Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages remains a challenging task due to limited training data. This paper introduces a comprehensive study exploring the effectiveness of Whisper, a pre-trained ASR model, for Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) an under-resourced language spoken in the Middle East. We investigate three fine-tuning strategies: vanilla, specific parameters, and additional modules. Using a Northern Kurdish fine-tuning speech corpus containing approximately 68 hours of validated transcribed data, our experiments demonstrate that the additional module fine-tuning strategy significantly improves ASR accuracy on a specialized test set, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of 10.5% and Character Error Rate (CER) of 5.7% with Whisper version 3. These results underscore the potential of sophisticated transformer models for low-resource ASR and emphasize the importance of tailored fine-tuning techniques for optimal performance.

With the recent surge in popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is the rising risk of users blindly trusting the information in the response, even in cases where the LLM recommends actions that have potential legal implications and this may put the user in danger. We provide an empirical analysis on multiple existing LLMs showing the urgency of the problem. Hence, we propose a short-term solution consisting in an approach for isolating these legal issues through prompt re-engineering. We further analyse the outcomes but also the limitations of the prompt engineering based approach and we highlight the need of additional resources for fully solving the problem We also propose a framework powered by a legal knowledge graph (KG) to generate legal citations for these legal issues, enriching the response of the LLM.

Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages are not considered high resource and lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not without resources, however, and bilingual dictionaries and grammar books are available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can begin to use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world's languages. In this paper, we demonstrate incorporating grammar books in the prompt of GPT-4 to improve machine translation and evaluate the performance on 16 topologically diverse low-resource languages, using a combination of reference material to show that the machine translation performance of LLMs can be improved using this method.

Cognitive diagnosis model (CDM) is a fundamental and upstream component in intelligent education. It aims to infer students' mastery levels based on historical response logs. However, existing CDMs usually follow the ID-based embedding paradigm, which could often diminish the effectiveness of CDMs in open student learning environments. This is mainly because they can hardly directly infer new students' mastery levels or utilize new exercises or knowledge without retraining. Textual semantic information, due to its unified feature space and easy accessibility, can help alleviate this issue. Unfortunately, directly incorporating semantic information may not benefit CDMs, since it does not capture response-relevant features and thus discards the individual characteristics of each student. To this end, this paper proposes a dual-fusion cognitive diagnosis framework (DFCD) to address the challenge of aligning two different modalities, i.e., textual semantic features and response-relevant features. Specifically, in DFCD, we first propose the exercise-refiner and concept-refiner to make the exercises and knowledge concepts more coherent and reasonable via large language models. Then, DFCD encodes the refined features using text embedding models to obtain the semantic information. For response-related features, we propose a novel response matrix to fully incorporate the information within the response logs. Finally, DFCD designs a dual-fusion module to merge the two modal features. The ultimate representations possess the capability of inference in open student learning environments and can be also plugged in existing CDMs. Extensive experiments across real-world datasets show that DFCD achieves superior performance by integrating different modalities and strong adaptability in open student learning environments.

Text embeddings are vital for tasks such as text retrieval and semantic textual similarity (STS). Recently, the advent of pretrained language models, along with unified benchmarks like the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), has facilitated the development of versatile general-purpose text embedding models. Advanced embedding models are typically developed using large-scale multi-task data and joint training across multiple tasks. However, our experimental analysis reveals two significant drawbacks of joint training: 1) Task Conflict: Gradients from different tasks interfere with each other, leading to negative transfer. 2) Data Imbalance: Disproportionate data distribution introduces biases that negatively impact performance across tasks. To overcome these challenges, we explore model merging-a technique that combines independently trained models to mitigate gradient conflicts and balance data distribution. We introduce a novel method, Self Positioning, which efficiently searches for optimal model combinations within the interpolation space of task vectors using stochastic gradient descent. Our experiments demonstrate that Self Positioning significantly enhances multi-task performance on the MTEB dataset, achieving an absolute improvement of 0.7 points. It outperforms traditional resampling methods while reducing computational costs. This work offers a robust approach to building generalized text embedding models with superior performance across diverse embedding-related tasks.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance graph neural networks' (GNNs) ability to learn rich representations from unlabeled graph-structured data. However, current GCL models face challenges with computational demands and limited feature utilization, often relying only on basic graph properties like node degrees and edge attributes. This constrains their capacity to fully capture the complex topological characteristics of real-world phenomena represented by graphs. To address these limitations, we propose Tensor-Fused Multi-View Graph Contrastive Learning (TensorMV-GCL), a novel framework that integrates extended persistent homology (EPH) with GCL representations and facilitates multi-scale feature extraction. Our approach uniquely employs tensor aggregation and compression to fuse information from graph and topological features obtained from multiple augmented views of the same graph. By incorporating tensor concatenation and contraction modules, we reduce computational overhead by separating feature tensor aggregation and transformation. Furthermore, we enhance the quality of learned topological features and model robustness through noise-injected EPH. Experiments on molecular, bioinformatic, and social network datasets demonstrate TensorMV-GCL's superiority, outperforming 15 state-of-the-art methods in graph classification tasks across 9 out of 11 benchmarks while achieving comparable results on the remaining two. The code for this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/CS-SAIL/Tensor-MV-GCL.git.

