Wikipedia articles (content pages) are commonly used corpora in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially in low-resource languages other than English. Yet, a few research studies have studied the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, Arabic Wikipedia (AR), Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia (ARZ), and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia (ARY), and documented issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition regarding the massive automatic creation of its articles using template-based translation from English to Arabic without human involvement, overwhelming the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with articles that do not only have low-quality content but also with articles that do not represent the Egyptian people, their culture, and their dialect. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the problem of template translation that occurred in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics through exploratory analysis and building automatic detection systems. We first explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and utilize the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging articles' metadata to detect the template-translated articles automatically. We then publicly deploy and host the best-performing classifier, XGBoost, as an online application called EGYPTIAN WIKIPEDIA SCANNER and release the extracted, filtered, and labeled datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the online, web-based detection system.

Single document news summarization has seen substantial progress on faithfulness in recent years, driven by research on the evaluation of factual consistency, or hallucinations. We ask whether these advances carry over to other text summarization domains. We propose a new evaluation benchmark on topic-focused dialogue summarization, generated by LLMs of varying sizes. We provide binary sentence-level human annotations of the factual consistency of these summaries along with detailed explanations of factually inconsistent sentences. Our analysis shows that existing LLMs hallucinate significant amounts of factual errors in the dialogue domain, regardless of the model's size. On the other hand, when LLMs, including GPT-4, serve as binary factual evaluators, they perform poorly and can be outperformed by prevailing state-of-the-art specialized factuality evaluation metrics. Finally, we conducted an analysis of hallucination types with a curated error taxonomy. We find that there are diverse errors and error distributions in model-generated summaries and that non-LLM based metrics can capture all error types better than LLM-based evaluators.

Generative models are rapidly gaining popularity and being integrated into everyday applications, raising concerns over their safety issues as various vulnerabilities are exposed. Faced with the problem, the field of red teaming is experiencing fast-paced growth, which highlights the need for a comprehensive organization covering the entire pipeline and addressing emerging topics for the community. Our extensive survey, which examines over 120 papers, introduces a taxonomy of fine-grained attack strategies grounded in the inherent capabilities of language models. Additionally, we have developed the searcher framework that unifies various automatic red teaming approaches. Moreover, our survey covers novel areas including multimodal attacks and defenses, risks around multilingual models, overkill of harmless queries, and safety of downstream applications. We hope this survey can provide a systematic perspective on the field and unlock new areas of research. Warning: This paper contains examples that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not always imply an underlying genetic relationship. Many tests of significance based on permutation of wordlists and word similarity measures appeared in the past to determine the statistical significance of such relationships. We demonstrate that although existing tests may work well for bilateral comparisons, i.e., on pairs of languages, they are either infeasible by design or are prone to yield false positives when applied to groups of languages or language families. To this end, inspired by molecular phylogenetics, we propose a likelihood ratio test to determine if given languages are related based on the proportion of invariant character sites in the aligned wordlists applied during tree inference. Further, we evaluate some language families and show that the proposed test solves the problem of false positives. Finally, we demonstrate that the test supports the existence of macro language families such as Nostratic and Macro-Mayan.

Microblogging platforms, of which Twitter is a representative example, are valuable information sources for market screening and financial models. In them, users voluntarily provide relevant information, including educated knowledge on investments, reacting to the state of the stock markets in real-time and, often, influencing this state. We are interested in the user forecasts in financial, social media messages expressing opportunities and precautions about assets. We propose a novel Targeted Aspect-Based Emotion Analysis (TABEA) system that can individually discern the financial emotions (positive and negative forecasts) on the different stock market assets in the same tweet (instead of making an overall guess about that whole tweet). It is based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and Machine Learning streaming algorithms. The system comprises a constituency parsing module for parsing the tweets and splitting them into simpler declarative clauses; an offline data processing module to engineer textual, numerical and categorical features and analyse and select them based on their relevance; and a stream classification module to continuously process tweets on-the-fly. Experimental results on a labelled data set endorse our solution. It achieves over 90% precision for the target emotions, financial opportunity, and precaution on Twitter. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work in the literature has addressed this problem despite its practical interest in decision-making, and we are not aware of any previous NLP nor online Machine Learning approaches to TABEA.

In this paper, we propose WaterMark Detection (WMD), the first invisible watermark detection method under a black-box and annotation-free setting. WMD is capable of detecting arbitrary watermarks within a given reference dataset using a clean non-watermarked dataset as a reference, without relying on specific decoding methods or prior knowledge of the watermarking techniques. We develop WMD using foundations of offset learning, where a clean non-watermarked dataset enables us to isolate the influence of only watermarked samples in the reference dataset. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of WMD, significantly outperforming naive detection methods, which only yield AUC scores around 0.5. In contrast, WMD consistently achieves impressive detection AUC scores, surpassing 0.9 in most single-watermark datasets and exceeding 0.7 in more challenging multi-watermark scenarios across diverse datasets and watermarking methods. As invisible watermarks become increasingly prevalent, while specific decoding techniques remain undisclosed, our approach provides a versatile solution and establishes a path toward increasing accountability, transparency, and trust in our digital visual content.

