In many ways, biomedical analysis is analogous to possibilistic reasoning. In spite of that, there are hardly any applications of possibility theory in biology or medicine. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the use of possibility theory in an epidemiological study. In the paper, we build the possibility distribution for the controlled bloodstream concentrations of any physiologically activ...

Automatic knowledge base enrichment methods rely critically on candidate axiom scoring. The most popular scoring heuristics proposed in the literature are based on statistical inference. We argue that such a probability-based framework is not always completely satisfactory and propose a novel, alternative scoring heuristics expressed in terms of possibility theory, whereby a candidate axiom rec...

In this paper, we analyze the formalism proposed by Yagerr6] to represent default knowledge in the framework of possibility theory. Three diierent application schemes are examined. The results produced by these application schemes are compared with those by Reiter's default logic. It is shown that for a restricted class of default theories, there is some kinds of correspondence between Yager's ...

A two-period lifetime overlapping generations growth model is used to evaluate the possibility that social insurance can effectively offset economic risks associated with uncertainty about the rate of population growth. Crude measures of the seriousness of this type of risk in the current United States situation are presented. Sufficient conditions on the structure of the economy for such inter...

Almost all existing referring expression generation algorithms aim to find one best referring expression for a given intended referent. However, human-produced data demonstrates that, for any given entity, many perfectly acceptable referring expressions exist. At the same time, it is not the case that all logically possible descriptions are acceptable; so, if we remove the requirement to produc...

Cross-linguistic work on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world into named categories. Although word meanings vary widely across languages, unrelated languages often have words with similar or identical meanings, and many logically possible meanings are never observed. We review work s...

Where have we been and where are we going? Three types of answers will be discussed: consistent progress, oscillations and discontinuities. Moore’s Law provides a convincing demonstration of consistent progress, when it applies. Speech recognition error rates are declining by 10× per decade; speech coding rates are declining by 2× per decade. Unfortunately, fields do not always move in consiste...

This paper proposes a model for Information Retrieval (IR) based on possibilistic directed networks. Relations documents-terms and query-terms are modeled through possibility and necessity measures rather than a probability measure. The relevance value for the document given the query is measured by two degrees: the necessity and the possibility. More precisely, the user’s query triggers a prop...

THE IDEA of possible worlds has both promised and, I believe, delivered understanding and insight in a wide range of topics. Pre-eminent here, I think, is the topic of broadly logical possibility, both de &to and de re. But there are others: the nature of propositions, properties, and sets; the function of proper names and definite descriptions; the nature of counterfactuals; time and temporal ...

The main subject of this paper is the embedding of fuzzy set theory—and related concepts—in a coherent conditional probability scenario. This allows to deal with perception-based information—in the sense of Zadeh—and with a rigorous treatment of the concept of likelihood, dealing also with its role in statistical inference. A coherent conditional probability is looked on as a general non-additi...