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New Romanian law may have averted NATO clash with Russia after border strikes

FOX News

Russia hit pipelines in Ukraine, sparking bright flames and plumes of smoke seen from Romania. Russia narrowly avoided an armed skirmish with Romania, a member of the NATO alliance, after striking just a half mile from its border. Romanian defense officials believe the new law passed by parliament explicitly allowing its armed forces to shoot down Russian drones that fly over its territory prevented the Kremlin from incurring on its territory. Russia struck a gas distribution center in the Ismail Area of Ukraine with Shahed kamikaze drones on Tuesday and Wednesday, so close to Romania's border that Bucharest deployed F-16 aircraft to monitor. No unauthorized intrusions were reported.


Few-shot text-based emotion detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper describes the approach of the Unibuc - NLP team in tackling the SemEval 2025 Workshop, Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection. We mainly focused on experiments using large language models (Gemini, Qwen, DeepSeek) with either few-shot prompting or fine-tuning. With our final system, for the multi-label emotion detection track (track A), we got an F1-macro of $0.7546$ (26/96 teams) for the English subset, $0.1727$ (35/36 teams) for the Portuguese (Mozambican) subset and $0.325$ (\textbf{1}/31 teams) for the Emakhuwa subset.


News Source Citing Patterns in AI Search Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI-powered search systems are emerging as new information gatekeepers, fundamentally transforming how users access news and information. Despite their growing influence, the citation patterns of these systems remain poorly understood. We address this gap by analyzing data from the AI Search Arena, a head-to-head evaluation platform for AI search systems. The dataset comprises over 24,000 conversations and 65,000 responses from models across three major providers: OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google. Among the over 366,000 citations embedded in these responses, 9% reference news sources. We find that while models from different providers cite distinct news sources, they exhibit shared patterns in citation behavior. News citations concentrate heavily among a small number of outlets and display a pronounced liberal bias, though low-credibility sources are rarely cited. User preference analysis reveals that neither the political leaning nor the quality of cited news sources significantly influences user satisfaction. These findings reveal significant challenges in current AI search systems and have important implications for their design and governance.


The Cognate Data Bottleneck in Language Phylogenetics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To fully exploit the potential of computational phylogenetic methods for cognate data one needs to leverage specific (complex) models an machine learning-based techniques. However, both approaches require datasets that are substantially larger than the manually collected cognate data currently available. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no feasible approach to automatically generate larger cognate datasets. We substantiate this claim by automatically extracting datasets from BabelNet, a large multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. We demonstrate that phylogenetic inferences on the respective character matrices yield trees that are largely inconsistent with the established gold standard ground truth trees. We also discuss why we consider it as being unlikely to be able to extract more suitable character matrices from other multilingual resources. Phylogenetic data analysis approaches that require larger datasets can therefore not be applied to cognate data. Thus, it remains an open question how, and if these computational approaches can be applied in historical linguistics.


Putin confirms he wants all of Ukraine, as Europe steps up military aid

Al Jazeera

Ukraine's European allies pledged increased levels of military aid to Ukraine this year, making up for a United States aid freeze, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his ambition to absorb all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. "At this moment, the Europeans and the Canadians have pledged, for this year, 35bn in military support to Ukraine," said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte ahead of the alliance's annual summit, which took place in The Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24-25. "Last year, it was just over 50bn for the full year. Now, before we reach half year, it is already at 35bn. And there are even others saying it's already close to 40bn," he added.


ViLLa: A Neuro-Symbolic approach for Animal Monitoring

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Monitoring animal populations in natural environments requires systems that can interpret both visual data and human language queries. This work introduces ViLLa (Vision-Language-Logic Approach), a neuro-symbolic framework designed for interpretable animal monitoring. ViLLa integrates three core components: a visual detection module for identifying animals and their spatial locations in images, a language parser for understanding natural language queries, and a symbolic reasoning layer that applies logic-based inference to answer those queries. Given an image and a question such as "How many dogs are in the scene?" or "Where is the buffalo?", the system grounds visual detections into symbolic facts and uses predefined rules to compute accurate answers related to count, presence, and location. Unlike end-to-end black-box models, ViLLa separates perception, understanding, and reasoning, offering modularity and transparency. The system was evaluated on a range of animal imagery tasks and demonstrates the ability to bridge visual content with structured, human-interpretable queries.


Do Large Language Models Know Folktales? A Case Study of Yokai in Japanese Folktales

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong language understanding and generation abilities across various languages, their cultural knowledge is often limited to English-speaking communities, which can marginalize the cultures of non-English communities. To address the problem, evaluation of the cultural awareness of the LLMs and the methods to develop culturally aware LLMs have been investigated. In this study, we focus on evaluating knowledge of folktales, a key medium for conveying and circulating culture. In particular, we focus on Japanese folktales, specifically on knowledge of Yokai. Yokai are supernatural creatures originating from Japanese folktales that continue to be popular motifs in art and entertainment today. Yokai have long served as a medium for cultural expression, making them an ideal subject for assessing the cultural awareness of LLMs. We introduce YokaiEval, a benchmark dataset consisting of 809 multiple-choice questions (each with four options) designed to probe knowledge about yokai. We evaluate the performance of 31 Japanese and multilingual LLMs on this dataset. The results show that models trained with Japanese language resources achieve higher accuracy than English-centric models, with those that underwent continued pretraining in Japanese, particularly those based on Llama-3, performing especially well. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/CyberAgentA ILab/YokaiEval.