The advent of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced natural language processing tasks like text summarization. However, their large size and computational demands, coupled with privacy concerns in data transmission, limit their use in resource-constrained and privacy-centric settings. To overcome this, we introduce TriSum, a framework for distilling LLMs' text summarization abilities into a compact, local model. Initially, LLMs extract a set of aspect-triple rationales and summaries, which are refined using a dual-scoring method for quality. Next, a smaller local model is trained with these tasks, employing a curriculum learning strategy that evolves from simple to complex tasks. Our method enhances local model performance on various benchmarks (CNN/DailyMail, XSum, and ClinicalTrial), outperforming baselines by 4.5%, 8.5%, and 7.4%, respectively. It also improves interpretability by providing insights into the summarization rationale.

Relation extraction (RE) involves identifying the relations between entities from unstructured texts. RE serves as the foundation for many natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as knowledge graph completion, question answering, and information retrieval. In recent years, deep neural networks have dominated the field of RE and made noticeable progress. Subsequently, the large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have taken the state-of-the-art of RE to a new level. This survey provides a comprehensive review of existing deep learning techniques for RE. First, we introduce RE resources, including RE datasets and evaluation metrics. Second, we propose a new taxonomy to categorize existing works from three perspectives (text representation, context encoding, and triplet prediction). Third, we discuss several important challenges faced by RE and summarize potential techniques to tackle these challenges. Finally, we outline some promising future directions and prospects in this field. This survey is expected to facilitate researchers' collaborative efforts to tackle the challenges of real-life RE systems.

The costs and impacts of government corruption range from impairing a country's economic growth to affecting its citizens' well-being and safety. Public contracting between government dependencies and private sector instances, referred to as public procurement, is a fertile land of opportunity for corrupt practices, generating substantial monetary losses worldwide. Thus, identifying and deterring corrupt activities between the government and the private sector is paramount. However, due to several factors, corruption in public procurement is challenging to identify and track, leading to corrupt practices going unnoticed. This paper proposes a machine learning model based on an ensemble of random forest classifiers, which we call hyper-forest, to identify and predict corrupt contracts in M\'exico's public procurement data. This method's results correctly detect most of the corrupt and non-corrupt contracts evaluated in the dataset. Furthermore, we found that the most critical predictors considered in the model are those related to the relationship between buyers and suppliers rather than those related to features of individual contracts. Also, the method proposed here is general enough to be trained with data from other countries. Overall, our work presents a tool that can help in the decision-making process to identify, predict and analyze corruption in public procurement contracts.

The Computing Research Laboratory (CRL) at New Mexico State University is a center for research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Specific areas of research include the human-computer interface, natural language understanding, connectionism, knowledge representation and reasoning, computer vision, robotics, and graph theory. This article describes the ongoing projects at CRL.