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Management of Uncertainty in
Knowledge Based Systems 15th
International Conference IPMU 2014
Montpellier France July 15 19 2014
Proceedings Part III 1st Edition Anne
Laurent
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Anne Laurent
Olivier Strauss
Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier
Ronald R. Yager (Eds.)
Information Processing
and Management
of Uncertainty in
Knowledge-Based Systems
15th International Conference, IPMU 2014
Montpellier, France, July 15-19, 2014
Proceedings, Part III
Part 3
123
Communications
in Computer and Information Science 444
Editorial Board
Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio),
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Phoebe Chen
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Alfredo Cuzzocrea
ICAR-CNR and University of Calabria, Italy
Xiaoyong Du
Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Joaquim Filipe
Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Portugal
Orhun Kara
TÜBİTAK BİLGEM and Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Igor Kotenko
St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation
of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Krishna M. Sivalingam
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
Dominik Śle˛zak
University of Warsaw and Infobright, Poland
Takashi Washio
Osaka University, Japan
Xiaokang Yang
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Anne Laurent Olivier Strauss
Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier
Ronald R. Yager (Eds.)
Information Processing
and Management
of Uncertainty in
Knowledge-Based Systems
15th International Conference, IPMU 2014
Montpellier, France, July 15-19, 2014
Proceedings, Part III
13
Volume Editors
Anne Laurent
Université Montpellier 2, LIRMM, France
E-mail: laurent@lirmm.fr
Olivier Strauss
Université Montpellier 2, LIRMM, France
E-mail: olivier.strauss@lirmm.fr
Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier
Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Paris 6, France
E-mail: bernadette.bouchon-meunier@lip6.fr
Ronald R. Yager
Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, USA
E-mail: ryager@iona.edu
appreciate the work and effort of those who contributed papers to the conference.
All of them deserve many thanks for having helped to attain the goal of providing
a high quality conference in a pleasant environment.
General Chairs
Anne Laurent Université Montpellier 2, France
Olivier Strauss Université Montpellier 2, France
Executive Directors
Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier CNRS-UPMC, France
Ronald R. Yager Iona College, USA
Web Chair
Yuan Lin INRA, SupAgro, France
Proceedings Chair
Jérôme Fortin Université Montpellier 2, France
Program Committee
Similarity Analysis
Robust Selection of Domain-Specific Semantic Similarity Measures
from Uncertain Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Stefan Janaqi, Sébastien Harispe, Sylvie Ranwez, and
Jacky Montmain
Antitone L-bonds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Jan Konecny
Theory of Evidence
A Logical Version of the Belief Function Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Laurence Cholvy
Aggregation Functions
Pairwise and Global Dependence in Trivariate Copula Models . . . . . . . . . 243
Fabrizio Durante, Roger B. Nelsen, José Juan Quesada-Molina, and
Manuel Úbeda-Flores
Aggregation Functions
Some Aggregation Operators of General Misinformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 559
Doretta Vivona and Maria Divari
1 Introduction
A. Laurent et al. (Eds.): IPMU 2014, Part III, CCIS 444, pp. 1–10, 2014.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
2 S. Janaqi et al.
used to estimate the semantic proximity of resources (e.g., diseases) indexed by con-
cepts (e.g., syndromes) [9]. Among the large diversity of semantic measures (refer to
[5] for a survey), knowledge-based semantic similarity measures (SSM) can be used
to compare how similar the meanings of concepts are according to taxonomical evi-
dences formalized in a KR. Among their broad range of practical applications, SSMs
are used to disambiguate texts, to design information retrieval algorithms, to suggest
drug repositioning, or to analyse genes products [5]. Nevertheless, most SSMs were
designed in an ad hoc manner and only few domain-specific comparisons involving
restricted subsets of measures have been made. It is therefore difficult to select a SSM
for a specific usage. Moreover, in a larger extent, it is the study of SSM and all know-
ledge-based systems relying on SSMs which are hampered by this diversity of
proposals since it is difficult today to distinguish the benefits of using a particular
measure.
In continuation of several contributions which studied similitudes between meas-
ures [2, 13, 15], a theoretical unifying framework of SSMs has recently been pro-
posed [4]. It enables the decomposition of SSMs through a small set of intuitive core
elements and parameters. This highlights the fact that most SSMs can be instantiated
from general similarity formula. This result is not only relevant for theoretical studies;
it opens interesting perspectives for practical applications of measures, such as the
definition of new measures or the characterization of measures best performing in
specific application contexts. To this end, the proposal of the theoretical framework
has been completed by the development of the Semantic Measures Library (SML)
1
[6] , an open source generic software solution dedicated to semantic measures.
