Intent to Contract

There is a remarkable difference between black-letter contract laws of the United States and England. In England, the existence of a contract is supposedly conditioned on the parties\u27 intent to be legally bound, while section 21 of the Second Restatement of Contracts states that [n]either real nor apparent intention that a promise be legally binding is essential to the formation of a contract. There are also differences within U.S. law on the issue. While section 21 describes courts\u27 approach to most contracts, the parties\u27 intent to contact can be a condition of validity of preliminary agreements, domestic agreements and social arrangements, reporters’ promises of confidentiality to sources, and gratuitous promises. This Article develops an analytic framework for evaluating these rules and examines their relationship to the broader principles that animate contract law. Rules that condition contractual liability on proof of contractual intent must include rules for interpreting that intent. Those interpretive rules will include both interpretive defaults and rules for what it takes to opt-out of the default. By adjusting these default and opt-out rules, the law can achieve different balances between the duty-imposing and power-conferring functions of contract law, or among the various reasons for enforcement. This is demonstrated by an analysis of the rules for gratuitous promises, preliminary agreements, spousal agreements and reporters\u27 confidentiality promises. The results of that analysis include a new argument for the Model Written Obligations Act; a critique of Alan Schwartz and Robert Scott\u27s proposal preliminary agreements and a recommended alternative to it; and recommended changes to the rules for agreements between spouses. Attention to intent to contract requirements also indicates an overlooked aspect of how the enforcement of contracts affects extralegal norms and relationships of trust. Interpretive rules that require parties who want, or who do not want, legal liability expressly to say so are particularly likely to interfere with or erode extralegal forms trust that otherwise create value in transactions

Spoken Language Intent Detection using Confusion2Vec

Decoding speaker's intent is a crucial part of spoken language understanding (SLU). The presence of noise or errors in the text transcriptions, in real life scenarios make the task more challenging. In this paper, we address the spoken language intent detection under noisy conditions imposed by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We propose to employ confusion2vec word feature representation to compensate for the errors made by ASR and to increase the robustness of the SLU system. The confusion2vec, motivated from human speech production and perception, models acoustic relationships between words in addition to the semantic and syntactic relations of words in human language. We hypothesize that ASR often makes errors relating to acoustically similar words, and the confusion2vec with inherent model of acoustic relationships between words is able to compensate for the errors. We demonstrate through experiments on the ATIS benchmark dataset, the robustness of the proposed model to achieve state-of-the-art results under noisy ASR conditions. Our system reduces classification error rate (CER) by 20.84% and improves robustness by 37.48% (lower CER degradation) relative to the previous state-of-the-art going from clean to noisy transcripts. Improvements are also demonstrated when training the intent detection models on noisy transcripts

Oblique intent, foresight and authorisation

In R v Jogee, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (UKSC) abolished a contentious doctrine of criminal law which allowed accomplices to a crime A to be convicted of another’s crime B on the basis that they foresaw commission of the latter in the course of the former. The Court held that nothing short of an intention to assist or encourage crime B would suffice to fix the accomplice with criminal liability. At common law intention has traditionally been understood to entail acts and consequences that were either achieved with purpose (direct intent) or foreseen as virtually certain to follow one’s chosen course of conduct (oblique intent). This paper argues that Jogee constitutes a first step away from a conception that measures ‘guilty minds’ in degrees of foresight: by associating the accessory’s intent to assist or encourage the perpetrator’s crime with ‘authorisation’, Jogee seems to support the view that intention in the legal sense depends ultimately on whether the accused had endorsed the consequences of his and the perpetrator’s actions

Adapting to the Shifting Intent of Search Queries

Search engines today present results that are often oblivious to abrupt shifts in intent. For example, the query `independence day' usually refers to a US holiday, but the intent of this query abruptly changed during the release of a major film by that name. While no studies exactly quantify the magnitude of intent-shifting traffic, studies suggest that news events, seasonal topics, pop culture, etc account for 50% of all search queries. This paper shows that the signals a search engine receives can be used to both determine that a shift in intent has happened, as well as find a result that is now more relevant. We present a meta-algorithm that marries a classifier with a bandit algorithm to achieve regret that depends logarithmically on the number of query impressions, under certain assumptions. We provide strong evidence that this regret is close to the best achievable. Finally, via a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms prior approaches, particularly as the amount of intent-shifting traffic increases.Comment: This is the full version of the paper in NIPS'0

The Gibson Girl: a reflection on kite flying

This article examines, via a self-reflective analysis, a period of practice-based research started during residency at the Nordic Artists Centre, Dale in 2012, culminating in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Jamais Vu, London in 2013. Titled Rescue Kite, the exhibited artworks explored the relationship between play and structure; with particular focus on the use of 'play' in post-war culture and post-structural collapse. This textual analysis suggests a re-invigoration of play in art production through exploring the work of Joseph Beuys, the 'Gibson Girl' radio transmitter, instruction-based art of the 1970s and Mary Flanagan's notion of 'critical play'