Formal epistemologists traditionally model rational states of partial belief with probability measures, functions that map each proposition to a single real number. But many have recently rejected this model as excessively precise. Sometimes your evidence for a certain claim is unspecific. And many have argued that the rational response to unspecific evidence is to have credences that are impre...

A probabilistic learning model for vague queries and missing or imprecise information in databases is described. Instead of retrieving only a set of answers, our approach yields a ranking of objects from the database in response to a query. By using relevance judgements from the user about the objects retrieved, the ranking for the actual query as well as the overall retrieval quality of the sy...