This paper and use of autonomous weapons systems has been will discuss the moral and ethical questions that arise in the one of the outcomes of the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency use of lethally autonomous technology for military purposes operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The asymmetrical and how the forms of subjectivity and moral agency that battlefields of these theaters, where no frontline it creates could be highly counterproductive to mission provides a buffer between combatants and civilians and effectiveness, diplomacy and conflict resolution and prevention.

The Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) problem is the problem of finding a truth assignment that maximizes the number of satisfied clauses of a given Boolean formula in Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF). Many exact solvers for MaxSAT have been developed during recent years, and many of them were presented in the well-known SAT conference. Algorithms for MaxSAT generally fall into two categories: (1) branch and bound algorithms and (2) algorithms that use successive calls to a SAT solver (SAT- based), which this paper in on. In practical problems, SAT-based algorithms have been shown to be more efficient. This paper provides an experimental investigation to compare the performance of recent SAT-based and branch and bound algorithms on the benchmarks of the MaxSAT Evaluations.

In machine learning, there is an ongoing revival of the use of variational Bayes (VB) to deal with complex probabilistic models with hidden variables. The revival is driven by the use of stochastic methods to approximate the VB lower bound and associated gradients. See for example [1, 2, 5]. The advantages include automated inference [3] and also that they are applicable to a much wider class of probabilistic models. While the basic recipes are limited in the flexibility of the approximate hidden-variable posteriors, there are ongoing efforts to make them more flexible.

Understanding the demographics of users of online social networks has important applications for health, marketing, and public messaging. Whereas most prior approaches rely on a supervised learning approach, in which individual users are labeled with demographics for training, we instead create a distantly labeled dataset by collecting audience measurement data for 1,500 websites (e.g., 50% of visitors to gizmodo.com are estimated to have a bachelor's degree). We then fit a regression model to predict these demographics from information about the followers of each website on Twitter. Using patterns derived both from textual content and the social network of each user, our final model produces an average held-out correlation of .77 across seven different variables (age, gender, education, ethnicity, income, parental status, and political preference). We then apply this model to classify individual Twitter users by ethnicity, gender, and political preference, finding performance that is surprisingly competitive with a fully supervised approach.

Poaching is a serious threat to the conservation of key species and whole ecosystems. While conducting foot patrols is the most commonly used approach in many countries to prevent poaching, such patrols often do not make the best use of limited patrolling resources. To remedy this situation, prior work introduced a novel emerging application called PAWS (Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security); PAWS was proposed as a game-theoretic (``security games'') decision aid to optimize the use of patrolling resources. This paper reports on PAWS's significant evolution from a proposed decision aid to a regularly deployed application, reporting on the lessons from the first tests in Africa in Spring 2014, through its continued evolution since then, to current regular use in Southeast Asia and plans for future worldwide deployment. In this process, we have worked closely with two NGOs (Panthera and Rimba) and incorporated extensive feedback from professional patrolling teams. We outline key technical advances that lead to PAWS's regular deployment: (i) incorporating complex topographic features, e.g., ridgelines, in generating patrol routes; (ii) handling uncertainties in species distribution (game theoretic payoffs); (iii) ensuring scalability for patrolling large-scale conservation areas with fine-grained guidance; and (iv) handling complex patrol scheduling constraints.

In this paper, we extend the Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) problem to {\L}ukasiewicz logic. The MaxSAT problem for a set of formulae {\Phi} is the problem of finding an assignment to the variables in {\Phi} that satisfies the maximum number of formulae. Three possible solutions (encodings) are proposed to the new problem: (1) Disjunctive Linear Relations (DLRs), (2) Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and (3) Weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problem (WCSP). Like its Boolean counterpart, the extended fuzzy MaxSAT will have numerous applications in optimization problems that involve vagueness.

How do we parse the languages for which no treebanks are available? This contribution addresses the cross-lingual viewpoint on statistical dependency parsing, in which we attempt to make use of resource-rich source language treebanks to build and adapt models for the under-resourced target languages. We outline the benefits, and indicate the drawbacks of the current major approaches. We emphasize synthetic treebanking: the automatic creation of target language treebanks by means of annotation projection and machine translation. We present competitive results in cross-lingual dependency parsing using a combination of various techniques that contribute to the overall success of the method. We further include a detailed discussion about the impact of part-of-speech label accuracy on parsing results that provide guidance in practical applications of cross-lingual methods for truly under-resourced languages.

Accessing or integrating data lexicalized in different languages is a challenge. Multilingual lexical resources play a fundamental role in reducing the language barriers to map concepts lexicalized in different languages. In this paper we present a large-scale study on the effectiveness of automatic translations to support two key cross-lingual ontology mapping tasks: the retrieval of candidate matches and the selection of the correct matches for inclusion in the final alignment. We conduct our experiments using four different large gold standards, each one consisting of a pair of mapped wordnets, to cover four different families of languages. We categorize concepts based on their lexicalization (type of words, synonym richness, position in a subconcept graph) and analyze their distributions in the gold standards. Leveraging this categorization, we measure several aspects of translation effectiveness, such as word-translation correctness, word sense coverage, synset and synonym coverage. Finally, we thoroughly discuss several findings of our study, which we believe are helpful for the design of more sophisticated cross-lingual mapping algorithms.

Sentiment analysis research has predominantly been on English texts. Thus there exist many sentiment resources for English, but less so for other languages. Approaches to improve sentiment analysis in a resource-poor focus language include: (a) translate the focus language text into a resource-rich language such as English, and apply a powerful English sentiment analysis system on the text, and (b) translate resources such as sentiment labeled corpora and sentiment lexicons from English into the focus language, and use them as additional resources in the focus-language sentiment analysis system. In this paper we systematically examine both options. We use Arabic social media posts as stand-in for the focus language text. We show that sentiment analysis of English translations of Arabic texts produces competitive results, w.r.t. Arabic sentiment analysis. We show that Arabic sentiment analysis systems benefit from the use of automatically translated English sentiment lexicons. We also conduct manual annotation studies to examine why the sentiment of a translation is different from the sentiment of the source word or text. This is especially relevant for building better automatic translation systems. In the process, we create a state-of-the-art Arabic sentiment analysis system, a new dialectal Arabic sentiment lexicon, and the first Arabic-English parallel corpus that is independently annotated for sentiment by Arabic and English speakers.

We describe a hybridisation strategy whose objective is to integrate linguistic resources from shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation (RBMT) into phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT). It basically consists of enriching the phrase table of a PBSMT system with bilingual phrase pairs matching transfer rules and dictionary entries from a shallow-transfer RBMT system. This new strategy takes advantage of how the linguistic resources are used by the RBMT system to segment the source-language sentences to be translated, and overcomes the limitations of existing hybrid approaches that treat the RBMT systems as a black box. Experimental results confirm that our approach delivers translations of higher quality than existing ones, and that it is specially useful when the parallel corpus available for training the SMT system is small or when translating out-of-domain texts that are well covered by the RBMT dictionaries. A combination of this approach with a recently proposed unsupervised shallow-transfer rule inference algorithm results in a significantly greater translation quality than that of a baseline PBSMT; in this case, the only hand-crafted resource used are the dictionaries commonly used in RBMT. Moreover, the translation quality achieved by the hybrid system built with automatically inferred rules is similar to that obtained by those built with hand-crafted rules.