Non-intrusive signal quality assessment in general, and its application to speech signal processing, in particular, builds extensively upon statistical regression models. Commonly, the raw preference scores used for fitting these models belong to a categorical scale. Averaging the scores over a number of test subjects results in smooth, close-to-continuous ratings, thus justifying the use of re...

This paper is an inquiry into the largely unexamined analysis of arguments by analogy (ABA). By exposing the degree of philosophical complexity, which ultimately renders evaluation of ABA subjective, we shall see that the most appropriate doxastic attitude to adopt, with respect to the conclusions drawn from these arguments, is often suspension of judgment. A critical examination of Copi’s crit...

currently, one of the most important challenges to smes is financing as their managers are faced with many problems in this area. in this study the barriers to smes financing were identified by using q methodology which is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. after literature review and conduct of interviews with 12 executive managers of smes, 64 barriers were identified to th...

This paper presents a method for searching the web for sentences expressing opinions. To retrieve an appropriate number of opinions that users may want to read, declaratively subjective clues are used to judge whether a sentence expresses an opinion. We collected declaratively subjective clues in opinionexpressing sentences from Japanese web pages retrieved with opinion search queries. These cl...

There is long-standing theoretical debate on the role of collateral in …nancial markets. There is no satisfactory evidence of the causal relationship (if any) between the amount of collateral required and the subsequent probability of overdues. We analyze an exogenous change in the number of cosigners required as collateral on small loans in South India. Our regression discontinuity approach re...

Social networking sites and applications are the major phenomenon all over the world and are constantly on a rise. As the users share their information and data on these sites, these sites can act as major source for misuse of information. So these SNS take steps stop this misuse of information and allows users to choose what information to share and to with whom. This study is aimed to measure...

The topic of critical hydrogeological phenomena, due to flooding, has a particular relevance given the risk that it implies. In this paper we simulated complex weather scenarios in which forecasts coming from different sources become relevant. Our basic idea is that agents can build their own evaluations on the future weather events integrating these different information sources also consideri...

To achieve sustainable human-agent interaction (HAI), we proposed a new model of intrinsically motivated adaptive agent, which learns about the human partner and behaves to satisfy its intrinsic motivation. To investigate the model’s effectiveness, we conducted a comparative HAI experiment with a simple interaction setting. The results showed that the model was effective in inducing subjective ...