Regular Rules Research Articles

Adding recursive constructs to bialgebraic semantics

This paper aims at fitting a general class of recursive equations into the framework of `well-behaved' structural operational semantics, formalized as bialgebraic semantics by Turi and Plotkin. Rather than interpreting recursive constructs by means of operational rules, separate recursive equations are added to semantic descriptions of languages. The equations, together with the remaining rules, are then interpreted in a suitable category and merged by means of certain fixpoint constructions. For a class of recursive equations called regular unfolding rules, this construction yields distributive laws as analyzed by Turi and Plotkin. This means that regular unfolding rules can be merged seamlessly with abstract operational rules.

Subdivision scheme tuning around extraordinary vertices

In this paper we extend the standard method to derive and optimize subdivision rules in the vicinity of extraordinary vertices (EV). Starting from a given set of rules for regular control meshes, we tune the extraordinary rules (ER) such that the necessary conditions for C 1 continuity are satisfied along with as many necessary C 2 conditions as possible. As usually done, our approach sets up the general configuration around an EV by exploiting rotational symmetry and reformulating the subdivision rules in terms of the subdivision matrix' eigencomponents. The degrees of freedom are then successively eliminated by imposing new constraints which allows us, e.g., to improve the curvature behavior around EVs. The method is flexible enough to simultaneously optimize several subdivision rules, i.e., not only the one for the EV itself but also the rules for its direct neighbors. Moreover, it allows us to prescribe the stencils for the ERs and naturally blends them with the regular rules that are applied away from the EV. All the constraints are combined in an optimization scheme that searches in the space of feasible subdivision schemes for a candidate which satisfies some necessary conditions exactly and other conditions approximately. The relative weighting of the constraints allows us to tune the properties of the subdivision scheme according to application specific requirements. We demonstrate our method by tuning the ERs for the well-known Loop scheme and by deriving ERs for a 3 -type scheme based on a 6-direction Box-spline.

Representing topological relationships among heterogeneous Geometry-Collection features

Topological relationships between two spatial features represent important knowledge in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). In the last few years, many models that represent topological relationships have been proposed. But these models cannot represent the topological relationships between heterogeneous geometrycollection features, which are composed of different dimensional geometries. In this paper, the formal definition of regular heterogeneous geometrycollection and regularization rules are given. Based on the spatial model, two methods for representing topological relationships between these complex features are proposed. The first method is Dimensionally Extended Nine-Intersection Model Based on Components (DE-9IMBC) that extends Dimensionally Extended Nine-Intersection Model (DE-9IM) and takes into account the topological relationships between components of these complex features. The advantage of DE-9IMBC is that, a large number of different topological relationships can be checked. The second method extends the definitions of topological relationships in Open Geodata Interoperability Specification (OpenGIS), and redefines the seven named topological relationships: {Disjoint, Touches, Within, Crosses, Overlaps, Contains and Equal}, to represent the topological relationships between heterogeneous geometrycollection features. It is proven that the seven extended topological relationships are complete and mutually exclusive, and they are suitable for being embedded in spatial query languages.

On the Formation of Tiberian Hebrew Imperatives, Evidence from Spirantization

This paper argues that imperatives in Tiberian Hebrew are not derived by truncation, but rather by a root-and-pattern association. The argument is based on spirantization, which behaves irregularly in truncated words, but not in imperatives. Tiberian Hebrew spirantization is a well-studied phenomenon within the phonology of the language, due to the fact that the generalizations associated with it are violated in so many instances. In Tiberian Hebrew, stops and spirants (fricatives) are in complementary distribution: spirants appear post-vocalically, and stops appear elsewhere. There are two main groups of exceptions to this generalization, both of which contribute to surface opacity of the rule. One is the plural segolates that involves cases in which spirantization is triggered by a so-called vowel that does not appear in the surface form and yields a post-consonantal spirant. The other class of exceptions to the canonical pattern is the truncated jussive and 2fs perfect stems. The purpose of this paper is to use these observations to determine the word formation of the imperative. The hypothesis is that truncation in Tiberian Hebrew yields phonological irregularities of spirantization in truncated words in order to mimic the base word. However, imperatives do not yield these phonological irregularities of spirantization in order to mimic the imperfective: yi xt ov ≈ k ∂ θ ov (and not * x ∂ t ov ). If the imperative is formed by truncation of the imperfective, then why does this truncation seem to act according to the regular phonological rules of the language? The proposed solution is to view Tiberian Hebrew imperatives as an instance of traditional non-concatenative morphology, and not as a truncated form. If k∂θov is not derived from yixtov there is no reason for spirantization to mimic the imperfective form.