Both the theoretical framework of SSMs and the SML can be used to tackle
fundamental questions regarding SSMs: which measure should be considered for a
concrete application? Are there strong implications associated to the selection of a
specific SSM (e.g., in term of accuracy)? Do some of the measures have similar be-
haviours? Is the accuracy of a measure one of its intrinsic properties, i.e., are there
measures which always better perform? Is a given measure sensitive w.r.t. uncertainty
in data or selection process? Can the impact of these uncertainties be estimated?
In this paper, we focus on the uncertainty relative to the selection of a SSM in a
particular context of use. Considering that a representative set of pairs of concepts
, and expected similarities , have been furnished by domain experts,
we propose to use the aforementioned framework and its implementation, to study
SSMs and to support context-specific selection of measures. Applying semi-
supervised learning techniques, we propose to ‘learn’ the core elements and the pa-
rameters of general measures in order to fit domain-expert’s knowledge. Moreover,
we focus on the impact of experts’ uncertainty on the selection of measures that is: to
which extent can a given SSM be reliably used knowing that similarities provided by
experts are inherently approximate assessments? We define the robustness of a SSM
as its ability to remain a reliable model in presence of uncertainties in the learning
dataset.
1
http://www.semantic-measures-library.org
Robust Selection of Domain-Specific Semantic Similarity Measures 3
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the unifying
framework of SSMs. Section 3 describes a learning procedure for choosing the core
elements and parameters on the basis of expert’s knowledge. A simple, yet realistic,
model of uncertainty for experts’ assessments and indicators of robustness are intro-
duced. Section 4 illustrates the practical application of our proposal in the biomedical
domain. Finally, section 5 provides conclusions as well as some lines of future work.
This section briefly introduces SSMs for the comparison of two concepts defined in a
KR, more details are provided in [5]. We present how the unifying framework
recently introduced in [4] can be used to define parametric measures from which ex-
isting and new SSMs can be expressed. We focus on semantic similarity which is
estimated based on the taxonomical relationships between concepts; we therefore
focus on the taxonomy of concepts of a KR. This taxonomy is a rooted direct acyclic
graph denoted ; it defines a partial order among the set of concepts . We use
these notations:
Case 1 2 3 4
ρ
Θ | |
Ψ , , , | |
Table 2. Instantiations of SSMs which can be used to assess the similarity of concepts
,
, 2 α 0.5, 0.5
,
, 2 α 1, 1
,
∑ 3 α 0.5, 0.5
, ∑ ∑
| |
, 4 α 1, 1
| |
Robust Selection of Domain-Specific Semantic Similarity Measures 5
max , ,
(1)
0 α, β
The bound constraint of this optimization problem (1) is reasonable since the
case ∞ or ∞ should imply , 0 which have no appeal for us.
6 S. Janaqi et al.
0 65413
70
9 6 48
0.66285
0.67158
0.8
8
0.6803
0.68903
0.7
5
0.6977
0.75 7
6 48
0. 7
0.7 06
48
0.70
15 2
0.7 6 52
0 6454
71
0. 0.65
beta
0.65413
0.65 5 0.7
0.72393 15 2
0.66285
80358
4 0.72
0.671
0.6
77 3
3 93
0.73
0. 0.690
0 636680 62795
71056 48 5
0.732 65 0. 73
0 0.6968
3
3
39
65 0.6
0. 2
0.55 0.7326
32
72
5
20 0. 7 0.74138
0..7
0.741 38
2
0.6454
15 20 0.750 1
15 0.7501
0.7
10 1
0.6
0.7
10 0.74
50
1 38
54 1
3
5 0.6
0.6 0.7
0.7 0.7501 0.55
1
5 20.
