1 Boolean retrieval 1 2 The term vocabulary and postings lists 19 3 Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval 49 4 Index construction 67 5 Index compression 85 6 Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model 109 7 Computing scores in a complete search system 135 8 Evaluation in information retrieval 151 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion 177 10 XML retrieval 195 11 Probabilistic information retrieval 219 12 Language models for information retrieval 237 13 Text classification and Naive Bayes 253 (...) 14 Vector space classification 289 15 Support vector machines and machine learning on documents 319 16 Flat clustering 349 17 Hierarchical clustering 377 18 Matrix decompositions and latent semantic indexing 403 19 Web search basics 421 20 Web crawling and indexes 443 21 Link analysis 461.. (shrink)

Originally published in 1972, Should Trees Have Standing? was a rallying point for the then burgeoning environmental movement, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, in the 35th anniversary edition of this remarkably influential book, Christopher D. Stone updates his original thesis and explores the impact his ideas have had on the courts, the academy, and society as a whole. At the heart of the book is an eminently (...) sensible, legally sound, and compelling argument that the environment should be granted legal rights. For the new edition, Stone explores a variety of recent cases and current events--and related topics such as climate change and protecting the oceans--providing a thoughtful survey of the past and an insightful glimpse at the future of the environmental movement. This enduring work continues to serve as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights, so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations. (shrink)

This paper presents the first use of a computational model of natural logic—a system of logical inference which operates over natural language—for textual inference. Most current approaches to the PAS- CAL RTE textual inference task achieve robustness by sacrificing semantic precision; while broadly effective, they are easily confounded by ubiquitous inferences involving monotonicity. At the other extreme, systems which rely on first-order logic and theorem proving are precise, but excessively brittle. This work aims at a middle way. Our system finds (...) a low-cost edit sequence which transforms the premise into the hypothesis; learns to classify entailment relations across atomic edits; and composes atomic entailments into a top-level entailment judgment. We provide the first reported results for any system on the FraCaS test suite. We also evaluate on RTE3 data, and show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant performance gains. (shrink)

We have only limited awareness of the system by which we control our actions and this limited awareness does not seem to be concerned with the control of action. Awareness of choosing one action rather than another comes after the choice has been made, while awareness of initiating an action occurs before the movement has begun. These temporal differences bind together in consciousness the intention to act and the consequences of the action. This creates our sense of agency. Activity in (...) the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex is associated with awareness of our own actions and also occurs when we think about the actions of others. I propose that the mechanism underlying awareness of how our own intentions lead to actions can also be used to represent the intentions that underlie the actions of others. This common system enables us to communicate mental states and thereby share our experiences. (shrink)

I wish to present a codi cation of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages and argue for the correctness of one particular approach, which I will call the Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis.1 I presume familiarity with the term `ergativity', but, brie y, many languages have ergative case marking, such as Burushaski in (1), in contrast to the accusative case marking of Latin in (2). More generally, if we follow Dixon (1979) and use A to mark the agent-like argument of (...) a transitive verb, O to mark the patient-like argument of a transitive verb, and S to mark the single argument of an intransitive verb, then we can call ergative any subsystem of a language that groups S and O in contrast to A, as shown in (3). (shrink)

We propose a model of natural language inference which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We extend past work in natural logic, which has focused on semantic containment and monotonicity, by incorporating both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our model decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical semantic relation for each edit; propagates these relations upward through a semantic composition tree according to properties of (...) intermediate nodes; and joins the resulting semantic relations across the edit sequence. A computational implementation of the model achieves 70% accuracy and 89% precision on the FraCaS test suite. Moreover, including this model as a component in an existing system yields significant performance gains on the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenge. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new architecture for textual inference in which finding a good alignment is separated from evaluating entailment. Current approaches to semantic inference in question answering and textual entailment have approximated the entailment problem as that of computing the best alignment of the hypothesis to the text, using a locally decomposable matching score. While this formulation is adequate for representing local (word-level) phenomena such as synonymy, it is incapable of representing global interactions, such as that between verb negation (...) and the addition/removal of qualifiers, which are often critical for determining entailment. We propose a pipelined approach where alignment is followed by a classification step, in which we extract features representing high-level characteristics of the entailment problem, and give the resulting feature vector to a statistical classifier trained on development data. (shrink)

We present a system for deciding whether a given sentence can be inferred from text. Each sentence is represented as a directed graph (extracted from a dependency parser) in which the nodes represent words or phrases, and the links represent syntactic and semantic relationships. We develop a learned graph matching model to approximate entailment by the amount of the sentence’s semantic content which is contained in the text. We present results on the Recognizing Textual Entailment dataset (Dagan et al., 2005), (...) and show that our approach outperforms Bag- Of-Words and TF-IDF models. (shrink)

