Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness (...) or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated in even the most intelligent nonhuman animals, thus we should suspend our judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their actions while further questioning the recent insistence on developing an animal morality. (shrink)

Nowadays the increase of traffic causes numerous serious traffic jams, and traffic signals are desired to work adaptively for dynamic traffic flows. In this paper, we view such a problem of traffic signal control as a multi-agent problem where each signal has a controlling agent, and aim to make the agents work cooperatively depending on the traffic status. To build such an agent program automatically, we introduce genetic programming, an evolutionary method for program construction. In GP, it is known as (...) important to encapsulate the substructures of a program which leads to higher fitness to the environment, and we propose a new encapsulation method using an efficient technique for discovering frequent substructures, which has been recently proposed in the data mining field. We also conducted a simulation with a real traffic data, and confirmed that GP with our encapsulation method outperforms the normal GP. It is also observed that the best individual has a communication part that chooses an appropriate communication area and adapts to the traffic status. (shrink)

This paper addresses the challenging problem of automating the human's intelligent ability to evaluate output from machine translation systems, which are subsystems of Speech-to-Speech MT systems. Conventional automatic MT evaluation methods include BLEU, which MT researchers have frequently used. BLEU is unsuitable for SSMT evaluation for two reasons. First, BLEU assesses errors lightly at the beginning or ending of translations and heavily in the middle, although the assessments should be independent from the positions. Second, BLEU lacks tolerance in accepting colloquial (...) sentences with small errors, although such errors do not prevent us from continuing conversation. In this paper, the authors report a new evaluation method called RED that automatically grades each MT output by using a decision tree. The DT is learned from training examples that are encoded by using multiple edit distances and their grades. The multiple edit distances are normal edit dista nce defined by insertion, deletion, and replacement, as well as extensions of ED. The use of multiple edit distances allows more tolerance than either ED or BLEU. Each evaluated MT output is assigned a grade by using the DT. RED and BLEU were compared for the task of evaluating SSMT systems, which have various performances, on a spoken language corpus, ATR's Basic Travel Expression Corpus. Experimental results showed that RED significantly outperformed BLEU. (shrink)

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN MOḤAMMAD b. Aḥmad (362/973- after 442/1050), scholar and polymath of the period of the late Samanids and early Ghaznavids and one of the two greatest intellectual figures of his time in the eastern lands of the Muslim world, the other being Ebn Sīnā.

We have developed a new method for Japanese-to-English translation of tense, aspect, and modality that uses an example-based method. In this method the similarity between input and example sentences is defined as the degree of semantic matching between the expressions at the ends of the sentences. Our method also uses the k-nearest neighbor method in order to exclude the effects of noise; for example, wrongly tagged data in the bilingual corpora. Experiments show that our method can translate tenses, aspects, and (...) modalities more accurately than the top-level MT software currently available on the market can. Moreover, it does not require hand-craft rules. (shrink)

The “Game of Life” acquires the property of significant behavior, such as universal computation, selforganized criticality and 1/f fluctuation, which depends on initial configurations. Our research investigates the relationship between the transient behavior starting from random initial configurations and array size in the Game of Life. The simulations show that the average transient time ‹T› increases logarithmically with square array size N×N, ‹T›∼logN in null and periodic boundary conditions. This result suggests that the duration of 1/f fluctuation in the “Game (...) of Life” lengthens infinitely in infinite array size. (shrink)

在尼采「上帝已死」的思想中，人失去其價值根源的有效性，在強力意 志所建構的生成世界中，人不再具有不變與永恆的意義與真理，而是由其 相對、暫時的效用與價值來理解存有的意義。本文即嘗試研究在尼采永恆回 歸學說中，是否提供了一種在「上帝已死」、傳統形上學之外對生命的理解 與評價的可能，並且由這個新的理解方式創造出在生成世界之內的新價值。 對此，本文所提出的假說為：永恆回歸的學說是人自我評價的方式，它的特 殊性在於透過此評價方式，一方面保住了生成世界的意義，另一方面在虛無 與生成中創造了存在的價值；而此方式在尼采哲學中呈顯為由從「虛無」到 「笑」的動態發展；在一切言說與理性之外，「笑」創造了一個由身體出發的新視角，它是人作為超人的意義。.

: The written renderings of Turkish names, so frequently encountered in the history of the pre-modern ruling dynasties of the Central and Eastern Islamic lands, suffered badly in the past from the deformations of authors and copyists, mainly Arabs and Persians, who did not themselves know Turkish. Moreover, these renderings have often been perpetuated by modern historians of Islam, few of whom have bothered to elucidate these names and to set forth their correct forms and meanings. The present study discusses (...) some of the very diverse principles behind medieval Turkish onomastic and uses these specifically for a consideration of the names of some prominent military commanders of the Great Seljuq sultans, ruling essentially in Persia and Iraq during the 11th and 12th centuries. (shrink)

This paper proposes a fast clustering method for time-series data based on average time sequence vector. A clustering procedure based on an exhaustive search method is time-consuming although its result typically exhibits high quality. BIRCH, which reduces the number of examples by data squashing based on a data structure CF tree, represents an effective solution for such a method when the data set consists of numerical attributes only. For time-series data, however, a straightforward application of BIRCH based on a Euclidean (...) distance for a pair of sequences, miserably fails since such a distance typically differs from human's perception. A dissimilarity measure based on DTW is desirable, but to the best of our knowledge no methods have been proposed for time-series data in the context of data squashing. In order to circumvent this problem, we propose DTWS tree, which employs a dissimilarity measure based on DTW, and compresses time sequences to the average time sequence vector. An average time sequence vector is obtained by a novel procedure which estimates correct shrinkage of a result of DTW. Experiments using the Australian sign language data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of correctness of clustering, while its degradation of time efficiency is negligible. (shrink)