Token free approaches have been successfully applied to a series of word and span level tasks. In this work, we compare a byte-level (ByT5) and a wordpiece based (mT5) sequence to sequence model on the 51 languages of the MASSIVE multilingual semantic parsing dataset. We examine multiple experimental settings: (i) zero-shot, (ii) full gold data and (iii) zero-shot with synthetic data. By leveraging a state-of-the-art label projection method for machine translated examples, we are able to reduce the gap in exact match accuracy to only 5 points with respect to a model trained on gold data from all the languages. We additionally provide insights on the cross-lingual transfer of ByT5 and show how the model compares with respect to mT5 across all parameter sizes.

Modal verbs (e.g., "can", "should", or "must") occur highly frequently in scientific articles. Decoding their function is not straightforward: they are often used for hedging, but they may also denote abilities and restrictions. Understanding their meaning is important for various NLP tasks such as writing assistance or accurate information extraction from scientific text. To foster research on the usage of modals in this genre, we introduce the MIST (Modals In Scientific Text) dataset, which contains 3737 modal instances in five scientific domains annotated for their semantic, pragmatic, or rhetorical function. We systematically evaluate a set of competitive neural architectures on MIST. Transfer experiments reveal that leveraging non-scientific data is of limited benefit for modeling the distinctions in MIST. Our corpus analysis provides evidence that scientific communities differ in their usage of modal verbs, yet, classifiers trained on scientific data generalize to some extent to unseen scientific domains.

This study introduces and examines the potential of an AI system to generate health awareness messages. The topic of folic acid, a vitamin that is critical during pregnancy, served as a test case. Using prompt engineering, we generated messages that could be used to raise awareness and compared them to retweeted human-generated messages via computational and human evaluation methods. The system was easy to use and prolific, and computational analyses revealed that the AI-generated messages were on par with human-generated ones in terms of sentiment, reading ease, and semantic content. Also, the human evaluation study showed that AI-generated messages ranked higher in message quality and clarity. We discuss the theoretical, practical, and ethical implications of these results.

This paper describes a simple yet efficient repetition-based modular system for speeding up air-traffic controllers (ATCos) training. E.g., a human pilot is still required in EUROCONTROL's ESCAPE lite simulator (see https://www.eurocontrol.int/simulator/escape) during ATCo training. However, this need can be substituted by an automatic system that could act as a pilot. In this paper, we aim to develop and integrate a pseudo-pilot agent into the ATCo training pipeline by merging diverse artificial intelligence (AI) powered modules. The system understands the voice communications issued by the ATCo, and, in turn, it generates a spoken prompt that follows the pilot's phraseology to the initial communication. Our system mainly relies on open-source AI tools and air traffic control (ATC) databases, thus, proving its simplicity and ease of replicability. The overall pipeline is composed of the following: (1) a submodule that receives and pre-processes the input stream of raw audio, (2) an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that transforms audio into a sequence of words; (3) a high-level ATC-related entity parser, which extracts relevant information from the communication, i.e., callsigns and commands, and finally, (4) a speech synthesizer submodule that generates responses based on the high-level ATC entities previously extracted. Overall, we show that this system could pave the way toward developing a real proof-of-concept pseudo-pilot system. Hence, speeding up the training of ATCos while drastically reducing its overall cost.

In 2021 300 mm of rain, nearly half the average annual rainfall, fell near Catania (Sicily island, Italy). Such events took place in just a few hours, with dramatic consequences on the environmental, social, economic, and health systems of the region. This is the reason why, detecting extreme rainfall events is a crucial prerequisite for planning actions able to reverse possibly intensified dramatic future scenarios. In this paper, the Affinity Propagation algorithm, a clustering algorithm grounded on machine learning, was applied, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time, to identify excess rain events in Sicily. This was possible by using a high-frequency, large dataset we collected, ranging from 2009 to 2021 which we named RSE (the Rainfall Sicily Extreme dataset). Weather indicators were then been employed to validate the results, thus confirming the presence of recent anomalous rainfall events in eastern Sicily. We believe that easy-to-use and multi-modal data science techniques, such as the one proposed in this study, could give rise to significant improvements in policy-making for successfully contrasting climate changes.