We propose an approach to natural language inference based on a model of natural logic, which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We greatly extend past work in natural logic, which has focused solely on semantic containment and monotonicity, to incorporate both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our system decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical entailment relation for each edit using a statistical classifier; (...) propagates these relations upward through a syntax tree according to semantic properties of intermediate nodes; and composes the resulting entailment relations across the edit sequence. We evaluate our system on the FraCaS test suite, and achieve a 27% reduction in error from previous work. We also show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant gains on the RTE3 test suite. (shrink)

In this book, Christopher D. Rodkey asks how the brain worships and responds by engaging ideas from neurological science, philosophy, ritual theory, and religious education. The Synaptic Gospel will prove to be a useful theoretical tool for pastors, religious educators, youth ministers, church music professionals, and seminary students.

gloria evangelina anzaldúa has been hailed as one of most important cultural theorists of the past fifty years. Her work, especially her groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, continues to animate many contemporary discourses, especially those concerned with cultural and linguistic hybridity, intersectionality, and women of color feminism. Yet one may ask: What is Anzaldúa's distinctive contribution to contemporary discourses of spirituality and religion? In a 1993 interview, Anzaldúa herself lays bare the relative inattention that critics have given to her (...) understanding of spirituality: One of the things that doesn't get talked about is the connection between body... (shrink)

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, (...) where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

MutL family proteins contain an N‐terminal ATPase domain (NTD), an unstructured interdomain linker, and a C‐terminal domain (CTD), which mediates constitutive dimerization between subunits and often contains an endonuclease active site. Most MutL homologs direct strand‐specific DNA mismatch repair by cleaving the error‐containing daughter DNA strand. The strand cleavage reaction is poorly understood; however, the structure of the endonuclease active site is consistent with a two‐ or three‐metal ion cleavage mechanism. A motif required for this endonuclease activity is present in (...) the unstructured linker of Mlh1 and is conserved in all eukaryotic Mlh1 proteins, except those from metamonads, which also lack the almost absolutely conserved Mlh1 C‐terminal phenylalanine‐glutamate‐arginine‐cysteine (FERC) sequence. We hypothesize that the cysteine in the FERC sequence is autoinhibitory, as it sequesters the active site. We further hypothesize that the evolutionary co‐occurrence of the conserved linker motif with the FERC sequence indicates a functional interaction, possibly by linker motif‐mediated displacement of the inhibitory cysteine. This role is consistent with available data for interactions between the linker motif with DNA and the CTDs in the vicinity of the active site. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between epistemic and metaphysical problems of arbitrariness for vagueness. It argues that epistemicism can resolve the epistemic problem of arbitrariness but not the metaphysical one.

Environmental ethics has reached a certain level of maturity; further significant advances require reexamining its status within the larger realm of moral philosophy. It could aim to extend to nonhumans one of the familiar sets of principles subject to appropriate modifications; or it could seek to break away and put forward its own paradigm or paradigms. Selecting the proper course requires as the most immediate mission exploring the formal requirements of an ethical system. In general, are there constraints against bringing (...) our moral relations with different sorts of things under different mIes of govemance? In particular, how much independence can an environmental ethic (or ethics) aim to have? (shrink)

Between Sickness and Health is about illness rather than disease, and recovery rather than cure. The book argues that illness is an experience, represented by the feeling that 'I am not myself'. From the book's phenomenological point of view, feelings of illness cannot be 'unreal' or 'fake', whatever their biological basis, nor need they be categorised as 'physical', 'psychosomatic' or 'psychiatric'. The book challenges the disease-centred ethos of medicine and medical education. It demonstrates that a clearer conception of illness, as (...) distinct from disease, is therapeutic. The feeling that 'I am once again myself' can return, in some degree, whatever state the body is in. Resilience becomes more available when it is seen as a set of personal skills that can be developed, rather than as an inborn trait. Possibilities of wellness are enhanced by recognising that medical and other therapies can either support or impede recovery, as can human relationships and the socio-political environment. The book's many clinical examples are drawn from the author's broad experience as a neurologist, rehabilitation physician and systemic family therapist. Between Sickness and Health will be useful for students, practitioners and academics, and also for anyone who has been or might one day be ill. (shrink)

Increasingly, voices in the growing neurodiversity movement are alleging that individuals who are neurologically divergent, such as those with conditions related to bipolar disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and depression, must struggle for their civil rights. This movement therefore raises questions of interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to concerned members of the general public. These questions have to do with such matters as the accessibility of knowledge about mental health; autonomy and community within the realm (...) of the mentally ill; and accommodation in civil society and its institutions. The contributors to Ethics and Neurodiversity explore these questions, and the traditional philosophical questions related to them. The authors pay special attention to the need to examine the policies and practices of institutions, such as higher education, social support, and healthcare. (shrink)

In the early years of the twentieth century, the so-called ‘postulate analysis’—the study of systems of axioms for mathematical objects for their own sake—was regarded by some as a vital part of the efforts to understand those objects. I consider the place of postulate analysis within early twentieth-century mathematics by focusing on the example of a group: I outline the axiomatic studies to which groups were subjected at this time and consider the changing attitudes towards such investigations.

