The lack of annotated data on professional argumentation and complete argumentative debates has led to the oversimplification and the inability of approaching more complex natural language processing tasks. Such is the case of the automatic debate evaluation. In this paper, we propose an original hybrid method to automatically evaluate argumentative debates. For that purpose, we combine concepts from argumentation theory such as argumentation frameworks and semantics, with Transformer-based architectures and neural graph networks. Furthermore, we obtain promising results that lay the basis on an unexplored new instance of the automatic analysis of natural language arguments.

We propose a weakly-supervised framework for the semantic segmentation of circular-scan synthetic-aperture-sonar (CSAS) imagery. The first part of our framework is trained in a supervised manner, on image-level labels, to uncover a set of semi-sparse, spatially-discriminative regions in each image. The classification uncertainty of each region is then evaluated. Those areas with the lowest uncertainties are then chosen to be weakly labeled segmentation seeds, at the pixel level, for the second part of the framework. Each of the seed extents are progressively resized according to an unsupervised, information-theoretic loss with structured-prediction regularizers. This reshaping process uses multi-scale, adaptively-weighted features to delineate class-specific transitions in local image content. Content-addressable memories are inserted at various parts of our framework so that it can leverage features from previously seen images to improve segmentation performance for related images. We evaluate our weakly-supervised framework using real-world CSAS imagery that contains over ten seafloor classes and ten target classes. We show that our framework performs comparably to nine fully-supervised deep networks. Our framework also outperforms eleven of the best weakly-supervised deep networks. We achieve state-of-the-art performance when pre-training on natural imagery. The average absolute performance gap to the next-best weakly-supervised network is well over ten percent for both natural imagery and sonar imagery. This gap is found to be statistically significant.

This systematic review focuses on analyzing the use of machine learning techniques for identifying and quantifying analytes in various electrochemical applications, presenting the available applications in the literature. Machine learning is a tool that can facilitate the analysis and enhance the understanding of processes involving various analytes. In electrochemical biosensors, it increases the precision of medical diagnostics, improving the identification of biomarkers and pathogens with high reliability. It can be effectively used for the classification of complex chemical products; in environmental monitoring, using low-cost sensors; in portable devices and wearable systems; among others. Currently, the analysis of some analytes is still performed manually, requiring the expertise of a specialist in the field and thus hindering the generalization of results. In light of the advancements in artificial intelligence today, this work proposes to carry out a systematic review of the literature on the applications of artificial intelligence techniques. A set of articles has been identified that address electrochemical problems using machine learning techniques, more specifically, supervised learning.

We extend the diffusion-map formalism to data sets that are induced by asymmetric kernels. Analytical convergence results of the resulting expansion are proved, and an algorithm is proposed to perform the dimensional reduction. In this work we study data sets in which its geometry structure is induced by an asymmetric kernel. We use a priori coordinate system to represent this geometry and, thus, be able to improve the computational complexity of reducing the dimensionality of data sets. A coordinate system connected to the tensor product of Fourier basis is used to represent the underlying geometric structure obtained by the diffusion-map, thus reducing the dimensionality of the data set and making use of the speedup provided by the two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform algorithm (2-D FFT). We compare our results with those obtained by other eigenvalue expansions, and verify the efficiency of the algorithms with synthetic data, as well as with real data from applications including climate change studies.

Dynamic adversarial question generation, where humans write examples to stump a model, aims to create examples that are realistic and informative. However, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has been a double-edged sword for human authors: more people are interested in seeing and pushing the limits of these models, but because the models are so much stronger an opponent, they are harder to defeat. To understand how these models impact adversarial question writing process, we enrich the writing guidance with LLMs and retrieval models for the authors to reason why their questions are not adversarial. While authors could create interesting, challenging adversarial questions, they sometimes resort to tricks that result in poor questions that are ambiguous, subjective, or confusing not just to a computer but also to humans. To address these issues, we propose new metrics and incentives for eliciting good, challenging questions and present a new dataset of adversarially authored questions.

