While a source sentence can be translated in many ways, most machine translation (MT) models are trained with only a single reference. Previous work has shown that using synthetic paraphrases can improve MT. This paper investigates best practices for employing multiple references by analyzing the semantic similarity among different English translations of world literature in the Par3 dataset. We classify the semantic similarity between paraphrases into three groups: low, medium, and high, and fine-tune two different LLMs (mT5-large and LLaMA-2-7B) for downstream MT tasks. Across different models, holding the total training instances constant, single-reference but more source texts only marginally outperforms multiple-reference with half of the source texts. Moreover, using paraphrases of medium and high semantic similarity outperforms an unfiltered dataset (+BLEU 0.3-0.5, +COMET 0.2-0.9, +chrF++ 0.25-0.32). Our code is publicly available on GitHub.

Learning processes by exploiting restricted domain knowledge is an important task across a plethora of scientific areas, with more and more hybrid methods combining data-driven and model-based approaches. However, while such hybrid methods have been tested in various scientific applications, they have been mostly tested on dynamical systems, with only limited study about the influence of each model component on global performance and parameter identification. In this work, we assess the performance of hybrid modeling against traditional machine learning methods on standard regression problems. We compare, on both synthetic and real regression problems, several approaches for training such hybrid models. We focus on hybrid methods that additively combine a parametric physical term with a machine learning term and investigate model-agnostic training procedures. We also introduce a new hybrid approach based on partial dependence functions. Experiments are carried out with different types of machine learning models, including tree-based models and artificial neural networks.

Responsive teaching is a highly effective strategy that promotes student learning. In math classrooms, teachers might "funnel" students towards a normative answer or "focus" students to reflect on their own thinking, deepening their understanding of math concepts. When teachers focus, they treat students' contributions as resources for collective sensemaking, and thereby significantly improve students' achievement and confidence in mathematics. We propose the task of computationally detecting funneling and focusing questions in classroom discourse. We do so by creating and releasing an annotated dataset of 2,348 teacher utterances labeled for funneling and focusing questions, or neither. We introduce supervised and unsupervised approaches to differentiating these questions. Our best model, a supervised RoBERTa model fine-tuned on our dataset, has a strong linear correlation of .76 with human expert labels and with positive educational outcomes, including math instruction quality and student achievement, showing the model's potential for use in automated teacher feedback tools. Our unsupervised measures show significant but weaker correlations with human labels and outcomes, and they highlight interesting linguistic patterns of funneling and focusing questions. The high performance of the supervised measure indicates its promise for supporting teachers in their instruction.

On a video screen projected to a crowd attending the United Nations' summit Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a small drone whizzes past a tech executive. It shoots a projectile into the skull of a test dummy, detonating an explosive that could kill a human. In front of an audience, the executive pitches the drones as "unstoppable" and calls them capable of "an airstrike of surgical precision" that could render nuclear weapons obsolete. The scene quickly cuts to the drones being hijacked by terrorist organizations and going on a killing spree, targeting politicians and social media activists. The film, titled Slaughterbots and produced by the Future of Life Institute, shows how easily autonomous weapons could become weapons of mass destruction.