Post-earnings volatility prediction is critical for investors, with previous works often leveraging earnings call transcripts under the assumption that their rich semantics contribute significantly. To further investigate how transcripts impact volatility, we introduce DEC, a dataset featuring accurate volatility calculations enabled by the previously overlooked beforeAfterMarket attribute and dense ticker coverage. Unlike established benchmarks, where each ticker has only around two earnings, DEC provides 20 earnings records per ticker. Using DEC, we reveal that post-earnings volatility undergoes significant shifts, with each ticker displaying a distinct volatility distribution. To leverage historical post-earnings volatility and capture ticker-specific patterns, we propose two training-free baselines: Post-earnings Volatility (PEV) and Same-ticker Post-earnings Volatility (STPEV). These baselines surpass all transcripts-based models on DEC as well as on established benchmarks. Additionally, we demonstrate that current transcript representations predominantly capture ticker identity rather than offering financially meaningful insights specific to each earnings. This is evidenced by two key observations: earnings representations from the same ticker exhibit significantly higher similarity compared to those from different tickers, and predictions from transcript-based models show strong correlations with prior post-earnings volatility.

Beyond mere formality, small talk plays a pivotal role in social dynamics, serving as a verbal handshake for building rapport and understanding. For conversational AI and social robots, the ability to engage in small talk enhances their perceived sociability, leading to more comfortable and natural user interactions. In this study, we evaluate the capacity of current Large Language Models (LLMs) to drive the small talk of a social robot and identify key areas for improvement. We introduce a novel method that autonomously generates feedback and ensures LLM-generated responses align with small talk conventions. Through several evaluations -- involving chatbot interactions and human-robot interactions -- we demonstrate the system's effectiveness in guiding LLM-generated responses toward realistic, human-like, and natural small-talk exchanges.

In the rapidly evolving AI era with large language models (LLMs) at the core, making LLMs more trustworthy and efficient, especially in output generation (inference), has gained significant attention. This is to reduce plausible but faulty LLM outputs (a.k.a hallucinations) and meet the highly increased inference demands. This tutorial explores such efforts and makes them transparent to the database community. Understanding these efforts is essential in harnessing LLMs in database tasks and adapting database techniques to LLMs. Furthermore, we delve into the synergy between LLMs and databases, highlighting new opportunities and challenges in their intersection. This tutorial aims to share with database researchers and practitioners essential concepts and strategies around LLMs, reduce the unfamiliarity of LLMs, and inspire joining in the intersection between LLMs and databases.

Retrieving relevant context is a common approach to reduce hallucinations and enhance answer reliability. Explicitly citing source documents allows users to verify generated responses and increases trust. Prior work largely evaluates citation correctness - whether cited documents support the corresponding statements. But citation correctness alone is insufficient. To establish trust in attributed answers, we must examine both citation correctness and citation faithfulness. In this work, we first disentangle the notions of citation correctness and faithfulness, which have been applied inconsistently in previous studies. Faithfulness ensures that the model's reliance on cited documents is genuine, reflecting actual reference use rather than superficial alignment with prior beliefs, which we call post-rationalization. We design an experiment that reveals the prevalent issue of post-rationalization, which undermines reliable attribution and may result in misplaced trust. Our findings suggest that current attributed answers often lack citation faithfulness (up to 57 percent of the citations), highlighting the need to evaluate correctness and faithfulness for trustworthy attribution in language models.

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.

Causal reasoning capabilities are essential for large language models (LLMs) in a wide range of applications, such as education and healthcare. But there is still a lack of benchmarks for a better understanding of such capabilities. Current LLM benchmarks are mainly based on conversational tasks, academic math tests, and coding tests. Such benchmarks evaluate LLMs in well-regularized settings, but they are limited in assessing the skills and abilities to solve real-world problems. In this work, we provide a benchmark, named by CARL-GT, which evaluates CAusal Reasoning capabilities of large Language models using Graphs and Tabular data. The benchmark has a diverse range of tasks for evaluating LLMs from causal graph reasoning, knowledge discovery, and decision-making aspects. In addition, effective zero-shot learning prompts are developed for the tasks. In our experiments, we leverage the benchmark for evaluating open-source LLMs and provide a detailed comparison of LLMs for causal reasoning abilities. We found that LLMs are still weak in casual reasoning, especially with tabular data to discover new insights. Furthermore, we investigate and discuss the relationships of different benchmark tasks by analyzing the performance of LLMs. The experimental results show that LLMs have different strength over different tasks and that their performance on tasks in different categories, i.e., causal graph reasoning, knowledge discovery, and decision-making, shows stronger correlation than tasks in the same category.

