Previous work has demonstrated that AI methods for analysing scientific literature benefit significantly from annotating sentences in papers according to their rhetorical roles, such as research gaps, results, limitations, extensions of existing methodologies, and others. Such representations also have the potential to support the development of a new generation of systems capable of producing high-quality literature reviews. However, achieving this goal requires the definition of a relevant annotation schema and effective strategies for large-scale annotation of the literature. This paper addresses these challenges by 1) introducing a novel annotation schema specifically designed to support literature review generation and 2) conducting a comprehensive evaluation of a wide range of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in classifying rhetorical roles according to this schema. To this end, we also present Sci-Sentence, a novel multidisciplinary benchmark comprising 700 sentences manually annotated by domain experts and 2,240 sentences automatically labelled using LLMs. We evaluate 37 LLMs on this benchmark, spanning diverse model families and sizes, using both zero-shot learning and fine-tuning approaches. The experiments yield several novel insights that advance the state of the art in this challenging domain. First, the current generation of LLMs performs remarkably well on this task when fine-tuned on high-quality data, achieving performance levels above 96\% F1. Second, while large proprietary models like GPT-4o achieve the best results, some lightweight open-source alternatives also demonstrate excellent performance. Finally, enriching the training data with semi-synthetic examples generated by LLMs proves beneficial, enabling small encoders to achieve robust results and significantly enhancing the performance of several open decoder models.

Clinical language models have achieved strong performance on downstream tasks by pretraining on domain specific corpora such as discharge summaries and medical notes. However, most approaches treat the electronic health record as a static document, neglecting the temporally-evolving and causally entwined nature of patient trajectories. In this paper, we introduce a novel temporal entailment pretraining objective for language models in the clinical domain. Our method formulates EHR segments as temporally ordered sentence pairs and trains the model to determine whether a later state is entailed by, contradictory to, or neutral with respect to an earlier state. Through this temporally structured pretraining task, models learn to perform latent clinical reasoning over time, improving their ability to generalize across forecasting and diagnosis tasks. We pretrain on a large corpus derived from MIMIC IV and demonstrate state of the art results on temporal clinical QA, early warning prediction, and disease progression modeling.

Specifically focusing on the landscape of abstractive text summarization, as opposed to extractive techniques, this survey presents a comprehensive overview, delving into state-of-the-art techniques, prevailing challenges, and prospective research directions. We categorize the techniques into traditional sequence-to-sequence models, pre-trained large language models, reinforcement learning, hierarchical methods, and multi-modal summarization. Unlike prior works that did not examine complexities, scalability and comparisons of techniques in detail, this review takes a comprehensive approach encompassing state-of-the-art methods, challenges, solutions, comparisons, limitations and charts out future improvements - providing researchers an extensive overview to advance abstractive summarization research. We provide vital comparison tables across techniques categorized - offering insights into model complexity, scalability and appropriate applications. The paper highlights challenges such as inadequate meaning representation, factual consistency, controllable text summarization, cross-lingual summarization, and evaluation metrics, among others. Solutions leveraging knowledge incorporation and other innovative strategies are proposed to address these challenges. The paper concludes by highlighting emerging research areas like factual inconsistency, domain-specific, cross-lingual, multilingual, and long-document summarization, as well as handling noisy data. Our objective is to provide researchers and practitioners with a structured overview of the domain, enabling them to better understand the current landscape and identify potential areas for further research and improvement.

This paper presents the development process of a natural language to SQL model using the T5 model as the basis. The models, developed in August 2022 for an online transaction processing system and a data warehouse, have a 73\% and 84\% exact match accuracy respectively. These models, in conjunction with other work completed in the research project, were implemented for several companies and used successfully on a daily basis. The approach used in the model development could be implemented in a similar fashion for other database environments and with a more powerful pre-trained language model.

Agnostic learning [Hau92, KSS92] is an important generalization of PAC-learning [Val84]. Agnostic learning is meant to more accurately capture a common approach to machine learning, where a predefined set of functions is explored in order to find the one achieving the least error on a set of data produced by some totally unknown process. Thus, roughly speaking, the objective of an agnostic learning algorithm for a complexity class Λ is to output a hypothesis h whose error in approximating an arbitrary concept is nearly as small as that of the best possible hypothesis within Λ. The class Λ is referred to as the touchstone class. Designing computationally efficient (i.e., polynomial time) agnostic learning algorithms for expressive touchstone classes has historically been relatively hard. Even extremely simple touchstone classes such as parity functions are believed to be computationally hard to learn in the agnostic model [BFKL93]. Some positive results exist, however, including for piecewise functions [KSS92], restricted fan-in two-layer neural nets [Lee96], geometric patterns [GKS97], decision trees, [GKK08], and halfspaces [KKMS08]. If we take some combination of the common relaxations considered in computational learning theory, such as access to membership queries, distribution-specific learning, or super-polynomial runtime, more positive results become known. For instance, the famed polynomial time agnostic learning algorithm for parity functions due to [GL89] (also referred to sometimes as the KM algorithm after [KM91]), uses membership queries and requires a uniform distribution over unlabelled examples.