Stems and Paradigms

This article presents an analysis of the conjugational systems of West Germanic that highlights the central role of two basic stem types and suggests some consequences for the description of inflectional systems in general. The analyses distinguish morphomic stems, which underlie morphosyntactically distinct word forms, from inflectional stems, which realize tense and mood features and provide the input to regular agreement rules. It is argued that the recognition of these stem types simplifies the description of West Germanic conjugations, supports a general realization-based approach, and suggests a reinterpretation of current realizational models.

Taxes and the acquisition of depreciable assets: The Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the alternative minimum tax

Analysis of firm investment behavior during 1982–1993 shows that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA 86) Public Law No. 99-514 substantially affects both purchases and leases of depreciable assets. The changes in the regular corporate income tax rules are shown to lower asset acquisition. The effect of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) is found to vary with the debt share in firms’ capital structure and with the frequency of AMT exposure during the life of the assets acquired. On average, TRA86 depresses asset purchases less for firms that are subject to the AMT: AMT somewhat mitigates the negative effects of the regular tax rules.

Variability of autogamy-maturation pattern in genetically identical populations of Paramecium tetraurelia.

Autogamy in Paramecium tetraurelia is a form of sexual reproduction in a single cell that results in homozygosity in every genetic locus. Autogamy becomes inducible by natural starvation several fissions after the previous autogamy, and percent autogamy increases gradually with clonal age to reach 100%. We here report the degree of variability of the autogamy-maturation pattern, and how it is inherited through autogamous generations. We assessed the autogamy-maturation pattern by monitoring percent autogamy at the ages of 9, 18 and 27 fissions in the wild-type stock 51. To determine how the autogamy-maturation pattern is inherited, clones that showed the lowest and the highest percent autogamy at age 18 in a given autogamous generation (Gn) were examined for their percent autogamy in the next autogamous generation (Gn+1). This procedure was repeated through successive autogamous generations. We found that percent autogamy at ages 9 and 27 was rather stable (low and high, respectively), while it was extremely variable at age 18 ranging from 3% to 100%. We also found that percent autogamy at age 18 in the progeny clones was variable irrespective of percent autogamy at age 18 in the parental clones; there was no regular rule such as producing progeny with higher (or lower) percent autogamy from parents with lower (or higher) percent autogamy.

A cascadic geometric filtering approach to subdivision

A new approach to subdivision based on the evolution of surfaces under curvature motion is presented. Such an evolution can be understood as a natural geometric filter process where time corresponds to the filter width. Thus, subdivision can be interpreted as the application of a geometric filter on an initial surface. The concrete scheme is a model of such a filtering based on a successively improved spatial approximation starting with some initial coarse mesh and leading to a smooth limit surface. In every subdivision step the underlying grid is refined by some regular refinement rule and a linear finite element problem is either solved exactly or, especially on fine grid levels, one confines to a small number of smoothing steps within the corresponding iterative linear solver. The approach closely connects subdivision to surface fairing concerning the geometric smoothing and to cascadic multigrid methods with respect to the actual numerical procedure. The derived method does not distinguish between different valences of nodes nor between different mesh refinement types. Furthermore, the method comes along with a new approach for the theoretical treatment of subdivision.

