Sensitivity to variations in luminance (contrast) is fundamental to perception because contrasts define the edges and textures of visual objects. Recent research has shown that contrast sensitivity, in addition to being controlled by purely stimulus-driven mechanisms, is also affected by expectations and prior knowledge about the contrast of upcoming stimuli. The ability to adjust contrast sens...

Natural language understanding is a key requirement for many NLP tasks. Deep language understanding, which enables inference, requires systems that have large amounts of knowledge enabling them to connect natural language to the concepts of the world. We present a novel attempt to automatically acquire conceptual knowledge about events in the form of inference rules by reading verb definitions....

Much work on idioms has focused on type identification, i.e., determining whether a sequence of words can form an idiomatic expression. Since an idiom type often has a literal interpretation as well, token classification of potential idioms in context is critical for NLP. We explore the use of informative prior knowledge about the overall syntactic behaviour of a potentially-idiomatic expressio...

We introduce a probabilistic model that generalizes classical linear discriminant analysis and gives an interpretation for the components as informative or relevant components of data. The components maximize the predictability of class distribution which is asymptotically equivalent to (i) maximizing mutual information with the classes, and (ii) finding principal components in the so-called le...

We create a formal framework for the design of informative securities in prediction markets. These securities allow a market organizer to infer the likelihood of events of interest as well as if he knew all of the traders’ private signals. We consider the design of markets that are always informative, markets that are informative for a particular signal structure of the participants, and inform...

One of the new expanding areas in functional genomics is metabolomics: measuring the metabolome of an organism. Data being generated in metabolomics studies are very diverse in nature depending on the design underlying the experiment. Traditionally, variation in measurements is conceptually broken down in systematic variation and noise where the latter contains, e.g. technical variation. There ...

Listeners draw on their knowledge of phonetic categories when identifying speech sounds, extracting meaningful structural features from auditory cues. We use a Bayesian model to investigate the extent to which their perceptions of linguistic content incorporate their full knowledge of the phonetic category structure, or only certain aspects of this knowledge. Simulations show that listeners are...