67
0. 68
0.6 32
23152
9365 0.7501 0.74138
0 868
1 558
03 3 0.7
9097
0.7 064
75 8 0.74138
0.73
0 0.73265
72393 0 0.73265
0.73
72393
3
beta 0 0 0 2 4 6 8 10
alpha
alpha
Fig. 1. The fitting function , α, β and its level lines for choice 4 (see Table 1)
Fig. 1 presents an experiment which has been made to distinguish the optimal
α , β parameters for instantiation of using case 4, and considering a bio-
medical benchmark (discussed in section 4). The maximal correlation value is 0.759,
for α 6.17 and β 0.77 (the dot in the right image). The strong asymmetry in
the contour lines is a consequence of Φ , Φ , . This approach is efficient to
derive the optimal configuration considering a given vector of similarities ( ). Never-
theless it does not take into account the fact that expert assessments of similarity are
inherently marred by uncertainty.
In our application domain, expected similarities are often provided in a finite ordi-
nal linear scale of type ∆, 1. . . (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4 in the next
section). If ∆ denotes the difference between two contiguous levels of the scale, then
we assume in this case that ∆, 0, ∆ with probability 0
, ∆ ∆ . This model of uncertainty merely means that
expert assessment errors cannot exceed ∆. In addition, it allows computing the prob-
ability distributions of the optimal couples α ,β ~ , with α ,β
being the solution of problem (1) with instead of as inputs, and the
uncertainty parameter ( ) (note that α , β α 0 , β 0 ).
The aim is to quantify the impact of uncertainty in expert assessments on the selec-
tion of a measure instantiation, i.e. selection of , α , β . We are interested in the
evaluation of SSM robustness w.r.t. expert uncertainty, and we more particularly fo-
cus on the relevance to consider α , β in case of uncertain expert assessments.
Finding a robust solution to an optimization problem without knowing the probability
density of data is well known [1, 7]. In our case, we do not use any hypothesis on the
distribution of . We define a set of near optimal (α , β ) using a threshold value
(domain-specific). The near optimal solutions are those in the level set:
α ,β | , , i.e. the set of pairs of parameters α, β giving good
correlation values w.r.t the threshold . The robustness is therefore given by:
, α β ; the bigger , the more robust the model α , β is. Nev-
ertheless, given that analytical form for the distribution , cannot be established,
Robust Selection of Domain-Specific Semantic Similarity Measures 7
even in the normal case ~ 0, Σ , estimation techniques are used, e.g., Monte Carlo
method.
The computation of , allows identifying a robust couple α , β for a given
uncertainty level . An approximation of this point, named α , β , is given by the
median of points α ,β generated by Monte Carlo method. Note that α , β
coincides with α , β for 0 or little values of . Therefore α , β remains
inside for most and is significantly different from α , β when increases.
,
18.62 4.23
Table 3. Best correlations of parametric SSMs, refer to Table 2 for case details
It can be observed from the analysis of the results that, naturally, the choice of core
elements affects the maximal correlation; instantiations C2 and C4 always resulted in
the highest correlations (results are considered to be significant since the accuracies of
C2 and C4 are around 5% better than C1 and C3). Another interesting aspect of the
results is that asymmetrical measures provide best results: all experiments provided
the best correlations by tuning the measures with asymmetric contributions of and
8 S. Janaqi et al.
parameters – which can be linked to the results obtained in [4, 8]. Note that best
tunings and , ratio vary depending on the core elements considered.
Setting a threshold of correlation at 0.75, we now focus on the instantiations C2
and C4; they have comparable results (respectively 0.768/0.759, Δ 0.009). The aim
is to evaluate their robustness according to the framework introduced in section 3.
Considering inter-agreements between pools of experts reported in [12] (0.68/0.78),
the level of near optimality is fixed to 0.73. We also choose uncertainty
values 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 . The probability for the expert(s) to give erroneous
values, i.e. their uncertainty, is 1 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 . For each -value, a
large number of -vectors are generated to derive α , β . Estimated values of the
robustness and α , β for measures C2 and C4 are given in Table 4 and are
illustrated in Fig. 2.
Table 4. Robustness of parametric SSMs for case 2 (C2) and case 4 (C4) measures
ሺȽ ǡ Ⱦ ሻ
ሺȽכ ǡ Ⱦכ ሻ
ሺȽ ǡ Ⱦ ሻ
ሺȽכ ǡ Ⱦכ ሻ
Fig. 2. Robustness of case 2 (C2) and case 4 (C4) measures for 10% and 40% of uncertainty. In
each figure the solutions α , β , α , β and are plotted.
