David Dorn, Alfonso Sousa-Poza, Why is the employment rate of older Swiss so high? An analysis of the social security system, Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, Vol. 28 (4), 2003. (Journal Article)
Extracts of this paper were presented at the conference "Work Beyond 60: Preparing for the Demographic Shock", 6–7 March 2003 in Vienna organized by The Geneva Association, The Club of Rome, and The Risk Institute. Parts were also presented at the Bertelsmann Foundation conference "Strategien gegen den Fachkräftemangel" in Berlin, 2 July 2002 and at the Bertelsmann Foundation conference "Reformen zur Steigerung der Beschäftigungsfähigkeit älterer Arbeitskräfte" in Berlin, 26 October 2001. The authors would like to thank the participants as well as Jaap van Dam, Thomas Liebig, Fred Henneberger, and Geneviève Reday-Mulvey for their valuable comments and discussions. Alfonso Sousa-Poza would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for financial assistance. The usual disclaimer applies. |
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Marc Chesney, Pauline Barrieu, Optimal Timing to Adopt Environmental Policy in a Strategic Framework, Environmental Modeling & Assessment, Vol. 8 (3), 2003. (Journal Article)
In this paper, the problem of optimal timing, when to adopt an environmental policy in a strategic framework is considered. Using real options theory and some basic tools of game theory, we show that, under certain assumptions, a country behaving strategically should wait longer before adopting such a policy than if it behaves unstrategically or within a larger entity. Such a postponed decision is sub-optimal as regards to the environment protection. |
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Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Diego Mollà Aliod, Rolf Schwitter, Kaarel Kaljurand, Knowledge-Based Question Answering, In: Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems, KES-2003, Springer, Oxford, UK, September 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Large amounts of technical documentation are available in machine readable format, however there is a lack of effective ways to access them. In this paper we propose an approach based on linguistic techniques, geared towards the creation of a domain-specific Knowledge Base, starting from the available technical documentation. We then discuss an effective way to access the information encoded in the Knowledge Base. Given a user question phrased in natural language the system is capable of retrieving the encoded semantic information that most closely matches the user input, and present it by highlighting the textual elements that were used to deduct it. |
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N. Mileva, C. Martínez, C. Mediano, T. Bastiaens, T. Castro, S. Tzanova, S. Stoyanova, N. Mathieu, T. Yovcheva, D. Tokmakov, Helmut Schauer, Internet-Based Performance Support Systems with Educational Elements, In: IPSS_EE9 for Engineering Education – Experimental Design and some Results from the Experiments. Global Engineer: Education and Training for Mobility 31st SEFI Conference, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal, Sep 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
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Kjell G. Nyborg, Ilya A Strebulaev, Multiple Unit Auctions and Short Squeezes, Review of Financial Studies, Vol. 17 (2), 2003. (Journal Article)
This article develops a theory of multiunit auctions where short squeezes can occur in the secondary market. Both uniform and discriminatory auctions are studied and bidders can submit multiple bids. We show that bidders with short and long preauction positions have different valuations in an otherwise common value setting. Discriminatory auctions lead to more short squeezing and higher revenue than uniform auctions, ceteris paribus. Asymptotically, as the auction size approaches infinity, the two formats lead to equivalent outcomes. Shorts employ more aggressive equilibrium bidding strategies. Most longs strategically choose to be passive. Free riding on a squeeze by small, long players has no impact on these results, but affects revenue in discriminatory auctions. |
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Diego Mollà Aliod, Fabio Rinaldi, Rolf Schwitter, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Answer Extraction from Technical Texts, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 18, 2003. (Journal Article)
Describes the ExtrAns answer-extraction system which uses logical forms and lexical relations for semantic representation, to delve into and leverage the meaning of sentences, phrases, and words. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Scott Clearwater, Foster Provost, The Relational Vector-space Model and Industry Classification, In: IJCAI-2003 Workshop on Learning Statistical Models from Relational Data, August 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
This paper addresses the classification of linked entities. We introduce a relational vector-space (VS) model (in analogy to the VS model used in information retrieval) that abstracts the linked structure, representing entities by vectors of weights. Given labeled data as background knowledge/training data, classification procedures can be defined for this model, including a straightforward, “direct” model using weighted adjacency vectors. Using a large set of tasks from the domain of company affiliation identification, we demonstrate that such classification procedures can be effective. We then examine the method in more detail, showing that as expected the classification performance correlates with the relational autocorrelation of the data set. We then turn the tables and use the relational VS scores as a way to analyze/visualize the relational autocorrelation present in a complex linked structure. The main contribution of the paper is to introduce the relational VS model as a potentially useful addition to the toolkit for relational data mining. It could provide useful constructed features for domains with low to moderate relational autocorrelation; it may be effective by itself for domains with high levels of relational autocorrelation, and it provides a useful abstraction for analyzing the properties of linked data.
