Creativity relates to the ability to generate novel and effective ideas in the areas of interest. How are such creative ideas generated? One possible mechanism that supports creative ideation and is gaining increased empirical attention is by asking questions. Question asking is a likely cognitive mechanism that allows defining problems, facilitating creative problem solving. However, much is unknown about the exact role of questions in creativity. This work presents an attempt to apply text mining methods to measure the cognitive potential of questions, taking into account, among others, (a) question type, (b) question complexity, and (c) the content of the answer. This contribution summarizes the history of question mining as a part of creativity research, along with the natural language processing methods deemed useful or helpful in the study. In addition, a novel approach is proposed, implemented, and applied to five datasets. The experimental results obtained are comprehensively analyzed, suggesting that natural language processing has a role to play in creative research.

Recently, multiple applications of machine learning have been introduced. They include various possibilities arising when image analysis methods are applied to, broadly understood, video streams. In this context, a novel tool, developed for academic educators to enhance the teaching process by automating, summarizing, and offering prompt feedback on conducting lectures, has been developed. The implemented prototype utilizes machine learning-based techniques to recognise selected didactic and behavioural teachers' features within lecture video recordings. Specifically, users (teachers) can upload their lecture videos, which are preprocessed and analysed using machine learning models. Next, users can view summaries of recognized didactic features through interactive charts and tables. Additionally, stored ML-based prediction results support comparisons between lectures based on their didactic content. In the developed application text-based models trained on lecture transcriptions, with enhancements to the transcription quality, by adopting an automatic speech recognition solution are applied. Furthermore, the system offers flexibility for (future) integration of new/additional machine-learning models and software modules for image and video analysis.

The United Nations (UN) is an international organization founded in 1945, comprising 193 member states. It was established after World War II with the intent to prevent future conflicts and foster global peace and security. The UN is a global forum where countries discuss and address critical issues ranging from international security, economic development, climate change, human rights, and humanitarian aid. It operates through various organs, including the General Assembly, the Security Council, and specialized agencies like UNESCO and WHO. The UN is pivotal in international cooperation and diplomacy, striving to maintain global stability and promote sustainable development. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) serves as a global forum for member states to discuss and work together on international issues.

This study explores the potential of super-resolution techniques in enhancing object detection accuracy in football. Given the sport's fast-paced nature and the critical importance of precise object (e.g. ball, player) tracking for both analysis and broadcasting, super-resolution could offer significant improvements. We investigate how advanced image processing through super-resolution impacts the accuracy and reliability of object detection algorithms in processing football match footage. Our methodology involved applying state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques to a diverse set of football match videos from SoccerNet, followed by object detection using Faster R-CNN. The performance of these algorithms, both with and without super-resolution enhancement, was rigorously evaluated in terms of detection accuracy. The results indicate a marked improvement in object detection accuracy when super-resolution preprocessing is applied. The improvement of object detection through the integration of super-resolution techniques yields significant benefits, especially for low-resolution scenarios, with a notable 12\% increase in mean Average Precision (mAP) at an IoU (Intersection over Union) range of 0.50:0.95 for 320x240 size images when increasing the resolution fourfold using RLFN. As the dimensions increase, the magnitude of improvement becomes more subdued; however, a discernible improvement in the quality of detection is consistently evident. Additionally, we discuss the implications of these findings for real-time sports analytics, player tracking, and the overall viewing experience. The study contributes to the growing field of sports technology by demonstrating the practical benefits and limitations of integrating super-resolution techniques in football analytics and broadcasting.

Action scene understanding in soccer is a challenging task due to the complex and dynamic nature of the game, as well as the interactions between players. This article provides a comprehensive overview of this task divided into action recognition, spotting, and spatio-temporal action localization, with a particular emphasis on the modalities used and multimodal methods. We explore the publicly available data sources and metrics used to evaluate models' performance. The article reviews recent state-of-the-art methods that leverage deep learning techniques and traditional methods. We focus on multimodal methods, which integrate information from multiple sources, such as video and audio data, and also those that represent one source in various ways. The advantages and limitations of methods are discussed, along with their potential for improving the accuracy and robustness of models. Finally, the article highlights some of the open research questions and future directions in the field of soccer action recognition, including the potential for multimodal methods to advance this field. Overall, this survey provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in the field of action scene understanding in soccer.

A considerable number of texts encountered daily are somehow connected with each other. For example, Wikipedia articles refer to other articles via hyperlinks, scientific papers relate to others via citations or (co)authors, while tweets relate via users that follow each other or reshare content. Hence, a graph-like structure can represent existing connections and be seen as capturing the "context" of the texts. The question thus arises if extracting and integrating such context information into a language model might help facilitate a better automated understanding of the text. In this study, we experimentally demonstrate that incorporating graph-based contextualization into BERT model enhances its performance on an example of a classification task. Specifically, on Pubmed dataset, we observed a reduction in error from 8.51% to 7.96%, while increasing the number of parameters just by 1.6%. Our source code: https://github.com/tryptofanik/gc-bert

Distance Metric Learning (DML) has attracted much attention in image processing in recent years. This paper analyzes its impact on supervised fine-tuning language models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) classification tasks under few-shot learning settings. We investigated several DML loss functions in training RoBERTa language models on known SentEval Transfer Tasks datasets. We also analyzed the possibility of using proxy-based DML losses during model inference. Our systematic experiments have shown that under few-shot learning settings, particularly proxy-based DML losses can positively affect the fine-tuning and inference of a supervised language model. Models tuned with a combination of CCE (categorical cross-entropy loss) and ProxyAnchor Loss have, on average, the best performance and outperform models with only CCE by about 3.27 percentage points -- up to 10.38 percentage points depending on the training dataset.

This paper presents an analysis regarding an influence of the Distance Metric Learning (DML) loss functions on the supervised fine-tuning of the language models for classification tasks. We experimented with known datasets from SentEval Transfer Tasks. Our experiments show that applying the DML loss function can increase performance on downstream classification tasks of RoBERTa-large models in few-shot scenarios. Models fine-tuned with the use of SoftTriple loss can achieve better results than models with a standard categorical cross-entropy loss function by about 2.89 percentage points from 0.04 to 13.48 percentage points depending on the training dataset. Additionally, we accomplished a comprehensive analysis with explainability techniques to assess the models' reliability and explain their results.

This paper presents research on a prototype developed to serve the quantitative study of public policy design. This sub-discipline of political science focuses on identifying actors, relations between them, and tools at their disposal in health, environmental, economic, and other policies. Our system aims to automate the process of gathering legal documents, annotating them with Institutional Grammar, and using hypergraphs to analyse inter-relations between crucial entities. Our system is tested against the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage from 2003, a legal document regulating essential aspects of international relations securing cultural heritage.

Recent years brought an increasing interest in the application of machine learning algorithms in e-commerce, omnichannel marketing, and the sales industry. It is not only to the algorithmic advances but also to data availability, representing transactions, users, and background product information. Finding products related in different ways, i.e., substitutes and complements is essential for users' recommendations at the vendor's site and for the vendor - to perform efficient assortment optimization. The paper introduces a novel method for finding products' substitutes and complements based on the graph embedding Cleora algorithm. We also provide its experimental evaluation with regards to the state-of-the-art Shopper algorithm, studying the relevance of recommendations with surveys from industry experts. It is concluded that the new approach presented here offers suitable choices of recommended products, requiring a minimal amount of additional information. The algorithm can be used in various enterprises, effectively identifying substitute and complementary product options.