BACKGROUND The second half of the 20th century brought a sharp increase in the number of people self-identifying as “brown” in the Brazilian Censuses. Previous studies have demonstrated that this was not the result of demographic forces, such as differential birth rates, but of a large number of people changing their response in the censuses from “black” or “white” to “brown”. Despite the incre...

Abstract To address racial inequity and the exclusion of African Americans in applied linguistics, second-language acquisition, world language (WL) education, our field must reckon with social justice problems racism anti-Blackness. Theoretical frameworks critical race theory (CRT) pedagogy (CRP) elucidate how such injustices are perpetuated, plus, propose solutions for them. This article discu...

Inspired by the concept of deviation measure between two linguistic preference relations, this paper further defines the deviation measure of a linguistic preference relation to the set of consistent linguistic preference relations. Based on this, we present a consistency index of linguistic preference relations and develop a consistency measure method for linguistic preference relations. This ...

The last two decades have seen a growing interest in the development of automated agents that are able to negotiate on the user’s behalf. When representing a user in a negotiation, it is essential for the agent to understand the user’s preferences, without exposing them to elicitation fatigue. To this end, we propose a new model in which a negotiating agent may incrementally elicit the user’s p...

Groups engaged in a mutual activity often need assistance in order to reach a joint decision. However, the group members’ personal preferences are often unknown and need to be collected. Querying for preferences can annoy the users. We suggest employing a voting mechanism that finds a winning item under incomplete settings. We present a practical method for eliciting the preferences, so that wi...

Preference relations can provide a more realistic model of random phenomena than quantita­ tive probability or belief functions. In order to use preference relations for reasoning under un­ certainty, it is necessary to perform sequential and parallel combinations of propagated infor­ mation in a qualitative inference network. This paper discusses the rules for such sequential and parallel comb...

The increasing complexity of products and services being offered by businesses has made providing customers with easy access to technical assistance an important business function. Therefore, most businesses operate call centers to respond to product related queries from consumers. An emerging model is to let a third-party to run the contact center for a business. Preference elicitation the pro...