Robust Selection of Domain-Specific Semantic Similarity Measures 9
Fig. 2 shows the spread of the couples α , β for measures C2 and C4 consid-
ering the levels of uncertainty set to 10% and 40%. An interesting aspect of the results
is that robustness is significantly different depending on the case considered, 83% for
C2 and 76% for C4. Therefore, despite their correlations were comparable ( Δ
0.009), C2 is less sensible to uncertainty w.r.t. to the learning dataset used to distin-
guish best-suited parameters Indeed, only based on correlation analysis, SSM users
will most of the time prefer measures which have been derived from C2 since their
computational complexity is lower than those derived from C4 (computations of the
IC and the MICA are more complex). Nevertheless, C4 appears to be a more risky
choice considering the robustness of the measures and the uncertainty inherently as-
sociated to expert evaluations. In this case, one can reasonably conclude that α , β
of C2 is robust for uncertainty lower than 10% ( 1 0.1; 0.83). The size of
the level set is also a relevant feature for the selection of SSMs; it indicates the
size of the set of parameters α , β that give high correlations considering imprecise
human expectations. Therefore, an analytical (and its graphical counterpart) estimator
of robustness is introduced. Another interesting finding of this study is that, even if
human observations are marred by uncertainty and the semantic choice of measures
parameters, ρ , Θ , Ψ , Φ , is not a precise process, the resulting SSM is not so
sensitive to all these uncertainty factors.
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Coping with Imprecision During
a Semi-automatic Conceptual Indexing Process
1 Introduction
A. Laurent et al. (Eds.): IPMU 2014, Part III, CCIS 444, pp. 11–20, 2014.
c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
12 N. Fiorini et al.
available [1]. The vocabulary used to describe the resources is therefore controlled
and structured as it is limited to the concepts available in the retained domain
ontology. The latter also provides a framework to calculate semantic similarities
to assess the relatedness between two concepts or between two groups of con-
cepts. For instance, the relevance score between a query and a document can be
computed using such measures, thus taking into account specialization and gen-
eralization relationships defined in the ontology. However, the requirement of an
annotated corpus is a limit of such semantic based approach because augmenting
a concept-based index is a tedious and time-consuming task which needs a high
level of expertise. Here we propose an assisted semantic indexing process build
upon a solution that we initially developed for resources indexed by a series of
numerical values. Indeed, few years ago we proposed a semi-automatic indexing
method to ease and support the indexing process of music pieces [2]. The goal
of this approach was to infer a new annotation thanks to existing ones: what we
called annotation propagation. A representative sample of the corpus is displayed
on a map to let the expert point out (e.g. by clicking) the expected location of a
new item in a neighborhood of similar resources. An indexation is then proposed
to characterize the new item by summarizing those of nearby resources. In prac-
tice, this is done by taking the mean of the annotations of the closest neighbors,
weighted by their distances to the click location. According to experts (DJs),
the generated annotations were satisfying and our method greatly sped up their
annotation process (the vector contained 23 independent dimensions and more
than 20 songs were indexed in less than five minutes by an expert). We also
successfully applied it in another context, to annotate photographs [3].
Here we propose a solution to extend this approach to a concept-based in-
dexing process. Indeed, using indexation propagation is not straightforward in
the semantic framework since concepts indexing a resource are not necessarily
independent and the average of a set of concepts is not as obvious as the average
of a set of numerical values. Summarizing the annotations of the closest neigh-
bors cannot be done using a mere barycenter anymore. In our approach, we rely
on semantic similarity measures in order to define the new item’s annotation,
thanks to its neighbors’ ones. The exact location of the user click may have more
or less impact on the proposed indexation depending on the resources’ index-
ation and density in the selected area. To further support the user during the
indexation process, we thus propose to analyze the semantic map to give him
a visual indication of this impact. The user can then pay more attention to his
selection when needed and go faster when possible.
After having described the annotation propagation related works in section 2,
section 3 introduces our framework. We explain the objective function leading
to the annotation and the impact of expert’s imprecision withing the annotation
propagation process. Section 4 focuses on the management of this imprecision
and more specifically on solutions to help the user to take it into account within
the indexing process. Results are discussed in section 5 with a special care of
visual rendering proposed to assist the end-user.
Coping with Imprecision During an Indexing Process 13
2 Related Work
The need of associating metadata to increasingly numerous documents led the
community to conceive approaches easing and supporting this task. Some of them
infer new annotations thanks to existing ones [4]. The propagation of annotations
then relies on existing links among entities to determine the propagation rules.