Humans and animals learn throughout their lives from limited amounts of sensed data, both with and without supervision. Autonomous, intelligent robots of the future are often expected to do the same. The existing continual learning (CL) methods are usually not directly applicable to robotic settings: they typically require buffering and a balanced replay of training data. A few-shot online continual learning (FS-OCL) setting has been proposed to address more realistic scenarios where robots must learn from a non-repeated sparse data stream. To enable truly autonomous life-long learning, an additional challenge of detecting novelties and learning new items without supervision needs to be addressed. We address this challenge with our new prototype-based approach called Continually Learning Prototypes (CLP). In addition to being capable of FS-OCL learning, CLP also detects novel objects and learns them without supervision. To mitigate forgetting, CLP utilizes a novel metaplasticity mechanism that adapts the learning rate individually per prototype. CLP is rehearsal-free, hence does not require a memory buffer, and is compatible with neuromorphic hardware, characterized by ultra-low power consumption, real-time processing abilities, and on-chip learning. Indeed, we have open-sourced a simple version of CLP in the neuromorphic software framework Lava, targetting Intel's neuromorphic chip Loihi 2. We evaluate CLP on a robotic vision dataset, OpenLORIS. In a low-instance FS-OCL scenario, CLP shows state-of-the-art results. In the open world, CLP detects novelties with superior precision and recall and learns features of the detected novel classes without supervision, achieving a strong baseline of 99% base class and 65%/76% (5-shot/10-shot) novel class accuracy.

The surge of interest in data augmentation within the realm of NLP has been driven by the need to address challenges posed by hate speech domains, the dynamic nature of social media vocabulary, and the demands for large-scale neural networks requiring extensive training data. However, the prevalent use of lexical substitution in data augmentation has raised concerns, as it may inadvertently alter the intended meaning, thereby impacting the efficacy of supervised machine learning models. In pursuit of suitable data augmentation methods, this study explores both established legacy approaches and contemporary practices such as Large Language Models (LLM), including GPT in Hate Speech detection. Additionally, we propose an optimized utilization of BERT-based encoder models with contextual cosine similarity filtration, exposing significant limitations in prior synonym substitution methods. Our comparative analysis encompasses five popular augmentation techniques: WordNet and Fast-Text synonym replacement, Back-translation, BERT-mask contextual augmentation, and LLM. Our analysis across five benchmarked datasets revealed that while traditional methods like back-translation show low label alteration rates (0.3-1.5%), and BERT-based contextual synonym replacement offers sentence diversity but at the cost of higher label alteration rates (over 6%). Our proposed BERT-based contextual cosine similarity filtration markedly reduced label alteration to just 0.05%, demonstrating its efficacy in 0.7% higher F1 performance. However, augmenting data with GPT-3 not only avoided overfitting with up to sevenfold data increase but also improved embedding space coverage by 15% and classification F1 score by 1.4% over traditional methods, and by 0.8% over our method.

Statistical fairness stipulates equivalent outcomes for every protected group, whereas causal fairness prescribes that a model makes the same prediction for an individual regardless of their protected characteristics. Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) is effective for reducing bias in NLP models, yet models trained with CDA are often evaluated only on metrics that are closely tied to the causal fairness notion; similarly, sampling-based methods designed to promote statistical fairness are rarely evaluated for causal fairness. In this work, we evaluate both statistical and causal debiasing methods for gender bias in NLP models, and find that while such methods are effective at reducing bias as measured by the targeted metric, they do not necessarily improve results on other bias metrics. We demonstrate that combinations of statistical and causal debiasing techniques are able to reduce bias measured through both types of metrics.

The semantic image segmentation task consists of classifying each pixel of an image into an instance, where each instance corresponds to a class. This task is a part of the concept of scene understanding or better explaining the global context of an image. In the medical image analysis domain, image segmentation can be used for image-guided interventions, radiotherapy, or improved radiological diagnostics. In this review, we categorize the leading deep learning-based medical and non-medical image segmentation solutions into six main groups of deep architectural, data synthesis-based, loss function-based, sequenced models, weakly supervised, and multi-task methods and provide a comprehensive review of the contributions in each of these groups. Further, for each group, we analyze each variant of these groups and discuss the limitations of the current approaches and present potential future research directions for semantic image segmentation.