Oceania
A Study on Scaling Up Multilingual News Framing Analysis
Akter, Syeda Sabrina, Anastasopoulos, Antonios
Media framing is the study of strategically selecting and presenting specific aspects of political issues to shape public opinion. Despite its relevance to almost all societies around the world, research has been limited due to the lack of available datasets and other resources. This study explores the possibility of dataset creation through crowdsourcing, utilizing non-expert annotators to develop training corpora. We first extend framing analysis beyond English news to a multilingual context (12 typologically diverse languages) through automatic translation. We also present a novel benchmark in Bengali and Portuguese on the immigration and same-sex marriage domains. Additionally, we show that a system trained on our crowd-sourced dataset, combined with other existing ones, leads to a 5.32 percentage point increase from the baseline, showing that crowdsourcing is a viable option. Last, we study the performance of large language models (LLMs) for this task, finding that task-specific fine-tuning is a better approach than employing bigger non-specialized models.
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios
Zhang, Xiaokang, Zhang, Jing, Ma, Zeyao, Li, Yang, Zhang, Bohan, Li, Guanlin, Yao, Zijun, Xu, Kangli, Zhou, Jinchang, Zhang-Li, Daniel, Yu, Jifan, Zhao, Shu, Li, Juanzi, Tang, Jie
We introduce TableLLM, a robust large language model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters, purpose-built for proficiently handling tabular data manipulation tasks, whether they are embedded within documents or spreadsheets, catering to real-world office scenarios. We propose a distant supervision method for training, which comprises a reasoning process extension strategy, aiding in training LLMs to understand reasoning patterns more effectively as well as a cross-way validation strategy, ensuring the quality of the automatically generated data. To evaluate the performance of TableLLM, we have crafted a benchmark tailored to address both document and spreadsheet formats as well as constructed a well-organized evaluation pipeline capable of handling both scenarios. Thorough evaluations underscore the advantages of TableLLM when compared to various existing general-purpose and tabular data-focused LLMs.
Constructing and Expanding Low-Resource and Underrepresented Parallel Datasets for Indonesian Local Languages
Lopo, Joanito Agili, Tanone, Radius
In Indonesia, local languages play an integral role in the culture. However, the available Indonesian language resources still fall into the category of limited data in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. This is become problematic when build NLP model for these languages. To address this gap, we introduce Bhinneka Korpus, a multilingual parallel corpus featuring five Indonesian local languages. Our goal is to enhance access and utilization of these resources, extending their reach within the country. We explained in a detail the dataset collection process and associated challenges. Additionally, we experimented with translation task using the IBM Model 1 due to data constraints. The result showed that the performance of each language already shows good indications for further development. Challenges such as lexical variation, smoothing effects, and cross-linguistic variability are discussed. We intend to evaluate the corpus using advanced NLP techniques for low-resource languages, paving the way for multilingual translation models.
LITE: Modeling Environmental Ecosystems with Multimodal Large Language Models
Li, Haoran, Liu, Junqi, Wang, Zexian, Luo, Shiyuan, Jia, Xiaowei, Yao, Huaxiu
The modeling of environmental ecosystems plays a pivotal role in the sustainable management of our planet. Accurate prediction of key environmental variables over space and time can aid in informed policy and decision-making, thus improving people's livelihood. Recently, deep learning-based methods have shown promise in modeling the spatial-temporal relationships for predicting environmental variables. However, these approaches often fall short in handling incomplete features and distribution shifts, which are commonly observed in environmental data due to the substantial cost of data collection and malfunctions in measuring instruments. To address these issues, we propose LITE -- a multimodal large language model for environmental ecosystems modeling. Specifically, LITE unifies different environmental variables by transforming them into natural language descriptions and line graph images. Then, LITE utilizes unified encoders to capture spatial-temporal dynamics and correlations in different modalities. During this step, the incomplete features are imputed by a sparse Mixture-of-Experts framework, and the distribution shift is handled by incorporating multi-granularity information from past observations. Finally, guided by domain instructions, a language model is employed to fuse the multimodal representations for the prediction. Our experiments demonstrate that LITE significantly enhances performance in environmental spatial-temporal prediction across different domains compared to the best baseline, with a 41.25% reduction in prediction error. This justifies its effectiveness. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/hrlics/LITE.
AIOps Solutions for Incident Management: Technical Guidelines and A Comprehensive Literature Review
Remil, Youcef, Bendimerad, Anes, Mathonat, Romain, Kaytoue, Mehdi
The management of modern IT systems poses unique challenges, necessitating scalability, reliability, and efficiency in handling extensive data streams. Traditional methods, reliant on manual tasks and rule-based approaches, prove inefficient for the substantial data volumes and alerts generated by IT systems. Artificial Intelligence for Operating Systems (AIOps) has emerged as a solution, leveraging advanced analytics like machine learning and big data to enhance incident management. AIOps detects and predicts incidents, identifies root causes, and automates healing actions, improving quality and reducing operational costs. However, despite its potential, the AIOps domain is still in its early stages, decentralized across multiple sectors, and lacking standardized conventions. Research and industrial contributions are distributed without consistent frameworks for data management, target problems, implementation details, requirements, and capabilities. This study proposes an AIOps terminology and taxonomy, establishing a structured incident management procedure and providing guidelines for constructing an AIOps framework. The research also categorizes contributions based on criteria such as incident management tasks, application areas, data sources, and technical approaches. The goal is to provide a comprehensive review of technical and research aspects in AIOps for incident management, aiming to structure knowledge, identify gaps, and establish a foundation for future developments in the field.
