GETAE: Graph information Enhanced deep neural NeTwork ensemble ArchitecturE for fake news detection

In today's digital age, fake news has become a major problem that has serious consequences, ranging from social unrest to political upheaval. To address this issue, new methods for detecting and mitigating fake news are required. In this work, we propose to incorporate contextual and network-aware features into the detection process. This involves analyzing not only the content of a news article but also the context in which it was shared and the network of users who shared it, i.e., the information diffusion. Thus, we propose GETAE, \underline{G}raph Information \underline{E}nhanced Deep Neural Ne\underline{t}work Ensemble \underline{A}rchitectur\underline{E} for Fake News Detection, a novel ensemble architecture that uses textual content together with the social interactions to improve fake news detection. GETAE contains two Branches: the Text Branch and the Propagation Branch. The Text Branch uses Word and Transformer Embeddings and a Deep Neural Network based on feed-forward and bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (\textsc{[Bi]RNN}) for learning novel contextual features and creating a novel Text Content Embedding. The Propagation Branch considers the information propagation within the graph network and proposes a Deep Learning architecture that employs Node Embeddings to create novel Propagation Embedding. GETAE Ensemble combines the two novel embeddings, i.e., Text Content Embedding and Propagation Embedding, to create a novel \textit{Propagation-Enhanced Content Embedding} which is afterward used for classification. The experimental results obtained on two real-world publicly available datasets, i.e., Twitter15 and Twitter16, prove that using this approach improves fake news detection and outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Malinowski in the Age of AI: Can large language models create a text game based on an anthropological classic?

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown remarkable abilities in a wide range of tasks such as summarizing texts and assisting in coding. Scientific research has demonstrated that these models can also play text-adventure games. This study aims to explore whether LLMs can autonomously create text-based games based on anthropological classics, evaluating also their effectiveness in communicating knowledge. To achieve this, the study engaged anthropologists in discussions to gather their expectations and design inputs for an anthropologically themed game. Through iterative processes following the established HCI principle of 'design thinking', the prompts and the conceptual framework for crafting these games were refined. Leveraging GPT3.5, the study created three prototypes of games centered around the seminal anthropological work of the social anthropologist's Bronislaw Malinowski's "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (1922). Subsequently, evaluations were conducted by inviting senior anthropologists to playtest these games, and based on their inputs, the game designs were refined. The tests revealed promising outcomes but also highlighted key challenges: the models encountered difficulties in providing in-depth thematic understandings, showed suspectibility to misinformation, tended towards monotonic responses after an extended period of play, and struggled to offer detailed biographical information. Despite these limitations, the study's findings open up new research avenues at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, machine learning, LLMs, ethnography, anthropology and human-computer interaction.

CoT-TL: Low-Resource Temporal Knowledge Representation of Planning Instructions Using Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Autonomous agents often face the challenge of interpreting uncertain natural language instructions for planning tasks. Representing these instructions as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) enables planners to synthesize actionable plans. We introduce CoT-TL, a data-efficient in-context learning framework for translating natural language specifications into LTL representations. CoT-TL addresses the limitations of large language models, which typically rely on extensive fine-tuning data, by extending chain-of-thought reasoning and semantic roles to align with the requirements of formal logic creation. This approach enhances the transparency and rationale behind LTL generation, fostering user trust. CoT-TL achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across three diverse datasets in low-data scenarios, outperforming existing methods without fine-tuning or intermediate translations. To improve reliability and minimize hallucinations, we incorporate model checking to validate the syntax of the generated LTL output. We further demonstrate CoT-TL's effectiveness through ablation studies and evaluations on unseen LTL structures and formulas in a new dataset. Finally, we validate CoT-TL's practicality by integrating it into a QuadCopter for multi-step drone planning based on natural language instructions.

Relation Extraction with Fine-Tuned Large Language Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation Frameworks

Information Extraction (IE) is crucial for converting unstructured data into structured formats like Knowledge Graphs (KGs). A key task within IE is Relation Extraction (RE), which identifies relationships between entities in text. Various RE methods exist, including supervised, unsupervised, weakly supervised, and rule-based approaches. Recent studies leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown significant success in this area. In the current era dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning these models can overcome limitations associated with zero-shot LLM prompting-based RE methods, especially regarding domain adaptation challenges and identifying implicit relations between entities in sentences. These implicit relations, which cannot be easily extracted from a sentence's dependency tree, require logical inference for accurate identification. This work explores the performance of fine-tuned LLMs and their integration into the Retrieval Augmented-based (RAG) RE approach to address the challenges of identifying implicit relations at the sentence level, particularly when LLMs act as generators within the RAG framework. Empirical evaluations on the TACRED, TACRED-Revisited (TACREV), Re-TACRED, and SemEVAL datasets show significant performance improvements with fine-tuned LLMs, including Llama2-7B, Mistral-7B, and T5 (Large). Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains on SemEVAL, where implicit relations are common, surpassing previous results on this dataset. Additionally, our method outperforms previous works on TACRED, TACREV, and Re-TACRED, demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse evaluation scenarios.

