In 2011, I sat in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and watched Rupert Murdoch announce the beginning of a "new digital renaissance" for news. The newspaper mogul was unveiling an iPad-inspired publication called The Daily. "The iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft," he said. The Daily shut down the following year, after burning through a reported 40 million. For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more.

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on multilingual data have revolutionized natural language processing research, by transitioning from languages and task specific model pipelines to a single model adapted on a variety of tasks. However majority of existing multilingual NLP benchmarks for LLMs provide evaluation data in only few languages with little linguistic diversity. In addition these benchmarks lack quality assessment against the respective state-of the art models. This study presents an in-depth examination of prominent LLMs; GPT-3.5-turbo, Llama2-7B-Chat, Bloomz 7B1 and Bloomz 3B, across 14 tasks using 15 Urdu datasets, in a zero-shot setting, and their performance against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, has been compared and analysed. Our experiments show that SOTA models surpass all the encoder-decoder pre-trained language models in all Urdu NLP tasks with zero-shot learning. Our results further show that LLMs with fewer parameters, but more language specific data in the base model perform better than larger computational models, but low language data.

In recent years, diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) generation has gained prominence, offering a novel approach to synthesizing musical content from textual descriptions. Achieving high accuracy and diversity in this generation process requires extensive, high-quality data, which often constitutes only a fraction of available datasets. Within open-source datasets, the prevalence of issues like mislabeling, weak labeling, unlabeled data, and low-quality music waveform significantly hampers the development of music generation models. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel quality-aware masked diffusion transformer (QA-MDT) approach that enables generative models to discern the quality of input music waveform during training. Building on the unique properties of musical signals, we have adapted and implemented a MDT model for TTM task, while further unveiling its distinct capacity for quality control. Moreover, we address the issue of low-quality captions with a caption refinement data processing approach. Our demo page is shown in https://qa-mdt.github.io/.

Unlearning methods for recommender systems (RS) have emerged to address privacy issues and concerns about legal compliance. However, evolving user preferences and content licensing issues still remain unaddressed. This is particularly true in case of multi-modal recommender systems (MMRS), which aim to accommodate the growing influence of multi-modal information on user preferences. Previous unlearning methods for RS are inapplicable to MMRS due to incompatibility of multi-modal user-item behavior data graph with the matrix based representation of RS. Partitioning based methods degrade recommendation performance and incur significant overhead costs during aggregation. This paper introduces MMRecUN, a new framework for multi-modal recommendation unlearning, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt in this direction. Given the trained recommendation model and marked forget data, we devise Reverse Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) objective to force the model to forget it. MMRecUN employs both reverse and forward BPR loss mechanisms to selectively attenuate the impact of interactions within the forget set while concurrently reinforcing the significance of interactions within the retain set. Our experiments demonstrate that MMRecUN outperforms baseline methods across various unlearning requests when evaluated on benchmark multi-modal recommender datasets. MMRecUN achieves recall performance improvements of up to $\mathbf{49.85%}$ compared to the baseline methods. It is up to $\mathbf{1.3}\times$ faster than the \textsc{Gold} model, which is trained on retain data from scratch. MMRecUN offers advantages such as superior performance in removing target elements, preservation of performance for retained elements, and zero overhead costs in comparison to previous methods.

Text generation has become more accessible than ever, and the increasing interest in these systems, especially those using large language models, has spurred an increasing number of related publications. We provide a systematic literature review comprising 244 selected papers between 2017 and 2024. This review categorizes works in text generation into five main tasks: open-ended text generation, summarization, translation, paraphrasing, and question answering. For each task, we review their relevant characteristics, sub-tasks, and specific challenges (e.g., missing datasets for multi-document summarization, coherence in story generation, and complex reasoning for question answering). Additionally, we assess current approaches for evaluating text generation systems and ascertain problems with current metrics. Our investigation shows nine prominent challenges common to all tasks and sub-tasks in recent text generation publications: bias, reasoning, hallucinations, misuse, privacy, interpretability, transparency, datasets, and computing. We provide a detailed analysis of these challenges, their potential solutions, and which gaps still require further engagement from the community. This systematic literature review targets two main audiences: early career researchers in natural language processing looking for an overview of the field and promising research directions, as well as experienced researchers seeking a detailed view of tasks, evaluation methodologies, open challenges, and recent mitigation strategies.

