When turned on, "GitHub Copilot checks code completion suggestions with their surrounding

When turned on, "GitHub Copilot checks code completion suggestions with their surrounding

The growing use of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns regarding their safety. While many studies have focused on English, the safety of LLMs in Arabic, with its linguistic and cultural complexities, remains under-explored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we present an Arab-region-specific safety evaluation dataset consisting of 5,799 questions, including direct attacks, indirect attacks, and harmless requests with sensitive words, adapted to reflect the socio-cultural context of the Arab world. To uncover the impact of different stances in handling sensitive and controversial topics, we propose a dual-perspective evaluation framework. It assesses the LLM responses from both governmental and opposition viewpoints. Experiments over five leading Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs reveal substantial disparities in their safety performance. This reinforces the need for culturally specific datasets to ensure the responsible deployment of LLMs.

The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions -- firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.

Ukrainian sea drones have attacked a key Russian port on the Black Sea, damaging a naval ship, according to a Ukrainian official, speaking about the latest in a series of strikes inside Russia after Kyiv promised to bring the fight home to the Kremlin. Moscow said it repelled Friday's attack on Novorossiysk, which marked the first time a commercial Russian port has been targeted in the 18-month war. Olenegorsky Gornyak, a landing ship, suffered a serious breach in the attack, carried out by Ukraine's navy and security service, according to a security service official. As a result, the ship is unable to carry out its combat missions, said the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to give the information to the media. Ukrainian news agencies carried footage from social media channels that they suggested showed the Olenegorsky Gornyak listing to one side. The ship is designed to transport troops and heavy equipment and was sent for repairs in 2014, according to Russian media reports.

We present the results and findings of the First Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI). This Shared Task includes two subtasks: country-level dialect identification (Subtask 1) and province-level sub-dialect identification (Subtask 2). The data for the shared task covers a total of 100 provinces from 21 Arab countries and are collected from the Twitter domain. As such, NADI is the first shared task to target naturally-occurring fine-grained dialectal text at the sub-country level. A total of 61 teams from 25 countries registered to participate in the tasks, thus reflecting the interest of the community in this area. We received 47 submissions for Subtask 1 from 18 teams and 9 submissions for Subtask 2 from 9 teams.

The sun is getting a close-up as NASA releases historic new photographs. Talk about "to boldly go." A new space toilet is making its way to the crew of the International Space Station aboard a Cygnus spacecraft. "Its features improve on current space toilet operations and help NASA prepare for future missions, including those to the Moon and Mars," explained NASA, in a statement. "The Universal Waste Management System (UWMS) demonstrates a compact toilet and the Urine Transfer System that further automates waste management and storage."

INRIX chose its criteria based on a future business model where an autonomous truck powered by electric batteries or diesel-hybrid motors would cross long highway miles and then be taken over by people who would pilot the rigs through crowded cities to the final loading dock or port, said Avery Ash, INRIX's autonomous vehicle director.

Then again, even after 19 films in Disney's superhero universe, it's not as if he's had much strong competition. Aside from the puckish Loki and tragic Killmonger, most Marvel villains have been pretty forgettable. Now, after years of build up (we first caught a glimpse of Thanos in 2012's The Avengers) he finally took center stage in this summer's Avengers: Infinity War. But what's most intriguing about Thanos isn't that he wants to wipe out half of life across the universe -- instead, it's that he's a big purple alien who feels genuine emotion. He cries when he's forced to sacrifice Gamora, his adopted daughter.

The Kangbashi district of Ordos, China, looks like a cosmopolitan city of the future. It's just 14 years old but already has all the trappings of a mature municipality. It has a large public library designed to mimic the shape of books on shelves. Elsewhere are a contemporary and cavernous airport, a spectacular-looking stadium, clusters of towering apartment buildings, spacious plazas and parks, a five-story food court with 400 vendors, an intricate opera house, and perfectly paved streets designed to connect more than 300,000 residents to the places they live, work, and play. Although Kangbashi has the appearance of a modern metropolis, the truth is apparent in the one thing it lacks: people. Kangbashi is one of hundreds of "ghost cities" rumored to dot the Chinese countryside. Erected at the height of China's real estate boom, they're pet projects of wealthy local governments that built them to be the center of a virtuous circle: Spending their economic windfalls on megacities, governments believed, would attract inhabitants from outlying agrarian communities, creating new urban centers with which to generate even more wealth.