The rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has favored major languages such as English, leaving a significant gap for many others due to limited resources. This is especially evident in the context of data annotation, a task whose importance cannot be underestimated, but which is time-consuming and costly. Thus, any dataset for resource-poor languages is precious, in particular when it is task-specific. Here, we explore the feasibility of repurposing existing datasets for a new NLP task: we repurposed the Belebele dataset (Bandarkar et al., 2023), which was designed for multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), to enable extractive QA (EQA) in the style of machine reading comprehension. We present annotation guidelines and a parallel EQA dataset for English and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). We also present QA evaluation results for several monolingual and cross-lingual QA pairs including English, MSA, and five Arabic dialects. Our aim is to enable others to adapt our approach for the 120+ other language variants in Belebele, many of which are deemed under-resourced. We also conduct a thorough analysis and share our insights from the process, which we hope will contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges and the opportunities associated with task reformulation in NLP research.

Recent advancements in machine learning and deep learning have brought algorithmic fairness into sharp focus, illuminating concerns over discriminatory decision making that negatively impacts certain individuals or groups. These concerns have manifested in legal, ethical, and societal challenges, including the erosion of trust in intelligent systems. In response, this survey delves into the existing literature on algorithmic fairness, specifically highlighting its multifaceted social consequences. We introduce a novel taxonomy based on 'tolerance', a term we define as the degree to which variations in fairness outcomes are acceptable, providing a structured approach to understanding the subtleties of fairness within algorithmic decisions. Our systematic review covers diverse industries, revealing critical insights into the balance between algorithmic decision making and social equity. By synthesizing these insights, we outline a series of emerging challenges and propose strategic directions for future research and policy making, with the goal of advancing the field towards more equitable algorithmic systems.

Electricity generated from renewable energy sources has been established as an efficient remedy for both energy shortages and the environmental pollution stemming from conventional energy production methods. Solar and wind power are two of the most dominant renewable energy sources. The accurate forecasting of the energy generation of those sources facilitates their integration into electric grids, by minimizing the negative impact of uncertainty regarding their management and operation. This paper proposes a novel methodology for deterministic wind and solar energy generation forecasting for multiple generation sites, utilizing multi-location weather forecasts. The method employs a U-shaped Temporal Convolutional Auto-Encoder (UTCAE) architecture for temporal processing of weather-related and energy-related time-series across each site. The Multi-sized Kernels convolutional Spatio-Temporal Attention (MKST-Attention), inspired by the multi-head scaled-dot product attention mechanism, is also proposed aiming to efficiently transfer temporal patterns from weather data to energy data, without a priori knowledge of the locations of the power stations and the locations of provided weather data. The conducted experimental evaluation on a day-ahead solar and wind energy forecasting scenario on five datasets demonstrated that the proposed method achieves top results, outperforming all competitive time-series forecasting state-of-the-art methods.

The design of Graph Transformers (GTs) generally neglects considerations for fairness, resulting in biased outcomes against certain sensitive subgroups. Since GTs encode graph information without relying on message-passing mechanisms, conventional fairness-aware graph learning methods cannot be directly applicable to address these issues. To tackle this challenge, we propose FairGT, a Fairness-aware Graph Transformer explicitly crafted to mitigate fairness concerns inherent in GTs. FairGT incorporates a meticulous structural feature selection strategy and a multi-hop node feature integration method, ensuring independence of sensitive features and bolstering fairness considerations. These fairness-aware graph information encodings seamlessly integrate into the Transformer framework for downstream tasks. We also prove that the proposed fair structural topology encoding with adjacency matrix eigenvector selection and multi-hop integration are theoretically effective. Empirical evaluations conducted across five real-world datasets demonstrate FairGT's superiority in fairness metrics over existing graph transformers, graph neural networks, and state-of-the-art fairness-aware graph learning approaches.

We use the process and findings from a case study of design educators' practices of assessment and feedback to fuel theorizing about how to make AI useful in service of human experience. We build on Suchman's theory of situated actions. We perform a qualitative study of 11 educators in 5 fields, who teach design processes situated in project-based learning contexts. Through qualitative data gathering and analysis, we derive codes: design process; assessment and feedback challenges; and computational support. We twice invoke creative cognition's family resemblance principle. First, to explain how design instructors already use assessment rubrics and second, to explain the analogous role for design creativity analytics: no particular trait is necessary or sufficient; each only tends to indicate good design work. Human teachers remain essential. We develop a set of situated design creativity analytics--Fluency, Flexibility, Visual Consistency, Multiscale Organization, and Legible Contrast--to support instructors' efforts, by providing on-demand, learning objectives-based assessment and feedback to students. We theorize a methodology, which we call situating analytics, firstly because making AI support living human activity depends on aligning what analytics measure with situated practices. Further, we realize that analytics can become most significant to users by situating them through interfaces that integrate them into the material contexts of their use. Here, this means situating design creativity analytics into actual design environments. Through the case study, we identify situating analytics as a methodology for explaining analytics to users, because the iterative process of alignment with practice has the potential to enable data scientists to derive analytics that make sense as part of and support situated human experiences.

