General-purpose modelingGeneral-purpose modeling (GPM) is the systematic use of a general-purpose modeling language to represent the various facets of an object or a system. Examples of GPM languages are: The Unified Modeling Language (UML), an industry standard for modeling software-intensive systems EXPRESS, a data modeling language for product data, standardized as ISO 10303-11 IDEF, a group of languages from the 1970s that aimed to be neutral, generic and reusable Gellish, an industry standard natural language oriented modeling language for storage and exchange of data and knowledge, published in 2005 XML, a data modeling language now beginning to be used to model code (MetaL, Microsoft .
Markov modelIn probability theory, a Markov model is a stochastic model used to model pseudo-randomly changing systems. It is assumed that future states depend only on the current state, not on the events that occurred before it (that is, it assumes the Markov property). Generally, this assumption enables reasoning and computation with the model that would otherwise be intractable. For this reason, in the fields of predictive modelling and probabilistic forecasting, it is desirable for a given model to exhibit the Markov property.
Cache language modelA cache language model is a type of statistical language model. These occur in the natural language processing subfield of computer science and assign probabilities to given sequences of words by means of a probability distribution. Statistical language models are key components of speech recognition systems and of many machine translation systems: they tell such systems which possible output word sequences are probable and which are improbable.
Limited dependent variableA limited dependent variable is a variable whose range of possible values is "restricted in some important way." In econometrics, the term is often used when estimation of the relationship between the limited dependent variable of interest and other variables requires methods that take this restriction into account. For example, this may arise when the variable of interest is constrained to lie between zero and one, as in the case of a probability, or is constrained to be positive, as in the case of wages or hours worked.
Ordination (statistics)Ordination or gradient analysis, in multivariate analysis, is a method complementary to data clustering, and used mainly in exploratory data analysis (rather than in hypothesis testing). In contrast to cluster analysis, ordination orders quantities in a (usually lower-dimensional) latent space. In the ordination space, quantities that are near each other share attributes (i.e., are similar to some degree), and dissimilar objects are farther from each other.
Statistical learning in language acquisitionStatistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition. The earliest evidence for these statistical learning abilities comes from a study by Jenny Saffran, Richard Aslin, and Elissa Newport, in which 8-month-old infants were presented with nonsense streams of monotone speech.
Principles and parametersPrinciples and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages (i.
Ad hoc hypothesisIn science and philosophy, an ad hoc hypothesis is a hypothesis added to a theory in order to save it from being falsified. Often, ad hoc hypothesizing is employed to compensate for anomalies not anticipated by the theory in its unmodified form. Scientists are often skeptical of theories that rely on frequent, unsupported adjustments to sustain them. This is because, if a theorist so chooses, there is no limit to the number of ad hoc hypotheses that they could add. Thus the theory becomes more and more complex, but is never falsified.
Teleology in biologyTeleology in biology is the use of the language of goal-directedness in accounts of evolutionary adaptation, which some biologists and philosophers of science find problematic. The term teleonomy has also been proposed. Before Darwin, organisms were seen as existing because God had designed and created them; their features such as eyes were taken by natural theology to have been made to enable them to carry out their functions, such as seeing.
