Mass customization, as a means to meet individual consumer’s need on a large scale, has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. However, as customers and their needs grow increasingly diverse, meeting every consumer’s need has become a surefire way to add unnecessary cost and complexity to operations. Furthermore, consumers are not all really ready for mass custo...

The priority problem of incomplete preference relations is investigated. Using the transformation relation between multiplicative preference relation and fuzzy preference relation, we develop a least-square model to obtain the collective priority vector of the incomplete preference relations presented by multiple decision makers, with the existence condition of the solution being developed. Mea...

We consider the challenge of preference elicitation in systems that help users discover the most desirable item(s) within a given database. Past work on preference elicitation focused on structured models that provide a factored representation of users’ preferences. Such models require less information to construct and support efficient reasoning algorithms. This paper makes two substantial con...

In this game, agents will face-off against each other in the ultra-competitive real estate market. Each competitor will act as a real estate agent, working on behalf of clients who need to move into new homes. These clients need to buy a new home as well as sell their current home. The game will test competitors’ technology in two main research areas: preference elicitation and multi-issue nego...

The paper introduces a new approach to preference structure, where from a weak preference relation derive the following relations:strict preference, indifference and incomparability, which by aggregations and negations are created and examined. We decomposing a preference relation into a strict preference, anindifference, and an incomparability relation.This approach allows one to quantify diff...

Social Network Analysis traditionally examines the graph of a communications network to identify key individuals based on the pattern of their interactions, but there is a limit to the level of detail which can be inferred from metadata alone. Message content is a richer source of data, and can provide an indication of the relationship between a pair of communicants. An individual’s language us...

Human walk is a complex phenomenon and is hence difficult to model, even if the walking process is something we do every day without even thinking of it. A broad field of applications can nowadays be found for human motion synthesis: 3D animation and video games, medical application, sports, artistic performances, to name a few. Several approaches can be taken for the modeling of complex and hi...

User attribute prediction from social media text has proven successful and useful for downstream tasks. In previous studies, differences in user trait language use have been limited primarily to the presence or absence of words that indicate topical preferences. In this study, we aim to find linguistic style distinctions across three different user attributes: gender, age and occupational class...

Irony is perceived through a complex interaction between an utterance and its context and serves many social functions such as to be sarcastic and to be humorous. The purpose of this paper is to explore what role linguistic style and contextual information play in the recognition of irony (i.e., assessing the degree of irony) and in the appreciation of ironic functions (i.e., assessing the degr...

This thesis proposal outlines the use of unsupervised data-driven methods for paraphrasing tasks. We motivate the development of knowledge-free methods at the guiding use case of multi-document summarization, which requires a domain-adaptable system for both the detection and generation of sentential paraphrases. First, we define a number of guiding research questions that will be addressed in ...