This work incorporates Selectional Preferences (SP) into a Semantic Role (SR) Classification system. We learn separate selectional preferences for noun phrases and prepositional phrases and we integrate them in a state-of-the-art SR classification system both in the form of features and individual class predictors. We show that the inclusion of the refined SPs yields statistically significant i...

Each month many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Whereas research finds that this cycle influences women’s mating preferences, we propose that it might also change women’s political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women’s politics, religio...

Many preference aggregation problems are not, by nature, one-shot. In these settings, voter preferences need to be repeatedly aggregated as a function of the underlying pool of options that are being voted over. For example, imagine that a firm votes an offer to a candidate. If the offer is declined, then the pool of options shrinks, votes are aggregated once more, and a subsequent offer is mad...

Given a set of individual preferences defined on a same finite set of candidates, we consider the problem of aggregating them into a collective preference minimizing the number of disagreements with respect to the given set and verifying some structural properties like transitivity. We study the complexity of this problem when the individual preferences as well as the collective one must verify...

Situations akin to public deliberation leading to preference changes are modelled. A set of agents is considered, each endowed with a preference relation over a set of objects and a reliability relation over the involved agents. Different ways in which the public announcement of the current individual preferences can influence the agents’ future preferences are studied. Special emphasis is give...

We identify and test a specific psychological mechanism underlying cross-national differences in preferences for performance-based versus redistributive compensation systems. We posit that individuals’ beliefs in the inherent justness and deservedness of individual outcomes (i.e., just world beliefs: JWBs) can help explain individual and culture-level variation in preferences for these compensa...

introduction: in recent years, most environmental evaluation studies have managed the heterogeneity of preferences among individuals. differing sensitivities are the basis for targeted communication programs and promotions. as consumer preferences and sensitivities become more diverse, it becomes less and less efficient to consider the society in the aggregate. in this research, we will show ho...

How individual are visual preferences? For real-world scenes, there is high agreement in observer's preference ratings. This could be driven by visual attributes of the images but also by non-visual associations, since those are common to most individuals. To investigate this, we developed a set of novel abstract, visually diverse images. At the individual observer level both abstract and real-...

Collaborative filtering (CF) and contentbased filtering (CBF) have widely been used in information filtering applications, both approaches having their individual strengths and weaknesses. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic framework to unify CF and CBF, named collaborative ensemble learning. Based on content based probabilistic models for each user’s preferences (the CBF idea), it combi...