The use of question-based activities (QBAs) is wide-spread in education, traditionally forming an integral part of the learning and assessment process. In this paper, we design and evaluate an automated question generation tool for formative and summative assessment in schools. We present an expert survey of one hundred and four teachers, demonstrating the need for automated generation of QBAs, as a tool that can significantly reduce the workload of teachers and facilitate personalized learning experiences. Leveraging the recent advancements in generative AI, we then present a modular framework employing transformer based language models for automatic generation of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from textual content. The presented solution, with distinct modules for question generation, correct answer prediction, and distractor formulation, enables us to evaluate different language models and generation techniques. Finally, we perform an extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation, demonstrating trade-offs in the use of different techniques and models.

With the development of large language models (LLMs), zero-shot learning has attracted much attention for various NLP tasks. Different from prior works that generate training data with billion-scale natural language generation (NLG) models, we propose a retrieval-enhanced framework to create training data from a general-domain unlabeled corpus. To realize this, we first conduct contrastive pretraining to learn an unsupervised dense retriever for extracting the most relevant documents using class-descriptive verbalizers. We then further propose two simple strategies, namely Verbalizer Augmentation with Demonstrations and Self-consistency Guided Filtering to improve the topic coverage of the dataset while removing noisy examples. Experiments on nine datasets demonstrate that REGEN achieves 4.3% gain over the strongest baselines and saves around 70% of the time compared to baselines using large NLG models. Besides, REGEN can be naturally integrated with recently proposed large language models to boost performance.

Konkani is a highly nasalised language which makes it unique among Indo-Aryan languages. This work investigates the acoustic-phonetic properties of Konkani oral and nasal vowels. For this study, speech samples from six speakers (3 male and 3 female) were collected. A total of 74 unique sentences were used as a part of the recording script, 37 each for oral and nasal vowels, respectively. The final data set consisted of 1135 vowel phonemes. A comparative F1-F2 plot of Konkani oral and nasal vowels is presented with an experimental result and formant analysis. The average F1, F2 and F3 values are also reported for the first time through experimentation for all nasal and oral vowels. This study can be helpful for the linguistic research on vowels and speech synthesis systems specific to the Konkani language.

However, up until the COVID-19 pandemic caused a seismic shift in the education sector, few educational institutions had fully developed digital learning models in place and adoption of digital models was ad-hoc or only partially integrated alongside traditional teaching modes [1]. In the wake of the disruptive impact of the pandemic, the education sector and more importantly educators have had to move rapidly to take up digital solutions to continue delivering learning. At the most rudimentary level, this has meant moving to online teaching through platforms such as Zoom, Google, Teams and Interactive Whiteboards and delivering pre-recorded educational materials via Learning Management Systems (e.g., Echo). Digital learning is now simply part of the education landscape both in the traditional education sector as well as within the context of corporate and workplace learning. A key challenge future teachers face when delivering educational content via digital learning is to be able to assess what the learner knows and understands, the depths of that knowledge and understanding and any gaps in that learning. Assessment also occurs in the context of the cohort and relevant band or level of learning. The Teachers Guide to Assessment produced by the Australian Capital Territory Government [2] identified that teachers and learning designers were particularly challenged by the assessment process, and that new technologies have the potential to transform existing digital teaching and learning practices through refined information gathering and the ability to enhance the nature of learner feedback. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of the next generation of digital learning, enabling educators to create learning content, stream content to suit individual learner needs and access and in turn respond to data based on learner performance and feedback [3]. AI has the capacity to provide significant benefits to teachers to deliver nuanced and personalised experiences to learners.

Panaji: A team from Don Bosco College of Engineering, Fatorda, in a project sponsored by ISRO, has developed an algorithm that enables accurate identification of land features like forests, waterbodies, etc, using satellite images. Unlike applications like Google Earth, the machine-learning algorithm even helps identify details like the type of crops being cultivated in a field. The tool is expected to be immensely helpful in town and country planning, and in carrying out environmental studies, among other uses. Rahul Kotru, Musab Shaikh and Satyaswarup Banerjee of the electronics and telecommunication (ETC) branch have developed the deep learning algorithm, under the guidance of lead scientist, Varsha Turkar, who heads the department, and Shreyas Simu. This data can be captured during day and night independent of weather and climatic conditions.