For instance, [5] proposes to propagate metadata on the Internet by using the
webpages hyperlinks, while [6] uses document citations. However, such propaga-
tion strategies only rely on application specific links and not on the underlying
semantics of entities. A document cited as a counter example will thus inherit
from metadata which are possibly irrelevant.
Some propagation methods have been specifically designed to handle media-
specific resources not easily applicable in our context, e.g. picture annotation.
They generally rely on image analysis of other pictures to define, thanks to
probabilistic approaches, which terms to pick in order to annotate the new one.
Some of them are based on maximal entropy [7], n-grams, bayesian inference
[8] or SVM — Support Vector Machine. [9] proposed to propagate WordNet1
based indexations rather than mere terms. [4] proposed a different approach in
which resources are not necessarily pictures and their associated annotations
are based on concepts. During the manual indexing process, they propose to
assist the end user by propagating annotation from a newly annotated entity
to the rest of the corpus. This led to a very fast solution, able to deal with
millions of images, that assign the exact same annotation to several resources
without any expert validation of the propagated information. We propose to use
the opposite strategy and to assist the user by providing him with an initial
annotation of the new resource based on existing ones. Indeed we believe this
strategy is better adapted for the numerous contexts in which a smaller corpus
is used but a high quality annotation is crucial. Each annotation should thus
be specific and validated by a human expert. Maintaining and augmenting an
index is always mentioned as a tedious task for the experts in the literature [9].
This issue is yet more problematic when the annotation is made of concepts
because it requires an expertise of the whole knowledge model (e.g. a domain
ontology). This means that, besides high-level knowledge of a specific domain,
the user is also supposed to perfectly control the concepts and their structure,
i.e. the model that analysts impose on him. While it is difficult to imagine a
fully automatic annotation process (probably including NLP, clustering, etc.),
we propose a semi-automatic approach supporting the expert’s task.
— Mitä hänestä?
— Kuinka hän täällä olisi? Jos olisi täällä, niin täällä raapisikin.
Kotonaan istuu, hampaita kivistää. Hehehee!
— Hehehee!
Kolmannessa ryhmässä:
Ja sitten oli tulos kaikissa eri kohdissa sama: syyllinen, kyllä, hän
on syyllinen, ja näin lausuttiin ilman vähintäkään suopeutta! Tätä ei
kukaan ollut odottanut, ainakin suopeudesta olivat melkein kaikki
olleet varmoja. Kuolonhiljaisuus salissa ei keskeytynyt, kaikki olivat
aivan kuin sananmukaisesti kivettyneet, — sekä ne, jotka olivat
toivoneet langettamista, että ne, jotka olivat toivoneet syyttömäksi
julistamista. Mutta tätä kesti vain ensimmäisten minuuttien ajan.
Sitten alkoi hirveä sekamelska. Yleisön miespuolisista jäsenistä
monet näyttivät olevan hyvin tyytyväisiä. Jotkut suorastaan hieroivat
käsiään salaamatta iloaan. Tyytymättömät olivat kuin puserruksissa,
kohauttelivat olkapäitään, kuiskuttelivat, mutta eivät näyttäneet yhä
vieläkään oikein käsittävän. Mutta, hyvä Jumala, miten naisten laita
oli! Minä luulin, että he tekevät kapinan. Alussa, he eivät näyttäneet
uskovan korviaan. Ja yhtäkkiä alkoi yli koko salin kajahdella
huudahduksia: »Mutta mitä tämä on? Mitä tämä taas on?» He
hyppelivät pois paikoiltaan. Luultavasti he arvelivat, että tuon kaiken
voi heti taas muuttaa ja järjestää toisin. Tällä hetkellä yhtäkkiä Mitja
nousi seisomaan ja huusi päästäen vihlovan parkaisun ja ojennellen
käsiään eteensä:
Hän ei jaksanut puhua loppuun ja alkoi itkeä, niin että se kuului yli
koko salin, ääneensä, omituisella uudella, vieraalla,
odottamattomalla äänellä, jonka mistä lieneekin yhtäkkiä saanut.