Current methods to identify and classify racist language in text rely on small-n qualitative approaches or large-n approaches focusing exclusively on overt forms of racist discourse. This article provides a step-by-step generalizable guideline to identify and classify different forms of racist discourse in large corpora. In our approach, we start by conceptualizing racism and its different manifestations. We then contextualize these racist manifestations to the time and place of interest, which allows researchers to identify their discursive form. Finally, we apply XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R), a cross-lingual model for supervised text classification with a cutting-edge contextual understanding of text. We show that XLM-R and XLM-R-Racismo, our pretrained model, outperform other state-of-the-art approaches in classifying racism in large corpora. We illustrate our approach using a corpus of tweets relating to the Ecuadorian ind\'igena community between 2018 and 2021.

Time-series anomaly detection deals with the problem of detecting anomalous timesteps by learning normality from the sequence of observations. However, the concept of normality evolves over time, leading to a "new normal problem", where the distribution of normality can be changed due to the distribution shifts between training and test data. This paper highlights the prevalence of the new normal problem in unsupervised time-series anomaly detection studies. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy based on trend estimation and a self-supervised approach to learning new normalities during inference. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that incorporating the proposed strategy into the anomaly detector consistently improves the model's performance compared to the baselines, leading to robustness to the distribution shifts.

Although the synthesis of programs encoding policies often carries the promise of interpretability, systematic evaluations were never performed to assess the interpretability of these policies, likely because of the complexity of such an evaluation. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric that uses large-language models (LLM) to assess the interpretability of programmatic policies. For our metric, an LLM is given both a program and a description of its associated programming language. The LLM then formulates a natural language explanation of the program. This explanation is subsequently fed into a second LLM, which tries to reconstruct the program from the natural-language explanation. Our metric then measures the behavioral similarity between the reconstructed program and the original. We validate our approach with synthesized and human-crafted programmatic policies for playing a real-time strategy game, comparing the interpretability scores of these programmatic policies to obfuscated versions of the same programs. Our LLM-based interpretability score consistently ranks less interpretable programs lower and more interpretable ones higher. These findings suggest that our metric could serve as a reliable and inexpensive tool for evaluating the interpretability of programmatic policies.

Semi-supervised anomaly detection aims to detect anomalies from normal samples using a model that is trained on normal data. With recent advancements in deep learning, researchers have designed efficient deep anomaly detection methods. Existing works commonly use neural networks to map the data into a more informative representation and then apply an anomaly detection algorithm. In this paper, we propose a method, DASVDD, that jointly learns the parameters of an autoencoder while minimizing the volume of an enclosing hyper-sphere on its latent representation. We propose an anomaly score which is a combination of autoencoder's reconstruction error and the distance from the center of the enclosing hypersphere in the latent representation. Minimizing this anomaly score aids us in learning the underlying distribution of the normal class during training. Including the reconstruction error in the anomaly score ensures that DASVDD does not suffer from the common hypersphere collapse issue since the DASVDD model does not converge to the trivial solution of mapping all inputs to a constant point in the latent representation. Experimental evaluations on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the commonly used state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms while maintaining robust performance across different anomaly classes.

Three people have been jailed in the kidnapping and killing of a Hmong American comedian and activist who was found dead near Medellín after going out to meet a woman he reportedly met on social media, Colombian officials announced Thursday. The Prosecutor's Office said in a statement that two men and a woman were charged with the crimes of aggravated kidnapping for extortion and aggravated homicide in the death last month of Tou Ger Xiong, 50. The suspects denied the charges at a hearing, the statement said. A minor who presented himself to the Public Prosecutor's Office admitting to having participated in the crime also was charged in the case and transferred to a special detention center for minors, it added. The U.S. Embassy in Bogota warned a week ago about Colombian criminals who use dating apps to lure victims and then assault and rob them.