Large scale machine learning-based Raga identification continues to be a nontrivial issue in the computational aspects behind Carnatic music. Each raga consists of many unique and intrinsic melodic patterns that can be used to easily identify them from others. These ragas can also then be used to cluster songs within the same raga, as well as identify songs in other closely related ragas. In this case, the input sound is analyzed using a combination of steps including using a Discrete Fourier transformation and using Triangular Filtering to create custom bins of possible notes, extracting features from the presence of particular notes or lack thereof. Using a combination of Neural Networks including 1D Convolutional Neural Networks conventionally known as Time-Delay Neural Networks) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which are a form of Recurrent Neural Networks, the backbone of the classification strategy to build the model can be created. In addition, to help with variations in shruti, a long-time attention-based mechanism will be implemented to determine the relative changes in frequency rather than the absolute differences. This will provide a much more meaningful data point when training audio clips in different shrutis. To evaluate the accuracy of the classifier, a dataset of 676 recordings is used. The songs are distributed across the list of ragas. The goal of this program is to be able to effectively and efficiently label a much wider range of audio clips in more shrutis, ragas, and with more background noise.

Generative AI appears poised to transform white collar professions, with more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies using OpenAI's flagship GPT models, which have been characterized as "general purpose technologies" capable of effecting epochal changes in the economy. But how will such technologies impact organizations whose job is to verify and report factual information, and to ensure the health of the information ecosystem? To investigate this question, we conducted 30 interviews with N=38 participants working at 29 fact-checking organizations across six continents, asking about how they use generative AI and the opportunities and challenges they see in the technology. We found that uses of generative AI envisioned by fact-checkers differ based on organizational infrastructure, with applications for quality assurance in Editing, for trend analysis in Investigation, and for information literacy in Advocacy. We used the TOE framework to describe participant concerns ranging from the Technological (lack of transparency), to the Organizational (resource constraints), to the Environmental (uncertain and evolving policy). Building on the insights of our participants, we describe value tensions between fact-checking and generative AI, and propose a novel Verification dimension to the design space of generative models for information verification work. Finally, we outline an agenda for fairness, accountability, and transparency research to support the responsible use of generative AI in fact-checking. Throughout, we highlight the importance of human infrastructure and labor in producing verified information in collaboration with AI. We expect that this work will inform not only the scientific literature on fact-checking, but also contribute to understanding of organizational adaptation to a powerful but unreliable new technology.

Grammatical Error Correction has seen significant progress with the recent advancements in deep learning. As those methods require huge amounts of data, synthetic datasets are being built to fill this gap. Unfortunately, synthetic datasets are not organic enough in some cases and even require clean data to start with. Furthermore, most of the work that has been done is focused mostly on English. In this work, we introduce a new organic data-driven approach, clean insertions, to build parallel Turkish Grammatical Error Correction datasets from any organic data, and to clean the data used for training Large Language Models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on two Turkish Grammatical Error Correction test sets out of the three publicly available ones. We also show the effectiveness of our method on the training losses of training language models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL. Previous methods generally employ a two-stage reasoning framework, namely 1) schema linking and 2) logical synthesis, making the framework not only effective but also interpretable. Despite these advancements, the inherent bad nature of the generalization of LLMs often results in hallucinations, which limits the full potential of LLMs. In this work, we first identify and categorize the common types of hallucinations at each stage in text-to-SQL. We then introduce a novel strategy, Task Alignment (TA), designed to mitigate hallucinations at each stage. TA encourages LLMs to take advantage of experiences from similar tasks rather than starting the tasks from scratch. This can help LLMs reduce the burden of generalization, thereby mitigating hallucinations effectively. We further propose TA-SQL, a text-to-SQL framework based on this strategy. The experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. Specifically, it enhances the performance of the GPT-4 baseline by 21.23% relatively on BIRD dev and it yields significant improvements across six models and four mainstream, complex text-to-SQL benchmarks.

We propose a novel approach for training large language models (LLMs) to adhere to objectives defined within a latent embedding space. Our method leverages reinforcement learning (RL), treating a pre-trained LLM as an environment. Our embedding-aligned guided language (EAGLE) agent is trained to iteratively steer the LLM's generation towards optimal regions of the latent embedding space, w.r.t. some predefined criterion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the EAGLE agent using the MovieLens 25M dataset to surface content gaps that satisfy latent user demand. We also demonstrate the benefit of using an optimal design of a state-dependent action set to improve EAGLE's efficiency. Our work paves the way for controlled and grounded text generation using LLMs, ensuring consistency with domain-specific knowledge and data representations.