This book argues that the othering and criminalization of Black people in times of crisis is part of the religious meaning of America that fuels the problem of mass incarceration. The author develops a religious interpretation of the significance of these images to America’s political economy the produces the very problems we punish as a society.

I examine what would be necessary to move part-of-speech tagging performance from its current level of about 97.3% token accuracy (56% sentence accuracy) to close to 100% accuracy. I suggest that it must still be possible to greatly increase tagging performance and examine some useful improvements that have recently been made to the Stanford Part-of-Speech Tagger. However, an error analysis of some of the remaining errors suggests that there is limited further mileage to be had either from better machine learning (...) or better features in a discriminative sequence classifier. The prospects for further gains from semisupervised learning also seem quite limited. Rather, I suggest and begin to demonstrate that the largest opportunity for further progress comes from improving the taxonomic basis of the linguistic resources from which taggers are trained. That is, from improved descriptive linguistics. However, I conclude by suggesting that there are also limits to this process. The status of some words may not be able to be adequately captured by assigning them to one of a small number of categories. While conventions can be used in such cases to improve tagging consistency, they lack a strong linguistic basis. (shrink)

The correct locus (or loci) of binding theory has been a matter of much discussion. Theories can be seen as varying along at least two dimensions. The rst is whether binding theory is con gurationally determined (that is, the theory exploits the geometry of a phrase marker, appealing to such purely structural notions as c-command and government) or whether the theory depends rather on examining the relations between items selected by a predicate (where by selection I am intending to cover (...) everything from semantic dependencies to syntactic subcategorization). The second is the level of grammar on which binding is de ned. Attempting to roughly equate levels across di erent theories, suggestions have included the semantics/lexical conceptual structure (Jackendo 1992), thematic structure (Jackendo 1972, Wilkins 1988), argument structure/D-structure/initial grammatical relations (Manning 1994, Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Perlmutter 1984), surface syntax/grammatical relations, logical form, linear order, pragmatics (Levinson 1991), and discourse (Iida 1992). The data is su ciently varied and complex that many theories end up as mixtures, variously employing a combination of elements along both dimensions (for instance, Chomsky (1986) relies purely on con gurational notions for the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent, but uses concepts from selection in the de nition of the binding domain of an anaphor). LFG has always rejected a con gurational account of binding. For instancError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMape, Simpson (1991) argues that a con gurational theory of binding in Warlpiri cannot be maintained, among other reasons because nite clauses lack a VP.. (shrink)

Discriminative feature-based methods are widely used in natural language processing, but sentence parsing is still dominated by generative methods. While prior feature-based dynamic programming parsers have restricted training and evaluation to artificially short sentences, we present the first general, featurerich discriminative parser, based on a conditional random field model, which has been successfully scaled to the full WSJ parsing data. Our efficiency is primarily due to the use of stochastic optimization techniques, as well as parallelization and chart prefiltering. On WSJ15, (...) we attain a state-of-the-art F-score of 90.9%, a 14% relative reduction in error over previous models, while being two orders of magnitude faster. On sentences of length 40, our system achieves an F-score of 89.0%, a 36% relative reduction in error over a generative baseline. (shrink)

Grammatical theory has long wrestled with the fact that causative constructions exhibit properties of both single words and complex phrases. However, as Paul Kiparsky has observed, the distribution of such properties of causatives is not arbitrary: ‘construal’ phenomena such as honorification, anaphor and pronominal binding, and quantifier ‘floating’ typically behave as they would if causatives were syntactically complex, embedding constructions; whereas case marking, agreement and word order phenomena all point to the analysis of causatives as single lexical items.1 Although an (...) analysis of causatives in terms of complex syntactic structures has frequently been adopted in an attempt to simplify the mapping to semantic structure, we believe that motivating syntactic structure based on perceived semantics is questionable because in general a syntax/semantics homomorphism cannot be maintained without vitiating syntactic theory (Miller 1991). Instead, we sketch a strictly lexical theory of Japanese causatives that deals with the evidence offered for a complex phrasal analysis. Such an analysis makes the phonology, morphology and syntax parallel, while a mismatch occurs with the semantics. The conclusions we will reach are given in (1). (shrink)

Antti Revonsuo has given us an engaging and deliberately provocative paper discussing the value of brain imaging in the search for the neural basis of consciousness. In some places, however, his enthusiasm for the controversial nature of the topic has led him to overstate or misdirect his case.

