The attribution question

Drought return times in the Sahel: A question of attribution

[1] Recurrence times for extreme drought events in the African Sahel are estimated using a classical peaks-overthreshold model. Results, which are computed for both mean seasonal rainfall and fractional area in drought, suggest that the distribution of dry extremes after about 1970 is statistically distinct from that of preceding years. This finding throws into relief the critical role played b...

Investigating Embedded Question Reuse in Question Answering

The investigation presented in this paper is a novel method in question answering (QA) that enables a QA system to gain performance through reuse of information in the answer to one question to answer another related question. Our analysis shows that a pair of question in a general open domain QA can have embedding relation through their mentions of noun phrase expressions. We present methods f...

The dilemma of attribution.

I suspected that there were some members of the live audience who were somewhat apprehensive about sitting through the morning’s physics lectures. After all, there were three guys there to talk about one minus sign. If it were just two people and a plus sign, , one could talk about the and the other about the –. However, to my mind, this year’s awards represent or symbolize not just a minus sig...

The Processes of Causal Attribution

This article summarizes and synthesizes my several papers on attribution theory (Kelley, 1967, 1971, 1972). Lest the reader incorrectly conclude that these writings define attribution theory, note must be made of other statements of the theory. These include, most importantly, Fritz Heider's (1958) book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which has played a central role in the orginatio...

Performance attribution