This essay identifies the empirical facts about lobbying which are generally agreed upon in the literature. It then discusses challenges to empirical research in lobbying and provides examples of empirical methods that can be employed to overcome these challenges—with an emphasis on statistical measurement, identification, and casual inference. The essay then discusses the advantages, disadvant...

We examine what purpose a dialog metric serves and then propose empirical methods for evaluating systems that meet that purpose. The methods include a protocol for conducting a wizard-of-oz experiment and a basic set of descriptive statistics for substantiating performance claims using the data collected from the experiment as an ideal benchmark or “gold standard” for comparative judgments. The...

This article describes a comprehensive approach to automatic theory revision. Given an imperfect theory, the approach combines explanation attempts for incorrectly classi ed examples in order to identify the failing portions of the theory. For each theory fault, correlated subsets of the examples are used to inductively generate a correction. Because the corrections are focused, they tend to pr...

In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three infer­ ence methods for uncertain reasoning is presented in the context of Pathfinder, a large expert system for the diagnosis of lymph node pathology. The inference procedures evaluated are (1) Bayes' theorem, a:ssum­ ing evidence is conditionally independent given each hypothesis, (2) odds-likelihood updating, assuming evidence is conditionally ...

There are now many methods for assessing the maturity and capabilities of software engineering organizations. Assessment scores are being used in making the contract award decision by the U.S. Navy [Ru93] and Air Force [SK95], as well as in commercial organizations [MC96]. Furthermore, conformance to process standards such as ISO 9001, as determined during an audit, is a necessity for doing bus...

In economics and political science, the theoretical literature on social choice routinely highlights worst-case scenarios and emphasizes the nonexistence of a universally best voting method. Behavioral social choice is grounded in psychology and tackles consensus methods descriptively and empirically. We analyzed four elections of the American Psychological Association using a state-of-the-art ...