“obligation”, “dette” and “droit personnel” are three important and correlative legal terms in civil law that have been introduce into persian legal literature with improper translation. the failure to distinguish them from common terms in islamic jurisprudence like “dein” and “eltezam” have caused conceptual confusion between special terms of two great legal systems: civil law and islamic law....

A large amount of labeled data is required for supervised learning. However, labeling by domain experts is expensive and timeconsuming. A low cost and high e ciency way to obtain large training datasets is to aggregate noisy labels collected from nonprofessional crowds. Prior works have proposed confusion matrices to evaluate the reliability of workers. In this paper, we redene the structure of...

We review the performance of a new two-stage cascaded machine learning approach for rescoring keyword search output for low resource languages. In the first stage Confusion Networks (CNs) are rescored for improved Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) by reranking the arcs of each confusion bin. In the second stage we generate keyword search hypotheses from the rescored ASR output and rescore them...

Studies on small and declining populations dominate research in conservation biology. This emphasis reflects two overarching frameworks: the small-population paradigm focuses on correlates of increased extinction probability; the declining-population paradigm directs attention to the causes and consequences of depletion. Neither, however, particularly informs research on the determinants, rate ...

There is confusion in the medical decision-making literature about how to handle uncertainty in medical tests. In this article, the authors consider the situation in which there is uncertainty about the pretest probability of a disease in a patient as well as uncertainty about the sensitivity and specificity of a diagnostic test for that disease. They discuss how to calculate posttest probabili...

R. Duncan Luce once mentioned in a conversation that he did not consider Kolmogorov’s probability theory well-constructed because it treats stochastic independence as a “numerical accident,” while it should be treated as a fundamental relation, more basic than the assignment of numerical probabilities. I argue here that stochastic independence is indeed a “numerical accident,” a special form of...

In this study, a general framework integrating a data-driven estimation model with sequential probability updating is suggested for detecting quality faults in water distribution systems from multivariate water quality time series. The method utilizes artificial neural networks (ANNs) for studying the interplay between multivariate water quality parameters and detecting possible outliers. The a...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses information relevant to the understanding of climate change and explores options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC reports communicate uncertainty by using a set of probability terms accompanied by global interpretational guidelines. The judgment literature indicates that there are large differences in the way people understand...

Study of Landsat imagery prompted Cannon (1) to suggest that Sithylemenkat Lake in central Alaska occupies a meteorite impact crater. In support of his thesis, he cites physiographic, structural, geochemical, and aeromagnetic evidence from various published sources. We believe, on the basis of our previous work in the area (2-4), that Cannon has largely misinterpreted these published data, whic...