Personalized chatbots focus on endowing the chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users and further act as personal assistants. Previous studies have explored generating implicit user profiles from the user's dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. However, these studies only use the response generation loss to train the entire model, thus it is prone to suffer from the problem of data sparsity. Besides, they overemphasize the final generated response's quality while ignoring the correlations and fusions between the user's dialogue history, leading to rough data representations and performance degradation. To tackle these problems, we propose a self-supervised learning framework MCP for capturing better representations from users' dialogue history for personalized chatbots. Specifically, we apply contrastive sampling methods to leverage the supervised signals hidden in user dialog history, and generate the pre-training samples for enhancing the model. We design three pre-training tasks based on three types of contrastive pairs from user dialogue history, namely response pairs, sequence augmentation pairs, and user pairs. We pre-train the utterance encoder and the history encoder towards the contrastive objectives and use these pre-trained encoders for generating user profiles while personalized response generation. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show a significant improvement in our proposed model MCP compared with the existing methods.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for air traffic control is generally trained by pooling Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) and pilot data into one set. This is motivated by the fact that pilot's voice communications are more scarce than ATCOs. Due to this data imbalance and other reasons (e.g., varying acoustic conditions), the speech from ATCOs is usually recognized more accurately than from pilots. Automatically identifying the speaker roles is a challenging task, especially in the case of the noisy voice recordings collected using Very High Frequency (VHF) receivers or due to the unavailability of the push-to-talk (PTT) signal, i.e., both audio channels are mixed. In this work, we propose to (1) automatically segment the ATCO and pilot data based on an intuitive approach exploiting ASR transcripts and (2) subsequently consider an automatic recognition of ATCOs' and pilots' voice as two separate tasks. Our work is performed on VHF audio data with high noise levels, i.e., signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios below 15 dB, as this data is recognized to be helpful for various speech-based machine-learning tasks. Specifically, for the speaker role identification task, the module is represented by a simple yet efficient knowledge-based system exploiting a grammar defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The system accepts text as the input, either manually verified annotations or automatically generated transcripts. The developed approach provides an average accuracy in speaker role identification of about 83%. Finally, we show that training an acoustic model for ASR tasks separately (i.e., separate models for ATCOs and pilots) or using a multitask approach is well suited for the noisy data and outperforms the traditional ASR system where all data is pooled together.

Matrix factorization exploits the idea that, in complex high-dimensional data, the actual signal typically lies in lower-dimensional structures. These lower dimensional objects provide useful insight, with interpretability favored by sparse structures. Sparsity, in addition, is beneficial in terms of regularization and, thus, to avoid over-fitting. By exploiting Bayesian shrinkage priors, we devise a computationally convenient approach for high-dimensional matrix factorization. The dependence between row and column entities is modeled by inducing flexible sparse patterns within factors. The availability of external information is accounted for in such a way that structures are allowed while not imposed. Inspired by boosting algorithms, we pair the the proposed approach with a numerical strategy relying on a sequential inclusion and estimation of low-rank contributions, with data-driven stopping rule. Practical advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by means of a simulation study and the analysis of soccer heatmaps obtained from new generation tracking data.

Many commodity crops have growth stages during which they are particularly vulnerable to stress-induced yield loss. In-season crop progress information is useful for quantifying crop risk, and satellite remote sensing (RS) can be used to track progress at regional scales. At present, all existing RS-based crop progress estimation (CPE) methods which target crop-specific stages rely on ground truth data for training/calibration. This reliance on ground survey data confines CPE methods to surveyed regions, limiting their utility. In this study, a new method is developed for conducting RS-based in-season CPE in unsurveyed regions by combining data from surveyed regions with synthetic crop progress data generated for an unsurveyed region. Corn-growing zones in Argentina were used as surrogate 'unsurveyed' regions. Existing weather generation, crop growth, and optical radiative transfer models were linked to produce synthetic weather, crop progress, and canopy reflectance data. A neural network (NN) method based upon bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory was trained separately on surveyed data, synthetic data, and two different combinations of surveyed and synthetic data. A stopping criterion was developed which uses the weighted divergence of surveyed and synthetic data validation loss. Net F1 scores across all crop progress stages increased by 8.7% when trained on a combination of surveyed region and synthetic data, and overall performance was only 21% lower than when the NN was trained on surveyed data and applied in the US Midwest. Performance gain from synthetic data was greatest in zones with dual planting windows, while the inclusion of surveyed region data from the US Midwest helped mitigate NN sensitivity to noise in NDVI data. Overall results suggest in-season CPE in other unsurveyed regions may be possible with increased quantity and variety of synthetic crop progress data.

Experimental sciences have come to depend heavily on our ability to organize and interpret high-dimensional datasets. Natural laws, conservation principles, and inter-dependencies among observed variables yield geometric structure, with fewer degrees of freedom, on the dataset. We introduce the frameworks of semiclassical and microlocal analysis to data analysis and develop a novel, yet natural uncertainty principle for extracting fine-scale features of this geometric structure in data, crucially dependent on data-driven approximations to quantum mechanical processes underlying geometric optics. This leads to the first tractable algorithm for approximation of wave dynamics and geodesics on data manifolds with rigorous probabilistic convergence rates under the manifold hypothesis. We demonstrate our algorithm on real-world datasets, including an analysis of population mobility information during the COVID-19 pandemic to achieve four-fold improvement in dimensionality reduction over existing state-of-the-art and reveal anomalous behavior exhibited by less than 1.2% of the entire dataset. Our work initiates the study of data-driven quantum dynamics for analyzing datasets, and we outline several future directions for research.