In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic boundary might signal the end of the current constituent, requiring the following constituent to be attached high in the syntactic tree. We present three listening experiments that test an alternat...

The goal of one type of recommenders is to minimize the number of clicks users need to reach the information they are looking for. Recommenders typically estimate the probability that pages contain the user’s target information and provide the user with links to the most promising pages. In this paper we show that this greedy strategy can lead to recommendations that are suboptimal in terms of ...

In this paper we propose a Bayesian, information theoretic approach to dimensionality reduction. The approach is formulated as a variational principle on mutual information, and seamlessly addresses the notions of sufficiency, relevance, and representation. Maximally informative statistics are shown to minimize a Kullback-Leibler distance between posterior distributions. Illustrating the approa...

Central London. He spotted an antique pen shop, and wanted to stop in. It was 1998, and we were in town to meet with some folks helping to build the digital dome system for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, to open in 2000. It turns out that Tyson is an antique pen buff. He's also a lateral thinker, and looking at the old fountain pens and pencils go...

Informative Art display systems have been proposed to provide users with information considered relevant at arbitrary points of work or living engagement, originating from many different –mostly geographically dislocated– sources and presented at the periphery of human (visual) perception. Having the displays operate at the periphery of a user's attention allows other user tasks to sustain prim...

There are certain families of words and word sequences (words in the generators of a two-generator group) that arise frequently in the Teichmüller theory of hyperbolic three-manifolds and Kleinian and Fuchsian groups and in the discreteness problem for two generator matrix groups. We survey some of the families of such words and sequences: the semigroup of so called good words of Gehring-Martin...