An important factor for the acceptance of spoken dialogue systems is their ability to react flexibly on misunderstandings between user and system. This paper addresses the issue of grounding utterances in task-oriented human-computer dialogues. It focuses on the aspect of handling ambiguities while parsing word lattices from a speech recognizer: The parser detects the origin and the type of amb...

Critics of my Opinion piece,”A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” [1] have focused primarily on my first point, which deals with the question of whether or not major evolutionary improvements can be built up through many minor improvements. It is clear to me that they cannot, but this question is the traditional front on which most battles over Darwinism have been fought since 1859, and I did ...

This paper revisits the golden constant – gold’s property of keeping purchasing power via a comparison with set 17 commodities (energy, metals and agricultural products). We use graphical devices CPI-deflated commodity prices first, then stationarity tests designed to assess how fast real revert their “constant” and, finally, measurements convergence speed. find that price gold is far from cons...