Initiated by the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), GIS&T Body of Knowledge (BoK) is a community-driven endeavor to define, develop, and document geospatial topics related to geographic information science and technologies (GIS&T). In recent years, GIS&T BoK has undergone rigorous development in terms of its topic re-organization and content updating, resulting in a new digital version of the project. While the BoK topics provide useful materials for researchers and students to learn about GIS, the semantic relationships among the topics, such as semantic similarity, should also be identified so that a better and automated topic navigation can be achieved. Currently, the related topics are either defined manually by editors or authors, which may result in an incomplete assessment of topic relationship. To address this challenge, our research evaluates the effectiveness of multiple natural language processing (NLP) techniques in extracting semantics from text, including both deep neural networks and traditional machine learning approaches. Besides, a novel text summarization - KACERS (Keyword-Aware Cross-Encoder-Ranking Summarizer) - is proposed to generate a semantic summary of scientific publications. By identifying the semantic linkages among key topics, this work provides guidance for future development and content organization of the GIS&T BoK project. It also offers a new perspective on the use of machine learning techniques for analyzing scientific publications, and demonstrate the potential of KACERS summarizer in semantic understanding of long text documents.

Thank you for joining us on "The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity." John Domingue, computer science professor with the Knowledge Media Institute at Open University, shares how evolving AI technology is democratizing education by allowing the customization of more than 300 courses at the largest university in the UK.

This paper tackles the task of legal extractive summarization using a dataset of 430K U.S. court opinions with key passages annotated. According to automated summary quality metrics, the reinforcement-learning-based MemSum model is best and even out-performs transformer-based models. In turn, expert human evaluation shows that MemSum summaries effectively capture the key points of lengthy court opinions. Motivated by these results, we open-source our models to the general public. This represents progress towards democratizing law and making U.S. court opinions more accessible to the general public.

The prediction of academic dropout, with the aim of preventing it, is one of the current challenges of higher education institutions. Machine learning techniques are a great ally in this task. However, attention is needed in the way that academic data are used by such methods, so that it reflects the reality of the prediction problem under study and allows achieving good results. In this paper, we study strategies for splitting and using academic data in order to create training and testing sets. Through a conceptual analysis and experiments with data from a public higher education institution, we show that a random proportional data splitting, and even a simple temporal splitting are not suitable for dropout prediction. The study indicates that a temporal splitting combined with a time-based selection of the students' incremental academic histories leads to the best strategy for the problem in question.

Designing an effective representation learning method for multimodal sentiment analysis tasks is a crucial research direction. The challenge lies in learning both shared and private information in a complete modal representation, which is difficult with uniform multimodal labels and a raw feature fusion approach. In this work, we propose a deep modal shared information learning module based on the covariance matrix to capture the shared information between modalities. Additionally, we use a label generation module based on a self-supervised learning strategy to capture the private information of the modalities. Our module is plug-and-play in multimodal tasks, and by changing the parameterization, it can adjust the information exchange relationship between the modes and learn the private or shared information between the specified modes. We also employ a multi-task learning strategy to help the model focus its attention on the modal differentiation training data. We provide a detailed formulation derivation and feasibility proof for the design of the deep modal shared information learning module. We conduct extensive experiments on three common multimodal sentiment analysis baseline datasets, and the experimental results validate the reliability of our model. Furthermore, we explore more combinatorial techniques for the use of the module. Our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on most of the metrics of the three public datasets.

Millions of users come to online peer counseling platforms to seek support on diverse topics ranging from relationship stress to anxiety. However, studies show that online peer support groups are not always as effective as expected largely due to users' negative experiences with unhelpful counselors. Peer counselors are key to the success of online peer counseling platforms, but most of them often do not have systematic ways to receive guidelines or supervision. In this work, we introduce CARE: an interactive AI-based tool to empower peer counselors through automatic suggestion generation. During the practical training stage, CARE helps diagnose which specific counseling strategies are most suitable in the given context and provides tailored example responses as suggestions. Counselors can choose to select, modify, or ignore any suggestion before replying to the support seeker. Building upon the Motivational Interviewing framework, CARE utilizes large-scale counseling conversation data together with advanced natural language generation techniques to achieve these functionalities. We demonstrate the efficacy of CARE by performing both quantitative evaluations and qualitative user studies through simulated chats and semi-structured interviews. We also find that CARE especially helps novice counselors respond better in challenging situations.

Another challenge: Forming an AI regulatory body on a global scale would require significant funding. "We need money," he said. "We need some philanthropists probably to get us started." "It's still a very long road," Marcus told Fox News. "It's a big ask, but I think the time for it is right."

Over the last two decades, technology use in language learning and teaching has significantly advanced and is now referred to as Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Recently, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into CALL has brought about a significant shift in the traditional approach to language education both inside and outside the classroom. In line with this book's scope, I explore the advantages and disadvantages of AI-mediated communication in language education. I begin with a brief review of AI in education. I then introduce the ICALL and give a critical appraisal of the potential of AI-powered automatic speech recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT), Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), AI-powered chatbots, and Extended Reality (XR). In conclusion, I argue that it is crucial for language teachers to engage in CALL teacher education and professional development to keep up with the ever-evolving technology landscape and improve their teaching effectiveness.

We study parameterized MDPs (PMDPs) in which the key parameters of interest are unknown and must be learned using Bayesian inference. One key defining feature of such models is the presence of "uninformative" actions that provide no information about the unknown parameters. We contribute a set of assumptions for PMDPs under which Thompson sampling guarantees an asymptotically optimal expected regret bound of $O(T^{-1})$, which are easily verified for many classes of problems such as queuing, inventory control, and dynamic pricing.

As the shortage of skilled workers continues to be a pressing issue, exacerbated by demographic change, it is becoming a critical challenge for organizations to preserve the knowledge of retiring experts and to pass it on to novices. While this knowledge transfer has traditionally taken place through personal interaction, it lacks scalability and requires significant resources and time. IT-based teaching systems have addressed this scalability issue, but their development is still tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we investigate the potential of machine learning (ML) models to facilitate knowledge transfer in an organizational context, leading to more cost-effective IT-based teaching systems. Through a systematic literature review, we examine key concepts, themes, and dimensions to better understand and design ML-based teaching systems. To do so, we capture and consolidate the capabilities of ML models in IT-based teaching systems, inductively analyze relevant concepts in this context, and determine their interrelationships. We present our findings in the form of a review of the key concepts, themes, and dimensions to understand and inform on ML-based teaching systems. Building on these results, our work contributes to research on computer-supported cooperative work by conceptualizing how ML-based teaching systems can preserve expert knowledge and facilitate its transfer from SMEs to human novices. In this way, we shed light on this emerging subfield of human-computer interaction and serve to build an interdisciplinary research agenda.