and compositional phrases. Our system uses a dependency-based vector space model, in combination with a technique called latent vector weighting. The system computes the similarity between a particular noun in- stance and the head noun of a particular noun phrase, which was weighted according to the semantics of the modifier. The system is en- tirely unsupervised; one single parameter, the similarity threshold, was tuned using the train- ing data

MELODI : A Supervised Distributional Approach for Free Paraphrasing of Noun Compounds

National audienceThis paper describes the system submitted by the MELODI team for the SemEval-2013 Task 4 : Free Paraphrases of Noun Compounds (Hendrickx et al., 2013). Our approach combines the strength of an unsupervised distributional word space model with a supervised maximum-entropy classification model; the distributional model yields a feature representation for a particular compound noun, which is subsequently used by the classifier to induce a number of appropriate paraphrases

A Comparison of the Learning Styles of Aviation and Non-Aviation College Students

In contrast to established educational fields such as mathematics, the discipline of aviation education is relatively young. Despite strong signs that our discipline is maturing (Brady 1991), it is not clear as to the extent to which a larger body of instructional theory can be applied specifically to aviation instruction (Telfer 1993, p. 210) or the broader field of aviation education. A starting point in unraveling this complex question is to better understand the characteristics of aviation students. In recent years a limited number of researchers have begun to address this and related questions (Moore and Telfer 1990; Quilty 1996; Green 1998; and Kanske 2001). In the current study, we seek to relate the learning characteristics of the student in aviation education to the well-established concepts of andragogy and pedagogy. Knowles (1977a) defined pedagogy as the art and science of teaching children, and gives an historical account (Knowles 1977b) of the origins of this mode of educational practice in 7th century European monasteries for the purpose of rapidly training a cadre of young workers to copy teachings from decaying scrolls. This is notable because through subsequent centuries this teaching model has been applied to ever broader and more complex learning situations. Current literature suggests that the traditional lecture format for college classes is not always effective with today\u27s students when used as the sole means for transmitting information (e.g., Campbell 1997). Traditional lecture formats follow the pedagogical teaching model in that they are teacher-centered, and not necessarily influenced by the needs or interests of the students

Discourse-Based Evaluation of Language Understanding

We introduce DiscEval, a compilation of $11$ evaluation datasets with a focus on discourse, that can be used for evaluation of English Natural Language Understanding when considering meaning as use. We make the case that evaluation with discourse tasks is overlooked and that Natural Language Inference (NLI) pretraining may not lead to the learning really universal representations. DiscEval can also be used as supplementary training data for multi-task learning-based systems, and is publicly available, alongside the code for gathering and preprocessing the datasets

Esperance land resource survey

The climate, geology, landforms, soils, native vegetation and land uses of the Esperance agricultural district of Western Australia are described, while the soil landscapes of the survey area of about 336,000 ha, covered by the Esperance and Merivale 1:100,000 topographic map sheets, are described in detail. The survey area represents most of the features and problems of the district, especially those of the Esperance sandplain for more resource information. An appropriate mapping scale was chosen from a preliminary survey of five farms on the Esperance sandplain. The study identifies five major land systems which are divided into map units on the basis of soils and landforms. Other landscape features such as swamps, drainage lines and salt-affected areas are also mapped. The land uses; improved annual pastures (clover and medics), perennial grasses, cereal crops, lupins, perennial legume pastures (lucerne, tagasaste) and pine trees for wind-breaks and/or agroforestry are common or proposed for appropriate situations in the Esperance district. Land qualities important for plant growth, farm management and for soil conservation requirements are identified for each of seven land uses. Data on rainfall zones and climatic hazards were added to the resource information to more closely align the capability ratings with production potential. All the map units identified are classified for the above five-class capability classification. We believe results of the survey will be of value to landholders and agricultural advisers in farm and regional planning

Expressiveness modulo bisimilarity of regular expressions with parallel composition

The languages accepted by finite automata are precisely the languages denoted by regular expressions. In contrast, finite automata may exhibit behaviours that cannot be described by regular expressions up to bisimilarity. In this paper, we consider extensions of the theory of regular expressions with various forms of parallel composition and study the effect on expressiveness. First we prove that adding pure interleaving to the theory of regular expressions strictly increases its expressiveness modulo bisimilarity. Then, we prove that replacing the operation for pure interleaving by ACP-style parallel composition gives a further increase in expressiveness, still insufficient, however, to facilitate the expression of all finite automata up to bisimilarity. Finally, we prove that the theory of regular expressions with ACP-style parallel composition and encapsulation is expressive enough to express all finite automata up to bisimilarity. Our results extend the expressiveness results obtained by Bergstra, Bethke and Ponse for process algebras with (the binary variant of) Kleene’s star operation

Simulating the Impact of Personality on Fake News

Fake news is a key issue for social networks. We use an agent-based network simulation to model the spread of (fake) news. The agents' behaviour captures the OCEAN ("big five") personality trait model. The network is homophilic for political preference, analytical thinking and emotion. We studied the system with personality traits and homophily each turned on/off. Personality traits and homophily exhibited a statistically significant but typically minimal impact. Ignoring personality traits when modelling fact-checking can overestimate its effectiveness

An introduction to the soils of the Esperance advisory district

With descriptions, illustrations and notes on seven common soils.https://researchlibrary.agric.wa.gov.au/bulletins/1025/thumbnail.jp