The question of grammar coverage in a treebank is addressed from the perspective of language description, not corpus description. We argue that a treebanking methodology based on parsing a corpus does not necessarily imply worse coverage than grammar induction based on a manually annotated corpus.

In this paper, we study the possibility of Occam’s razors for a widely studied class of Boolean Formulae : Disjunctive Normal Forms (DNF). An Occam’s razor is an algorithm which compresses the knowledge of observations (examples) in small formulae. We prove that approximating the minimally consistent DNF formula, and a generalization of graph colorability, is very hard. Our proof technique is s...

We introduce the notion of a database system that is information theoretically secure in between accesses—a database system with the properties that 1) users can efficiently access their data, and 2) while a user is not accessing their data, the user’s information is information theoretically secure to malicious agents, provided that certain requirements on the maintenance of the database are r...

We present Information Theoretically secure Byzantine Paxos (IT ByzPaxos), the first deterministic asynchronous Byzantine consensus protocol that is provably secure despite a computationally unbounded adversary. Previous deterministic asynchronous algorithms for Byzantine consensus rely on unproven number theoretic assumptions (i.e., digital signatures) to maintain agreement. IT ByzPaxos instea...