Automating high-volume unstructured data processing is essential for operational efficiency. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is critical but often struggles with accuracy and efficiency in complex layouts and ambiguous text. These challenges are especially pronounced in large-scale tasks requiring both speed and precision. This paper introduces LMV-RPA, a Large Model Voting-based Robotic Process Automation system to enhance OCR workflows. LMV-RPA integrates outputs from OCR engines such as Paddle OCR, Tesseract OCR, Easy OCR, and DocTR with Large Language Models (LLMs) like LLaMA 3 and Gemini-1.5-pro. Using a majority voting mechanism, it processes OCR outputs into structured JSON formats, improving accuracy, particularly in complex layouts. The multi-phase pipeline processes text extracted by OCR engines through LLMs, combining results to ensure the most accurate outputs. LMV-RPA achieves 99 percent accuracy in OCR tasks, surpassing baseline models with 94 percent, while reducing processing time by 80 percent. Benchmark evaluations confirm its scalability and demonstrate that LMV-RPA offers a faster, more reliable, and efficient solution for automating large-scale document processing tasks.

We propose a methodology that combines several advanced techniques in Large Language Model (LLM) retrieval to support the development of robust, multi-source question-answer systems. This methodology is designed to integrate information from diverse data sources, including unstructured documents (PDFs) and structured databases, through a coordinated multi-agent orchestration and dynamic retrieval approach. Our methodology leverages specialized agents-such as SQL agents, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) agents, and router agents - that dynamically select the most appropriate retrieval strategy based on the nature of each query. To further improve accuracy and contextual relevance, we employ dynamic prompt engineering, which adapts in real time to query-specific contexts. The methodology's effectiveness is demonstrated within the domain of Contract Management, where complex queries often require seamless interaction between unstructured and structured data. Our results indicate that this approach enhances response accuracy and relevance, offering a versatile and scalable framework for developing question-answer systems that can operate across various domains and data sources.

Large language models (LLMs) possess vast semantic knowledge but often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, particularly in relational reasoning problems such as kinship or spatial reasoning. In this paper, we present Path-of-Thoughts (PoT), a novel framework designed to tackle relation reasoning by decomposing the task into three key stages: graph extraction, path identification, and reasoning. Unlike previous approaches, PoT efficiently extracts a task-agnostic graph that identifies crucial entities, relations, and attributes within the problem context. Subsequently, PoT identifies relevant reasoning chains within the graph corresponding to the posed question, facilitating inference of potential answers. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets, demanding long reasoning chains, demonstrate that PoT surpasses state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin (maximum 21.3%) without necessitating fine-tuning or extensive LLM calls. Furthermore, as opposed to prior neuro-symbolic methods, PoT exhibits improved resilience against LLM errors by leveraging the compositional nature of graphs.

We present BenCzechMark (BCM), the first comprehensive Czech language benchmark designed for large language models, offering diverse tasks, multiple task formats, and multiple evaluation metrics. Its scoring system is grounded in statistical significance theory and uses aggregation across tasks inspired by social preference theory. Our benchmark encompasses 50 challenging tasks, with corresponding test datasets, primarily in native Czech, with 11 newly collected ones. These tasks span 8 categories and cover diverse domains, including historical Czech news, essays from pupils or language learners, and spoken word. Furthermore, we collect and clean BUT-Large Czech Collection, the largest publicly available clean Czech language corpus, and use it for (i) contamination analysis, (ii) continuous pretraining of the first Czech-centric 7B language model, with Czech-specific tokenization. We use our model as a baseline for comparison with publicly available multilingual models. Lastly, we release and maintain a leaderboard, with existing 44 model submissions, where new model submissions can be made at https://huggingface.co/spaces/CZLC/BenCzechMark.