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Abraham Bernstein, The Product Workbench: An Environment for the Mass-Customization of Production-Processes, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 515 - 524, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
This article investigates how to support process enactment in highly flexible organizations. First it develops the requirements for such a support system. Then it proposes a prototype implementation, which offers its users the equivalent of a CAD/CAM-like tool for designing and supporting business processes. The tool enables end-users to take flexible building blocks of a production process, reassemble them to fit the specific needs of a particular case and finally export its description to process support systems like workflow management systems. |
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Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, George Wyner, John Quimby, Abraham Bernstein, George Herman, Mark Klein, Charley Osborne, Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an on-line ìprocess handbook"". The handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesign existing organizational processes, (2) invent new organizational processes (especially ones that take advantage of information technology), and (3) share ideas about organizational practices.
A key element of the work is an approach to analyzing processes at various levels of abstraction, thus capturing both the details of specific processes as well as the ""deep structure"" of their similarities. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. A primary advantage of the approach is that it allows people to explicitly represent the similarities (and differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternatives for how a given process could be performed. In addition to describing this new approach, the work reported here demonstrates the basic technical feasibility of these ideas and gives one example of their use in a field study. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein, Thomas W. Malone, The Process Recombinator: A Tool for Generating New Business Process Ideas, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 203 - 422, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
A critical need for many organizations in the next century will be the ability to quickly develop innovative business processes to take advantage of rapidly changing technologies and markets. Current process design tools and methodologies, however, are very resource-intensive and provide little support for generating (as opposed to merely recording) new design alternatives.
This paper describes the Process Recombinator, a novel tool for generating new business process ideas by recombining elements from a richly structured repository of knowledge about business processes. The key contribution of the work is the technical demonstration of how such a repository can be used to automatically generate a wide range of innovative process designs. We have also informally evaluated the Process Recombinator in several field studies, which are briefly described here as well. |
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Abraham Bernstein, How can cooperative work tools support dynamic group processes? Bridging the specificity frontier, In: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 525 - 544, August 2003. (Book Chapter)
In the past, most collaboration support systems have focused on either automating fixed work processes or simply supporting communication in ad-hoc processes. This results in systems that are usually inflexible and difficult to change or that provide no specific support to help users decide what to do next.
This paper describes a new kind of tool that bridges the gap between these two approaches by flexibly supporting processes at many points along the spectrum: from highly specified to highly unspecified. The development of this approach was strongly based on social science theory about collaborative work. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Benjamin Grosof, Beyond Monotonic Inheritance: Towards Semantic Web Process Ontologies, No. IFI-2008.0006, Version: 1, August 2003. (Technical Report)
Semantic Web Services (SWS), the convergence of Semantic Web and Web Services, is the emerging next major generation of the Web, in which e-services and business communication become more knowledge-based and agent-based. In the SWS vision, service descriptions are built partly upon process ontologies – widely shared ontological knowledge about business processes – which are represented using Semantic Web techniques for declarative knowledge representation (KR), e.g., OWL Description Logic or RuleML Logic Programs.
In this paper, we give the first approach to solving a previously unsolved, crucial problem in representing process ontologies using SW KR: how to represent non-monotonic inheritance reasoning, in which at each (sub)class in the class hierarchy, any inherited property value may be overridden with another value, or simply cancelled (i.e., not inherited). Non-monotonic inheritance is an important, heavily-used feature in pre-SWS process ontologies, e.g., ubiquitous in object-oriented (OO) programming. The advantages of non-monotonicity in inheritance include greater reuse/modularity and easier specification, updating, and merging. We focus in particular on the Process Handbook (PH), a large, influential, and well-used process ontologies repository that is representative in its features for non-monotonic inheritance. W3C’s OWL, the currently dominant SW KR for ontologies, is fundamentally incapable of representing non-monotonicity; so too is First Order Logic. Using instead another form of leading SW KR – RuleML – we give a new approach that successfully represents the PH’s style of non-monotonic inheritance. In this Courteous Inheritance approach, PH ontology knowledge is represented as prioritized default rules expressed in the Courteous Logic Programs (CLP) subset of RuleML.