Integrated multi-strategic Web document pre-processing for sentence and word boundary detection

Most work in NLP requires that texts have been previously segmented into sentences and words. Segmenting a text into sentences and words, however, is a complex task, due to the ambiguity of many punctuation marks and spaces. Furthermore, Web texts such as HTML documents are more difficult to make into well refined and segmented texts because they are described in a more free style, with many sentence boundary and spacing errors. The objective of this paper introduces a multi-strategic integrated text preprocessing method for difficult problems of sentence boundary disambiguation and word boundary disambiguation of Web texts. We have applied a hybrid method (the regular expression rule, the heuristic rule, and the inductive learning of statistical decision trees, using a C4.5 learner) synergically to the task of raw corpus preprocessing. This work contributes to a more correct morphological analysis and guarantees a more stable working of application systems. We tackle easily definable problems with automatically acquired constraints and we use inductively learned decision trees to solve ill-defined ambiguity problems by incorporating multiple features ( n-grams, relative frequency, entropy, tri-dictionary index). The multi-strategy approach was thoroughly tested: it achieved approximately 99.12% (with punctuation marks) and 98.04% (without any punctuation marks) accuracy in sentence boundary disambiguation, 95.39% accuracy of word spacing correction, and 94.61% accuracy for whole intermixed text preprocessing problems, from Korean news script Web documents.

Probabilistic Parallel Communicating Grammar Systems

Grammar systems are theoretical models of distributed computing which play a major role in modern Computer Science. In this paper, we define and study a variant of Parallel Communicating(PC) grammar systems namely, Probabilistic PC grammar systems which serves as a grammatical model for random distributed processing. We study the construct with two different models of communication protocols namely, communication by request and communication by command. We explore the generative capacity of the variant with regular, context-free and context-sensitive rules in both models of communication.

Normal Meshes for Multiresolution Analysis of Irregular Meshes with Boundaries.

In this paper we present a remeshing algorithm for irregular meshes with boundaries. The irregular meshes are approximated by regular meshes that have topological regularity, which is essential for the multiresolution analysis of the given irregular meshes. Normal meshes are used to reduce the necessary data size at each resolution level of the regularized meshes. The normal mesh uses one scalar value, i. e., normal offset value that is calculated by the regular rule of a uniform subdivision and normal sampling, while other remeshing schemes use one 3D vector at each vertex. Since the normal offset cannot be adopted for the boundaries of meshes, we use a combined subdivision scheme that resolves the problem of the proposed normal offset method at the boundaries. Lastly, an example showing the effectiveness of the proposed scheme to reduce the data size of a mesh model is included.

Modular Liability Rules

Recent work has discussed and formalized the conditions under which Liability Rules are superior to Property Rules in a world with one-sided incomplete information. These studies demonstrated how Liability Rules achieve higher social welfare by harnessing one party's private information about its own valuation to the process of optimally allocating the entitlement between the parties. This article introduces a new family of Liability Rules hitherto neglected by courts and legal scholars. Modular Liability Rules is a legal regime in which the court applies legal Rules for which the traditional Liability Rules are building blocks; these Rules harness both parties' private information. Whereas in an efficient Liability Rule 2 (for example) a Polluter is granted a call-option to purchase the right to the air (so to speak) with an exercise price that equals the Resident's harm, in Modular Liability Rule 6 5, (for example) a pair of options, rather than a single one, is allocated; the Resident gets a put option to force a transfer of the entitlement (as under Rule 6), but the Polluter has a consecutive put option to sell the entitlement back to the Resident, if he wishes (as under Rule 5). Interestingly, the maximizing joint welfare exercise-price equals, in general and for uniform distributions, to an amount that is the average of one party's maximum estimated valuation and the other party's minimum estimated valuation. Two paradigmatic worlds of two-sided incomplete information are studied: a symmetric world, in which the court's best estimate of the parties' private valuations is that they are identically distributed, and an asymmetric world. In the symmetric world, Modular Liability Rules are in some respects more efficient and more fair (exact definitions are discussed in the article) than the conventional Liability Rules. In the two-sided and asymmetric world, Modular Liability Rules yield higher joint payoff than regular Liability Rules if, and only if, the difference between the parties' means is larger than the difference between their amount of private information (represented by the distribution's support). A practical way to implement these insights in real life situations is offered.

