In this article we present a novel system for natural language generation (NLG) of Spanish sentences from a minimum set of meaningful words (such as nouns, verbs and adjectives) which, unlike other state-of-the-art solutions, performs the NLG task in a fully automatic way, exploiting both knowledge-based and statistical approaches. Relying on its linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, the system is able to generate complete, coherent and correctly spelled sentences from the main word sets presented by the user. The system, which was designed to be integrable, portable and efficient, can be easily adapted to other languages by design and can feasibly be integrated in a wide range of digital devices. During its development we also created a supplementary lexicon for Spanish, aLexiS, with wide coverage and high precision, as well as syntactic trees from a freely available definite-clause grammar. The resulting NLG library has been evaluated both automatically and manually (annotation). The system can potentially be used in different application domains such as augmentative communication and automatic generation of administrative reports or news.

Sea surface temperature (SST) is an essential climate variable that can be measured via ground truth, remote sensing, or hybrid model methodologies. Here, we celebrate SST surveillance progress via the application of a few relevant technological advances from the late 20th and early 21st century. We further develop our existing water cycle observation framework, Flux to Flow (F2F), to fuse AMSR-E and MODIS into a higher resolution product with the goal of capturing gradients and filling cloud gaps that are otherwise unavailable. Our neural network architecture is constrained to a deep convolutional residual regressive neural network. We utilize three snapshots of twelve monthly SST measurements in 2010 as measured by the passive microwave radiometer AMSR-E, the visible and infrared monitoring MODIS instrument, and the in situ Argo dataset ISAS. The performance of the platform and success of this approach is evaluated using the root mean squared error (RMSE) metric. We determine that the 1:1 configuration of input and output data and a large observation region is too challenging for the single compute node and dcrrnn structure as is. When constrained to a single 100 x 100 pixel region and a small training dataset, the algorithm improves from the baseline experiment covering a much larger geography. For next discrete steps, we envision the consideration of a large input range with a very small output range. Furthermore, we see the need to integrate land and sea variables before performing computer vision tasks like those within. Finally, we see parallelization as necessary to overcome the compute obstacles we encountered.

A few benchmarking datasets have been released to evaluate the factual knowledge of pretrained language models. These benchmarks (e.g., LAMA, and ParaRel) are mainly developed in English and later are translated to form new multilingual versions (e.g., mLAMA, and mParaRel). Results on these multilingual benchmarks suggest that using English prompts to recall the facts from multilingual models usually yields significantly better and more consistent performance than using non-English prompts. Our analysis shows that mLAMA is biased toward facts from Western countries, which might affect the fairness of probing models. We propose a new framework for curating factual triples from Wikidata that are culturally diverse. A new benchmark DLAMA-v1 is built of factual triples from three pairs of contrasting cultures having a total of 78,259 triples from 20 relation predicates. The three pairs comprise facts representing the (Arab and Western), (Asian and Western), and (South American and Western) countries respectively. Having a more balanced benchmark (DLAMA-v1) supports that mBERT performs better on Western facts than non-Western ones, while monolingual Arabic, English, and Korean models tend to perform better on their culturally proximate facts. Moreover, both monolingual and multilingual models tend to make a prediction that is culturally or geographically relevant to the correct label, even if the prediction is wrong.

The immense scale of the recent large language models (LLM) allows many interesting properties, such as, instruction- and chain-of-thought-based fine-tuning, that has significantly improved zero- and few-shot performance in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Inspired by such successes, we adopt such an instruction-tuned LLM Flan-T5 as the text encoder for text-to-audio (TTA) generation -- a task where the goal is to generate an audio from its textual description. The prior works on TTA either pre-trained a joint text-audio encoder or used a non-instruction-tuned model, such as, T5. Consequently, our latent diffusion model (LDM)-based approach TANGO outperforms the state-of-the-art AudioLDM on most metrics and stays comparable on the rest on AudioCaps test set, despite training the LDM on a 63 times smaller dataset and keeping the text encoder frozen. This improvement might also be attributed to the adoption of audio pressure level-based sound mixing for training set augmentation, whereas the prior methods take a random mix.

The Port of Montevideo is located in the capital city of Montevideo, on the banks of the "Río de la Plata" river. Due to its strategic location between the Atlantic Ocean and the "Uruguay" river, it is considered one of the main routes of cargo mobilization for Uruguay and MERCOSUR . Over the past decades, it has established itself as a multipurpose port handling: containers, bulk, fishing boats, cruises, passenger transport, cars, and general cargo. MERCOSUR or officially the Southern Common Market is a commercial and political bloc established in 1991 by several South American countries. Moreover, only two companies concentrate all-cargo operations in this port: the company of Belgian origin Katoen Natie and the Chilean and Canadian capital company Montecon.

Narrative cartography is a discipline which studies the interwoven nature of stories and maps. However, conventional geovisualization techniques of narratives often encounter several prominent challenges, including the data acquisition & integration challenge and the semantic challenge. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose the idea of narrative cartography with knowledge graphs (KGs). Firstly, to tackle the data acquisition & integration challenge, we develop a set of KG-based GeoEnrichment toolboxes to allow users to search and retrieve relevant data from integrated cross-domain knowledge graphs for narrative mapping from within a GISystem. With the help of this tool, the retrieved data from KGs are directly materialized in a GIS format which is ready for spatial analysis and mapping. Two use cases - Magellan's expedition and World War II - are presented to show the effectiveness of this approach. In the meantime, several limitations are identified from this approach, such as data incompleteness, semantic incompatibility, and the semantic challenge in geovisualization. For the later two limitations, we propose a modular ontology for narrative cartography, which formalizes both the map content (Map Content Module) and the geovisualization process (Cartography Module). We demonstrate that, by representing both the map content and the geovisualization process in KGs (an ontology), we can realize both data reusability and map reproducibility for narrative cartography.

While traditional research on text clustering has largely focused on grouping documents by topic, it is conceivable that a user may want to cluster documents along other dimensions, such as the author's mood, gender, age, or sentiment. Without knowing the user's intention, a clustering algorithm will only group documents along the most prominent dimension, which may not be the one the user desires. To address the problem of clustering documents along the user-desired dimension, previous work has focused on learning a similarity metric from data manually annotated with the user's intention or having a human construct a feature space in an interactive manner during the clustering process. With the goal of reducing reliance on human knowledge for fine-tuning the similarity function or selecting the relevant features required by these approaches, we propose a novel active clustering algorithm, which allows a user to easily select the dimension along which she wants to cluster the documents by inspecting only a small number of words. We demonstrate the viability of our algorithm on a variety of commonly-used sentiment datasets.