A prototype of our approach is in progress. We aim to use it to enable SWS exploitation of the forthcoming open-source version of the PH. |
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David Seidl, The role of general strategy concepts in the practice of strategy, In: 19th European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium. 2003. (Conference Presentation)
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Mukhija Arun, Martin Glinz, CASA - A Contract-based Adaptive Software Architecture Framework., In: 3rd Workshop on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks (ASWN 2003), 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Kaarel Kaljurand, Michael Hess, Diego Mollà Aliod, Exploiting Paraphrases in a Question Answering System, In: ACL-2003, Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing: Paraphrase Acquisition and Applications, Sapporo, Japan, July 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
We present a Question Answering system for technical domains which makes an intelligent use of paraphrases to increase the likelihood of finding the answer to the user's question. The system implements a simple and efficient logic representation of questions and answers that maps paraphrases to the same underlying semantic representation. Further, paraphrases of technical terminology are dealt with by a separate process that detects surface variants. |
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Fabio Rinaldi, James Dowdall, Michael Hess, Kaarel Kaljurand, Andreas Persidis, Babis Theodoulidis, Bill Black, John McNaught, Haralampos Karanikas, Argyris Vasilakopoulos, Kelly Zervanou, Luc Bernard, Gian Piero Zarri, Hilbert Bruins Slot, Chris van der Touw, Margaret Daniel-King, Nancy Underwood, Agnes Lisowska, Lonneke van der Plas, Veronique Sauron, Myra Spiliopoulou, Marko Brunzel, Jeremy Elleman, Giorgos Orphanos, Thomas Mavroudakis, Spiros Taraviras, Parmenides: an opportunity for ISO TC37 SC4?, In: ACL-2003: Workshop on Linguistic Annotation: Getting the Model Right, Sapporo, Japan, July 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Despite the many initiatives in recent years aimed at creating Language Engineering standards, it is often the case that different projects use different approaches and often define their own standards. Even within the same project it often happens that different tools will require different ways to represent their linguistic data. In a recently started EU project focusing on the integration of Information Extraction and Data Mining techniques, we aim at avoiding the problem of incompatibility among different tools by defining a Common Annotation Scheme internal to the project. However, when the project was started (Sep 2002) we were unaware of the standardization effort of ISO TC37/SC4, and so we commenced once again trying to define our own schema. Fortunately, as this work is still at an early stage (the project will last till 2005) it is still possible to redirect it in a way that it will be compatible with the standardization work of ISO. In this paper we describe the status of the work in the project and explore possible synergies with the work in ISO TC37 SC4. |
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James Dowdall, Fabio Rinaldi, Fidelia Imbekwe-SanJuan, Eric SanJuan, Complex Structuring of term variants for Question Answering, In: MultiWord Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treratment. Workshop at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL-03, Sapporo, Japan, July 2003. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Question Answering provides a method of locating precise answers to specific questions but in technical domains the amount of Multi-Word Terms complicates this task.
This paper outlines the Question Answering task in such a domain and explores two ways of detecting relations between Multi-Word Terms. The first targets specific semantic relations, the second uses a clustering algorithm, but they are both based on the idea of syntactic variation. The paper demonstrates how the combination of these two methodologies provide sophisticated access to technical domains. |
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, A Comprehensive Model to assess the Performance of Government Policies and Institutions, improving Nuclear Regulatory Performance, In: AEN/NEA, OECD. 2003. (Conference Presentation)
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Bruno Staffelbach, Der Teamgeist bleibt meist in der Flasche: Wunsch und Wirklichkeit im Verwaltungsrat, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 131, p. 59, 10 June 2003. (Newspaper Article)
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Andrea Baranzini, Marc Chesney, Jacques Morisset, The impact of possible climate catastrophes on global warming policy, Energy Policy, Vol. 31 (8), 2003. (Journal Article)
Recent studies on global warming have introduced the inherent uncertainties associated with the costs and benefits of climate policies and have often shown that abatement policies are likely to be less aggressive or postponed in comparison to those resulting from traditional cost–benefit analyses (CBA). Yet, those studies have failed to include the possibility of sudden climate catastrophes. The aim of this paper is to account simultaneously for possible continuous and discrete damages resulting from global warming, and to analyse their implications on the optimal path of abatement policies. Our approach is related to the new literature on investment under uncertainty, and relies on some recent developments of the real option in which we incorporated negative jumps (climate catastrophes) in the stochastic process corresponding to the net benefits associated with the abatement policies. The impacts of continuous and discrete climatic risks can therefore be considered separately. Our numerical applications lead to two main conclusions: (i) gradual, continuous uncertainty in the global warming process is likely to delay the adoption of abatement policies as found in previous studies, with respect to the standard CBA; however (ii) the possibility of climate catastrophes accelerates the implementation of these policies as their net discounted benefits increase significantly. |
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