Image caption, Will Pep Guardiola or Mikel Arteta be lifting the Premier League trophy next month? With five games to go, Manchester City and Arsenal are only separated on goals scored at the top of the Premier League table. It's a new league now, says Gunners boss Mikel Arteta, whose side had been top of the table for 209 days until Wednesday. Manchester City's 2-1 win over Arsenal on Sunday boosted their hopes - and a 1-0 victory at Burnley on Wednesday sent them top. Who is going to win the title now?

Image caption, Khadija Shaw is the top goalscorer in the Women's Super League this season If Khadija Shaw is on your team, you have a very good chance of winning. She's that good, her Manchester City team-mate Sam Coffey felt like she was watching a video game with Shaw the star of the show. I said earlier that I feel like I'm playing Fifa. You can score three goals like that in 20 minutes? the bewildered US international said after their emphatic 5-2 win over Spurs. It was actually three goals in 13 minutes - the fastest hat-trick in Women's Super League history - and City fans are so desperate to keep Shaw at the club that, each time she scored, they chanted sign her up on repeat.

Tottenham may have coasted through to the Champions League last 16, but their Premier League form remains a problem for boss Thomas Frank. I was at their draw with Burnley last week and there are a lot of angry Spurs fans out there, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Their domestic results are such a contrast to their record in Europe, and it could be another difficult afternoon for Frank when they face Manchester City on Sunday. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. His guest for week 24 is boxer Francesca Hennessy, who supports Chelsea . Hennessy faces Ellie Bouttell in a WBC title eliminator on Saturday, live on BBC Two from 20:00 GMT.

Will the start of 2026 see a change of fortune for BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton, whose title hopes are fading fast? After Sutton made a strong start to the season, AI has taken charge of the predictions title race, clinching another win last week. It's been a bad start to the new year for me, with AI top of the table, Sutton said. I also lost to my daugher Sophia at cards over Christmas. We played rummy and I think she was cheating - a lot like AI, she was definitely getting some help from somewhere. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 20, he takes on singer-songwriter Andrew Cushin, who is a Newcastle fan.

Online communities for sports fans have surged in popularity, with Reddit's r/PremierLeague emerging as a focal point for fans of one of the globe's most celebrated sports leagues. This boom has helped the Premier League make significant inroads into the US market, increasing viewership and sparking greater interest in its matches. Despite the league's broad appeal, there's still a notable gap in understanding its online fan community. Therefore, we analyzed a substantial dataset of over 1.1 million comments posted from 2013-2022 on r/PremierLeague. Our study delves into the sentiment, topics, and toxicity of these discussions, tracking trends over time, aiming to map out the conversation landscape. The rapid expansion has brought more diverse discussions, but also a worrying rise in negative sentiment and toxicity. Additionally, the subreddit has become a venue for users to voice frustrations about broader societal issues like racism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and political tensions.

The 197th Manchester derby takes place at Etihad Stadium on Sunday, but will it be the Blues or the Reds who claim the points - and local bragging rights? This is so hard to call, for many reasons, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Manchester United could be buoyed by their win over Burnley before the international break, but I actually have bigger doubts about what we will see from Manchester City after seeing them capitulate the way they did against Brighton. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week four, he takes on Only The Poets frontman Tommy Longhurst. The Reading band are charging £1 a ticket when they play the O2 Academy Brixton, in February 2026.

Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot reports on the state of the suspected terrorists in Russia and the Kremlin's'spin machine.' Spain's Ministry of the Interior, on Tuesday, announced that it is on high alert and has activated all alert and response systems to prevent jihadist attacks during the Champions League quarterfinal matches scheduled to take place in Madrid on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to reports. On Tuesday, Real Madrid will take on Manchester City, while on Wednesday, Atlético Madrid will play against Borussia Dortmund. As the quarterfinals approach, threats have been made by the Islamic State terrorist network, which has threatened drone attacks on the soccer tournament, a reminder of the resurgence of the network after several deadly attacks earlier this year in places like Iran and Moscow. The ministry, led by Fernando Grand-Marlask, said the "State Security Forces and Bodies have all their early warning and protection systems activated, as well as their response systems ready" in response to preventing a terrorist attack, according to Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

This paper introduces an innovative application of Large Event Models (LEMs), akin to Large Language Models, to the domain of soccer analytics. By learning the "language" of soccer - predicting variables for subsequent events rather than words LEMs facilitate the simulation of matches and offer various applications, including player performance prediction across different team contexts. We focus on fine-tuning LEMs with the WyScout dataset for the 2017-2018 Premier League season to derive specific insights into player contributions and team strategies. Our methodology involves adapting these models to reflect the nuanced dynamics of soccer, enabling the evaluation of hypothetical transfers. Our findings confirm the effectiveness and limitations of LEMs in soccer analytics, highlighting the model's capability to forecast teams' expected standings and explore high-profile scenarios, such as the potential effects of transferring Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi to different teams in the Premier League. This analysis underscores the importance of context in evaluating player quality. While general metrics may suggest significant differences between players, contextual analyses reveal narrower gaps in performance within specific team frameworks.

Automatic fact verification has received significant attention recently. Contemporary automatic fact-checking systems focus on estimating truthfulness using numerical scores which are not human-interpretable. A human fact-checker generally follows several logical steps to verify a verisimilitude claim and conclude whether its truthful or a mere masquerade. Popular fact-checking websites follow a common structure for fact categorization such as half true, half false, false, pants on fire, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to have an aspect-based (delineating which part(s) are true and which are false) explainable system that can assist human fact-checkers in asking relevant questions related to a fact, which can then be validated separately to reach a final verdict. In this paper, we propose a 5W framework (who, what, when, where, and why) for question-answer-based fact explainability. To that end, we present a semi-automatically generated dataset called FACTIFY-5WQA, which consists of 391, 041 facts along with relevant 5W QAs - underscoring our major contribution to this paper. A semantic role labeling system has been utilized to locate 5Ws, which generates QA pairs for claims using a masked language model. Finally, we report a baseline QA system to automatically locate those answers from evidence documents, which can serve as a baseline for future research in the field. Lastly, we propose a robust fact verification system that takes paraphrased claims and automatically validates them. The dataset and the baseline model are available at https: //github.com/ankuranii/acl-5W-QA

Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. As part of the introduction series on sports analytics for beginners, I am writing a series of articles examining the impact and benefits of machine learning and data analytics.