The machine learning (ML) paradigm has gained much popularity today. Its algorithmic models are employed in every field, such as natural language processing, pattern recognition, object detection, image recognition, earth observation and many other research areas. In fact, machine learning technologies and their inevitable impact suffice in many technological transformation agendas currently being propagated by many nations, for which the already yielded benefits are outstanding. From a regional perspective, several studies have shown that machine learning technology can help address some of Africa's most pervasive problems, such as poverty alleviation, improving education, delivering quality healthcare services, and addressing sustainability challenges like food security and climate change. In this state-of-the-art paper, a critical bibliometric analysis study is conducted, coupled with an extensive literature survey on recent developments and associated applications in machine learning research with a perspective on Africa. The presented bibliometric analysis study consists of 2761 machine learning-related documents, of which 89% were articles with at least 482 citations published in 903 journals during the past three decades. Furthermore, the collated documents were retrieved from the Science Citation Index EXPANDED, comprising research publications from 54 African countries between 1993 and 2021. The bibliometric study shows the visualization of the current landscape and future trends in machine learning research and its application to facilitate future collaborative research and knowledge exchange among authors from different research institutions scattered across the African continent.

Adaptation-relevant predictions of climate change are often derived by combining climate model simulations in a multi-model ensemble. Model evaluation methods used in performance-based ensemble weighting schemes have limitations in the context of high-impact extreme events. We introduce a locally time-invariant method for evaluating climate model simulations with a focus on assessing the simulation of extremes. We explore the behaviour of the proposed method in predicting extreme heat days in Nairobi and provide comparative results for eight additional cities.

Critical voices within and beyond the scientific community have pointed to a grave matter of concern regarding who is included in research and who is not. Subsequent investigations have revealed an extensive form of sampling bias across a broad range of disciplines that conduct human subjects research called "WEIRD": Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic. Recent work has indicated that this pattern exists within human-computer interaction (HCI) research, as well. How then does human-robot interaction (HRI) fare? And could there be other patterns of sampling bias at play, perhaps those especially relevant to this field of study? We conducted a systematic review of the premier ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (2006-2022) to discover whether and how WEIRD HRI research is. Importantly, we expanded our purview to other factors of representation highlighted by critical work on inclusion and intersectionality as potentially underreported, overlooked, and even marginalized factors of human diversity. Findings from 827 studies across 749 papers confirm that participants in HRI research also tend to be drawn from WEIRD populations. Moreover, we find evidence of limited, obscured, and possible misrepresentation in participant sampling and reporting along key axes of diversity: sex and gender, race and ethnicity, age, sexuality and family configuration, disability, body type, ideology, and domain expertise. We discuss methodological and ethical implications for recruitment, analysis, and reporting, as well as the significance for HRI as a base of knowledge.

Multilingual language models have pushed state-of-the-art in cross-lingual NLP transfer. The majority of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, however, use one and the same massively multilingual transformer (e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to transfer to all target languages, irrespective of their typological, etymological, and phylogenetic relations to other languages. In particular, readily available data and models of resource-rich sibling languages are often ignored. In this work, we empirically show, in a case study for Faroese -- a low-resource language from a high-resource language family -- that by leveraging the phylogenetic information and departing from the 'one-size-fits-all' paradigm, one can improve cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. In particular, we leverage abundant resources of other Scandinavian languages (i.e., Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic) for the benefit of Faroese. Our evaluation results show that we can substantially improve the transfer performance to Faroese by exploiting data and models of closely-related high-resource languages. Further, we release a new web corpus of Faroese and Faroese datasets for named entity recognition (NER), semantic text similarity (STS), and new language models trained on all Scandinavian languages.

Loneliness and social isolation are serious and widespread problems among older people, affecting their physical and mental health, quality of life, and longevity. In this paper, we propose a ChatGPT-based conversational companion system for elderly people. The system is designed to provide companionship and help reduce feelings of loneliness and social isolation. The system was evaluated with a preliminary study. The results showed that the system was able to generate responses that were relevant to the created elderly personas. However, it is essential to acknowledge the limitations of ChatGPT, such as potential biases and misinformation, and to consider the ethical implications of using AI-based companionship for the elderly, including privacy concerns.

