Forests are crucial for ecological balance, but wildfires, a major cause of forest loss, pose significant risks. Fire weather indices, which assess wildfire risk and predict resource demands, are vital. With the rise of sensor networks in fields like healthcare and environmental monitoring, semantic sensor networks are increasingly used to gather climatic data such as wind speed, temperature, and humidity. However, processing these data streams to determine fire weather indices presents challenges, underscoring the growing importance of effective forest fire detection. This paper discusses using Apache Spark for early forest fire detection, enhancing fire risk prediction with meteorological and geographical data. Building on our previous development of Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontologies and Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL) for managing forest fires in Monesterial Natural Park, we expanded SWRL to improve a Decision Support System (DSS) using a Large Language Models (LLMs) and Spark framework. We implemented real-time alerts with Spark streaming, tailored to various fire scenarios, and validated our approach using ontology metrics, query-based evaluations, LLMs score precision, F1 score, and recall measures.

In this paper, we propose a novel feature weighting method to address the limitation of existing feature processing methods for tabular data. Typically the existing methods assume equal importance across all samples and features in one dataset. This simplified processing methods overlook the unique contributions of each feature, and thus may miss important feature information. As a result, it leads to suboptimal performance in complex datasets with rich features. To address this problem, we introduce Tabular Feature Weighting with Transformer, a novel feature weighting approach for tabular data. Our method adopts Transformer to capture complex feature dependencies and contextually assign appropriate weights to discrete and continuous features. Besides, we employ a reinforcement learning strategy to further fine-tune the weighting process. Our extensive experimental results across various real-world datasets and diverse downstream tasks show the effectiveness of TFWT and highlight the potential for enhancing feature weighting in tabular data analysis.

In the e-commerce domain, the accurate extraction of attribute-value pairs from product listings (e.g., Brand: Apple) is crucial for enhancing search and recommendation systems. The automation of this extraction process is challenging due to the vast diversity of product categories and their respective attributes, compounded by the lack of extensive, accurately annotated training datasets and the demand for low latency to meet the real-time needs of e-commerce platforms. To address these challenges, we introduce GenToC, a novel two-stage model for extracting attribute-value pairs from product titles. GenToC is designed to train with partially-labeled data, leveraging incomplete attribute-value pairs and obviating the need for a fully annotated dataset. Moreover, we introduce a bootstrapping method that enables GenToC to progressively refine and expand its training dataset. This enhancement substantially improves the quality of data available for training other neural network models that are typically faster but are inherently less capable than GenToC in terms of their capacity to handle partially-labeled data. By supplying an enriched dataset for training, GenToC significantly advances the performance of these alternative models, making them more suitable for real-time deployment. Our results highlight the unique capability of GenToC to learn from a limited set of labeled data and to contribute to the training of more efficient models, marking a significant leap forward in the automated extraction of attribute-value pairs from product titles. GenToC has been successfully integrated into India's largest B2B e-commerce platform, IndiaMART.com, achieving a significant increase of 21.1% in recall over the existing deployed system while maintaining a high precision of 89.5% in this challenging task.

The classification of statements provided by individuals during police interviews is a complex and significant task within the domain of natural language processing (NLP) and legal informatics. The lack of extensive domain-specific datasets raises challenges to the advancement of NLP methods in the field. This paper aims to address some of the present challenges by introducing a novel dataset tailored for classification of statements made during police interviews, prior to court proceedings. Utilising the curated dataset for training and evaluation, we introduce a fine-tuned DistilBERT model that achieves state-of-the-art performance in distinguishing truthful from deceptive statements. To enhance interpretability, we employ explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to offer explainability through saliency maps, that interpret the model's decision-making process. Lastly, we present an XAI interface that empowers both legal professionals and non-specialists to interact with and benefit from our system. Our model achieves an accuracy of 86%, and is shown to outperform a custom transformer architecture in a comparative study. This holistic approach advances the accessibility, transparency, and effectiveness of statement analysis, with promising implications for both legal practice and research.

In this work, we explore idiomatic language processing with Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce the Idiomatic language Test Suite IdioTS, a new dataset of difficult examples specifically designed by language experts to assess the capabilities of LLMs to process figurative language at sentence level. We propose a comprehensive evaluation methodology based on an idiom detection task, where LLMs are prompted with detecting an idiomatic expression in a given English sentence. We present a thorough automatic and manual evaluation of the results and an extensive error analysis.

