This paper presents UD-NewsCrawl, the largest Tagalog treebank to date, containing 15.6k trees manually annotated according to the Universal Dependencies framework. We detail our treebank development process, including data collection, pre-processing, manual annotation, and quality assurance procedures. We provide baseline evaluations using multiple transformer-based models to assess the performance of state-of-the-art dependency parsers on Tagalog. We also highlight challenges in the syntactic analysis of Tagalog given its distinctive grammatical properties, and discuss its implications for the annotation of this treebank. We anticipate that UD-NewsCrawl and our baseline model implementations will serve as valuable resources for advancing computational linguistics research in underrepresented languages like Tagalog.

Joseph Humire, of the Center for a Secret Free Society, joined'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss reports that Chinese migrant encounters are skyrocketing under Biden. The United States is constantly assessing the need to expand export controls to stop China from acquiring advanced computer chips and manufacturing equipment that could be used to boost its military, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Monday. The U.S. export controls were first launched in 2022 to counter the use of chips for military applications that include the development of hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence. Last year, the U.S. Commerce Department broadened the export controls, sparking protests from China's Commerce Ministry that the restrictions violated international trade rules and "seriously threaten the stability of industrial supply chains." China said it would take "all necessary measures" to safeguard its rights and interests and urged Washington to lift the export control as soon as possible. Asked if the U.S. was planning to further broaden the chip export controls to China, Raimondo said in a news conference in the Philippine capital Manila that it was constantly under consideration.

Combining multi-spectral satellite data and machine learning has been suggested as a method for monitoring plastic pollutants in the ocean environment. Recent studies have made theoretical progress regarding the identification of marine plastic via machine learning. However, no study has assessed the application of these methods for mapping and monitoring marine-plastic density. As such, this paper comprised of three main components: (1) the development of a machine learning model, (2) the construction of the MAP-Mapper, an automated tool for mapping marine-plastic density, and finally (3) an evaluation of the whole system for out-of-distribution test locations. The findings from this paper leverage the fact that machine learning models need to be high-precision to reduce the impact of false positives on results. The developed MAP-Mapper architectures provide users choices to reach high-precision ($\textit{abbv.}$ -HP) or optimum precision-recall ($\textit{abbv.}$ -Opt) values in terms of the training/test data set. Our MAP-Mapper-HP model greatly increased the precision of plastic detection to 95\%, whilst MAP-Mapper-Opt reaches precision-recall pair of 87\%-88\%. The MAP-Mapper contributes to the literature with the first tool to exploit advanced deep/machine learning and multi-spectral imagery to map marine-plastic density in automated software. The proposed data pipeline has taken a novel approach to map plastic density in ocean regions. As such, this enables an initial assessment of the challenges and opportunities of this method to help guide future work and scientific study.

Companies in the Philippines need to adopt technologies like automation and artificial intelligence to get rid of repetitive and redundant processes, a partner of business advisory firm Grant Thornton says. Grant Thornton partner Depender Kumar Depender Kumar, in his presentation during the 8th P&A Grant Thornton Business Forum in Manila, says Philippine companies, including business process outsourcing providers, are slow to embrace automation and struggle to change. "To be honest, if they [BPOs] don't change the way they do things, they will pay locally for the disruption. Most of what is done by the BPOs are repetitive. You don't need a lot of intelligence to do the work that is with you. That is why those jobs are outsourced earlier. At the same time, if you need to survive in that industry, you need to adopt technology along the way," he says.

For two decades, Jerry Gonzaga was addicted to drugs. Like many of his neighbors and friends in Parañaque, a city south of Manila, Gonzaga would take shabu, an inexpensive amphetamine, to keep him focused on fixing cars, selling umbrellas, and doing other odd jobs to feed his wife and eight children. Then, on June 30, Rodrigo Duterte assumed the Philippine presidency on promises to kill scores of drug users -- and Gonzaga, a wiry 43-year-old, tried to turn himself in to police. At the station, officers made him sign a form pledging to stay off drugs. "It said, 'If you're caught the first, second and third time, there are warnings and conditions,'" he said.