Inference and learning of graphical models are both well-studied problems in statistics and machine learning that have found many applications in science and engineering. However, exact inference is intractable in general graphical models, which suggests the problem of seeking the best approximation to a collection of random variables within some tractable family of graphical models. In this paper, we focus our attention on the class of planar Ising models, for which inference is tractable using techniques of statistical physics [Kac and Ward; Kasteleyn]. Based on these techniques and recent methods for planarity testing and planar embedding [Chrobak and Payne], we propose a simple greedy algorithm for learning the best planar Ising model to approximate an arbitrary collection of binary random variables (possibly from sample data). Given the set of all pairwise correlations among variables, we select a planar graph and optimal planar Ising model defined on this graph to best approximate that set of correlations. We demonstrate our method in some simulations and for the application of modeling senate voting records.

When general purpose software agents fail, it's often because they're brittle and need more background commonsense knowledge. In this paper we present relation properties as a valuable type of commonsense knowledge that can be automatically inferred at scale by reading the Web. People base many commonsense inferences on their knowledge of relation properties such as functionality, transitivity, and others. For example, all people know that bornIn(Year) satisfies the functionality property, meaning that each person can be born in exactly one year. Thus inferences like "Obama was born in 1961, so he was not born in 2008", which computers do not know, are obvious even to children. We demonstrate scalable heuristics for learning relation functionality from noisy Web text that outperform existing approaches to detecting functionality. The heuristics we use address Web NLP challenges that are also common to learning other relation properties, and can be easily transferred. Each relation property we learn for a Web-scale set of relations will enable computers to solve real tasks, and the data from learning many such properties will be a useful addition to general commonsense knowledge bases.

Using computational intelligence, our ultimate goal is to self-regulate systems composed of humans, machines and robots. Self-regulation is important for the control of mixed organizations and systems. An overview of self-regulation for organizations and systems, characterized by our solution of the tradeoffs between Fourier pairs of Gaussian distributions that affect decision-making differently, is provided. A mathematical outline of our solution and a sketch of future plans are provided.

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that the resulting discourse is represented hierarchically. Two experiments examine some of the implications of these hierarchical structures on the perceived coherence of texts. Experiment 1 shows that texts with more levels to their hierarchical structure are judged to be more coherent. Experiment 2 demonstrates that these effects are sensitive to the genre of the text. Specifically, narratives seem to be more affected by manipulation of the discourse structure than procedural texts.

Links between licit and illicit economies fuel conflict in countries mired in irregular warfare. We argue that in Afghanistan, cultivating poppy and trading drugs bring stability to farmers who face the unintended consequences of haphazard development efforts while lacking alternative livelihoods and security necessary to access markets. Drug trafficking funds the crime-insurgency nexus and government corruption, in turn foiling attempts to establish a unified governance body. We show how individual rationality, market forces, corruption and opium stocks accumulated at different stages in the supply chain counteract the effects of poppy eradication. To that end, we use initial results from a multiagent model of the Afghan drug industry. We define physical, administrative, social and infrastructural environments in the simulation, and outline objectives and inputs for decision making and the structure of actor interactions.

In order to better understand the mechanisms that lead to resiliency in natural systems, to support decisions that lead to greater resiliency in systems we effect, and to create models that will utilized in highly resilient systems, methods for resiliency analysis will be required. Existing methods and technology for robustness analysis provide a foundation for a rigorous approach to resiliency analysis, but extensions are necessary to address the multiple time scales that must be modeled to understand highly adaptive systems. Further, if resiliency modeling is to be effective, it must be contextualized, requiring that the supporting software will need to mirror the systems being modeling by being pace layered and adaptive.

Forming ad-hoc coalitions between military forces and humanitarian organizations is crucial in mission-critical scenarios. Very often coalition parties need to operate according to planning constraints and regulations, or policies. Therefore, they find themselves not only in need to consider their own goals, but also to support coalition partners to the extent allowed by such regulations. In time-stressed conditions, this is a challenging and cognition-intensive task. In this paper, we present intelligent agents that support human planners and ease their cognitive burden by detecting and giving advice about the violation of policies and constraints. Through a series of experiments conducted with human subjects, we compare and contrast the agents' performance on a number of metrics in three conditions: agent support, transparent policy enforcement, and neither support nor enforcement.

Journalists and editors work under pressure to collect relevant details and background information about specific events. They spend a significant amount of time sifting through documents and finding new information such as facts, opinions or stakeholders (i.e. people, places and organizations that have a stake in the news). Spotting them is a tedious and cognitively intense process. One task, essential to this process, is to find and keep track of stakeholders. This task is taxing cognitively and in terms of memory. Tell Me More offers an automatic aid to this task. Tell Me More is a system that, given a seed story, mines the web for similar stories reported by different sources and selects only those stories which offer new information with respect to that original seed story. Much like a journalist, the task of detecting named entities is central to its success. In this paper we briefly describe Tell Me More and, in particular, we focus on Tell Me More's entity detection component. We describe an approach that combines off-the-shelf named entity recognizers (NERs) with WPED, an in-house publicly available NER that uses Wikipedia as its knowledge base. We show significant increase in precision scores with respect to traditional NERs. Lastly, we present an overall evaluation of Tell Me More using this approach.

This paper proposes a number of social issues that are essential in understanding any given story, and thus, that must be included in a comprehensive approach to computational modeling of narrative. It focuses on oral narratives, and on the social event of the telling of a story. For participants in the telling, the central social issue is the story’s evaluation or meaning: the point or moral of the story. Value or meaning is created relative to social membership, and so, to understand evaluation, it is not sufficient to understand a story solely as a bounded unit. Therefore, this paper examines the ways in which narrative meaning is negotiated between narrator and interlocutors. It demonstrates how a given story can take on different meanings for different audiences. The life course of a story is also proposed as relevant dimension for understanding. Ephemeral stories are distinguished from stories which have multiple tellings, both for the stories of individuals, and for stories which form part of the story stock of institutions. Storytelling rights are also considered: who within a group has the right to tell a particular story on a particular occasion. These issues are proposed as potential meta-data to be used in the analysis of stories. Finally, the paper indicates an area in which computational understanding of narrative, including these social issues, has potential for practical applications: as part of current commercial knowledge capture and archiving activities.

Narratives structure our understanding of the world and of ourselves. They exploit the shared cognitive structures of human motivations, goals, actions, events, and outcomes. We report on a computational model that is motivated by results in neural computation and captures fine-grained, context sensitive information about human goals, processes, actions, policies, and outcomes. We describe the use of the model in the context of a pilot system that is able to interpret simple stories and narrative fragments in the domain of international politics and economics. We identify problems with the pilot system and outline extensions required to incorporate several crucial dimensions of narrative structure.