This paper expands on existing learned models of human behavior via a measured step in structured irrationality. Specifically, by replacing the suboptimality constant $\beta$ in a Boltzmann rationality model with a function over states $\beta(s)$, we gain natural expressivity in a computationally tractable manner. This paper discusses relevant mathematical theory, sets up several experimental designs, presents limited preliminary results, and proposes future investigations.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) rely on accurately decoding electroencephalography (EEG) motor imagery (MI) signals for effective device control. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) outperform Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in this regard, by leveraging the spatial relationships between EEG electrodes through adjacency matrices. The EEG_GLT-Net framework, featuring the state-of-the-art EEG_GLT adjacency matrix method, has notably enhanced EEG MI signal classification, evidenced by an average accuracy of 83.95% across 20 subjects on the PhysioNet dataset. This significantly exceeds the 76.10% accuracy rate achieved using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) method within the same framework. In this research, we advance the field by applying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to the classification of EEG MI signals. Our innovative method empowers the RL agent, enabling not only the classification of EEG MI data points with higher accuracy, but effective identification of EEG MI data points that are less distinct. We present the EEG_RL-Net, an enhancement of the EEG_GLT-Net framework, which incorporates the trained EEG GCN Block from EEG_GLT-Net at an adjacency matrix density of 13.39% alongside the RL-centric Dueling Deep Q Network (Dueling DQN) block. The EEG_RL-Net model showcases exceptional classification performance, achieving an unprecedented average accuracy of 96.40% across 20 subjects within 25 milliseconds. This model illustrates the transformative effect of the RL in EEG MI time point classification.

Downscaling, or super-resolution, provides decision-makers with detailed, high-resolution information about the potential risks and impacts of climate change, based on climate model output. Machine learning algorithms are proving themselves to be efficient and accurate approaches to downscaling. Here, we show how a generative, diffusion-based approach to downscaling gives accurate downscaled results. We focus on an idealised setting where we recover ERA5 at $0.25\degree$~resolution from coarse grained version at $2\degree$~resolution. The diffusion-based method provides superior accuracy compared to a standard U-Net, particularly at the fine scales, as highlighted by a spectral decomposition. Additionally, the generative approach provides users with a probability distribution which can be used for risk assessment. This research highlights the potential of diffusion-based downscaling techniques in providing reliable and detailed climate predictions.

As the utilization of large language models (LLMs) has proliferated worldwide, it is crucial for them to have adequate knowledge and fair representation for diverse global cultures. In this work, we uncover culture perceptions of three SOTA models on 110 countries and regions on 8 culture-related topics through culture-conditioned generations, and extract symbols from these generations that are associated to each culture by the LLM. We discover that culture-conditioned generation consist of linguistic "markers" that distinguish marginalized cultures apart from default cultures. We also discover that LLMs have an uneven degree of diversity in the culture symbols, and that cultures from different geographic regions have different presence in LLMs' culture-agnostic generation. Our findings promote further research in studying the knowledge and fairness of global culture perception in LLMs. Code and Data can be found in: https://github.com/huihanlhh/Culture-Gen/

Word error rate (WER) is a metric used to evaluate the quality of transcriptions produced by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In many applications, it is of interest to estimate WER given a pair of a speech utterance and a transcript. Previous work on WER estimation focused on building models that are trained with a specific ASR system in mind (referred to as ASR system-dependent). These are also domain-dependent and inflexible in real-world applications. In this paper, a hypothesis generation method for ASR System-Independent WER estimation (SIWE) is proposed. In contrast to prior work, the WER estimators are trained using data that simulates ASR system output. Hypotheses are generated using phonetically similar or linguistically more likely alternative words. In WER estimation experiments, the proposed method reaches a similar performance to ASR system-dependent WER estimators on in-domain data and achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-domain data. On the out-of-domain data, the SIWE model outperformed the baseline estimators in root mean square error and Pearson correlation coefficient by relative 17.58% and 18.21%, respectively, on Switchboard and CALLHOME. The performance was further improved when the WER of the training set was close to the WER of the evaluation dataset.