Many named entities contain other named entities inside them. Despite this fact, the field of named entity recognition has almost entirely ignored nested named entity recognition, but due to technological, rather than ideological reasons. In this paper, we present a new technique for recognizing nested named entities, by using a discriminative constituency parser. To train the model, we transform each sentence into a tree, with constituents for each named entity (and no other syntactic structure). We present results on both newspaper (...) and biomedical corpora which contain nested named entities. In three out of four sets of experiments, our model outperforms a standard semi-CRF on the more traditional top-level entities. At the same time, we improve the overall F-score by up to 30% over the flat model, which is unable to recover any nested entities. (shrink)

This paper examines the Stanford typed dependencies representation, which was designed to provide a straightforward description of grammatical relations for any user who could benefit from automatic text understanding. For such purposes, we argue that dependency schemes must follow a simple design and provide semantically contentful information, as well as offer an automatic procedure to extract the relations. We consider the underlying design principles of the Stanford scheme from this perspective, and compare it to the GR and PARC representations. Finally, (...) we address the question of the suitability of the Stanford scheme for parser evaluation. (shrink)

Many factors are thought to increase the chances of misrecognizing a word in ASR, including low frequency, nearby disfluencies, short duration, and being at the start of a turn. However, few of these factors have been formally examined. This paper analyzes a variety of lexical, prosodic, and disfluency factors to determine which are likely to increase ASR error rates. Findings include the following. (1) For disfluencies, effects depend on the type of disfluency: errors increase by up to 15% (absolute) for (...) words near fragments, but decrease by up to 7.2% (absolute) for words near repetitions. This decrease seems to be due to longer word duration. (2) For prosodic features, there are more errors for words with extreme values than words with typical values. (3) Although our results are based on output from a system with speaker adaptation, speaker differences are a major factor influencing error rates, and the effects of features such as frequency, pitch, and intensity may vary between speakers. (shrink)

Recent criticism has already shown that the notoriously unanswered plot questions of The Big Sleep elicit serious philosophical issues, including skepticism about the validity of interpretation itself. The film allegorizes the reason for this questioning in what Derrida calls the "blackmail" of photography--its coercive claim to represent objective truth. Blackmail arising from photography is the main plot premise of The Big Sleep, but it serves as a figure for the "postal" world of signs divorced from referents, finally epitomized in thel (...) groundlessness of Marlowe's logic and final conclusions. Parallels are drawn between this Derridean world and Adorno's writings, in the light of Derrida's acknowledgement of their affinity. The phrase "big sleep" is gangster-slang for death, but this essay argues that it also refers to life, understood in the Buddhist sense of the human illusion of a waking or enlightened life. (shrink)

Christopher Frith is a research professor at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College, London. He explores, experimentally, using the techniques of functional brain imaging, the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. His research focuses on questions pertaining to perception, attention, control of action, free will, and awareness of our own mental states and those of others. As the following discussion makes clear, Frith investigates brain systems involved in the choice of (...) one action over another and in the understanding of other people. Such investigations are aimed at understanding brain basis of autism and schizophrenia. In his widely cited study of schizophrenia, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia , Frith argues that many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions of control, auditory hallucinations, and thought insertion, involve problems of self-monitoring. Patients, in effect, lose track of their own intentions and mistakenly attribute agency for their own actions to someone else. Frith employs models of motor control, involving comparator mechanisms and efference copy, not only to explain delusions that involve movement, but also to develop a neurocognitive explanation of delusional cognition. (shrink)

This paper shows that a simple two-stage approach to handle non-local dependencies in Named Entity Recognition (NER) can outperform existing approaches that handle non-local dependencies, while being much more computationally efficient. NER systems typically use sequence models for tractable inference, but this makes them unable to capture the long distance structure present in text. We use a Conbel.

Eastern Orthodox accounts of acedia are often neglected in Catholic and Protestant circles, yet offer a range of insights for contemporary virtue ethics and moral psychology. Acedia is a complex concept with shades of apathy, hate, and desire that poses grave problems for the moral life and human wellbeing. This is because acedia disorders reasoning, desiring, willing, and acting, and causes various harms to relationships. Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian discuss acedia in the context of a virtue ethic ordered to (...) human flourishing that includes practices to combat vices and build character. The result is an Orthodox conception of virtue and moral psychology that rewards ecumenical attention. (shrink)