Artificial intelligence approaches are being adapted to many research areas, including digital humanities. We built a methodology for large-scale analyses in folkloristics. Using machine learning and natural language processing, we automatically detected motifs in a large collection of Cinderella variants and analysed their similarities and differences with clustering and dimensionality reduction. The results show that large language models detect complex interactions in tales, enabling computational analysis of extensive text collections and facilitating cross-lingual comparisons.

Left: A human partner is confined to a wheelchair and struggles to move past an obstacle.

Emerging research on bias attribution and interpretability have revealed how tokens contribute to biased behavior in language models processing English texts. We build on this line of inquiry by adapting the information-theoretic bias attribution score metric for implementation on models handling agglutinative languages, particularly Filipino. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of our adapted method by using it on a purely Filipino model and on three multilingual models: one trained on languages worldwide and two on Southeast Asian data. Our results show that Filipino models are driven towards bias by words pertaining to people, objects, and relationships, entity-based themes that stand in contrast to the action-heavy nature of bias-contributing themes in English (i.e., criminal, sexual, and prosocial behaviors). These findings point to differences in how English and non-English models process inputs linked to sociodemographic groups and bias.

This paper reports on the implementation and evaluation of a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for DraCor, enabling Large Language Models (LLM) to autonomously interact with the DraCor API. We conducted experiments focusing on tool selection and application by the LLM, employing a qualitative approach that includes systematic observation of prompts to understand how LLMs behave when using MCP tools, evaluating "Tool Correctness", "Tool-Calling Efficiency", and "Tool-Use Reliability". Our findings highlight the importance of "Docstring Engineering", defined as reflexively crafting tool documentation to optimize LLM-tool interaction. Our experiments demonstrate both the promise of agentic AI for research in Computational Literary Studies and the essential infrastructure development needs for reliable Digital Humanities infrastructures.

Apple continued its slow-and-steady approach to integrating artificial intelligence into devices like the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch on Monday, announcing a raft of new features and upgrades at WWDC. The company also premiered the Foundation Models framework, a way for developers to write code that taps into Apple's AI models. Among the buzzier AI announcements at the event was Live Translation, a feature that translates phone and FaceTime calls from one language to another in real time. Apple also showed off Workout Buddy, an AI-powered voice helper designed to provide words of encouragement and useful updates during exercise. "This is your second run this week," Workout Buddy told a jogging woman in a demo video.

Increased robot deployment, such as in warehousing, has revealed a need for seamless collaboration among heterogeneous robot teams to resolve unforeseen conflicts. To address this challenge, we propose a novel, decentralized framework for robots to request and provide help. The framework begins with robots detecting conflicts using a Vision Language Model (VLM), then reasoning over whether help is needed. If so, it crafts and broadcasts a natural language (NL) help request using a Large Language Model (LLM). Potential helper robots reason over the request and offer help (if able), along with information about impact to their current tasks. Helper reasoning is implemented via an LLM grounded in Signal Temporal Logic (STL) using a Backus-Naur Form (BNF) grammar to guarantee syntactically valid NL-to-STL translations, which are then solved as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). Finally, the requester robot chooses a helper by reasoning over impact on the overall system. We evaluate our system via experiments considering different strategies for choosing a helper, and find that a requester robot can minimize overall time impact on the system by considering multiple help offers versus simple heuristics (e.g., selecting the nearest robot to help).

While it is commonly accepted that maintaining common ground plays a role in conversational success, little prior research exists connecting conversational grounding to success in task-oriented conversations. We study failures of grounding in the Ubuntu IRC dataset, where participants use text-only communication to resolve technical issues. We find that disruptions in conversational flow often stem from a misalignment in common ground, driven by a divergence in beliefs and assumptions held by participants. These disruptions, which we call conversational friction, significantly correlate with task success. We find that although LLMs can identify overt cases of conversational friction, they struggle with subtler and more context-dependent instances requiring pragmatic or domain-specific reasoning.

This paper introduces CodeQUEST, a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively evaluate and enhance code quality across multiple dimensions, including readability, maintainability, efficiency, and security. The framework is divided into two main components: an Evaluator that assesses code quality across ten dimensions, providing both quantitative scores and qualitative summaries, and an Optimizer that iteratively improves the code based on the Evaluator's feedback. Our study demonstrates that CodeQUEST can effectively and robustly evaluate code quality, with its assessments aligning closely with established code quality metrics. Through a series of experiments using a curated dataset of Python and JavaScript examples, CodeQUEST demonstrated significant improvements in code quality, achieving a mean relative percentage improvement of 52.6%. The framework's evaluations were validated against a set of proxy metrics comprising of Pylint Score, Radon Maintainability Index, and Bandit output logs, showing a meaningful correlation. This highlights the potential of LLMs in automating code quality evaluation and improvement processes, presenting a significant advancement toward enhancing software development practices. The code implementation of the framework is available at: https://github.com/jpmorganchase/CodeQuest.

Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic dialogue or QA with minimal professional knowledge and without goal guidance. In many real-world counseling scenarios, clients often seek multi-type help, such as diagnosis, consultation, therapy, console, and common questions, but existing dialogue systems struggle to combine different dialogue types naturally. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct mixed-type dialogue systems for psychological counseling that enable clients to clarify their goals before proceeding with counseling. To mitigate the challenge, we collect a mixed-type counseling dialogues corpus termed STAMPsy, covering five dialogue types, task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, knowledge-grounded dialogue, conversational recommendation, empathetic dialogue, and question answering, over 5,000 conversations. Moreover, spatiotemporal-aware knowledge enables systems to have world awareness and has been proven to affect one's mental health. Therefore, we link dialogues in STAMPsy to spatiotemporal state and propose a spatiotemporal-aware mixed-type psychological counseling dataset. Additionally, we build baselines on STAMPsy and develop an iterative self-feedback psychological dialogue generation framework, named Self-STAMPsy. Results indicate that clarifying dialogue goals in advance and utilizing spatiotemporal states are effective.