Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked. The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tok-enization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases. These disparities persist even for tokenizers that are intentionally trained for multilingual support.

How many Syrians have returned? A ceasefire between the Syrian army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) appears to be largely holding, even as the two sides have accused each other of violating its terms. The army on Sunday said the SDF launched multiple drone attacks in the Aleppo countryside, while the United States-trained Kurdish forces on Monday accused the army of targeting a Kurdish-majority city near the Turkish border. An initial four-day ceasefire between the Syrian army and the SDF was extended by 15 days soon after it expired on Saturday night. The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that the SDF launched more than 25 explosive drones on the army positions in the Aleppo countryside on Sunday, breaching the newly extended ceasefire.

The Syrian army is moving into areas east of Aleppo city, after Kurdish forces started a withdrawal. Syrian troops have been spotted entering Deir Hafer, a town about 50km (30 miles) from Aleppo. On Friday, the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia announced it would redeploy east of the Euphrates river. This follows talks with US officials, and a pledge from Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to make Kurdish a national language. After deadly clashes last week, the US urged both sides to avoid a confrontation.

At least three civilians and a Syrian soldier have been killed after clashes erupted between the Syrian army and the Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Aleppo, according to the state news agency SANA. Earlier, Syria's defence ministry said three soldiers were injured after SDF fired drones at a military checkpoint near Deir Hafer, east of northern province. Heavy machine gunfire and fighting have been reported in the areas of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah. The ministry says it will respond to the "aggression in an appropriate manner".

Short-term water demand forecasting (StWDF) is the foundation stone in the derivation of an optimal plan for controlling water supply systems. Deep learning (DL) approaches provide the most accurate solutions for this purpose. However, they suffer from complexity problem due to the massive number of parameters, in addition to the high forecasting error at the extreme points. In this work, an effective method to alleviate the error at these points is proposed. It is based on extending the data by inserting virtual data within the actual data to relieve the nonlinearity around them. To our knowledge, this is the first work that considers the problem related to the extreme points. Moreover, the water demand forecasting model proposed in this work is a novel DL model with relatively low complexity. The basic model uses the gated recurrent unit (GRU) to handle the sequential relationship in the historical demand data, while an unsupervised classification method, k -means, is introduced for the creation of new features to enhance the prediction accuracy with less number of parameters. Real data obtained from two different water plants in China are used to train and verify the model proposed. The prediction results and the comparison with the state-of-the-art illustrate that the method proposed reduces the complexity of the model six times of what achieved in the literature while conserving the same accuracy. Furthermore, it is found that extending the data set significantly reduces the error by about 30%. However, it increases the training time. Introduction Water scarcity has become a threat to humankind in recent decades. Many efforts in all possible directions are being made to compensate for this growing problem (Northey et al., 2016; González-Zeas et al., 2019). The major reliable strategies for that include water treatment (Zinatloo-Ajabshir et al., 2020a), water desalination, and optimization of water management systems. Nanotechnology is the most powerful technology employed for water treatment, where researchers have done impressive work (Zinatloo-Ajabshir et al., 2020b, 2017; Moshtaghi et al., 2016). On the other hand, StWDF is the foundation stone of the optimization of water management systems.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved significant success in generating real-valued data.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved significant success in generating real-valued data.

A 14th century trickster tale was misread as fact. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Misinformation surrounding COVID-19 is still a major problem more than five years after its emergence. Even after hundreds of years, our understanding of the Black Death () remains clouded by false narratives. In a study recently published in the, historians at the UK's University of Exeter argue the infamous plague likely didn't move across the continent as quickly as many experts thought.