Conceptual confusing similarity and pictorial trade marks

Several high-profile rebrands, including those by Twitter and Starbucks, have involved removing text from logos. This move towards wordless, pictorial trade marks raises a difficult question about how the scope of protection of a registered trade mark should be determined. This article examines the particular issue of how much weight should be given to the idea or concept underlying a pictorial mark when assessing whether a defendant’s junior mark is ‘confusingly similar’. Drawing on legal principles and case examples from Europe, the United Kingdom, Singapore and New Zealand, it is claimed that courts and adjudicators should be careful not to overweight conceptual similarity. It is argued that a lack of care in assessing conceptual similarity risks awarding one trader overbroad protection, which may be tantamount to conferring on one trader a monopoly in an idea. A lack of care may also undermine the logic of a registration system by untethering protection from what is recorded on the Register, and may make trade mark law less predictable and certain. * The author declares that he was junior counsel in a case discussed in this article, Carabao Tawandang Co Ltd v Red Bull GmbH HC Wellington CIV-2005-485-1975, 31 August 2006. The views represented in this article are the author’s own, and do not reflect the views of his employer at the time, or the views of the client represented in that particular case.

Gradual GRAM and secure computation for RAM programs

Despite the fact that the majority of applications encountered in practice today are captured more efficiently by RAM programs, the area of secure two-party computation (2PC) has seen tremendous improvement mostly for Boolean circuits. One of the most studied objects in this domain is garbled circuits. Analogously, garbled RAM (GRAM) provide similar security guarantees for RAM programs with applications to constant round 2PC. In this work we consider the notion of gradual GRAM which requires no memory garbling algorithm. Our approach provides several qualitative advantages over prior works due to the conceptual similarity to the analogue garbling mechanism for Boolean circuits. We next revisit the GRAM construction from (In STOC (2015) 449–458) and improve it in two orthogonal aspects: match it directly with tree-based ORAMs and explore its consistency with gradual ORAM.

Food Ingredients Similarity Based on Conceptual and Textual Similarity

Open Food Facts provides a database of food products such as product names, compositions, and additives, where everyone can contribute to add the data or reuse the existing data. The open food facts data are dirty and needs to be processed before storing the data to our system. To reduce redundancy in food ingredients data, we measure the similarity of ingredient food using two similarities: the conceptual similarity and textual similarity. The conceptual similarity measures the similarity between the two datasets by its word meaning (synonym), while the textual similarity is based on fuzzy string matching, namely Levenshtein distance, Jaro-Winkler distance, and Jaccard distance. Based on our evaluation, the combination of similarity measurements using textual and Wordnet similarity (conceptual) was the most optimal similarity method in food ingredients.

Unsupervised Novelty Characterization in Physical Environments Using Qualitative Spatial Relations

Detecting, characterizing and adapting to novelty, whether in the form of previously unseen objects or phenomena, or unexpected changes in the behavior of known elements, is essential for Artificial Intelligence agents to operate reliably in unconstrained real-world environments. We propose an automatic, unsupervised approach to novelty characterization for dynamic domains, based on describing the behaviors and interactions of objects in terms of their possible actions. To abstract from the variety of realizations of an action that can occur in physical domains, we model states in terms of qualitative spatial relations (QSRs) between their entities. By first learning a model of actions in the non-novel environment from the state transitions observed as the agent interacts with the world, we can detect novelty by the persistent deviations from this model that it causes, and characterize the novelty by new or modified actions. We also present a new method of learning action models from observation, based on conceptual similarity and hierarchical clustering.