Representation learning of Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has garnered significant attention due to its applications in various domains, including recommendation systems and social networks. Despite advancements in TAG learning methodologies, challenges remain in explainability due to the black-box nature of existing TAG representation learning models. This paper presents TAGExplainer, the first method designed to generate natural language explanations for TAG learning. TAGExplainer employs a generative language model that maps input-output pairs to explanations reflecting the model's decision-making process. To address the lack of annotated ground truth explanations in real-world scenarios, we propose first generating pseudo-labels that capture the model's decisions from saliency-based explanations, then the pseudo-label generator is iteratively trained based on three training objectives focusing on faithfulness and brevity via Expert Iteration, to improve the quality of generated pseudo-labels. The high-quality pseudo-labels are finally utilized to train an end-to-end explanation generator model. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of TAGExplainer in producing faithful and concise natural language explanations.

A "cocaine addicted" police officer who was found to be stealing drugs from an evidence store after he accidentally dropped a bag of white powder at his daughter's school has been jailed. Andrew Talbot, at the time a Greater Manchester Police detective, had taken just under 4kg (9lb) of cocaine worth almost 400,000 from police property rooms between 2018 and 2020. He also used the force's computer systems to find a drug dealer to help him sell the drugs on the streets of Manchester. The 54-year-old was found guilty of supplying the drug and misconduct in public office and sentenced to 19 years in jail at Liverpool Crown Court.GMPThe detective stole drugs from Greater Manchester's Police evidence rooms Sentencing him on Friday, Judge Neil Flewitt KC said Talbot had deceived colleagues to put a "significant" quantity of cocaine back into circulation as a result of his "addiction and greed". The investigation into Talbot by GMP's anti-corruption unit began in February 2020 after he dropped a small bag of cocaine outside his daughter's primary school.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought impressive performances on mitigation strategies against misinformation, such as counterargument generation. However, LLMs are still seriously hindered by outdated knowledge and by their tendency to generate hallucinated content. In order to circumvent these issues, we propose a new task, namely, Critical Questions Generation, consisting of processing an argumentative text to generate the critical questions (CQs) raised by it. In argumentation theory CQs are tools designed to lay bare the blind spots of an argument by pointing at the information it could be missing. Thus, instead of trying to deploy LLMs to produce knowledgeable and relevant counterarguments, we use them to question arguments, without requiring any external knowledge. Research on CQs Generation using LLMs requires a reference dataset for large scale experimentation. Thus, in this work we investigate two complementary methods to create such a resource: (i) instantiating CQs templates as defined by Walton's argumentation theory and (ii), using LLMs as CQs generators. By doing so, we contribute with a procedure to establish what is a valid CQ and conclude that, while LLMs are reasonable CQ generators, they still have a wide margin for improvement in this task.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance as text embedding models when finetuned with supervised contrastive training. However, their large size balloons inference time and memory requirements. In this paper, we show that by pruning the last $p\%$ layers of an LLM before supervised training for only 1000 steps, we can achieve a proportional reduction in memory and inference time. We evaluate four different state-of-the-art LLMs on text embedding tasks and find that our method can prune up to 30\% of layers with negligible impact on performance and up to 80\% with only a modest drop. With only three lines of code, our method is easily implemented in any pipeline for transforming LLMs to text encoders. We also propose $\text{L}^3 \text{Prune}$, a novel layer-pruning strategy based on the model's initial loss that provides two optimal pruning configurations: a large variant with negligible performance loss and a small variant for resource-constrained settings. On average, the large variant prunes 21\% of the parameters with a $-0.3$ performance drop, and the small variant only suffers from a $-5.1$ decrease while pruning 74\% of the model. We consider these results strong evidence that LLMs are overparameterized for text embedding tasks, and can be easily pruned.