Why Laws Work Pretty Well, but Not Great: Words and Rules in Legal Interpretation

Words and Rules is Steven Pinker's third popular book about linguistics and cognitive psychology.' It is not about the law. In fact, it barely even mentions the law. Words and Rules is a book about how we form plurals of nouns and past tenses of verbs. According to Pinker, the words for irregular plurals and past tenses, like children and went, are learned from experience and stored in our minds as separate words. We remember them individually and relate them to their singular or present tense forms, child and go. In contrast, regular forms, like books and rained, are rule governed. Although we might remember them individually, we need not do so, because we routinely apply regular rules of pluralization (adding the sound s or z or iz depending on the final sound of the word being pluralized) and of past tense formation (adding the sound t

Hadron structure functions in a chiral quark model: Regularization, scaling and sum rules

We provide a consistent regularization procedure for calculating hadron structure functions in a chiral quark model. The structure functions are extracted from the absorptive part of the forward Compton amplitude in the Bjorken limit. Since this amplitude is obtained as a time-ordered correlation function its regularization is consistently determined from the regularization of the bosonized action. We find that the Pauli-Villars regularization scheme is most suitable because it preserves both the anomaly structure of QCD and the leading scaling behavior of hadron structure functions in the Bjorken limit. We show that this procedure yields the correct pion structure function. In order to render the sum rules of the regularized polarized nucleon structure functions consistent with their corresponding axial charges we find it mandatory to further specify the regularization procedure. This specification goes beyond the double subtraction scheme commonly employed when studying static hadron properties in this model. In particular the present approach serves to determine the regularization prescription for structure functions whose leading moments are not given by matrix elements of local operators. In this regard we conclude somewhat surprisingly that in this model the Gottfried sum rule does not undergo regularization.

A feature geometric description of Finnish vowel harmony covering both loans and native words

Abstract Loanwords sometimes pose problems for phonological rules which otherwise cover the native vocabulary in the language. Finnish vowel harmony is a case in point. The native vocabulary is governed by a clear set of regular harmony rules for both roots and suffixes. Long loanwords, however, be they harmonic or disharmonie, typically manifest free variation in the suffixes. The existence of inter and intraspeaker suffixal variation has been well documented in both introspective studies and written experiments. In this paper, we use experimental evidence from spoken language to establish that one and the same individual indeed manifests free variation in loans. To account for this variation, we use the feature geometry of autosegmental phonology, with separate tiers for the coronal and dorsal vowels. It is further proposed that a general precedence constraint assigns primacy to the value [dorsal] in the spreading process, which precedence is absolute in the native vocabulary. In loanwords, this stipulation is suspended, and the autosegmental spreading can take place freely from one vowel place tier or another. This freedom is only restricted by the exclusively local nature of coronal spreading, which is inherently present in the native vocabulary as well. Which value actually spreads in any given word and at any given moment probably depends on factors such as rhythm, speaking style, information structure and the rate of speech.

Writing disorders in Italian aphasic patients. A multiple single-case study of dysgraphia in a language with shallow orthography.

