Setubal
Overview of the 17th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence
IJCCI 2025 (17th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence) received 146 paper submissions from 41 countries. To evaluate each submission, a double-blind paper review was performed by the Program Committee. After a stringent selection process, 36 papers were published and presented as full papers, i.e. completed work (12 pages/25' oral presentation), 83 papers were accepted as short papers (58 as oral presentation). The organizing committee included the IJCCI Conference Chair: Joaquim Filipe, Polytechnic Institute of Setubal, Portugal, and the IJCCI 2025 Program Chairs: Francesco Marcelloni, University of Pisa, Italy, Kurosh Madani, University of Paris-EST Créteil (UPEC), France, and Niki van Stein, Leiden University, Netherlands. At the closing session, the conference acknowledged a few papers that were considered excellent in their class, presenting a "Best Paper Award", "Best Student Paper Award", and "Best Poster Award" for each of the co-located conferences.
Working Document -- Formalising Software Requirements with Large Language Models
Beg, Arshad, O'Donoghue, Diarmuid, Monahan, Rosemary
This draft is a working document, having a summary of nighty-four (94) papers with additional sections on Traceability of Software Requirements (Section 4), Formal Methods and Its Tools (Section 5), Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) and Theory of Institutions (Section 6). Please refer to abstract of [7,8]. Key difference of this draft from our recently anticipated ones with similar titles, i.e. AACS 2025 [7] and SAIV 2025 [8] is: [7] is a two page submission to ADAPT Annual Conference, Ireland. Submitted on 18th of March, 2025, it went through the light-weight blind review and accepted for poster presentation. Conference was held on 15th of May, 2025; [8] is a nine page paper with additional nine pages of references and summary tables, submitted to Symposium on AI Verification (SAIV 2025) on 24th of April, 2025. It went through rigorous review process. The uploaded version on arXiv.org [8] is the improved one of the submission, after addressing the specific suggestions to improve the paper.
Clarifying Misconceptions in COVID-19 Vaccine Sentiment and Stance Analysis and Their Implications for Vaccine Hesitancy Mitigation: A Systematic Review
Barberia, Lorena G, Lombard, Belinda, Roman, Norton Trevisan, Sousa, Tatiane C. M.
Background Advances in machine learning (ML) models have increased the capability of researchers to detect vaccine hesitancy in social media using Natural Language Processing (NLP). A considerable volume of research has identified the persistence of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in discourse shared on various social media platforms. Methods Our objective in this study was to conduct a systematic review of research employing sentiment analysis or stance detection to study discourse towards COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination spread on Twitter (officially known as X since 2023). Following registration in the PROSPERO international registry of systematic reviews, we searched papers published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2023 that used supervised machine learning to assess COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through stance detection or sentiment analysis on Twitter. We categorized the studies according to a taxonomy of five dimensions: tweet sample selection approach, self-reported study type, classification typology, annotation codebook definitions, and interpretation of results. We analyzed if studies using stance detection report different hesitancy trends than those using sentiment analysis by examining how COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is measured, and whether efforts were made to avoid measurement bias. Results Our review found that measurement bias is widely prevalent in studies employing supervised machine learning to analyze sentiment and stance toward COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination. The reporting errors are sufficiently serious that they hinder the generalisability and interpretation of these studies to understanding whether individual opinions communicate reluctance to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion Improving the reporting of NLP methods is crucial to addressing knowledge gaps in vaccine hesitancy discourse.
Measuring the Effect of Transcription Noise on Downstream Language Understanding Tasks
Shapira, Ori, Chazan, Shlomo E., Cohen, Amir DN
With the increasing prevalence of recorded human speech, spoken language understanding (SLU) is essential for its efficient processing. In order to process the speech, it is commonly transcribed using automatic speech recognition technology. This speech-to-text transition introduces errors into the transcripts, which subsequently propagate to downstream NLP tasks, such as dialogue summarization. While it is known that transcript noise affects downstream tasks, a systematic approach to analyzing its effects across different noise severities and types has not been addressed. We propose a configurable framework for assessing task models in diverse noisy settings, and for examining the impact of transcript-cleaning techniques. The framework facilitates the investigation of task model behavior, which can in turn support the development of effective SLU solutions. We exemplify the utility of our framework on three SLU tasks and four task models, offering insights regarding the effect of transcript noise on tasks in general and models in particular. For instance, we find that task models can tolerate a certain level of noise, and are affected differently by the types of errors in the transcript.
Ancient Greek Technology: An Immersive Learning Use Case Described Using a Co-Intelligent Custom ChatGPT Assistant
Kasapakis, Vlasis, Morgado, Leonel
Achieving consistency in immersive learning case descriptions is essential but challenging due to variations in research focus, methodology, and researchers' background. We address these challenges by leveraging the Immersive Learning Case Sheet (ILCS), a methodological instrument to standardize case descriptions, that we applied to an immersive learning case on ancient Greek technology in VRChat. Research team members had differing levels of familiarity with the ILCS and the case content, so we developed a custom ChatGPT assistant to facilitate consistent terminology and process alignment across the team. This paper constitutes an example of how structured case reports can be a novel contribution to immersive learning literature. Our findings demonstrate how the ILCS supports structured reflection and interpretation of the case. Further we report that the use of a ChatGPT assistant significantly sup-ports the coherence and quality of the team members development of the final ILCS. This exposes the potential of employing AI-driven tools to enhance collaboration and standardization of research practices in qualitative educational research. However, we also discuss the limitations and challenges, including reliance on AI for interpretive tasks and managing varied levels of expertise within the team. This study thus provides insights into the practical application of AI in standardizing immersive learning research processes.
