Considering different geographic regions generally have their own native sign languages, it is valuable to establish corresponding SL T datasets to support related communication and research. Auslan, as a sign language specific to Australia, still lacks a dedicated large-scale dataset for SL T.

In this paper, we present two techniques for use in context-aware systems: Semantic Decomposition, which sequentially decomposes input prompts into a structured and hierarchal information schema in which systems can parse and process easily, and Selective Context Filtering, which enables systems to systematically filter out specific irrelevant sections of contextual information that is fed through a system's NLP-based pipeline. We will explore how context-aware systems and applications can utilize these two techniques in order to implement dynamic LLM-to-system interfaces, improve an LLM's ability to generate more contextually cohesive user-facing responses, and optimize complex automated workflows and pipelines.

Ireland's coastline, a critical and dynamic resource, is facing challenges such as erosion, sedimentation, and human activities. Monitoring these changes is a complex task we approach using a combination of satellite imagery and deep learning methods. However, limited research exists in this area, particularly for Ireland. This paper presents the Landsat Irish Coastal Segmentation (LICS) dataset, which aims to facilitate the development of deep learning methods for coastal water body segmentation while addressing modelling challenges specific to Irish meteorology and coastal types. The dataset is used to evaluate various automated approaches for segmentation, with U-NET achieving the highest accuracy of 95.0% among deep learning methods. Nevertheless, the Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI) benchmark outperformed U-NET with an average accuracy of 97.2%. The study suggests that deep learning approaches can be further improved with more accurate training data and by considering alternative measurements of erosion. The LICS dataset and code are freely available to support reproducible research and further advancements in coastal monitoring efforts.

Climate models lack the necessary resolution for urban climate studies, requiring computationally intensive processes to estimate high resolution air temperatures. In contrast, Data-driven approaches offer faster and more accurate air temperature downscaling. This study presents a data-driven framework for downscaling air temperature using publicly available outputs from urban climate models, specifically datasets generated by UrbClim. The proposed framework utilized morphological features extracted from LiDAR data. To extract urban morphological features, first a three-dimensional building model was created using LiDAR data and deep learning models. Then, these features were integrated with meteorological parameters such as wind, humidity, etc., to downscale air temperature using machine learning algorithms. The results demonstrated that the developed framework effectively extracted urban morphological features from LiDAR data. Deep learning algorithms played a crucial role in generating three-dimensional models for extracting the aforementioned features. Also, the evaluation of air temperature downscaling results using various machine learning models indicated that the LightGBM model had the best performance with an RMSE of 0.352{\deg}K and MAE of 0.215{\deg}K. Furthermore, the examination of final air temperature maps derived from downscaling showed that the developed framework successfully estimated air temperatures at higher resolutions, enabling the identification of local air temperature patterns at street level. The corresponding source codes are available on GitHub: https://github.com/FatemehCh97/Air-Temperature-Downscaling.

We analyse the effectiveness of RMSE, PSNR, SSIM and FOM for evaluating edge detection algorithms used for automated coastline detection. Typically, the accuracy of detected coastlines is assessed visually. This can be impractical on a large scale leading to the need for objective evaluation metrics. Hence, we conduct an experiment to find reliable metrics. We apply Canny edge detection to 95 coastline satellite images across 49 testing locations. We vary the Hysteresis thresholds and compare metric values to a visual analysis of detected edges. We found that FOM was the most reliable metric for selecting the best threshold. It could select a better threshold 92.6% of the time and the best threshold 66.3% of the time. This is compared RMSE, PSNR and SSIM which could select the best threshold 6.3%, 6.3% and 11.6% of the time respectively. We provide a reason for these results by reformulating RMSE, PSNR and SSIM in terms of confusion matrix measures. This suggests these metrics not only fail for this experiment but are not useful for evaluating edge detection in general.

We interpret a deep-learning semantic segmentation model used to classify coastline satellite images into land and water. This is to build trust in the model and gain new insight into the process of coastal water body extraction. Specifically, we seek to understand which spectral bands are important for predicting segmentation masks. This is done using a permutation importance approach. Results show that the NIR is the most important spectral band. Permuting this band lead to a decrease in accuracy of 38.12 percentage points. This is followed by Water Vapour, SWIR 1, and Blue bands with 2.58, 0.78 and 0.19 respectively. Water Vapour is not typically used in water indices and these results suggest it may be useful for water body extraction. Permuting, the Coastal Aerosol, Green, Red, RE1, RE2, RE3, RE4, and SWIR 2 bands did not decrease accuracy. This suggests they could be excluded from future model builds reducing complexity and computational requirements.

In settings where most deaths occur outside the healthcare system, verbal autopsies (VAs) are a common tool to monitor trends in causes of death (COD). VAs are interviews with a surviving caregiver or relative that are used to predict the decedent's COD. Turning VAs into actionable insights for researchers and policymakers requires two steps (i) predicting likely COD using the VA interview and (ii) performing inference with predicted CODs (e.g. modeling the breakdown of causes by demographic factors using a sample of deaths). In this paper, we develop a method for valid inference using outcomes (in our case COD) predicted from free-form text using state-of-the-art NLP techniques. This method, which we call multiPPI++, extends recent work in "prediction-powered inference" to multinomial classification. We leverage a suite of NLP techniques for COD prediction and, through empirical analysis of VA data, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in handling transportability issues. multiPPI++ recovers ground truth estimates, regardless of which NLP model produced predictions and regardless of whether they were produced by a more accurate predictor like GPT-4-32k or a less accurate predictor like KNN. Our findings demonstrate the practical importance of inference correction for public health decision-making and suggests that if inference tasks are the end goal, having a small amount of contextually relevant, high quality labeled data is essential regardless of the NLP algorithm.

Colexification refers to the linguistic phenomenon where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings. By studying cross-lingual colexifications, researchers have gained valuable insights into fields such as psycholinguistics and cognitive sciences [Jackson et al.,2019]. While several multilingual colexification datasets exist, there is untapped potential in using this information to bootstrap datasets across such semantic features. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how colexifications can be leveraged to create such cross-lingual datasets. We showcase curation procedures which result in a dataset covering 142 languages across 21 language families across the world. The dataset includes ratings of concreteness and affectiveness, mapped with phonemes and phonological features. We further analyze the dataset along different dimensions to demonstrate potential of the proposed procedures in facilitating further interdisciplinary research in psychology, cognitive science, and multilingual natural language processing (NLP). Based on initial investigations, we observe that i) colexifications that are closer in concreteness/affectiveness are more likely to colexify; ii) certain initial/last phonemes are significantly correlated with concreteness/affectiveness intra language families, such as /k/ as the initial phoneme in both Turkic and Tai-Kadai correlated with concreteness, and /p/ in Dravidian and Sino-Tibetan correlated with Valence; iii) the type-to-token ratio (TTR) of phonemes are positively correlated with concreteness across several language families, while the length of phoneme segments are negatively correlated with concreteness; iv) certain phonological features are negatively correlated with concreteness across languages. The dataset is made public online for further research.

The digitalization of news media become a good indicator of progress and signal to more threats. Media disinformation or fake news is one of these threats, and it is necessary to take any action in fighting disinformation. This paper utilizes ground truth-based annotations and TF-IDF as feature extraction for the news articles which is then used as a training data set for Multinomial Naive Bayes. The model has an accuracy of 99.46% in training and 88.98% in predicting unseen data. Tagging fake news as real news is a concerning point on the prediction that is indicated in the F1 score of 89.68%. This could lead to a negative impact. To prevent this to happen it is suggested to further improve the corpus collection, and use an ensemble machine learning to reinforce the prediction