This paper discusses an implemented dialogue system which generates the meanings of utterances by taking into account: the surface mood of the user’s last utterance; the meanings of all the user’s utterances from the current discourse; the system’s expert knowledge; and the system’s beliefs about the current situation arising from the discourse (including its beliefs about the user and her beli...

The hallmark of deterministic chaos is that it creates information—the rate being given by the Kolmogorov-Sinai metric entropy. Since its introduction half a century ago, the metric entropy has been used as a unitary quantity to measure a system’s intrinsic unpredictability. Here, we show that it naturally decomposes into two structurally meaningful components: A portion of the created informat...

Exchangeable models for vertex labeled graphs cannot replicate the large sample behaviors of sparsity and power law degree distributions observed in many network datasets. Out of this mathematical impossibility emerges the question of how network data can be modeled in a way that reflects known empirical behaviors and respects basic statistical principles. We address this question by observing ...

It seems that it’s not just elephants that have long memories. Research by Anthony Gendall and co-workers [Cell (2001) 107, 525–535] shows that plants have a remarkable capacity to ‘remember’ too. Studying the process of vernalization (the acceleration of flowering by exposure to a cold period) in Arabidopsis, the team has identified the ‘memory’ gene, VRN2 (vernalization2). Although VRN2 is no...

This paper describes the implementation of a system that reminds the user of the telephone number of a given list, even if the user only remembers part of it, or if the given number contains a series of exchanged digits. The system’s input consists of a telephone number (composed by digits from 0 to 9), containing from zero up to several generic digits (asterisks, in this case). The system proc...