A model of reputation is presented in which agents share and aggregate their opinions, and observe the way in which their opinions effect the opinions of others. A method is proposed that supports the deliberative process of combining opinions into a group’s reputation. The reliability of agents as opinion givers are measured in terms of the extent to which their opinions differ from that of th...

Fine-grained subjectivity analysis has been the subject of much recent research attention. As a result, the field has gained a number of working definitions, technical approaches and manually annotated corpora that cover many facets of subjectivity. Little work has been done, however, on one aspect of fine-grained opinions – the specification and identification of opinion topics. In particular,...

Providing opinions through labeling of images, tweets, etc. have drawn immense interest in crowdsourcing markets. This invokes a major challenge of aggregating multiple opinions received from different crowd workers for deriving the final judgment. Generally, opinion aggregation models deal with independent opinions, which are given unanimously and are not visible to all. However, in many real-...

A survey of the smoking habits and opinions of over 15,000 children aged 8-19 years, in full or part-time education, was carried out in northern England in December 1982. Highly significant differences were observed between the opinions of smokers and non-smokers on the reasons for and against smoking. There were dramatic variations with age: the youngest children, smokers and non-smokers, tend...

Extinction models vary in the information they require, the simplest considering the rate of certain sightings only. More complicated methods include uncertain sightings and allow for variation in the reliability of uncertain sightings. Generally extinction models require expert opinion, either as a prior belief that a species is extinct, or to establish the quality of a sighting record, or bot...

Tendinopathy is characterized by pain in the tendon and impaired performance sometimes associated with swelling of the tendon. Its diagnosis is usually clinical but ultrasonography and magnetic resonance imaging can refine the diagnosis. Tendinopathy is highly prevalent and is one of the most frequently self reported musculoskeletal diseases in physical workers and sports people. Nevertheless, ...

Agent-opinions play a significant role in their various day-to-day social interactions. The concept of opinion is very subjective in nature, and in some sense, beyond truth or falsity. One can merely assert having a positive or a negative opinion about something or somebody, and verifying the truth of such opinion statements is not really meaningful. In certain real-life situations, when one is...

Many web sites collect reviews of products and services and use them provide rankings of their quality. However, such rankings are not personalized. We investigate how the information in the reviews written by a particular user can be used to personalize the ranking she is shown. We propose a new technique, topic profile collaborative filtering, where we build user profiles from users’ review t...

Background In 2003 the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) introduced its Monthly Economic Forecasting Survey. Each month the WSJ polls between 50 and 60 well-known economic experts asking their forecasts of future key economic variables such as GDP, inflation, US treasury rates, unemployment, housing starts, and other data. The forecasts are always for set times of the year, namely the ends of the first...

Isolated premature mammary gland enlargement, or precocious thelarche (thelarche praecox, t.p.), is a glandular tissue development which occurs in girls below eight years of age without any other symptoms of systemic estro− gen activity. T.p. is usually observed during the first two to three years of life. Ethnic and nutritional factors influ− ence the frequency of t.p. incidence. T.p. is conne...