In 2005, years before Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa came on the scene, two startups--ScanSoft and Nuance Communications--merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Nuance's story is far from unique. In all major industries and technology domains, startups are facing unprecedented obstacles.

Google has updated its privacy policy to state that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models. The tech giant has changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched "AI models" for "language models." It also stated that it could use publicly available information to build not just features, but full products like "Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities." By updating its policy, it's letting people know and making it clear that anything they publicly post online could be used to train Bard, its future versions and any other generative AI product Google develops. The tech giant has highlighted the changes to its privacy policy on its archive, but here's a copy of the pertinent part: Critics have been raising concerns about companies' use of information posted online to train their large language models for generative AI use.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature concerning the utilization of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, with a particular focus on transformer-based large language models (LLMs) trained using Big Code, within the domain of AI-assisted programming tasks. LLMs, augmented with software naturalness, have played a crucial role in facilitating AI-assisted programming applications, including code generation, code completion, code translation, code refinement, code summarization, defect detection, and clone detection. Notable examples of such applications include the GitHub Copilot powered by OpenAI's Codex and DeepMind AlphaCode. This paper presents an overview of the major LLMs and their applications in downstream tasks related to AI-assisted programming. Furthermore, it explores the challenges and opportunities associated with incorporating NLP techniques with software naturalness in these applications, with a discussion on extending AI-assisted programming capabilities to Apple's Xcode for mobile software development. This paper also presents the challenges of and opportunities for incorporating NLP techniques with software naturalness, empowering developers with advanced coding assistance and streamlining the software development process.

Event schemas are a form of world knowledge about the typical progression of events. Recent methods for event schema induction use information extraction systems to construct a large number of event graph instances from documents, and then learn to generalize the schema from such instances. In contrast, we propose to treat event schemas as a form of commonsense knowledge that can be derived from large language models (LLMs). This new paradigm greatly simplifies the schema induction process and allows us to handle both hierarchical relations and temporal relations between events in a straightforward way. Since event schemas have complex graph structures, we design an incremental prompting and verification method to break down the construction of a complex event graph into three stages: event skeleton construction, event expansion, and event-event relation verification. Compared to directly using LLMs to generate a linearized graph, our method can generate large and complex schemas with 7.2% F1 improvement in temporal relations and 31.0% F1 improvement in hierarchical relations. In addition, compared to the previous state-of-the-art closed-domain schema induction model, human assessors were able to cover $\sim$10% more events when translating the schemas into coherent stories and rated our schemas 1.3 points higher (on a 5-point scale) in terms of readability.

Although there is widespread recognition of racial bias in US law, it is unclear how such bias appears in the language of law, namely judicial opinions, and whether it varies across time period or region. Building upon approaches for measuring implicit racial bias in large-scale corpora, we approximate GloVe word embeddings for over 6 million US federal and state court cases from 1860 to 2009. We find strong evidence of racial bias across nearly all regions and time periods, as traditionally Black names are more closely associated with pre-classified "unpleasant" terms whereas traditionally White names are more closely associated with pre-classified "pleasant" terms. We also test whether legal opinions before 1950 exhibit more implicit racial bias than those after 1950, as well as whether opinions from Southern states exhibit less change in racial bias than those from Northeastern states. We do not find evidence of elevated bias in legal opinions before 1950, or evidence that legal opinions from Northeastern states show greater change in racial bias over time compared to Southern states. These results motivate further research into institutionalized racial bias.

We present an end-to-end procedure for embodied exploration based on two biologically inspired computations: predictive coding and uncertainty minimization. The procedure can be applied to any exploration setting in a task-independent and intrinsically driven manner. We first demonstrate our approach in a maze navigation task and show that our model is capable of discovering the underlying transition distribution and reconstructing the spatial features of the environment. Second, we apply our model to the more complex task of active vision, where an agent must actively sample its visual environment to gather information. We show that our model is able to build unsupervised representations that allow it to actively sample and efficiently categorize sensory scenes. We further show that using these representations as input for downstream classification leads to superior data efficiency and learning speed compared to other baselines, while also maintaining lower parameter complexity. Finally, the modularity of our model allows us to analyze its internal mechanisms and to draw insight into the interactions between perception and action during exploratory behavior.

Gender inclusivity in language technologies has become a prominent research topic. In this study, we explore gender-neutral translation (GNT) as a form of gender inclusivity and a goal to be achieved by machine translation (MT) models, which have been found to perpetuate gender bias and discrimination. Specifically, we focus on translation from English into Italian, a language pair representative of salient gender-related linguistic transfer problems. To define GNT, we review a selection of relevant institutional guidelines for gender-inclusive language, discuss its scenarios of use, and examine the technical challenges of performing GNT in MT, concluding with a discussion of potential solutions to encourage advancements toward greater inclusivity in MT.

Fox News senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram reports on the outcome of the debt limit bill and how both sides responded on'Your World.' There wasn't a lot Congress absolutely had to accomplish legislatively this year. And overall, the floor traffic will likely be light until fall. There are really only about five things which Congress must do this year. With the pages halfway off the calendar, lawmakers have taken care of two of the five.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The International Seabed Authority -- the United Nations body that regulates the world's ocean floor -- is preparing to resume negotiations that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials critical for the green energy transition. Years long negotiations are reaching a critical point where the authority will soon need to begin accepting mining permit applications, adding to worries over the potential impacts on sparsely researched marine ecosystems and habitats of the deep sea. Here's a look at what deep sea mining is, why some companies and countries are applying for permits to carry it out and why environmental activists are raising concerns.

In community question-answering platforms, tags play essential roles in effective information organization and retrieval, better question routing, faster response to questions, and assessment of topic popularity. Hence, automatic assistance for predicting and suggesting tags for posts is of high utility to users of such platforms. To develop better tag prediction across diverse communities and domains, we performed a thorough analysis of users' tagging behavior in 17 StackExchange communities. We found various common inherent properties of this behavior in those diverse domains. We used the findings to develop a flexible neural tag prediction architecture, which predicts both popular tags and more granular tags for each question. Our extensive experiments and obtained performance show the effectiveness of our model