Related papers: Why SOV might be initially preferred and then lost…
The word order of a sentence is shaped by multiple principles. The principle of syntactic dependency distance minimization is in conflict with the principle of surprisal minimization (or predictability maximization) in single head syntactic…
Preference queries are relational algebra or SQL queries that contain occurrences of the winnow operator ("find the most preferred tuples in a given relation"). Such queries are parameterized by specific preference relations. Semantic…
Sentence ordering aims at arranging a list of sentences in the correct order. Based on the observation that sentence order at different distances may rely on different types of information, we devise a new approach based on multi-granular…
Prior work on generating explanations in a planning and decision-making context has focused on providing the rationale behind an AI agent's decision making. While these methods provide the right explanations from the explainer's…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
This paper is devoted to the online dominating set problem and its variants. We believe the paper represents the first systematic study of the effect of two limitations of online algorithms: making irrevocable decisions while not knowing…
We study the following rearrangement problem: Given $n$ words, rearrange and concatenate them so that the obtained string is lexicographically smallest (or largest, respectively). We show that this problem reduces to sorting the given words…
The problem of organizing information for multidocument summarization so that the generated summary is coherent has received relatively little attention. While sentence ordering for single document summarization can be determined from the…
Robust optimization (RO) has emerged as one of the leading paradigms to efficiently model parameter uncertainty. The recent connections between RO and problems in statistics and machine learning domains demand for solving RO problems in…
Models of bags of words typically assume topic mixing so that the words in a single bag come from a limited number of topics. We show here that many sets of bag of words exhibit a very different pattern of variation than the patterns that…
The subject-verb-object (SVO) word order prevalent in English is shared by about $42\%$ of world languages. Another $45\%$ of all languages follow the SOV order, $9\%$ the VSO order, and fewer languages use the three remaining permutations.…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…
Inverse optimization is a powerful paradigm for learning preferences and restrictions that explain the behavior of a decision maker, based on a set of external signal and the corresponding decision pairs. However, most inverse optimization…
A fundamental task underlying many important optimization problems, from influence maximization to sensor placement to content recommendation, is to select the optimal group of $k$ items from a larger set. Submodularity has been very…
This dissertation focuses on two fundamental sorting problems: string sorting and suffix sorting. The first part considers parallel string sorting on shared-memory multi-core machines, the second part external memory suffix sorting using…
Popularity is attractive -- this is the formula underlying preferential attachment, a popular explanation for the emergence of scaling in growing networks. If new connections are made preferentially to more popular nodes, then the resulting…
In many situations, the decision maker observes items in sequence and needs to determine whether or not to retain a particular item immediately after it is observed. Any decision rule creates a set of items that are selected. We consider…
Various structured argumentation frameworks utilize preferences as part of their standard inference procedure to enable reasoning with preferences. In this paper, we consider an inverse of the standard reasoning problem, seeking to identify…
The Right to Explanation and the Right to be Forgotten are two important principles outlined to regulate algorithmic decision making and data usage in real-world applications. While the right to explanation allows individuals to request an…
The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…