Contributions in Merlin

Terminology is arguably the most vital linguistic unit of technical documentation. Characterising the content of documents by the terminology they contain is a key factor in satisfactory document retrieval. But when users require answers rather than documents, more complex strategies for exploiting terminology are needed. Dealing effectively with this problem requires not only good techniques for terminology extraction but also ways to organize and structure the terminology. We describe some potential solutions to this problem, taking a Question Answering system as an example. We show which benefits our techniques bring to the system.

The stability of the international financial system depends on the consistency of announcements, beliefs, and actions by countries and international organizations like the IMF. This article considers the first element in this trinity and analyzes the incentives of a rational policy maker to announce a fixed or flexible exchange rate regime. In a cross-sectional analysis for the 1990s, I find that countries with a non-functioning legal system, a low degree of the rule of law, high expropriation risk, low infrastructure quality and similar characteristics are more ikely to announce fixed exchange rates. This result is consistent with a theoretical argument about announcing a fixed regime as a signal of “goodness” to the international community.

The coincidence effect-a phenomenon known in similarity research-suggests that people assign extra weight to features that 2 items have in common. The role of this effect in 2 kinds of environmental judgments about food products is investigated. Task 1 ("How environmentally friendly is a particular food product compared with a reference?") provided some evidence for the coincidence hypothesis. However, Task 2 ("How much more or less environmentally harmful is a food product compared with a standard?") showed anticoincidence. People's subjective evaluations were examined in regard to how they matched or deviated from objective measures of harmful environmental consequences related to food products. Coincidence and anticoincidence help to explain when and why subjective and objective evaluations may diverge.

The objective of this book is to give a self-contained presentation to the theory underlying the valuation of derivative financial instruments, which is becoming a standard part of the toolbox of professionals in the financial industry. Although a complete derivation of the Black-Scholes option pricing formula is given, the focus is on finite-time models. Not going for the greatest possible level of generality is greatly rewarded by a greater insight into the underlying economic ideas, putting the reader in an excellent position to proceed to the more general continuous-time theory. The material will be accessible to students and practitioners having a working knowledge of linear algebra and calculus. All additional material is developed from the very beginning as needed. In particular, the book also offers an introduction to modern probability theory, albeit mostly within the context of finite sample spaces. The style of presentation will appeal to financial economics students seeking an elementary but rigorous introduction to the subject; mathematics and physics students looking for an opportunity to become acquainted with this modern applied topic; and mathematicians, physicists or quantitatively inclined economists working in the financial industry.

The aim of this paper is to develop a model predicting the collected amount of waste paper at the regional level of municipalities. Learning about the factors that influence the amount of collected paper is a prerequisite for the evaluation and reorganization of collection systems. We hypothesize that the amount of collected paper depends on both the waste potential and the factors which influence the convenience such as the density of collection sites. For this study, we used a sample of 649 municipalities. Between the municipalities, the data show a high variance in terms of the collected waste paper per person and year. We developed a multivariate regression model providing valuable insights about the relationship between demographic parameters and the amount of collected waste paper. Furthermore, we found a significant positive impact of the convenience of the collection system.

The boards of large corporations sharing some of their directors are connected in complex networks. Boards are responsible for corporations' long-term strategy and are often involved in decisions about a common topic related to the belief in economical growth or recession. We are interested in understanding under which conditions a large majority of boards making the same decision can emerge in the network. We present a model where board directors are engaged in a decision-making dynamics based on "herd behavior." Boards influence each other through shared directors. We find that imitation of colleagues and opinion bias due to the interlock do not trigger an avalanche of identical decisions over the board network, whereas the information about interlocked boards' decisions does. There is no need to invoke global public information, nor external driving forces. This model provides a simple endogenous mechanism to explain the fact that boards of the largest corporations of a country can, in the span of a few months, make the same decisions about general topics.

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