Language is not only used to inform. We often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be taken at face value. How should listeners account for a speaker's "hidden agenda" when incorporating new information? Here, we extend recent probabilistic models of recursive social reasoning to allow for persuasive goals and show that our model provides a new pragmatic explanation for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, our model predicts a relationship between belief updating and speaker expectations: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers are expected to act under persuasive goals, implying the absence of stronger evidence. We introduce a simple experimental paradigm called the Stick Contest to measure the extent to which the weak evidence effect depends on speaker expectations, and show that a pragmatic listener model accounts for the empirical data better than alternative models. Our findings suggest potential avenues for rational models of social reasoning to further illuminate decision-making phenomena.
We present a method for calculating and analyzing stakeholder utilities of processes that arise in, but are not limited to, the social sciences. These areas include business process analysis, healthcare workflow analysis and policy process analysis. This method is quite general and applicable to any situation in which declarative-type constraints of a modal and/or temporal nature play a part. A declarative process is a process in which activities may freely happen while respecting a set of constraints. For such a process, anything may happen so long as it is not explicitly forbidden. Declarative processes have been used and studied as models of business and healthcare workflows by several authors. In considering a declarative process as a model of some system it is natural to consider how the process behaves with respect to stakeholders. We derive a measure for stakeholder utility that can be applied in a very general setting. This derivation is achieved by listing a collection a properties which we argue such a stakeholder utility function ought to satisfy, and then using these to show a very specific form must hold for such a utility. The utility measure depends on the set of unique traces of the declarative process, and calculating this set requires a combinatorial analysis of the declarative graph that represents the process. This builds on previous work of the author wherein the combinatorial diversity metrics for declarative processes were derived for use in policy process analysis. The collection of stakeholder utilities can themselves then be used to form a metric with which we can compare different declarative processes to one another. These are illustrated using several examples of declarative processes that already exist in the literature.
Context: Evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) can be an effective resource to bridge the gap between academia and industry by balancing research of practical relevance and academic rigor. To achieve this, it seems necessary to investigate EBSE training and its benefits for the practice. Objective: We sought both to develop an EBSE training course for university students and to investigate what effects it has on the attitudes and behaviors of the trainees. Method: We conducted a longitudinal case study to study our EBSE course and its effects. For this, we collect data at the end of each EBSE course (2017, 2018, and 2019), and in two follow-up surveys (one after 7 months of finishing the last course, and a second after 21 months). Results: Our EBSE courses seem to have taught students adequately and consistently. Half of the respondents to the surveys report making use of the new skills from the course. The most-reported effects in both surveys indicated that EBSE concepts increase awareness of the value of research and evidence and EBSE methods improve information gathering skills. Conclusions: As suggested by research in other areas, training appears to play a key role in the adoption of evidence-based practice. Our results indicate that our training method provides an introduction to EBSE suitable for undergraduates. However, we believe it is necessary to continue investigating EBSE training and its impact on software engineering practice.
The media attention to the personal sphere of famous and important individuals has become a key element of the gender narrative. Here we combine lexical, syntactic and sentiment analysis to investigate the role of gender in the personalization of a wide range of political office holders in Italy during the period 2017-2020. On the basis of a score for words that is introduced to account for gender unbalance in both representative and news coverage, we show that the political personalization in Italy is more detrimental for women than men, with the persistence of entrenched stereotypes including a masculine connotation of leadership, the resulting women's unsuitability to hold political functions, and a greater deal of focus on their attractiveness and body parts. In addition, women politicians are covered with a more negative tone than their men counterpart when personal details are reported. Further, the major contribution to the observed gender differences comes from online news rather than print news, suggesting that the expression of certain stereotypes may be better conveyed when click baiting and personal targeting have a major impact.
The problem of combining the evidence concerning an unknown, contained in each of $k$ Bayesian inference bases, is discussed. This can be considered as a generalization of the problem of pooling $k$ priors to determine a consensus prior. The linear opinion pool of Stone (1961) is seen to have the most appropriate properties for this role. In particular, linear pooling preserves a consensus with respect to the evidence and other rules do not. While linear pooling does not preserve prior independence, it is shown that it still behaves appropriately with respect to the expression of evidence in such a context. For the general problem of combining evidence, Jeffrey conditionalization plays a key role.