Inference in Randomized Least Squares and PCA via Normality of Quadratic Forms
Wang, Leda, Zhang, Zhixiang, Dobriban, Edgar
Randomized algorithms can be used to speed up the analysis of large datasets. In this paper, we develop a unified methodology for statistical inference via randomized sketching or projections in two of the most fundamental problems in multivariate statistical analysis: least squares and PCA. The methodology applies to fixed datasets -- i.e., is data-conditional -- and the only randomness is due to the randomized algorithm. We propose statistical inference methods for a broad range of sketching distributions, such as the subsampled randomized Hadamard transform (SRHT), Sparse Sign Embeddings (SSE) and CountSketch, sketching matrices with i.i.d. entries, and uniform subsampling. To our knowledge, no comparable methods are available for SSE and for SRHT in PCA. Our novel theoretical approach rests on showing the asymptotic normality of certain quadratic forms. As a contribution of broader interest, we show central limit theorems for quadratic forms of the SRHT, relying on a novel proof via a dyadic expansion that leverages the recursive structure of the Hadamard transform. Numerical experiments using both synthetic and empirical datasets support the efficacy of our methods, and in particular suggest that sketching methods can have better computation-estimation tradeoffs than recently proposed optimal subsampling methods.
Diverse Perspectives, Divergent Models: Cross-Cultural Evaluation of Depression Detection on Twitter
Ali, Nuredin, Zhang, Charles Chuankai, Mayo, Ned, Chancellor, Stevie
Social media data has been used for detecting users with mental disorders, such as depression. Despite the global significance of cross-cultural representation and its potential impact on model performance, publicly available datasets often lack crucial metadata related to this aspect. In this work, we evaluate the generalization of benchmark datasets to build AI models on cross-cultural Twitter data. We gather a custom geo-located Twitter dataset of depressed users from seven countries as a test dataset. Our results show that depression detection models do not generalize globally. The models perform worse on Global South users compared to Global North. Pre-trained language models achieve the best generalization compared to Logistic Regression, though still show significant gaps in performance on depressed and non-Western users. We quantify our findings and provide several actionable suggestions to mitigate this issue.
Uncertain Boundaries: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Copyright Issues in Generative AI
Dzuong, Jocelyn, Wang, Zichong, Zhang, Wenbin
In the rapidly evolving landscape of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the increasingly pertinent issue of copyright infringement arises as AI advances to generate content from scraped copyrighted data, prompting questions about ownership and protection that impact professionals across various careers. With this in mind, this survey provides an extensive examination of copyright infringement as it pertains to generative AI, aiming to stay abreast of the latest developments and open problems. Specifically, it will first outline methods of detecting copyright infringement in mediums such as text, image, and video. Next, it will delve an exploration of existing techniques aimed at safeguarding copyrighted works from generative models. Furthermore, this survey will discuss resources and tools for users to evaluate copyright violations. Finally, insights into ongoing regulations and proposals for AI will be explored and compared. Through combining these disciplines, the implications of AI-driven content and copyright are thoroughly illustrated and brought into question.
Benchmark Transparency: Measuring the Impact of Data on Evaluation
Kovatchev, Venelin, Lease, Matthew
In this paper we present an exploratory research on quantifying the impact that data distribution has on the performance and evaluation of NLP models. We propose an automated framework that measures the data point distribution across 6 different dimensions: ambiguity, difficulty, discriminability, length, noise, and perplexity. We use disproportional stratified sampling to measure how much the data distribution affects absolute (Acc/F1) and relative (Rank) model performance. We experiment on 2 different datasets (SQUAD and MNLI) and test a total of 135 different models (125 on SQUAD and 10 on MNLI). We demonstrate that without explicit control of the data distribution, standard evaluation frameworks are inconsistent and unreliable. We find that the impact of the data is statistically significant and is often larger than the impact of changing the metric. In a second set of experiments, we demonstrate that the impact of data on evaluation is not just observable, but also predictable. We propose to use benchmark transparency as a method for comparing datasets and quantifying the similarity between them. We find that the ``dataset similarity vector'' can be used to predict how well a model generalizes out of distribution.
HeteroMILE: a Multi-Level Graph Representation Learning Framework for Heterogeneous Graphs
Zhang, Yue, He, Yuntian, Gurukar, Saket, Parthasarathy, Srinivasan
Heterogeneous graphs are ubiquitous in real-world applications because they can represent various relationships between different types of entities. Therefore, learning embeddings in such graphs is a critical problem in graph machine learning. However, existing solutions for this problem fail to scale to large heterogeneous graphs due to their high computational complexity. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-Level Embedding framework of nodes on a heterogeneous graph (HeteroMILE) - a generic methodology that allows contemporary graph embedding methods to scale to large graphs. HeteroMILE repeatedly coarsens the large sized graph into a smaller size while preserving the backbone structure of the graph before embedding it, effectively reducing the computational cost by avoiding time-consuming processing operations. It then refines the coarsened embedding to the original graph using a heterogeneous graph convolution neural network. We evaluate our approach using several popular heterogeneous graph datasets. The experimental results show that HeteroMILE can substantially reduce computational time (approximately 20x speedup) and generate an embedding of better quality for link prediction and node classification.