Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP. Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in language models (LMs). However, the use of figurative language is an expression of our cultural and societal experiences, making it difficult for these phrases to be universally applicable. In this work, we create a figurative language inference dataset, \datasetname, for seven diverse languages associated with a variety of cultures: Hindi, Indonesian, Javanese, Kannada, Sundanese, Swahili and Yoruba. Our dataset reveals that each language relies on cultural and regional concepts for figurative expressions, with the highest overlap between languages originating from the same region. We assess multilingual LMs' abilities to interpret figurative language in zero-shot and few-shot settings. All languages exhibit a significant deficiency compared to English, with variations in performance reflecting the availability of pre-training and fine-tuning data, emphasizing the need for LMs to be exposed to a broader range of linguistic and cultural variation during training.

Over the past decade, machine learning-based algorithms have been deployed across a wide range of use cases and industries. From the algorithms that assess an individual's creditworthiness, to algorithms that serve up suggested movies and shows to watch on Netflix, the impact of Big Data, analytics, and automation are felt daily by nearly everyone. One area of life where algorithms have not yet been perfected is with payments made by government or relief organizations to people in the aftermath of a crisis, emergency, or natural disaster, where getting financial relief to the people who need it most is critical. Though there have been pilot programs and limited use of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide targeted aid, the practice is far from widespread. Key drivers behind the desire to incorporate more automation and data analysis into aid dispersion is the time-consuming nature of assessing who is eligible to receive aid, and then ensuring that aid is only delivered to those legitimate recipients.

Criminals are taking advantage of AI technology to conduct misinformation campaigns, commit fraud and obstruct justice through deepfake audio and video. Australia's eSafety Commission has raised concerns about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to assist predators in grooming children online as the country debates restrictions on the emerging technology. Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant posted on Twitter that "the manipulative power of generative AI to execute on grooming and sextortion is no longer speculative." "eSafety is already receiving cyberbullying reports and image-based abuse reports around deepfakes," she wrote. "The fact is AI has been'exfiltrated into the wild' without guardrails."

Dyson's first robot vacuum, the 360 Eye, was a tallish robot vac that brought several new tricks to automated floor cleaning, for a price. Now, the UK company is trying again with the 360 Vis Nav robovac, which just launched in Australia and should come to the US later this year. The motor speed has increased from 78,000 RPM on its predecessor to 110,000, which supposedly delivers six times the suction of other robot vacuums. It also has a "triple-action" brush bar for optimal cleaning on different surfaces. Namely, it uses soft nylon for hard floors, anti-static carbon fiber filaments for fine dust and stiff nylon bristles for carpets. The company has also added an arm that pops out and redirects suction, picking up dirt at the edges.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have recently gained significant attention in higher education. This study aims to understand how universities establish policies regarding the use of AI tools and explore the factors that influence their decisions. Our study examines ChatGPT policies implemented at universities around the world, including their existence, content, and issuance dates. Specifically, we analyzed the top 500 universities according to the 2022 QS World University Rankings. Our findings indicate that there is significant variation in university policies. Less than one-third of the universities included in the study had implemented ChatGPT policies. Of the universities with ChatGPT policies, approximately 67 percent embraced ChatGPT in teaching and learning, more than twice the number of universities that banned it. The majority of the universities that ban the use of ChatGPT in assessments allow individual instructors to deviate from this restrictive policy. Our empirical analysis identifies several factors that are significantly and positively correlated with a university's likelihood of having a ChatGPT policy, including the university's academic reputation score, being in an English-speaking country, and the general public attitudes toward ChatGPT. In addition, we found that a university's likelihood of having a ban policy is positively associated with faculty student ratio, citations, and the English-speaking country dummy, while negatively associated with the number of peer universities within the same country that have banned ChatGPT. We discuss the challenges faced by universities based our empirical findings.

Although existing image anomaly detection methods yield impressive results, they are mostly an offline learning paradigm that requires excessive data pre-collection, limiting their adaptability in industrial scenarios with online streaming data. Online learning-based image anomaly detection methods are more compatible with industrial online streaming data but are rarely noticed. For the first time, this paper presents a fully online learning image anomaly detection method, namely LeMO, learning memory for online image anomaly detection. LeMO leverages learnable memory initialized with orthogonal random noise, eliminating the need for excessive data in memory initialization and circumventing the inefficiencies of offline data collection. Moreover, a contrastive learning-based loss function for anomaly detection is designed to enable online joint optimization of memory and image target-oriented features. The presented method is simple and highly effective. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of LeMO in the online setting. Additionally, in the offline setting, LeMO is also competitive with the current state-of-the-art methods and achieves excellent performance in few-shot scenarios.

Automatic evaluation of hashtag recommendation models is a fundamental task in many online social network systems. In the traditional evaluation method, the recommended hashtags from an algorithm are firstly compared with the ground truth hashtags for exact correspondences. The number of exact matches is then used to calculate the hit rate, hit ratio, precision, recall, or F1-score. This way of evaluating hashtag similarities is inadequate as it ignores the semantic correlation between the recommended and ground truth hashtags. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel semantic evaluation framework for hashtag recommendation, called #REval. This framework includes an internal module referred to as BERTag, which automatically learns the hashtag embeddings. We investigate on how the #REval framework performs under different word embedding methods and different numbers of synonyms and hashtags in the recommendation using our proposed #REval-hit-ratio measure. Our experiments of the proposed framework on three large datasets show that #REval gave more meaningful hashtag synonyms for hashtag recommendation evaluation. Our analysis also highlights the sensitivity of the framework to the word embedding technique, with #REval based on BERTag more superior over #REval based on FastText and Word2Vec.

The integration of multi-document pre-training objectives into language models has resulted in remarkable improvements in multi-document downstream tasks. In this work, we propose extending this idea by pre-training a generic multi-document model from a novel cross-document question answering pre-training objective. To that end, given a set (or cluster) of topically-related documents, we systematically generate semantically-oriented questions from a salient sentence in one document and challenge the model, during pre-training, to answer these questions while "peeking" into other topically-related documents. In a similar manner, the model is also challenged to recover the sentence from which the question was generated, again while leveraging cross-document information. This novel multi-document QA formulation directs the model to better recover cross-text informational relations, and introduces a natural augmentation that artificially increases the pre-training data. Further, unlike prior multi-document models that focus on either classification or summarization tasks, our pre-training objective formulation enables the model to perform tasks that involve both short text generation (e.g., QA) and long text generation (e.g., summarization). Following this scheme, we pre-train our model -- termed QAmden -- and evaluate its performance across several multi-document tasks, including multi-document QA, summarization, and query-focused summarization, yielding improvements of up to 7%, and significantly outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) -- languages for which NLP re-search is particularly far behind in meeting user needs -- it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks -- tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text-only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text),supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models

Most research about natural language generation (NLG) relies on evaluation benchmarks with limited references for a sample, which may result in poor correlations with human judgements. The underlying reason is that one semantic meaning can actually be expressed in different forms, and the evaluation with a single or few references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model's hypotheses. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel method, named Para-Ref, to enhance existing evaluation benchmarks by enriching the number of references. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to paraphrase a single reference into multiple high-quality ones in diverse expressions. Experimental results on representative NLG tasks of machine translation, text summarization, and image caption demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the correlation with human evaluation for sixteen automatic evaluation metrics by +7.82% in ratio. We release the code and data at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Para-Ref.