While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown impressive capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, a systematic investigation of their potential in this field remains largely unexplored. This study aims to address this gap by exploring the following questions: (1) How are LLMs currently applied to NLP tasks in the literature? (2) Have traditional NLP tasks already been solved with LLMs? (3) What is the future of the LLMs for NLP? To answer these questions, we take the first step to provide a comprehensive overview of LLMs in NLP. Specifically, we first introduce a unified taxonomy including (1) parameter-frozen application and (2) parameter-tuning application to offer a unified perspective for understanding the current progress of LLMs in NLP. Furthermore, we summarize the new frontiers and the associated challenges, aiming to inspire further groundbreaking advancements. We hope this work offers valuable insights into the {potential and limitations} of LLMs in NLP, while also serving as a practical guide for building effective LLMs in NLP.

Language Models (LMs) excel in understanding textual descriptions of proteins, as evident in biomedical question-answering tasks. However, their capability falters with raw protein data, such as amino acid sequences, due to a deficit in pretraining on such data. Conversely, Protein Language Models (PLMs) can understand and convert protein data into high-quality representations, but struggle to process texts. To address their limitations, we introduce ProtT3, a framework for Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding. ProtT3 empowers an LM to understand protein sequences of amino acids by incorporating a PLM as its protein understanding module, enabling effective protein-to-text generation. This collaboration between PLM and LM is facilitated by a cross-modal projector (i.e., Q-Former) that bridges the modality gap between the PLM's representation space and the LM's input space. Unlike previous studies focusing on protein property prediction and protein-text retrieval, we delve into the largely unexplored field of protein-to-text generation. To facilitate comprehensive benchmarks and promote future research, we establish quantitative evaluations for protein-text modeling tasks, including protein captioning, protein question-answering, and protein-text retrieval. Our experiments show that ProtT3 substantially surpasses current baselines, with ablation studies further highlighting the efficacy of its core components. Our code is available at https://github.com/acharkq/ProtT3.

Haar Cascade is a cost-effective and user-friendly machine learning-based algorithm for detecting objects in images and videos. Unlike Deep Learning algorithms, which typically require significant resources and expensive computing costs, it uses simple image processing techniques like edge detection and Haar features that are easy to comprehend and implement. By combining Haar Cascade with OpenCV2 on an embedded computer like the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, this system can accurately detect and match faces in a database for attendance tracking. This system aims to achieve several specific objectives that set it apart from existing solutions. It leverages Haar Cascade, enriched with carefully selected Haar features, such as Haar-like wavelets, and employs advanced edge detection techniques. These techniques enable precise face detection and matching in both images and videos, contributing to high accuracy and robust performance. By doing so, it minimizes manual intervention and reduces errors, thereby strengthening accountability. Additionally, the integration of OpenCV2 and the NVIDIA Jetson Nano optimizes processing efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments. This system caters to a diverse range of educational institutions, including schools, colleges, vocational training centers, and various workplace settings such as small businesses, offices, and factories. ... The system's affordability and efficiency democratize attendance management technology, making it accessible to a broader audience. Consequently, it has the potential to transform attendance tracking and management practices, ultimately leading to heightened productivity and accountability. In conclusion, this system represents a groundbreaking approach to attendance tracking and management...

Context: Machine learning (ML)-enabled systems are being increasingly adopted by companies aiming to enhance their products and operational processes. Objective: This paper aims to deliver a comprehensive overview of the current status quo of engineering ML-enabled systems and lay the foundation to steer practically relevant and problem-driven academic research. Method: We conducted an international survey to collect insights from practitioners on the current practices and problems in engineering ML-enabled systems. We received 188 complete responses from 25 countries. We conducted quantitative statistical analyses on contemporary practices using bootstrapping with confidence intervals and qualitative analyses on the reported problems using open and axial coding procedures. Results: Our survey results reinforce and extend existing empirical evidence on engineering ML-enabled systems, providing additional insights into typical ML-enabled systems project contexts, the perceived relevance and complexity of ML life cycle phases, and current practices related to problem understanding, model deployment, and model monitoring. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis provides a detailed map of the problems practitioners face within each ML life cycle phase and the problems causing overall project failure. Conclusions: The results contribute to a better understanding of the status quo and problems in practical environments. We advocate for the further adaptation and dissemination of software engineering practices to enhance the engineering of ML-enabled systems.

Understanding generalization in deep neural networks is an active area of research. A promising avenue of exploration has been that of margin measurements: the shortest distance to the decision boundary for a given sample or that sample's representation internal to the network. Margin-based complexity measures have been shown to be correlated with the generalization ability of deep neural networks in some circumstances but not others. The reasons behind the success or failure of these metrics are currently unclear. In this study, we examine margin-based generalization prediction methods in different settings. We motivate why these metrics sometimes fail to accurately predict generalization and how they can be improved. First, we analyze the relationship between margins measured in the input space and sample noise. We find that different types of sample noise can have a very different effect on the overall margin of a network that has modeled noisy data. Following this, we empirically evaluate how robust margins measured at different representational spaces are at predicting generalization. We find that these metrics have several limitations and that a large margin does not exhibit a strong correlation with empirical risk in many cases. Finally, we introduce a new margin-based measure that incorporates an approximation of the underlying data manifold. It is empirically demonstrated that this measure is generally more predictive of generalization than all other margin-based measures. Furthermore, we find that this measurement also outperforms other contemporary complexity measures on a well-known generalization prediction benchmark. In addition, we analyze the utility and limitations of this approach and find that this metric is well aligned with intuitions expressed in prior work.

