Related papers: Natural revision is contingently-conditionalized r…
Counterfactual explanations are gaining prominence within technical, legal, and business circles as a way to explain the decisions of a machine learning model. These explanations share a trait with the long-established "principal reason"…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
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…
Requirements are informal and semi-formal descriptions of the expected behavior of a system. They are usually expressed in the form of natural language sentences and checked for errors manually, e.g., by peer reviews. Manual checks are…
With the growing interest in social applications of Natural Language Processing and Computational Argumentation, a natural question is how controversial a given concept is. Prior works relied on Wikipedia's metadata and on content analysis…
We address how to robustly interpret natural language refinements (or critiques) in recommender systems. In particular, in human-human recommendation settings people frequently use soft attributes to express preferences about items,…
Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be…
Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological…
The material conditional has long been charged with paradox. Defined truth-functionally, it renders true any conditional whose antecedent is false or consequent true -- hence, seemingly absurd statements such as `If unicorns exist, then…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
Prominent approaches to belief revision prescribe the adoption of a new belief that is as close as possible to the prior belief, in a process that, even in the standard case, can be described as attempting to minimize surprise. Here we…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…
Contextual situations are those in which seemingly "the same" random variable changes its identity depending on the conditions under which it is recorded. Such a change of identity is observed whenever the assumption that the variable is…
Belief revision is the task of modifying a knowledge base when new information becomes available, while also respecting a number of desirable properties. Classical belief revision schemes have been already specialised to \emph{binary…
A growing body of work studies how to answer a question or verify a claim by generating a natural language "proof": a chain of deductive inferences yielding the answer based on a set of premises. However, these methods can only make sound…
Dependence is an important concept for many tasks in artificial intelligence. A task can be executed more efficiently by discarding something independent from the task. In this paper, we propose two novel notions of dependence in…
Counterfactual explanations are emerging as an attractive option for providing recourse to individuals adversely impacted by algorithmic decisions. As they are deployed in critical applications (e.g. law enforcement, financial lending), it…
We consider entailment problems involving powerful constraint languages such as guarded existential rules, in which additional semantic restrictions are put on a set of distinguished relations. We consider restricting a relation to be…
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…