We report results of a writing task given to 53 mildly to moderately aphasic Italian subjects. The task was designed to test the writing performance along the subword-level routine for the spelling of regular words and non-words, and along the lexical routine for the spelling of irregular words. The aim of the study was to identify the incidence of different dysgraphic subtypes in Italian, a language that is considered to have shallow orthography. Its spelling, however, is not completely free of ambiguity. A five-part writing task was used: (i) words with regular one-sound-to-one-grapheme conversion; (ii) words with regular syllabic conversion; (iii) words with ambiguous transcription; (iv) loan-words; and (v) non-words. For regular words, the effects of word length and word frequency, and of the variables determining the complexity of the acoustic-to-phonological conversion (continuant versus plosive phones; consonant-vowel sequence versus doubled consonants or consonant clusters) were also considered. Patients' performances were classified according to the presence of a dissociation between (i) regular words and non-words, (ii) regular words and words with unpredictable spellings, and (iii) one-to-one and syllabic conversions. The 53 aphasic patients span the whole spectrum of dysgraphic taxonomy. Thirty-nine patients, in particular, manifested a dissociated pattern of performance. Eighteen patients showed a prevalent surface dysgraphic pattern and seven a phonological one, while 11 patients showed a mixed pattern (i.e. a better performance for regular words than for ambiguous words or regular non-words). Three patients showed a specific deficit for regular syllabic conversion rules only. A high rate of 'mixed dysgraphia' suggests either a mutual interaction of the two impaired routines when regular words are written, or two separate functional lesions: one at the level of the auditory-to-phonological conversion procedure, the other at the level of the orthographic output lexicon.

At the cutting edge: conflict avoidance and resolution in the US construction industry

The American Arbitration Association (AAA) has undertaken a number of reforms to the dispute resolution process, engendered by the ‘quiet revolution’ of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and its impact upon traditional arbitration mechanisms. This paper appraises the procedural changes which relate to the three distinct schemes: Fast Track Rules, Regular Track Rules, and Large Complex Case Rules; it also looks at parallel progress in mediation and partnering. The author concludes that the US construction industry has undergone, and continues to undergo, a transition from private adjudication, such as arbitration, through the ‘settlement-oriented interventions’ of ADR to more comprehensive approaches, as exemplified by partnering.

On the power of parallel communicating grammar systems with right-linear components

We settle here two problems concerning the generative power of parallel communicating grammar systems with right-linear components: (1) each linear language can be generated by a non-centralized returning system, (2) the family of languages generated by centifilized returning systems is incomparable with the family of languages generated by non-returning centralized systems. It is also proved that centralized returning systents with right-linear components are strictly more powerful than systems with regular rules in the restricted sense.

Fair-Play Rules and Injury Reduction in Ice Hockey

To determine the rate, type, and severity of injuries incurred and penalties assessed during the qualifying fair-play (points for playing without excessive penalties) and championship "regular" rules (winner advances) portions of a 1994 Junior Gold ice hockey tournament. A prospective evaluation of injuries by certified athletic trainers at the tournament site. A community-organized, 3-day, 31-game tournament in Minnesota. Two hundred seventy-three male players, younger than 20 years and in high school. Injuries were recorded by an on-site certified athletic trainer, and the penalties were tallied from the score sheets. The injury rates for the total number of injuries were 26.4 injuries per 1000 athlete exposures and 273.8 injuries per 1000 player hours. When only notable injuries (concussion, facial laceration, or moderate level of severity and above) were considered, the injury rates were 10 per 1000 athlete exposures and 103.9 per 1000 player hours. The ratio of notable fair-play to notable regular-rules injuries was 1:4.8. The number of penalties assessed per game averaged 7.1 penalties during fair-play rules and 13 penalties during the regular-rules competition. Penalties related to rough play and injury occurred four times more frequently during games with regular rules than those with fair-play rules. The fair-play concept can reduce injury rates, penalty rates, and severity of penalties and should be considered for ice hockey at all levels of play. The fair-play concept could be applied to other contact sports to reduce injury rates and rules infractions.

Tetrahedral grid refinement

We present a refinement algorithm for unstructured tetrahedral grids which generates possibly highly non-uniform but nevertheless consistent (closed) and stable triangulations. Therefore we first define somelocal regular and irregular refinement rules that are applied to single elements. Theglobal refinement algorithm then describes how these local rules can be combined and rearranged in order to ensure consistency as well as stability. It is given in a rather general form and includes also grid coarsening.