Text classification is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field. This paper introduces the Smart Expert System, a novel approach that leverages LLMs as text classifiers. The system simplifies the traditional text classification workflow, eliminating the need for extensive preprocessing and domain expertise. The performance of several LLMs, machine learning (ML) algorithms, and neural network (NN) based structures is evaluated on four datasets. Results demonstrate that certain LLMs surpass traditional methods in sentiment analysis, spam SMS detection and multi-label classification. Furthermore, it is shown that the system's performance can be further enhanced through few-shot or fine-tuning strategies, making the fine-tuned model the top performer across all datasets. Source code and datasets are available in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/yeyimilk/llm-zero-shot-classifiers.

A limitation of brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers is that they require the user to be able to move the eyes to fixate on targets. This poses an issue for users who cannot voluntarily control their eye movements, for instance, people living with late-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This pilot study makes the first step towards a gaze-independent speller based on the code-modulated visual evoked potential (c-VEP). Participants were presented with two bi-laterally located stimuli, one of which was flashing, and were tasked to attend to one of these stimuli either by directly looking at the stimuli (overt condition) or by using spatial attention, eliminating the need for eye movement (covert condition). The attended stimuli were decoded from electroencephalography (EEG) and classification accuracies of 88% and 100% were obtained for the covert and overt conditions, respectively. These fundamental insights show the promising feasibility of utilizing the c-VEP protocol for gaze-independent BCIs that use covert spatial attention when both stimuli flash simultaneously.

We introduce a heuristic to test the significance of fit of Self-Validated Ensemble Models (SVEM) against the null hypothesis of a constant response. A SVEM model averages predictions from nBoot fits of a model, applied to fractionally weighted bootstraps of the target dataset. It tunes each fit on a validation copy of the training data, utilizing anti-correlated weights for training and validation. The proposed test computes SVEM predictions centered by the response column mean and normalized by the ensemble variability at each of nPoint points spaced throughout the factor space. A reference distribution is constructed by refitting the SVEM model to nPerm randomized permutations of the response column and recording the corresponding standardized predictions at the nPoint points. A reduced-rank singular value decomposition applied to the centered and scaled nPerm x nPoint reference matrix is used to calculate the Mahalanobis distance for each of the nPerm permutation results as well as the jackknife (holdout) Mahalanobis distance of the original response column. The process is repeated independently for each response in the experiment, producing a joint graphical summary. We present a simulation driven power analysis and discuss limitations of the test relating to model flexibility and design adequacy. The test maintains the nominal Type I error rate even when the base SVEM model contains more parameters than observations.

The behavior of neural networks (NNs) on previously unseen types of data (out-of-distribution or OOD) is typically unpredictable. This can be dangerous if the network's output is used for decision-making in a safety-critical system. Hence, detecting that an input is OOD is crucial for the safe application of the NN. Verification approaches do not scale to practical NNs, making runtime monitoring more appealing for practical use. While various monitors have been suggested recently, their optimization for a given problem, as well as comparison with each other and reproduction of results, remain challenging. We present a tool for users and developers of NN monitors. It allows for (i) application of various types of monitors from the literature to a given input NN, (ii) optimization of the monitor's hyperparameters, and (iii) experimental evaluation and comparison to other approaches. Besides, it facilitates the development of new monitoring approaches. We demonstrate the tool's usability on several use cases of different types of users as well as on a case study comparing different approaches from recent literature.

Sentiment analysis is crucial for understanding public opinion and consumer behavior. Existing models face challenges with linguistic diversity, generalizability, and explainability. We propose TRABSA, a hybrid framework integrating transformer-based architectures, attention mechanisms, and BiLSTM networks to address this. Leveraging RoBERTa-trained on 124M tweets, we bridge gaps in sentiment analysis benchmarks, ensuring state-of-the-art accuracy. Augmenting datasets with tweets from 32 countries and US states, we compare six word-embedding techniques and three lexicon-based labeling techniques, selecting the best for optimal sentiment analysis. TRABSA outperforms traditional ML and deep learning models with 94% accuracy and significant precision, recall, and F1-score gains. Evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates consistent superiority and generalizability. SHAP and LIME analyses enhance interpretability, improving confidence in predictions. Our study facilitates pandemic resource management, aiding resource planning, policy formation, and vaccination tactics.