Narrative data spans all disciplines and provides a coherent model of the world to the reader or viewer. Recent advancement in machine learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) have enable great strides in analyzing natural language. However, Large language models (LLMs) still struggle with complex narrative arcs as well as narratives containing conflicting information. Recent work indicates LLMs augmented with external knowledge bases can improve the accuracy and interpretability of the resulting models. In this work, we analyze the effectiveness of applying knowledge graphs (KGs) in understanding true-crime podcast data from both classical Natural Language Processing (NLP) and LLM approaches. We directly compare KG-augmented LLMs (KGLLMs) with classical methods for KG construction, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. Additionally, the KGLLM allows us to query the knowledge base in natural language and test its ability to factually answer questions. We examine the robustness of the model to adversarial prompting in order to test the model's ability to deal with conflicting information. Finally, we apply classical methods to understand more subtle aspects of the text such as the use of hearsay and sentiment in narrative construction and propose future directions. Our results indicate that KGLLMs outperform LLMs on a variety of metrics, are more robust to adversarial prompts, and are more capable of summarizing the text into topics.

Many evolutionary algorithms (EAs) take advantage of parallel evaluation of candidates. However, if evaluation times vary significantly, many worker nodes (i.e.,\ compute clients) are idle much of the time, waiting for the next generation to be created. Evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS), a class of EAs that optimizes the architecture and hyperparameters of deep neural networks, is particularly vulnerable to this issue. This paper proposes a generic asynchronous evaluation strategy (AES) that is then adapted to work with ENAS. AES increases throughput by maintaining a queue of up to $K$ individuals ready to be sent to the workers for evaluation and proceeding to the next generation as soon as $M<

We implement stacked denoising autoencoders, a class of neural networks that are capable of learning powerful representations of high dimensional data. We describe stochastic gradient descent for unsupervised training of autoencoders, as well as a novel genetic algorithm based approach that makes use of gradient information. We analyze the performance of both optimization algorithms and also the representation learning ability of the autoencoder when it is trained on standard image classification datasets. The weight matrix of the decoding stage is the transpose of the weight matrix of the encoding stage. Autoencoders are a method for performing representation learning, an unsupervised pretraining process during which a more useful representation of the input data is automatically determined. Representation learning is important in machine learning since "the performance of machine learning methods is heavily dependent on the choice of data representation (or features) in which they are applied" [1]. For many supervised classification tasks, the high dimensionality of the input data means that the classifier requires an enormous number of training examples in order to generalize well and not overfit. Autoencoders are one such representation learning tool. An autoencoder is a neural network with a single hidden layer and where the output layer and the input layer have the same size. Then we have a neural network as shown in Figure 1. The weight matrix of the decoding stage is the transpose of weight matrix of the encoding stage in order to reduce the number of parameters to learn. After an autoencoder is trained, its decoding stage is discarded and the encoding stage is used to transform the training input examples as a preprocessing step.

Multitask learning, i.e. learning several tasks at once with the same neural network, can improve performance in each of the tasks. Designing deep neural network architectures for multitask learning is a challenge: There are many ways to tie the tasks together, and the design choices matter. The size and complexity of this problem exceeds human design ability, making it a compelling domain for evolutionary optimization. Using the existing state of the art soft ordering architecture as the starting point, methods for evolving the modules of this architecture and for evolving the overall topology or routing between modules are evaluated in this paper. A synergetic approach of evolving custom routings with evolved, shared modules for each task is found to be very powerful, significantly improving the state of the art in the Omniglot multitask, multialphabet character recognition domain. This result demonstrates how evolution can be instrumental in advancing deep neural network and complex system design in general.