Lexical Sense Labeling and Sentiment Potential Analysis Using Corpus-Based Dependency Graph

This paper describes a graph method for labeling word senses and identifying lexical sentiment potential by integrating the corpus-based syntactic-semantic dependency graph layer, lexical semantic and sentiment dictionaries. The method, implemented as ConGraCNet application on different languages and corpora, projects a semantic function onto a particular syntactical dependency layer and constructs a seed lexeme graph with collocates of high conceptual similarity. The seed lexeme graph is clustered into subgraphs that reveal the polysemous semantic nature of a lexeme in a corpus. The construction of the WordNet hypernym graph provides a set of synset labels that generalize the senses for each lexical cluster. By integrating sentiment dictionaries, we introduce graph propagation methods for sentiment analysis. Original dictionary sentiment values are integrated into ConGraCNet lexical graph to compute sentiment values of node lexemes and lexical clusters, and identify the sentiment potential of lexemes with respect to a corpus. The method can be used to resolve sparseness of sentiment dictionaries and enrich the sentiment evaluation of lexical structures in sentiment dictionaries by revealing the relative sentiment potential of polysemous lexemes with respect to a specific corpus. The proposed approach has the potential to be used as a complementary method to other NLP resources and tasks, including word disambiguation, domain relatedness, sense structure, metaphoricity, as well as a cross- and intra-cultural discourse variations of prototypical conceptualization patterns and knowledge representations.

Measuring the Belief System of a Person

Theories of belief system structure and dynamics assume that belief systems are an person-level construct. However, measures of belief system structure do not measures the structure of person-level belief systems and instead measure aggregated belief system structure (e.g., the belief system in a particular country). In this paper I show that a measure of conceptual similarity between attitudes and identities of a belief system works as a valid, reliable, flexible, and efficient measure of person-level belief system structure. In Studies 1 (N = 387) and 2 (N = 389), I show conceptual similarity judgments are reliable and are related to measures of political engagement, issue consistency, and preference congruence as predicted by theories of belief system dynamics. In Studies 3 (N = 981) and 4 (N = 983), I show that conceptual similarity judgments are affected by partisan frames and that changes in conceptual similarity judgments are associated with attitude change as predicted by theories of belief system dynamics. Conceptual similarity judgments can be used with a variety of attitudes and identities in easy to administer studies. It provides a tool to fill an empirical gap identified by theories of belief system dynamics.

Manipulations of List Type in the DRM Paradigm: A Review of How Structural and Conceptual Similarity Affect False Memory

The use of list-learning paradigms to explore false memory has revealed several critical findings about the contributions of similarity and relatedness in memory phenomena more broadly. Characterizing the nature of “similarity and relatedness” can inform researchers about factors contributing to memory distortions and about the underlying associative and semantic networks that support veridical memory. Similarity can be defined in terms of semantic properties (e.g., shared conceptual and taxonomic features), lexical/associative properties (e.g., shared connections in associative networks), or structural properties (e.g., shared orthographic or phonological features). By manipulating the type of list and its relationship to a non-studied critical item, we review the effects of these types of similarity on veridical and false memory. All forms of similarity reviewed here result in reliable error rates and the effects on veridical memory are variable. The results across a variety of paradigms and tests provide partial support for a number of theoretical explanations of false memory phenomena, but none of the theories readily account for all results.

“Crossed-out psychologism” of female salon portrait of the Art Nouveau: portraits of Elena Olive by the artist Konstantin Somov and Marina Makovskaya by Alexander Golovin

In view of female portrait of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, which stylistically belongs to “salon” painting of the Russian Art Nouveau, the authors analyzes the two works by the artists of “The World of Art” association – the portrait of Elena Olive by Konstantin Somov (1914) and the portrait of Marina Makovskaya by Alexander Golovin (1912). Both portraits are attributed to the series of female portraits created by Konstantin Somov and Alexander Golovin in the early 1910s. The general circle of  the artists’ clients, similar formats of works, compositional and stylistic techniques allow drawing parallels between the selected portraits and finding certain conceptual similarity. The determination of stylistic, formal and conceptual patterns of both works against the background of the series of similar portraits created by the artists indicates that the generally accepted criterion of “psychologism” of the images in assessing these works is inapplicable. The female portrait of the Art Nouveau appease to be representative, creating “stylish” images of the contemporaries, meeting the tastes of the clients and the moods of Belle Epoque, but virtually not oriented towards personal characteristics and psychologism of the image in traditional sense. However, in the considered portraits, the researchers reveal generalizations and characteristics that describe the psychology of the depicted models in a different way, as well as form a three-dimensional female image of the turn of centuries: the phenomenon of “hidden psychologism”, the prospects for studying which are outlined in this work.