On a cloudy Christmas morning last year, a rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built blasted off from a launchpad in French Guiana. After reaching its destination in space about a month later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back sparkling presents to humanity--jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways. Every year since 1988, Popular Science has highlighted the innovations that make living on Earth even a tiny bit better. And this year--our 35th--has been remarkable, thanks to the successful deployment of the JWST, which earned our highest honor as the Innovation of the Year. But it's just one item out of the 100 stellar technological accomplishments our editors have selected to recognize. The list below represents months of research, testing, discussion, and debate. It celebrates exciting inventions that are improving our lives in ways both big and small. These technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the ...

Conventional closed-world information extraction (IE) approaches rely on human ontologies to define the scope for extraction. As a result, such approaches fall short when applied to new domains. This calls for systems that can automatically infer new types from given corpora, a task which we refer to as type discovery. To tackle this problem, we introduce the idea of type abstraction, where the model is prompted to generalize and name the type. Then we use the similarity between inferred names to induce clusters. Observing that this abstraction-based representation is often complementary to the entity/trigger token representation, we set up these two representations as two views and design our model as a co-training framework. Our experiments on multiple relation extraction and event extraction datasets consistently show the advantage of our type abstraction approach. Code available at https://github.com/raspberryice/type-discovery-abs.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has grown over the last few years: conferences have become larger, we have published an incredible amount of papers, and state-of-the-art research has been implemented in a large variety of customer-facing products. However, this paper argues that we have been less successful than we should have been and reflects on where and how the field fails to tap its full potential. Specifically, we demonstrate that, in recent years, subpar time allocation has been a major obstacle for NLP research. We outline multiple concrete problems together with their negative consequences and, importantly, suggest remedies to improve the status quo. We hope that this paper will be a starting point for discussions around which common practices are -- or are not -- beneficial for NLP research.

Complex dialogue mappings (CDM), including one-to-many and many-to-one mappings, tend to make dialogue models generate incoherent or dull responses, and modeling these mappings remains a huge challenge for neural dialogue systems. To alleviate these problems, methods like introducing external information, reconstructing the optimization function, and manipulating data samples are proposed, while they primarily focus on avoiding training with CDM, inevitably weakening the model's ability of understanding CDM in human conversations and limiting further improvements in model performance. This paper proposes a Sentence Semantic \textbf{Seg}mentation guided \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{V}ariational \textbf{A}uto-\textbf{E}ncoder (SegCVAE) method which can model and take advantages of the CDM data. Specifically, to tackle the incoherent problem caused by one-to-many, SegCVAE uses response-related prominent semantics to constrained the latent variable. To mitigate the non-diverse problem brought by many-to-one, SegCVAE segments multiple prominent semantics to enrich the latent variables. Three novel components, Internal Separation, External Guidance, and Semantic Norms, are proposed to achieve SegCVAE. On dialogue generation tasks, both the automatic and human evaluation results show that SegCVAE achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly. Human: Hello, who are you? AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?

Welcome to our November 2022 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. This month, we hear from researchers who've developed an AI system for live music accompaniment and improvisation. Amongst other things, we also find out more about counterfactual explanations for reinforcement learning, planning robust frictional multi-object grasps, and social bias in knowledge graphs. Olga Vechtomova and Gaurav Sahu envisioned and developed a system, LyricJam Sonic, that uses AI to create a real-time generative stream of music based on an artist's own catalogue of studio recordings. The purpose is to inspire the artist with potentially unexpected combinations of sounds.

To address the widespread problem of uncivil behavior, many online discussion platforms employ human moderators to take action against objectionable content, such as removing it or placing sanctions on its authors. This reactive paradigm of taking action against already-posted antisocial content is currently the most common form of moderation, and has accordingly underpinned many recent efforts at introducing automation into the moderation process. Comparatively less work has been done to understand other moderation paradigms -- such as proactively discouraging the emergence of antisocial behavior rather than reacting to it -- and the role algorithmic support can play in these paradigms. In this work, we investigate such a proactive framework for moderation in a case study of a collaborative setting: Wikipedia Talk Pages. We employ a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative and design components for a holistic analysis. Through interviews with moderators, we find that despite a lack of technical and social support, moderators already engage in a number of proactive moderation behaviors, such as preemptively intervening in conversations to keep them on track. Further, we explore how automation could assist with this existing proactive moderation workflow by building a prototype tool, presenting it to moderators, and examining how the assistance it provides might fit into their workflow. The resulting feedback uncovers both strengths and drawbacks of the prototype tool and suggests concrete steps towards further developing such assisting technology so it can most effectively support moderators in their existing proactive moderation workflow.

In the first episode of the Talking Language AI series, I spoke with Maarten Grootendorst, author and maintainer of the BERTopic open source package (over 3,000 stars on Github). BERTopic is used to explore collections of text to spot trends and identify the topics in these texts. This is an NLP task called Topic Modeling. It's also embedded in the bottom of this overview. Feel free to post questions or comments in this thread in the Cohere Discord.

"…the very enterprise of communication among human beings is transforming in some way. We've been at this for a while. The first telegraph lines were strung around 1819. The telephone became a common object of the upper class around 1900.

If you are reading this article then chances are that some part of your life is affected by technology. In 2019, there were a number of technological advancements that changed our lives and brought us closer than ever. From smartphones to computers, these innovations have had a big impact on us all but they also had a major effect on humans as well. Artificial Intelligence is one such innovation, which has made people think about how we can make machines able to learn as we do with animals. So, if AI gets smarter, it means that humans are getting more intelligent too; making them a bit less human and more machinery.