The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I offer a cautionary note regarding this conclusion. I demonstrate that even on those issues for which the preferences of the wealthy and those in the middle diverge, policy ...

Empirical studies of the connection between citizen preferences and legislator actions have largely focused on the preferences of a district’s average or median voter. While many theories suggest that preference heterogeneity should also affect this connection, few empirical analyses have rigorously tested claims about the distribution of individual voter preferences. In this paper, we use a un...

We present a simple and natural non-pricing mechanism for allocating divisible goods among strategic agents having lexicographic preferences. Our mechanism has favorable properties of strategy-proofness (incentive compatibility). In addition (and even when extended to the case of Leontief bundles) it enjoys Pareto efficiency, envy-freeness, and time efficiency. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F...

A major problem with (partially) free constituent order is to manifest preferences among structurally distinct parses of ambiguous sentences. In order to obtain scoring criteria a preferred constituent order can considerably support a bestrst strategy. This work presents an experimentally evaluated model of preferred German constituent order in the middle eld and its application for the impleme...

Previous work on Relative Clause attachment has overlooked a crucial grammatical distinction across both the languages and structures tested: the selective availability of Pseudo Relatives. We reconsider the literature in light of this observation and argue that, all else being equal, local attachment is found with genuine Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment emerges when their surfac...

We present procedures which pool lexical information estimated from unlabeled data via the Inside-Outside algorithm, with lexical information from a treebank PCFG. The procedures produce substantial improvements (up to 31.6% error reduction) on the task of determining subcategorization frames of novel verbs, relative to a smoothed Penn Treebank-trained PCFG. Even with relatively small quantitie...

T he 2008 annual Math Awareness Month theme features the unusual combination of “Mathematics and Voting”. The importance of voting is obvious; indeed, with the United States election season hard upon us, discussions about voting are seemingly nonstop. More generally, on almost any day of any year the news media reports on some consequential election going on somewhere in the world. But what doe...

Semantic feedback is an important source of information that a parser could use to deal with local ambiguities in syntax. However, it is difficult to devise a systematic communication mechanism for interactive syntax and semantics. In this article, I propose a variant of left-corner parsing to define the points at which syntax and semantics should interact, an account of grammatical relations a...

Natural language parsing is conceived to be a procedure of disambiguation, which successively reduces an initially totally ambiguous structural representation towards a single interpretation. Graded constraints are used as means to express wellformedness conditions of different strength and to decide which partial structures are locally least preferred and, hence, can be deleted. This approach ...

Research on syntax and parsing played a central role in the cognitive revolution and continues to occupy a central position in the study of language. While linguistically driven theories of syntactic representation have not proven sufficient to predict and explain the full range of experimental outcomes, they have provided invaluable insights to language researchers. Greater success has been ac...