Text-to-SQL based on Large Language Models and Database Keyword Search
Nascimento, Eduardo R., Avila, Caio Viktor S., Izquierdo, Yenier T., García, Grettel M., Andrade, Lucas Feijó L., Facina, Michelle S. P., Lemos, Melissa, Casanova, Marco A.
Text-to-SQL prompt strategies based on Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance on well-known benchmarks. However, when applied to real-world databases, their performance is significantly less than for these benchmarks, especially for Natural Language (NL) questions requiring complex filters and joins to be processed. This paper then proposes a strategy to compile NL questions into SQL queries that incorporates a dynamic few-shot examples strategy and leverages the services provided by a database keyword search (KwS) platform. The paper details how the precision and recall of the schema-linking process are improved with the help of the examples provided and the keyword-matching service that the KwS platform offers. Then, it shows how the KwS platform can be used to synthesize a view that captures the joins required to process an input NL question and thereby simplify the SQL query compilation step. The paper includes experiments with a real-world relational database to assess the performance of the proposed strategy. The experiments suggest that the strategy achieves an accuracy on the real-world relational database that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The paper concludes by discussing the results obtained.
Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey
Kuang, Jiayi, Xie, Jingyou, Luo, Haohao, Li, Ronghao, Xu, Zhe, Cheng, Xianfeng, Li, Yinghui, Lin, Xika, Shen, Ying
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenge task that combines natural language processing and computer vision techniques and gradually becomes a benchmark test task in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The goal of our survey is to provide an overview of the development of VQA and a detailed description of the latest models with high timeliness. This survey gives an up-to-date synthesis of natural language understanding of images and text, as well as the knowledge reasoning module based on image-question information on the core VQA tasks. In addition, we elaborate on recent advances in extracting and fusing modal information with vision-language pretraining models and multimodal large language models in VQA. We also exhaustively review the progress of knowledge reasoning in VQA by detailing the extraction of internal knowledge and the introduction of external knowledge. Finally, we present the datasets of VQA and different evaluation metrics and discuss possible directions for future work.
Artificial Intelligence for Collective Intelligence: A National-Scale Research Strategy
Bullock, Seth, Ajmeri, Nirav, Batty, Mike, Black, Michaela, Cartlidge, John, Challen, Robert, Chen, Cangxiong, Chen, Jing, Condell, Joan, Danon, Leon, Dennett, Adam, Heppenstall, Alison, Marshall, Paul, Morgan, Phil, O'Kane, Aisling, Smith, Laura G. E., Smith, Theresa, Williams, Hywel T. P.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning often address challenges that are relatively monolithic: determine the safest action for an autonomous car; translate a document from English to French; analyse a medical image to detect a cancer; answer a question about a difficult topic. These kinds of challenge are important and worthwhile targets for AI research. However, an alternative set of challenges exist that are collective in nature: help to minimise a pandemic's impact by coordinating mitigating interventions; help to manage an extreme weather event using real-time physical and social data streams; help to avoid a stock market crash by managing interactions between trading agents; help to guide city developers towards more sustainable coordinated city planning decisions; help people with diabetes to collaboratively manage their condition while preserving privacy.
Artificial Intelligence for Microbiology and Microbiome Research
Wang, Xu-Wen, Wang, Tong, Liu, Yang-Yu
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed many scientific fields, with microbiology and microbiome research now experiencing significant breakthroughs through machine learning and deep learning applications. This review provides a comprehensive overview of AI-driven approaches tailored for microbiology and microbiome studies, emphasizing both technical advancements and biological insights. We begin with an introduction to foundational AI techniques, including primary machine learning paradigms and various deep learning architectures, and offer guidance on choosing between machine learning and deep learning methods based on specific research goals. The primary section on application scenarios spans diverse research areas, from taxonomic profiling, functional annotation & prediction, microbe-X interactions, microbial ecology, metabolic modeling, precision nutrition, clinical microbiology, to prevention & therapeutics. Finally, we discuss challenges unique to this field, including the balance between interpretability and complexity, the "small n, large p" problem, and the critical need for standardized benchmarking datasets to validate and compare models. Together, this review underscores AI's transformative role in microbiology and microbiome research, paving the way for innovative methodologies and applications that enhance our understanding of microbial life and its impact on our planet and our health.
Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Prediction with Importance-based Generative Contrastive Learning
Zhao, Kai, Zhuang, Zhihao, Guo, Chenjuan, Miao, Hao, Cheng, Yunyao, Yang, Bin
Time series anomaly prediction plays an essential role in many real-world scenarios, such as environmental prevention and prompt maintenance of cyber-physical systems. However, existing time series anomaly prediction methods mainly require supervised training with plenty of manually labeled data, which are difficult to obtain in practice. Besides, unseen anomalies can occur during inference, which could differ from the labeled training data and make these models fail to predict such new anomalies. In this paper, we study a novel problem of unsupervised time series anomaly prediction. We provide a theoretical analysis and propose Importance-based Generative Contrastive Learning (IGCL) to address the aforementioned problems. IGCL distinguishes between normal and anomaly precursors, which are generated by our anomaly precursor pattern generation module. To address the efficiency issues caused by the potential complex anomaly precursor combinations, we propose a memory bank with importance-based scores to adaptively store representative anomaly precursors and generate more complicated anomaly precursors. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on unsupervised time series anomaly prediction problems.