Parvekkeelta, ylhäältä, perimmäisestä nurkasta kuului läpitunkeva
naisen kirkaisu: se oli Grušenjka. Hän oli äsken saanut jonkun
taipumaan, ja hänet oli uudelleen päästetty saliin jo ennen syytös- ja
puolustuspuheitten alkamista. Mitja vietiin pois. Tuomion julistaminen
lykättiin seuraavaan päivään. Koko sali nousi paikoiltaan
epäjärjestyksessä, mutta minä en jäänyt enää odottamaan enkä
kuuntelemaan. Muistan vain muutamia huudahduksia, jotka kuulin
portailla, ulos mentäessä.
— Ei vähempää.
1.
2.
— Minä rakastan sinua sen tähden, että sinä aina sanot koko
totuuden etkä salaa mitään! — huudahti Mitja iloisesti nauraen. —
Siis olen saanut Aljoškani kiinni siitä, että hän on jesuiitta! Suudella
sinua siitä pitää, toden totta! No, kuule nyt siis loputkin, levitän
nähtäväksesi sieluni jäljelläolevankin puolen. Näin olen ajatellut ja
päättänyt: jos minä pakenenkin, vieläpä rahaa ja passi mukanani ja
vaikkapa Amerikkaan, niin minua rohkaisee vielä se ajatus, etten
minä pakene iloa enkä onnea etsimään, vaan totisesti toiseen
pakkotyöhön, joka kenties ei ole huonompi tätä! Ei ole huonompi,
Aleksei, totisesti sanon sen, ettei se ole huonompi! Minä vihaan jo
nyt tuota Amerikkaa, piru sen vieköön! Olkoon vain Gruša kanssani,
mutta katsohan häntä: onko hän mikään amerikkalainen? Hän on
venäläinen nainen, sormenpäitä myöten venäläinen, hän rupeaa
ikävöimään emoansa synnyinmaata, ja minä saan nähdä joka hetki,
että hän kärsii tätä ikävää minun tähteni, otti minun takiani sellaisen
ristin kannettavakseen, ja miten hän siihen on syypää? Ja jaksanko
minä sietää sikäläisiä orjia, vaikka he kenties jokikinen ovat
parempia kuin minä? Minä vihaan tuota Amerikkaa jo nyt! Ja
olkootpa he siellä joka mies suurenmoisia konemiehiä tai muuta
sellaista, — niin piru heidän kanssaan, eivät ne ole minun väkeäni,
eivät ole minun hengenheimolaisiani! Venäjää minä rakastan,
Aleksei, venäläistä Jumalaa rakastan, vaikka itse olenkin lurjus!
Minähän menehdyn siellä! — huudahti hän, ja hänen silmänsä
alkoivat säkenöidä. Hänen äänensä värisi itkusta.
— No, näin minä siis olen päättänyt, Aleksei, kuule! — alkoi hän
taas voittaen liikutuksensa. — Grušan kanssa saavumme sinne — ja
siellä heti kyntämään, tekemään työtä, korven kontioiden parissa,
yksinäisyydessä, jossakin kaukana. Löytyyhän sieltäkin jokin etäinen
paikka! Siellä kuuluu vielä olevan punanahkoja, jossakin siellä
näköpiirin rajalla, no, siihen maahan viimeisten mohikaanien luo. No,
ja heti käsiksi kielioppiin, minä ja Gruša. Työtä ja kielioppia, ja noin
kolmen vuoden aikana. Noina kolmena vuotena opimme engelskan
kieltä niin että osaamme sitä kuin syntyperäiset englantilaiset. Ja heti
kun olemme oppineet, niin — lopussa on Amerikassa-olo!
Riennämme tänne, Venäjälle, Amerikan kansalaisina. Älä ole
huolissasi, tähän kaupunkirähjään emme tule. Kätkeydymme
jonnekin kauemmaksi, pohjoiseen tai etelään. Minä muutun siihen
mennessä ja hän myöskin, siellä Amerikassa, minulle laittaa tohtori
jonkinmoisen syylän naamaan, eiväthän ne suotta ole mekaanikkoja.
Mutta ei, minä puhkaisen itseltäni toisen silmän, annan parran
kasvaa arssinan pituiseksi, se on harmaa (harmaannun
ikävöidessäni Venäjää) — ehkäpä minua ei tunneta. Ja jos
tunnetaan, niin lähettäkööt maanpakoon, se on silloin kohtalon
sallimaa! Täällä me jossakin syrjäseudussa kynnämme maata, ja
minä näyttelen koko ikäni amerikkalaista. Mutta sen sijaan saamme