Topic Modelling (TM) is from the research branches of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language processing (NLP) that is to facilitate insightful analysis from large documents and datasets, such as a summarisation of main topics and the topic changes. This kind of discovery is getting more popular in real-life applications due to its impact on big data analytics. In this study, from the social-media and healthcare domain, we apply popular Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) methods to model the topic changes in Swedish newspaper articles about Coronavirus. We describe the corpus we created including 6515 articles, methods applied, and statistics on topic changes over approximately 1 year and two months period of time from 17th January 2020 to 13th March 2021. We hope this work can be an asset for grounding applications of topic modelling and can be inspiring for similar case studies in an era with pandemics, to support socio-economic impact research as well as clinical and healthcare analytics. Our data and source code are openly available at https://github. com/poethan/Swed_Covid_TM Keywords: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA); Topic Modelling; Coronavirus; Pandemics; Natural Language Understanding; BERT-topic

While the emerging research field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) claims to address the lack of explainability in high-performance machine learning models, in practice, XAI targets developers rather than actual end-users. Unsurprisingly, end-users are often unwilling to use XAI-based decision support systems. Similarly, there is limited interdisciplinary research on end-users' behavior during XAI explanations usage, rendering it unknown how explanations may impact cognitive load and further affect end-user performance. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study with 271 prospective physicians, measuring their cognitive load, task performance, and task time for distinct implementation-independent XAI explanation types using a COVID-19 use case. We found that these explanation types strongly influence end-users' cognitive load, task performance, and task time. Further, we contextualized a mental efficiency metric, ranking local XAI explanation types best, to provide recommendations for future applications and implications for sociotechnical XAI research.

Pretrained multilingual large language models have typically used heuristic temperature-based sampling to balance between different languages. However previous work has not systematically evaluated the efficacy of different pretraining language distributions across model scales. In this paper, we propose a new sampling method, UniMax, that delivers more uniform coverage of head languages while mitigating overfitting on tail languages by explicitly capping the number of repeats over each language's corpus. We perform an extensive series of ablations testing a range of sampling strategies on a suite of multilingual benchmarks, while varying model scale. We find that UniMax outperforms standard temperature-based sampling, and the benefits persist as scale increases. As part of our contribution, we release: (i) an improved and refreshed mC4 multilingual corpus consisting of 29 trillion characters across 107 languages, and (ii) a suite of pretrained umT5 model checkpoints trained with UniMax sampling.

Textual logical reasoning, especially question-answering (QA) tasks with logical reasoning, requires awareness of particular logical structures. The passage-level logical relations represent entailment or contradiction between propositional units (e.g., a concluding sentence). However, such structures are unexplored as current QA systems focus on entity-based relations. In this work, we propose logic structural-constraint modeling to solve the logical reasoning QA and introduce discourse-aware graph networks (DAGNs). The networks first construct logic graphs leveraging in-line discourse connectives and generic logic theories, then learn logic representations by end-to-end evolving the logic relations with an edge-reasoning mechanism and updating the graph features. This pipeline is applied to a general encoder, whose fundamental features are joined with the high-level logic features for answer prediction. Experiments on three textual logical reasoning datasets demonstrate the reasonability of the logical structures built in DAGNs and the effectiveness of the learned logic features. Moreover, zero-shot transfer results show the features' generality to unseen logical texts.

Neural text ranking models have witnessed significant advancement and are increasingly being deployed in practice. Unfortunately, they also inherit adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural models, which have been detected but remain underexplored by prior studies. Moreover, the inherit adversarial vulnerabilities might be leveraged by blackhat SEO to defeat better-protected search engines. In this study, we propose an imitation adversarial attack on black-box neural passage ranking models. We first show that the target passage ranking model can be transparentized and imitated by enumerating critical queries/candidates and then train a ranking imitation model. Leveraging the ranking imitation model, we can elaborately manipulate the ranking results and transfer the manipulation attack to the target ranking model. For this purpose, we propose an innovative gradient-based attack method, empowered by the pairwise objective function, to generate adversarial triggers, which causes premeditated disorderliness with very few tokens. To equip the trigger camouflages, we add the next sentence prediction loss and the language model fluency constraint to the objective function. Experimental results on passage ranking demonstrate the effectiveness of the ranking imitation attack model and adversarial triggers against various SOTA neural ranking models. Furthermore, various mitigation analyses and human evaluation show the effectiveness of camouflages when facing potential mitigation approaches. To motivate other scholars to further investigate this novel and important problem, we make the experiment data and code publicly available.