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1. Combining Combination Properties: An Analysis of Stable Infiniteness, Convexity, and Politeness

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38499-8_30  

   Toledo, Guilherme V.; Zohar, Yoni; Barrett, Clark (September 2023, Lecture notes in computer science)

   Pientka, B.; Tinelli, C. (Ed.)

   We make two contributions to the study of theory combination in satisfiability modulo theories. The first is a table of examples for the combinations of the most common model-theoretic properties in theory combination, namely stable infiniteness, smoothness, convexity, finite witnessability, and strong finite witnessability (and therefore politeness and strong politeness as well). All of our examples are sharp, in the sense that we also offer proofs that no theories are available within simpler signatures. This table significantly progresses the current understanding of the various properties and their interactions. The most remarkable example in this table is of a theory over a single sort that is polite but not strongly polite (the existence of such a theory was only known until now for two-sorted signatures). The second contribution is a new combination theorem showing that in order to apply polite theory combination, it is sufficient for one theory to be stably infinite and strongly finitely witnessable, thus showing that smoothness is not a critical property in this combination method. This result has the potential to greatly simplify the process of showing which theories can be used in polite combination, as showing stable infiniteness is considerably simpler than showing smoothness. 

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2. The Nonexistence of Unicorns and Many-Sorted Löwenheim–Skolem Theorems

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71162-6_34  

   Przybocki, Benjamin; Toledo, Guilherme; Zohar, Yoni; Barrett, Clark (September 2024, Springer Nature Switzerland)

   Platzer, André; Rozier, Kristin Yvonne; Pradella, Matteo; Rossi, Matteo (Ed.)

   Abstract Stable infiniteness, strong finite witnessability, and smoothness are model-theoretic properties relevant to theory combination in satisfiability modulo theories. Theories that are strongly finitely witnessable and smooth are calledstrongly politeand can be effectively combined with other theories. Toledo, Zohar, and Barrett conjectured that stably infinite and strongly finitely witnessable theories are smooth and therefore strongly polite. They called counterexamples to this conjectureunicorn theories, as their existence seemed unlikely. We prove that, indeed, unicorns do not exist. We also prove versions of the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem and the Łoś–Vaught test for many-sorted logic. 

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3. Fresh Start: Encouraging Politeness in Wakeword-Driven Human-Robot Interaction

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3568162.3576959  

   Wen, Ruchen; Hanson, Alyssa; Han, Zhao; Williams, Tom (March 2023, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction)

   Deployed social robots are increasingly relying on wakeword-based interaction, where interactions are human-initiated by a wakeword like “Hey Jibo”. While wakewords help to increase speech recognition accuracy and ensure privacy, there is concern that wakeword-driven interaction could encourage impolite behavior because wakeword-driven speech is typically phrased as commands. To address these concerns, companies have sought to use wake- word design to encourage interactant politeness, through wakewords like “⟨Name⟩, please”. But while this solution is intended to encourage people to use more “polite words”, researchers have found that these wakeword designs actually decrease interactant politeness in text-based communication, and that other wakeword designs could better encourage politeness by priming users to use Indirect Speech Acts. Yet there has been no previous research to directly compare these wakewords designs in in-person, voice-based human-robot interaction experiments, and previous in-person HRI studies could not effectively study carryover of wakeword-driven politeness and impoliteness into human-human interactions. In this work, we conceptually reproduced these previous studies (n=69) to assess how the wakewords “Hey ⟨Name⟩”, “Excuse me ⟨Name⟩”, and “⟨Name⟩, please” impact robot-directed and human-directed politeness. Our results demonstrate the ways that different types of linguistic priming interact in nuanced ways to induce different types of robot-directed and human-directed politeness. 

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4. Dempster-Shafer Theoretic Learning of Indirect Speech Act Comprehension Norms

   Wen, Ruchen; Siddiqui, Mohammed Aun; Williams, Tom (February 2020, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   For robots to successfully operate as members of human-robot teams, it is crucial for robots to correctly understand the intentions of their human teammates. This task is particularly difficult due to human sociocultural norms: for reasons of social courtesy (e.g., politeness), people rarely express their intentions directly, instead typically employing polite utterance forms such as Indirect Speech Acts (ISAs). It is thus critical for robots to be capable of inferring the intentions behind their teammates’ utterances based on both their interaction context (including, e.g., social roles) and their knowledge of the sociocultural norms that are applicable within that context. This work builds off of previous research on understanding and generation of ISAs using Dempster-Shafer Theoretic Uncertain Logic, by showing how other recent work in Dempster-Shafer Theoretic rule learning can be used to learn appropriate uncertainty intervals for robots’ representations of sociocultural politeness norms. 

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5. New basis for Hamiltonian SU(2) simulations

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.074501  

   D’Andrea, Irian; Bauer, Christian W; Grabowska, Dorota M; Freytsis, Marat (April 2024, Physical Review D)

   Due to rapidly improving quantum computing hardware, Hamiltonian simulations of relativistic lattice field theories have seen a resurgence of attention. This computational tool requires turning the formally infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of the full theory into a finite-dimensional one. For gauge theories, a widely used basis for the Hilbert space relies on the representations induced by the underlying gauge group, with a truncation that keeps only a set of the lowest dimensional representations. This works well at large bare gauge coupling, but becomes less efficient at small coupling, which is required for the continuum limit of the lattice theory. In this work, we develop a new basis suitable for the simulation of an SU(2) lattice gauge theory in the maximal tree gauge. In particular, we show how to perform a Hamiltonian truncation so that the eigenvalues of both the magnetic and electric gauge-fixed Hamiltonian are mostly preserved, which allows for this basis to be used at all values of the coupling. Little prior knowledge is assumed, so this may also be used as an introduction to the subject of Hamiltonian formulations of lattice gauge theories. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

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