First Steps at the Pianoforte

QA@L2F, First Steps at QA@CLEF

This paper presents QA@LF, the question-answering system developed at LF, INESC-ID. QA@LF follows different strategies according with the question type, and relies strongly on named entity recognition and on the pre-detection of linguistic patterns. Each question type is mapped into a single strategy; however, if no answer is found, the system proceeds and tries to find an answer using one of t...

The First Steps in Seeing

First Steps: Minding

Fostering collaborative efforts among ethicists, researchers and administrators (including Research Integrity Officers) would certainly seem to lay a direct path to enhancing research integrity at the academic research institution. Before collaborations among these groups of professionals may be explored, however, the cultural and cognitive gaps between these professions must be filled. And a p...

First Steps Toward Narrative

Marya Schechtman has argued that contemporary attempts to save Locke’s account of personal identity suffer the same faults that are to be found in Locke, among which is an inability to capture the role our unconscious states play. To avoid these problems, she advocates giving up the mainstream Psychological View and adopting a narrative account like her ‘SelfUnderstanding’ View that, she claims...

Simulating Evolution's First Steps

We demonstrate a simple artificial chemistry environment in which two small evolutionary transitions from the simplest self-replicators to larger ones are observed. The replicators adapt to increasingly harsh environments, where they must synthesise the components they need for replication. The evolution of a biosynthetic pathway of increasing length is thus achieved, through the use of simple ...