Can we improve machine translation (MT) with LLMs by rewriting their inputs automatically? Users commonly rely on the intuition that well-written text is easier to translate when using off-the-shelf MT systems. LLMs can rewrite text in many ways but in the context of MT, these capabilities have been primarily exploited to rewrite outputs via post-editing. We present an empirical study of 21 input rewriting methods with 3 open-weight LLMs for translating from English into 6 target languages. We show that text simplification is the most effective MT-agnostic rewrite strategy and that it can be improved further when using quality estimation to assess translatability. Human evaluation further confirms that simplified rewrites and their MT outputs both largely preserve the original meaning of the source and MT. These results suggest LLM-assisted input rewriting as a promising direction for improving translations.

This paper presents the design and evolution of the RELATE platform. It provides a high-performance environment for natural language processing activities, specially constructed for Romanian language. Initially developed for text processing, it has been recently updated to integrate audio processing tools. Technical details are provided with regard to core components. We further present different usage scenarios, derived from actual use in national and international research projects, thus demonstrating that RELATE is a mature, modern, state-of-the-art platform for processing Romanian language corpora. Finally, we present very recent developments including bimodal (text and audio) features available within the platform.

Authorship profiling is the process of identifying an author's characteristics based on their writings. This centuries old problem has become more intriguing especially with recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper, we introduce a corpus of short texts in the Romanian language, annotated with certain author characteristic keywords; to our knowledge, the first of its kind. In order to do this, we exploit a social media platform called Reddit. We leverage its thematic community-based structure (subreddits structure), which offers information about the author's background. We infer an user's demographic and some broad personal traits, such as age category, employment status, interests, and social orientation based on the subreddit and other cues. We thus obtain a 23k+ samples corpus, extracted from 100+ Romanian subreddits. We analyse our dataset, and finally, we fine-tune and evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) to prove baselines capabilities for authorship profiling using the corpus, indicating the need for further research in the field. We publicly release all our resources.

This paper surveys the potential of contextualized AI in enhancing cyber defense capabilities, revealing significant research growth from 2015 to 2024. We identify a focus on robustness, reliability, and integration methods, while noting gaps in organizational trust and governance frameworks. Our study employs two LLM-assisted literature survey methodologies: (A) ChatGPT 4 for exploration, and (B) Gemma 2:9b for filtering with Claude 3.5 Sonnet for full-text analysis. We discuss the effectiveness and challenges of using LLMs in academic research, providing insights for future researchers.

In the power and energy systems area, a progressive increase of literature contributions containing applications of metaheuristic algorithms is occurring. In many cases, these applications are merely aimed at proposing the testing of an existing metaheuristic algorithm on a specific problem, claiming that the proposed method is better than other methods based on weak comparisons. This 'rush to heuristics' does not happen in the evolutionary computation domain, where the rules for setting up rigorous comparisons are stricter, but are typical of the domains of application of the metaheuristics. This paper considers the applications to power and energy systems, and aims at providing a comprehensive view of the main issues concerning the use of metaheuristics for global optimization problems. A set of underlying principles that characterize the metaheuristic algorithms is presented. The customization of metaheuristic algorithms to fit the constraints of specific problems is discussed. Some weaknesses and pitfalls found in literature contributions are identified, and specific guidelines are provided on how to prepare sound contributions on the application of metaheuristic algorithms to specific problems.

In this paper we present architecture of a fuzzy expert system used for therapy of dyslalic children. With fuzzy approach we can create a better model for speech therapist decisions. A software interface was developed for validation of the system. The main objectives of this task are: personalized therapy (the therapy must be in according with child's problems level, context and possibilities), speech therapist assistant (the expert system offer some suggestion regarding what exercises are better for a specific moment and from a specific child), (self) teaching (when system's conclusion is different that speech therapist's conclusion the last one must have the knowledge base change possibility). Keywords: fuzzy expert systems, speech therapy 1. Introduction In this article we refer to LOGOMON system developed in TERAPERS project by the authors.

-- In order to improve children speech therapy, we develop a Fuzzy Expert System based on a speech therapy guide. This guide, write in natural language, was formalized using fuzzy logic paradigm. In this manner we obtain a knowledge base with over 150 rules and 19 linguistic variables. All these researches, including expert system validation, are part of TERAPERS project (financed by the National Agency for Scientific Research, Romania). I. INTRODUCTION The main objectives of speech therapy expert system develop by our team are [1]: - personalized therapy (the therapy must be in according with child's problems level, context and possibilities); - speech therapist assistant (the expert system offer some suggestion regarding what exercises are better for a specific moment and from a specific child); - (self) teaching (when system's conclusion is different that speech therapist's conclusion the last one must have the knowledge base change possibility).