Commonsense reasoning research has so far been limited to English. We aim to evaluate and improve popular multilingual language models (ML-LMs) to help advance commonsense reasoning (CSR) beyond English. We collect the Mickey Corpus, consisting of 561k sentences in 11 different languages, which can be used for analyzing and improving ML-LMs. We propose Mickey Probe, a language-agnostic probing task for fairly evaluating the common sense of popular ML-LMs across different languages. In addition, we also create two new datasets, X-CSQA and X-CODAH, by translating their English versions to 15 other languages, so that we can evaluate popular ML-LMs for cross-lingual commonsense reasoning. To improve the performance beyond English, we propose a simple yet effective method -- multilingual contrastive pre-training (MCP). It significantly enhances sentence representations, yielding a large performance gain on both benchmarks.

Identifying academic plagiarism is a pressing problem, among others, for research institutions, publishers, and funding organizations. Detection approaches proposed so far analyze lexical, syntactical, and semantic text similarity. These approaches find copied, moderately reworded, and literally translated text. However, reliably detecting disguised plagiarism, such as strong paraphrases, sense-for-sense translations, and the reuse of non-textual content and ideas, is an open research problem. The thesis addresses this problem by proposing plagiarism detection approaches that implement a different concept: analyzing non-textual content in academic documents, specifically citations, images, and mathematical content. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed detection approaches, the thesis presents five evaluations that use real cases of academic plagiarism and exploratory searches for unknown cases. The evaluation results show that non-textual content elements contain a high degree of semantic information, are language-independent, and largely immutable to the alterations that authors typically perform to conceal plagiarism. Analyzing non-textual content complements text-based detection approaches and increases the detection effectiveness, particularly for disguised forms of academic plagiarism. To demonstrate the benefit of combining non-textual and text-based detection methods, the thesis describes the first plagiarism detection system that integrates the analysis of citation-based, image-based, math-based, and text-based document similarity. The system's user interface employs visualizations that significantly reduce the effort and time users must invest in examining content similarity.

Communication is a cornerstone of social interactions, be it with human or artificial intelligence (AI). Yet it can be harmful, depending on the honesty of the exchanged information. To study this, an agent based sociological simulation framework is presented, the reputation game. This illustrates the impact of different communication strategies on the agents' reputation. The game focuses on the trustworthiness of the participating agents, their honesty as perceived by others. In the game, each agent exchanges statements with the others about their own and each other's honesty, which lets their judgments evolve. Various sender and receiver strategies are studied, like sycophant, egocentricity, pathological lying, and aggressiveness for senders as well as awareness and lack thereof for receivers. Minimalist malicious strategies are identified, like being manipulative, dominant, or destructive, which significantly increase reputation at others' costs. Phenomena such as echo chambers, self-deception, deception symbiosis, clique formation, freezing of group opinions emerge from the dynamics. This indicates that the reputation game can be studied for complex group phenomena, to test behavioral hypothesis, and to analyze AI influenced social media. With refined rules it may help to understand social interactions, and to safeguard the design of non-abusive AI systems.

This article reviews recent progress in the development of the computing framework Vector Symbolic Architectures (also known as Hyperdimensional Computing). This framework is well suited for implementation in stochastic, nanoscale hardware and it naturally expresses the types of cognitive operations required for Artificial Intelligence (AI). We demonstrate in this article that the ring-like algebraic structure of Vector Symbolic Architectures offers simple but powerful operations on high-dimensional vectors that can support all data structures and manipulations relevant in modern computing. In addition, we illustrate the distinguishing feature of Vector Symbolic Architectures, "computing in superposition," which sets it apart from conventional computing. This latter property opens the door to efficient solutions to the difficult combinatorial search problems inherent in AI applications. Vector Symbolic Architectures are Turing complete, as we show, and we see them acting as a framework for computing with distributed representations in myriad AI settings. This paper serves as a reference for computer architects by illustrating techniques and philosophy of VSAs for distributed computing and relevance to emerging computing hardware, such as neuromorphic computing.

The Bangla language is the seventh most spoken language, with 265 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. However, English is the predominant language for online resources and technical knowledge, journals, and documentation. Consequently, many Bangla-speaking people, who have limited command of English, face hurdles to utilize English resources. To bridge the gap between limited support and increasing demand, researchers conducted many experiments and developed valuable tools and techniques to create and process Bangla language materials. Many efforts are also ongoing to make it easy to use the Bangla language in the online and technical domains. There are some review papers to understand the past, previous, and future Bangla Natural Language Processing (BNLP) trends. The studies are mainly concentrated on the specific domains of BNLP, such as sentiment analysis, speech recognition, optical character recognition, and text summarization. There is an apparent scarcity of resources that contain a comprehensive study of the recent BNLP tools and methods. Therefore, in this paper, we present a thorough review of 71 BNLP research papers and categorize them into 11 categories, namely Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, Parsing, Parts of Speech Tagging, Question Answering System, Sentiment Analysis, Spam and Fake Detection, Text Summarization, Word Sense Disambiguation, and Speech Processing and Recognition. We study articles published between 1999 to 2021, and 50% of the papers were published after 2015. We discuss Classical, Machine Learning and Deep Learning approaches with different datasets while addressing the limitations and current and future trends of the BNLP.

