Senate Intelligence Committee member Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tells'Hannity' the idea of citizenship is in danger. The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear a challenge to the Biden administration's regulation on so-called "ghost guns" next term. The rule in question was issued in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to regulate "buy build shoot" kits that are available online or in stores that allow any individual to assemble a working firearm without a background check or the usual serial numbers required by the federal government. The Fifth Circuit late last year struck down the rule, but the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court. The DOJ argued that the Gun Control Act of 1968 permits the rule because it defines a "firearm" to include "any weapon…which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive," as well as "the frame or receiver of any such weapon."

Machine Transliteration provides the ability to transliterate a basic language into different languages in a computational way. Transliteration is an important technical process that has caught the attention most recently. The Sinhala transliteration has many constraints because of the insufficiency of resources in the Sinhala language. Due to these limitations, Sinhala Transliteration is highly complex and time-consuming. Therefore, the majority of the Sri Lankans uses non-formal texting language named 'Singlish' to make that process simple. This study has focused on the transliteration of the Singlish language at the word level by reducing the complication in the transliteration. A new approach of coding system has invented with the rule-based approach that can map the matching Sinhala words even without the vowels. Various typing patterns were collected by different communities for this. The collected data have analyzed with every Sinhala character and unique Singlish patterns related to them were generated. The system has introduced a newly initiated numeric coding system to use with the Singlish letters by matching with the recognized typing patterns. For the mapping process, fuzzy logic-based implementation has used. A codified dictionary has also implemented including unique numeric values. In this system, Each Romanized English letter was assigned with a unique numeric code that can construct a unique pattern for each word. The system can identify the most relevant Sinhala word that matches with the pattern of the Singlish word or it gives the most related word suggestions. For example, the word 'kiyanna,kianna, kynna, kynn, kiynna' have mapped with the accurate Sinhala word "kiyanna". These results revealed that the 'Swa Bhasha' transliteration system has the ability to enhance the Sinhala users' experience while conducting the texting in Singlish to Sinhala.

Query rewrite, which aims to generate more efficient queries by altering a SQL query's structure without changing the query result, has been an important research problem. In order to maintain equivalence between the rewritten query and the original one during rewriting, traditional query rewrite methods always rewrite the queries following certain rewrite rules. However, some problems still remain. Firstly, existing methods of finding the optimal choice or sequence of rewrite rules are still limited and the process always costs a lot of resources. Methods involving discovering new rewrite rules typically require complicated proofs of structural logic or extensive user interactions. Secondly, current query rewrite methods usually rely highly on DBMS cost estimators which are often not accurate. In this paper, we address these problems by proposing a novel method of query rewrite named LLM-R2, adopting a large language model (LLM) to propose possible rewrite rules for a database rewrite system. To further improve the inference ability of LLM in recommending rewrite rules, we train a contrastive model by curriculum to learn query representations and select effective query demonstrations for the LLM. Experimental results have shown that our method can significantly improve the query execution efficiency and outperform the baseline methods. In addition, our method enjoys high robustness across different datasets.

Climate risk assessment is becoming increasingly important. For organisations, identifying and assessing climate-related risks is challenging, as they can come from multiple sources. This study identifies and assesses the main climate transition risks in the colombian processed food sector. As transition risks are vague, our approach uses Fuzzy Logic and compares it to various multi-criteria decision-making methods to classify the different climate transition risks an organisation may be exposed to. This approach allows us to use linguistic expressions for risk analysis and to better describe risks and their consequences. The results show that the risks ranked as the most critical for this organisation in their order were price volatility and raw materials availability, the change to less carbon-intensive production or consumption patterns, the increase in carbon taxes and technological change, and the associated development or implementation costs. These risks show a critical risk level, which implies that they are the most significant risks for the organisation in the case study. These results highlight the importance of investments needed to meet regulatory requirements, which are the main drivers for organisations at the financial level.

Business Process Modeling projects often require formal process models as a central component. High costs associated with the creation of such formal process models motivated many different fields of research aimed at automated generation of process models from readily available data. These include process mining on event logs, and generating business process models from natural language texts. Research in the latter field is regularly faced with the problem of limited data availability, hindering both evaluation and development of new techniques, especially learning-based ones. To overcome this data scarcity issue, in this paper we investigate the application of data augmentation for natural language text data. Data augmentation methods are well established in machine learning for creating new, synthetic data without human assistance. We find that many of these methods are applicable to the task of business process information extraction, improving the accuracy of extraction. Our study shows, that data augmentation is an important component in enabling machine learning methods for the task of business process model generation from natural language text, where currently mostly rule-based systems are still state of the art. Simple data augmentation techniques improved the $F_1$ score of mention extraction by 2.9 percentage points, and the $F_1$ of relation extraction by $4.5$. To better understand how data augmentation alters human annotated texts, we analyze the resulting text, visualizing and discussing the properties of augmented textual data. We make all code and experiments results publicly available.