It is imperative for all stakeholders that digital forensics investigations produce reliable results to ensure the field delivers a positive contribution to the pursuit of justice across the globe. Some aspects of these investigations are inevitably contingent on trust, however this is not always explicitly considered or critically evaluated. Erroneously treating features of the investigation as trusted can be enormously damaging to the overall reliability of an investigations findings as well as the confidence that external stakeholders can have in it. As an example, digital crime scenes can be manipulated by tampering with the digital artefacts left on devices, yet recent studies have shown that efforts to detect occurrences of this are rare and argue that this leaves digital forensics investigations vulnerable to accusations of inaccuracy. In this paper a new approach to digital forensics is considered based on the concept of Zero Trust, an increasingly popular design in network security. Zero Trust describes the practitioner mindset and principles upon which the reliance on trust in network components is eliminated in favour of dynamic verification of network interactions. An initial definition of Zero Trust Digital Forensics will be proposed and then a specific example considered showing how this strategy can be applied to digital forensic investigations to mitigate against the specific risk of evidence tampering. A definition of Zero Trust Digital Forensics is proposed, specifically that it is a strategy adopted by investigators whereby each aspect of an investigation is assumed to be unreliable until verified. A new principle will be introduced, namely the multifaceted verification of digital artefacts that can be used by practitioners who wish to adopt a Zero Trust Digital Forensics strategy during their investigations...
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact, we argue that it is critical to understand what user attributes potentially cause users to share fake news. The key to this causal-inference problem is to identify confounders -- variables that cause spurious associations between treatments (e.g., user attributes) and outcome (e.g., user susceptibility). In fake news dissemination, confounders can be characterized by fake news sharing behavior that inherently relates to user attributes and online activities. Learning such user behavior is typically subject to selection bias in users who are susceptible to share news on social media. Drawing on causal inference theories, we first propose a principled approach to alleviating selection bias in fake news dissemination. We then consider the learned unbiased fake news sharing behavior as the surrogate confounder that can fully capture the causal links between user attributes and user susceptibility. We theoretically and empirically characterize the effectiveness of the proposed approach and find that it could be useful in protecting society from the perils of fake news.
Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing systems. However, the theoretical status of distributional semantics within a broader theory of language and cognition is still unclear: What does distributional semantics model? Can it be, on its own, a fully adequate model of the meanings of linguistic expressions? The standard answer is that distributional semantics is not fully adequate in this regard, because it falls short on some of the central aspects of formal semantic approaches: truth conditions, entailment, reference, and certain aspects of compositionality. We argue that this standard answer rests on a misconception: These aspects do not belong in a theory of expression meaning, they are instead aspects of speaker meaning, i.e., communicative intentions in a particular context. In a slogan: words do not refer, speakers do. Clearing this up enables us to argue that distributional semantics on its own is an adequate model of expression meaning. Our proposal sheds light on the role of distributional semantics in a broader theory of language and cognition, its relationship to formal semantics, and its place in computational models.
Using the 6,638 case descriptions of societal impact submitted for evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014), we replicate the topic model (Latent Dirichlet Allocation or LDA) made in this context and compare the results with factor-analytic results using a traditional word-document matrix (Principal Component Analysis or PCA). Removing a small fraction of documents from the sample, for example, has on average a much larger impact on LDA than on PCA-based models to the extent that the largest distortion in the case of PCA has less effect than the smallest distortion of LDA-based models. In terms of semantic coherence, however, LDA models outperform PCA-based models. The topic models inform us about the statistical properties of the document sets under study, but the results are statistical and should not be used for a semantic interpretation - for example, in grant selections and micro-decision making, or scholarly work-without follow-up using domain-specific semantic maps.
We combine a neural image captioner with a Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model to make a system that is pragmatically informative: its objective is to produce captions that are not merely true but also distinguish their inputs from similar images. Previous attempts to combine RSA with neural image captioning require an inference which normalizes over the entire set of possible utterances. This poses a serious problem of efficiency, previously solved by sampling a small subset of possible utterances. We instead solve this problem by implementing a version of RSA which operates at the level of characters ("a","b","c"...) during the unrolling of the caption. We find that the utterance-level effect of referential captions can be obtained with only character-level decisions. Finally, we introduce an automatic method for testing the performance of pragmatic speaker models, and show that our model outperforms a non-pragmatic baseline as well as a word-level RSA captioner.
We combine a neural image captioner with a Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model to make a system that is pragmatically informative: its objective is to produce captions that are not merely true but also distinguish their inputs from similar images. Previous attempts to combine RSA with neural image captioning require an inference which normalizes over the entire set of possible utterances. This poses a serious problem of efficiency, previously solved by sampling a small subset of possible utterances. We instead solve this problem by implementing a version of RSA which operates at the level of characters ("a","b","c"...) during the unrolling of the caption. We find that the utterance-level effect of referential captions can be obtained with only character-level decisions. Finally, we introduce an automatic method for testing the performance of pragmatic speaker models, and show that our model outperforms a non-pragmatic baseline as well as a word-level RSA captioner.