Besides being described by their position in a taxonomy, concepts are also characterized by attributes as well as by relations to other concepts. In the context of this book, we will restrict ourselves to binary relations establishing a connection between different concepts at the schema level. In order to provide useful inferences, these relations need to be further axiomatically defined and c...

It is well known that real-world networks from many domains exhibit a large number of structural similarities, such as the form of the distributions of node degrees, the spectrum of the adjacency matrix, and the degree of interconnectedness. Some of these network statistics, such as the clustering coefficient, capture local behavior, while others, like the diameter, capture more global structur...

The issue of Generic Skills has received considerable attention over recent years as universities seek to renew and articulate their purposes and demonstrate the efficient achievement of these, particularly in response to calls for accountability. As an articulation of the core outcomes of higher education as a process (HEC 1992) generic skills (or generic attributes as they are also known) are...

The aggregation of personal attributes into user profiles is a significant privacy concern. Existing attribute management systems support the controlled release of attributes and unlinkability between session protocols, but do not address the problem that attributes distributed in this way may be data-mined for features that allow user profiles to be reconstructed. This paper identifies the agg...

In an earlier column, I compared the roles of a software architect and a traditional building architect. I suggested that this oftenused analogy may not be entirely accurate, and that there may be a more precise analogy available to us in the emerging field of architectural engineering. In a subsequent release of SEI Interactive, Rick Kazman continued contrasting software architecture and “trad...

The general topic addressed in this paper is the activation of scalar attributes in the context of degree gradation of non-scalar verbs. Non-scalar verbs such as German stinken ‘stink’ do not lexically encode a scale, meaning there is no scalar attribute in their lexical representation. Nevertheless such verbs can be used in a degree context as in (1). In the sentence, the intensifier sehr ‘ver...

Metastructures and metaterms have been proposed to extend Prolog systems 6, 5]. They enable special purpose uniications to be speciied. They are useful to implement for example coroutining and new domains of computation. In both cases, information is attached to variables, which then are encoded with metaterms or metastructures. This information must be taken into account during uniication. Pro...

A Conditional Random Field is a mathematical model for sequences that is similar in many ways to a Hidden Markov Model, but is discriminative rather than generative in nature. In this paper, we explore the application of the CRF model to ASR processing of discriminative phonetic features by building a system that performs first-pass phonetic recognition using discriminatively trained phonetic f...