Temporal expression (TE) normalization is a well-studied problem. However, the predominately used rule-based systems are highly restricted to specific settings, and upcoming machine learning approaches suffer from a lack of labeled data. In this work, we explore the feasibility of proprietary and open-source large language models (LLMs) for TE normalization using in-context learning to inject task, document, and example information into the model. We explore various sample selection strategies to retrieve the most relevant set of examples. By using a window-based prompt design approach, we can perform TE normalization across sentences, while leveraging the LLM knowledge without training the model. Our experiments show competitive results to models designed for this task. In particular, our method achieves large performance improvements for non-standard settings by dynamically including relevant examples during inference.

In the near future, mobile networks are expected to broaden their services and coverage to accommodate a larger user base and diverse user needs. Thus, they will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to manage network operation and control costs, undertaking complex decision-making roles. This shift will necessitate the application of techniques that incorporate critical thinking abilities, including reasoning and planning. Symbolic AI techniques already facilitate critical thinking based on existing knowledge. Yet, their use in telecommunications is hindered by the high cost of mostly manual curation of this knowledge and high computational complexity of reasoning tasks. At the same time, there is a spurt of innovations in industries such as telecommunications due to Generative AI (GenAI) technologies, operating independently of human-curated knowledge. However, their capacity for critical thinking remains uncertain. This paper aims to address this gap by examining the current status of GenAI algorithms with critical thinking capabilities and investigating their potential applications in telecom networks. Specifically, the aim of this study is to offer an introduction to the potential utilization of GenAI for critical thinking techniques in mobile networks, while also establishing a foundation for future research.

Math Word Problem (MWP) solving presents a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This study aims to provide MWP solvers with a more diverse training set, ultimately improving their ability to solve various math problems. We propose several methods for data augmentation by modifying the problem texts and equations, such as synonym replacement, rule-based: question replacement, and rule based: reversing question methodologies over two English MWP datasets. This study extends by introducing a new in-context learning augmentation method, employing the Llama-7b language model. This approach involves instruction-based prompting for rephrasing the math problem texts. Performance evaluations are conducted on 9 baseline models, revealing that augmentation methods outperform baseline models. Moreover, concatenating examples generated by various augmentation methods further improves performance.

Emotion expression is one of the essential traits of conversations. It may be self-related or caused by another speaker. The variety of reasons may serve as a source of the further emotion causes: conversation history, speaker's emotional state, etc. Inspired by the most recent advances in Chain-of-Thought, in this work, we exploit the existing three-hop reasoning approach (THOR) to perform large language model instruction-tuning for answering: emotion states (THOR-state), and emotion caused by one speaker to the other (THOR-cause). We equip THOR-cause with the reasoning revision (rr) for devising a reasoning path in fine-tuning. In particular, we rely on the annotated speaker emotion states to revise reasoning path. Our final submission, based on Flan-T5-base (250M) and the rule-based span correction technique, preliminary tuned with THOR-state and fine-tuned with THOR-cause-rr on competition training data, results in 3rd and 4th places (F1-proportional) and 5th place (F1-strict) among 15 participating teams. Our THOR implementation fork is publicly available: https://github.com/nicolay-r/THOR-ECAC

The explosion of data available in life sciences is fueling an increasing demand for expressive models and computational methods. Graph transformation is a model for dynamic systems with a large variety of applications. We introduce a novel method of the graph transformation model construction, combining generative and dynamical viewpoints to give a fully automated data-driven model inference method. The method takes the input dynamical properties, given as a "snapshot" of the dynamics encoded by explicit transitions, and constructs a compatible model. The obtained model is guaranteed to be minimal, thus framing the approach as model compression (from a set of transitions into a set of rules). The compression is permissive to a lossy case, where the constructed model is allowed to exhibit behavior outside of the input transitions, thus suggesting a completion of the input dynamics. The task of graph transformation model inference is naturally highly challenging due to the combinatorics involved. We tackle the exponential explosion by proposing a heuristically minimal translation of the task into a well-established problem, set cover, for which highly optimized solutions exist. We further showcase how our results relate to Kolmogorov complexity expressed in terms of graph transformation.