A variety of legal documents are increasingly being made available in electronic format. Automatic Information Search and Retrieval algorithms play a key role in enabling efficient access to such digitized documents. Although keyword-based search is the traditional method used for text retrieval, they perform poorly when literal term matching is done for query processing, due to synonymy and ambivalence of words. To overcome these drawbacks, an ontological framework to enhance the user’s query for retrieval of truly relevant legal judgments has (...) been proposed in this paper. Ontologies ensure efficient retrieval by enabling inferences based on domain knowledge, which is gathered during the construction of the knowledge base. Empirical results demonstrate that ontology-based searches generate significantly better results than traditional search methods. (shrink)

Legal judgments are complex in nature and hence a brief summary of the judgment, known as a headnote , is generated by experts to enable quick perusal. Headnote generation is a time consuming process and there have been attempts made at automating the process. The difficulty in interpreting such automatically generated summaries is that they are not coherent and do not convey the relative relevance of the various components of the judgment. A legal judgment can be segmented into coherent chunks (...) based on the rhetorical roles played by the sentences. In this paper, a comprehensive system is proposed for labeling sentences with their rhetorical roles and extracting structured head notes automatically from legal judgments. An annotated data set was created with the help of legal experts and used as training data. A machine learning technique, Conditional Random Field, is applied to perform document segmentation by identifying the rhetorical roles. The present work also describes the application of probabilistic models for the extraction of key sentences and composing the relevant chunks in the form of a headnote. The understanding of basic structures and distinct segments is shown to improve the final presentation of the summary. Moreover, by adding simple additional features the system can be extended to other legal sub-domains. The proposed system has been empirically evaluated and found to be highly effective on both the segmentation and summarization tasks. The final summary generated with underlying rhetorical roles improves the readability and efficiency of the system. (shrink)

The notion of ‘rhetorical bodies’ argues the cause of the rhetorical elements in the material and the material elements in the rhetorical in ways that can be seen as analogous to the bi-partite modes of Deleuzian film philosophy, ‘movement-image’ and ‘time-image’. Tamil films of the 1940s and 1950s bear the strong imprints of the rhetorical elements of the Self-Respect Movement and Dravidian Movement, which took root in different versions during the 1920s–60s. The narrative locations of the bodies in the Tamil (...) films of the 1940s and 1950s provide interesting theoretical and analytical challenges if one seeks to combine the Deleuzian notions of ‘movement-image’ with the notions of material rhetorics. The coming together of these notions provides new pointers to the understanding of an important phase in the history of Tamil cinema for its implications on the long-running nexus between politics and films in the state of Tamil Nadu. The Deleuzian trajectory in film philosophy provides more than enough pointers to examine early Tamil cinema's attempts to construct ‘movement-images’ through rhetorical bodies. This paper seeks to examine the contexts of ‘movement-images’ and the role of ‘rhetorical bodies’ in constructing the same in Velaikari, scripted by C. N. Annadurai. Popularly known as Aringnar Anna, C. N. Annadurai was the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and the Founder of DMK, the party which unseated Congress from power in Tamil Nadu in 1967, and the state remains out of reach of the national parties ever since. (shrink)

This article featuring India constitutes one of five articles in a collection of essays on local capacity-building in research ethics by graduates from the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics MHSc in Bioethics, International Stream program funded by the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences. Research ethics is a growing area of work and interest in India. Ethics review remains the weakest component in the mechanism of good clinical practice, and there is a severe dearth (...) of professionals trained in ethics who can provide leadership. Although the Indian Good Clinical Practice Guidelines, the Indian Medical Council Act, and the Drugs and Cosmetics Act require that the Indian Council of Medical Research’s ethical guidelines be followed as a mandatory requirement for physicians who conduct research, there is a pervasive lack of awareness of basic requirements guiding the ethical conduct of research. There is a great need to strengthen India’s research ethics capacity and regulatory framework for research. (shrink)

Papers presented at a national seminar on Vedic texts and the knowledge systems of India, held at Kalady during 9-11 December 2009.

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms, with urban citizenry representing the armed power of the state. This book investigates how men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides, and how masculine identity was confirmed with blades and guns.

The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and methodological discussion, of such (...) questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history. (shrink)

I argue that Quine’s naturalization of Lewis’s Kantian pragmatism should be understood in terms of Lewis’s attempt to de-psychologize pragmatist epistemology. Lewis wants epistemology to be a priori in order to be distinct from psychology. Quine’s criticisms of Lewis result in a picture that weakens the distinction between epistemology and psychology. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalized Kantian pragmatism remains far more Kantian than is widely recognized, due to what Quine retains from Lewis.

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most important and influential thinkers in twentieth-century European philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all their major sole-authored and collaborative works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari's groundbreaking thought. Students and experts alike will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z (...) entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Deleuze and Guattari's writings and detailed synopses of their key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on their major philosophical influences and key contemporaries, from Aristotle to Foucault. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these seminal thinkers or Modern European Philosophy more generally. (shrink)

How do our brains make choices? How do factors such as Alzheimer's or depression impair decision-making? Presenting the latest research on 'hot' and 'cold' decision-making, Barbara Sahakian and Jamie Nicole LaBuzetta look at the therapeutic smart drugs now available, and raise concerns about their unregulated use to enhance mental performance.

v. 1. Philosophie. Rechtsphilosophie -- v. 2-4. Volkenrecht -- v. 5-6. Rechtsgeschiedenis. Burgerlijk recht. Procesrecht. Octrooirecht. Studie.

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary (‘folk’) concept (...) of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic (or ‘many ideas’) analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment. (shrink)

Cognitive theories of emotion propose that the interpretation of emotion-eliciting situations crucially shapes affective responses. Implicit or automatic biases in these interpretations may hinder emotion regulation and thereby increase risk for the onset and maintenance of psychological disorders. In this study, participants were randomly assigned to a positive or negative interpretation bias training using ambiguous social scenarios. After the completion of the training, a stress task was administered and changes in positive and negative affect and self-esteem were assessed. The results (...) demonstrate that the interpretation bias training was successful in that participants exhibited a tendency to interpret novel scenarios in accordance with their training condition. Importantly, the positive training condition also had a protective effect on self-esteem. Participants in this condition did not exhibit a decrease in self-esteem after the stress task, whereas participants in the negative condition did. These results demonstrate that implicit cognitive biases can be trained and that this training affects self-esteem. Implications of these findings for research on psychopathology and emotion regulation are discussed. (shrink)