Dynamic Line Rating (DLR) systems are crucial for renewable energy integration in transmission networks. However, traditional methods relying on sensor data face challenges due to the impracticality of installing sensors on every pole or span. Additionally, sensor-based approaches may struggle predicting DLR in rapidly changing weather conditions. This paper proposes a novel approach, leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques alongside hyper-local weather forecast data. Unlike conventional methods, which solely rely on sensor data, this approach utilizes ML models trained to predict hyper-local weather parameters on a full network scale. Integrating topographical data enhances prediction accuracy by accounting for landscape features and obstacles around overhead lines. The paper introduces confidence intervals for DLR assessments to mitigate risks associated with uncertainties. A case study from Estonia demonstrates the practical implementation of the proposed methodology, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. By addressing limitations of sensor-based approaches, this research contributes to the discourse of renewable energy integration in transmission systems, advancing efficiency and reliability in the power grid.

Pyrolysis techniques have served to be a groundbreaking technique for effectively utilising natural and man-made biomass products like plastics, wood, crop residue, fruit peels etc. Recent advancements have shown a greater yield of essential products like biochar, bio-oil and other non-condensable gases by blending different biomasses in a certain ratio. This synergy effect of combining two pyrolytic raw materials i.e co-pyrolysis of algae and wood biomass has been systematically studied and grouped into 3 phases in this research paper-kinetic analysis of co-pyrolysis, correlation among proximate and ultimate analysis with bio-char yield and lastly grouping of different weight ratios based on biochar yield up to a certain percentage. Different ML and DL algorithms have been utilized for regression and classification techniques to give a comprehensive overview of the effect of the synergy of two different biomass materials on biochar yield. For the first phase, the best prediction of biochar yield was obtained by using a decision tree regressor with a perfect MSE score of 0.00, followed by a gradient-boosting regressor. The second phase was analyzed using both ML and DL techniques. Within ML, SVR proved to be the most convenient model with an accuracy score of 0.972 with DNN employed for deep learning technique. Finally, for the third phase, binary classification was applied to biochar yield with and without heating rate for biochar yield percentage above and below 40%. The best technique for ML was Support Vector followed by Random forest while ANN was the most suitable Deep Learning Technique.

We introduce IT5, the first family of encoder-decoder transformer models pretrained specifically on Italian. We document and perform a thorough cleaning procedure for a large Italian corpus and use it to pretrain four IT5 model sizes. We then introduce the ItaGen benchmark, which includes a broad range of natural language understanding and generation tasks for Italian, and use it to evaluate the performance of IT5 models and multilingual baselines. We find monolingual IT5 models to provide the best scale-to-performance ratio across tested models, consistently outperforming their multilingual counterparts and setting a new state-of-the-art for Italian language generation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the news media coverage encompassed a wide range of topics that includes viral transmission, allocation of medical resources, and government response measures. There have been studies on sentiment analysis of social media platforms during COVID-19 to understand the public response given the rise of cases and government strategies implemented to control the spread of the virus. Sentiment analysis can provide a better understanding of changes in societal opinions and emotional trends during the pandemic. Apart from social media, newspapers have played a vital role in the dissemination of information, including information from the government, experts, and also the public about various topics. A study of sentiment analysis of newspaper sources during COVID-19 for selected countries can give an overview of how the media covered the pandemic. In this study, we select The Guardian newspaper and provide a sentiment analysis during various stages of COVID-19 that includes initial transmission, lockdowns and vaccination. We employ novel large language models (LLMs) and refine them with expert-labelled sentiment analysis data. We also provide an analysis of sentiments experienced pre-pandemic for comparison. The results indicate that during the early pandemic stages, public sentiment prioritised urgent crisis response, later shifting focus to addressing the impact on health and the economy. In comparison with related studies about social media sentiment analyses, we found a discrepancy between The Guardian with dominance of negative sentiments (sad, annoyed, anxious and denial), suggesting that social media offers a more diversified emotional reflection. We found a grim narrative in The Guardian with overall dominance of negative sentiments, pre and during COVID-19 across news sections including Australia, UK, World News, and Opinion

Transformer architectures contribute to managing long-term dependencies for Natural Language Processing, representing one of the most recent changes in the field. These architectures are the basis of the innovative, cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) that have produced a huge buzz in several fields and industrial sectors, among the ones education stands out. Accordingly, these generative Artificial Intelligence-based solutions have directed the change in techniques and the evolution in educational methods and contents, along with network infrastructure, towards high-quality learning. Given the popularity of LLMs, this review seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of those solutions designed specifically to generate and evaluate educational materials and which involve students and teachers in their design or experimental plan. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review of educational applications (e.g., student assessment) of LLMs. As expected, the most common role of these systems is as virtual tutors for automatic question generation. Moreover, the most popular models are GTP-3 and BERT. However, due to the continuous launch of new generative models, new works are expected to be published shortly.