Recent controversies related to topics such as fake news, privacy, and algorithmic bias have prompted increased public scrutiny of digital technologies and soul-searching among many of the people associated with their development. In response, the tech industry, academia, civil society, and governments have rapidly increased their attention to "ethics" in the design and use of digital technologies ("tech ethics"). Yet almost as quickly as ethics discourse has proliferated across the world of digital technologies, the limitations of these approaches have also become apparent: tech ethics is vague and toothless, is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives, and has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design rather than on the structures and cultures of technology production. As a result of these limitations, many have grown skeptical of tech ethics and its proponents, charging them with "ethics-washing": promoting ethics research and discourse to defuse criticism and government regulation without committing to ethical behavior. By looking at how ethics has been taken up in both science and business in superficial and depoliticizing ways, I recast tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central fault line is not whether it is desirable to be ethical, but what "ethics" entails and who gets to define it. This framing highlights the significant limits of current approaches to tech ethics and the importance of studying the formulation and real-world effects of tech ethics. In order to identify and develop more rigorous strategies for reforming digital technologies and the social relations that they mediate, I describe a sociotechnical approach to tech ethics, one that reflexively applies many of tech ethics' own lessons regarding digital technologies to tech ethics itself.

Traditional machine learning especially supervised learning follows the assumptions of closed-world learning i.e., for each testing class a training class is available. However, such machine learning models fail to identify the classes which were not available during training time. These classes can be referred to as unseen classes. Whereas, open-world machine learning deals with arbitrary inputs (data with unseen classes) to machine learning systems. Moreover, traditional machine learning is static learning which is not appropriate for an active environment where the perspective and sources, and/or volume of data are changing rapidly. In this paper, first, we present an overview of open-world learning with importance to the real-world context. Next, different dimensions of open-world learning are explored and discussed. The area of open-world learning gained the attention of the research community in the last decade only. We have searched through different online digital libraries and scrutinized the work done in the last decade. This paper presents a systematic review of various techniques for open-world machine learning. It also presents the research gaps, challenges, and future directions in open-world learning. This paper will help researchers to understand the comprehensive developments of open-world learning and the likelihoods to extend the research in suitable areas. It will also help to select applicable methodologies and datasets to explore this further.

Building machine learning models using EEG recorded outside of the laboratory setting requires methods robust to noisy data and randomly missing channels. This need is particularly great when working with sparse EEG montages (1-6 channels), often encountered in consumer-grade or mobile EEG devices. Neither classical machine learning models nor deep neural networks trained end-to-end on EEG are typically designed or tested for robustness to corruption, and especially to randomly missing channels. While some studies have proposed strategies for using data with missing channels, these approaches are not practical when sparse montages are used and computing power is limited (e.g., wearables, cell phones). To tackle this problem, we propose dynamic spatial filtering (DSF), a multi-head attention module that can be plugged in before the first layer of a neural network to handle missing EEG channels by learning to focus on good channels and to ignore bad ones. We tested DSF on public EEG data encompassing ~4,000 recordings with simulated channel corruption and on a private dataset of ~100 at-home recordings of mobile EEG with natural corruption. Our proposed approach achieves the same performance as baseline models when no noise is applied, but outperforms baselines by as much as 29.4% accuracy when significant channel corruption is present. Moreover, DSF outputs are interpretable, making it possible to monitor channel importance in real-time. This approach has the potential to enable the analysis of EEG in challenging settings where channel corruption hampers the reading of brain signals.

Intelligent behaviour in the physical world exhibits structure at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Although movements are ultimately executed at the level of instantaneous muscle tensions or joint torques, they must be selected to serve goals defined on much longer timescales, and in terms of relations that extend far beyond the body itself, ultimately involving coordination with other agents. Recent research in artificial intelligence has shown the promise of learning-based approaches to the respective problems of complex movement, longer-term planning and multi-agent coordination. However, there is limited research aimed at their integration. We study this problem by training teams of physically simulated humanoid avatars to play football in a realistic virtual environment. We develop a method that combines imitation learning, single- and multi-agent reinforcement learning and population-based training, and makes use of transferable representations of behaviour for decision making at different levels of abstraction. In a sequence of stages, players first learn to control a fully articulated body to perform realistic, human-like movements such as running and turning; they then acquire mid-level football skills such as dribbling and shooting; finally, they develop awareness of others and play as a team, bridging the gap between low-level motor control at a timescale of milliseconds, and coordinated goal-directed behaviour as a team at the timescale of tens of seconds. We investigate the emergence of behaviours at different levels of abstraction, as well as the representations that underlie these behaviours using several analysis techniques, including statistics from real-world sports analytics. Our work constitutes a complete demonstration of integrated decision-making at multiple scales in a physically embodied multi-agent setting. See project video at https://youtu.be/KHMwq9pv7mg.

The evolution of electronic media is a mixed blessing. Due to the easy access, low cost, and faster reach of the information, people search out and devour news from online social networks. In contrast, the increasing acceptance of social media reporting leads to the spread of fake news. This is a minacious problem that causes disputes and endangers societal stability and harmony. Fake news spread has gained attention from researchers due to its vicious nature. proliferation of misinformation in all media, from the internet to cable news, paid advertising and local news outlets, has made it essential for people to identify the misinformation and sort through the facts. Researchers are trying to analyze the credibility of information and curtail false information on such platforms. Credibility is the believability of the piece of information at hand. Analyzing the credibility of fake news is challenging due to the intent of its creation and the polychromatic nature of the news. In this work, we propose a model for detecting fake news. Our method investigates the content of the news at the early stage i.e. when the news is published but is yet to be disseminated through social media. Our work interprets the content with automatic feature extraction and the relevance of the text pieces. In summary, we introduce stance as one of the features along with the content of the article and employ the pre-trained contextualized word embeddings BERT to obtain the state-of-art results for fake news detection. The experiment conducted on the real-world dataset indicates that our model outperforms the previous work and enables fake news detection with an accuracy of 95.32%.