Quantum Architecture Search: A Survey

Quantum computing has made significant progress in recent years, attracting immense interest not only in research laboratories but also in various industries. However, the application of quantum computing to solve real-world problems is still hampered by a number of challenges, including hardware limitations and a relatively under-explored landscape of quantum algorithms, especially when compared to the extensive development of classical computing. The design of quantum circuits, in particular parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), which contain learnable parameters optimized by classical methods, is a non-trivial and time-consuming task requiring expert knowledge. As a result, research on the automated generation of PQCs, known as quantum architecture search (QAS), has gained considerable interest. QAS focuses on the use of machine learning and optimization-driven techniques to generate PQCs tailored to specific problems and characteristics of quantum hardware. In this paper, we provide an overview of QAS methods by examining relevant research studies in the field. We discuss main challenges in designing and performing an automated search for an optimal PQC, and survey ways to address them to ease future research.

TR2MTL: LLM based framework for Metric Temporal Logic Formalization of Traffic Rules

Traffic rules formalization is crucial for verifying the compliance and safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, manual translation of natural language traffic rules as formal specification requires domain knowledge and logic expertise, which limits its adaptation. This paper introduces TR2MTL, a framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to automatically translate traffic rules (TR) into metric temporal logic (MTL). It is envisioned as a human-in-loop system for AV rule formalization. It utilizes a chain-of-thought in-context learning approach to guide the LLM in step-by-step translation and generating valid and grammatically correct MTL formulas. It can be extended to various forms of temporal logic and rules. We evaluated the framework on a challenging dataset of traffic rules we created from various sources and compared it against LLMs using different in-context learning methods. Results show that TR2MTL is domain-agnostic, achieving high accuracy and generalization capability even with a small dataset. Moreover, the method effectively predicts formulas with varying degrees of logical and semantic structure in unstructured traffic rules.

Fine-Grained Named Entities for Corona News

Information resources such as newspapers have produced unstructured text data in various languages related to the corona outbreak since December 2019. Analyzing these unstructured texts is time-consuming without representing them in a structured format; therefore, representing them in a structured format is crucial. An information extraction pipeline with essential tasks -- named entity tagging and relation extraction -- to accomplish this goal might be applied to these texts. This study proposes a data annotation pipeline to generate training data from corona news articles, including generic and domain-specific entities. Named entity recognition models are trained on this annotated corpus and then evaluated on test sentences manually annotated by domain experts evaluating the performance of a trained model. The code base and demonstration are available at https://github.com/sefeoglu/coronanews-ner.git.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation-based Relation Extraction

Information Extraction (IE) is a transformative process that converts unstructured text data into a structured format by employing entity and relation extraction (RE) methodologies. The identification of the relation between a pair of entities plays a crucial role within this framework. Despite the existence of various techniques for relation extraction, their efficacy heavily relies on access to labeled data and substantial computational resources. In addressing these challenges, Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge as promising solutions; however, they might return hallucinating responses due to their own training data. To overcome these limitations, Retrieved-Augmented Generation-based Relation Extraction (RAG4RE) in this work is proposed, offering a pathway to enhance the performance of relation extraction tasks. This work evaluated the effectiveness of our RAG4RE approach utilizing different LLMs. Through the utilization of established benchmarks, such as TACRED, TACREV, Re-TACRED, and SemEval RE datasets, our aim is to comprehensively evaluate the efficacy of our RAG4RE approach. In particularly, we leverage prominent LLMs including Flan T5, Llama2, and Mistral in our investigation. The results of our study demonstrate that our RAG4RE approach surpasses performance of traditional RE approaches based solely on LLMs, particularly evident in the TACRED dataset and its variations. Furthermore, our approach exhibits remarkable performance compared to previous RE methodologies across both TACRED and TACREV datasets, underscoring its efficacy and potential for advancing RE tasks in natural language processing.

Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Assisted Classification of COVID-19 from Computed Tomography Scans

Practical quantum computing (QC) is still in its infancy and problems considered are usually fairly small, especially in quantum machine learning when compared to its classical counterpart. Image processing applications in particular require models that are able to handle a large amount of features, and while classical approaches can easily tackle this, it is a major challenge and a cause for harsh restrictions in contemporary QC. In this paper, we apply a hybrid quantum machine learning approach to a practically relevant problem with real world-data. That is, we apply hybrid quantum transfer learning to an image processing task in the field of medical image processing. More specifically, we classify large CT-scans of the lung into COVID-19, CAP, or Normal. We discuss quantum image embedding as well as hybrid quantum machine learning and evaluate several approaches to quantum transfer learning with various quantum circuits and embedding techniques.

Hateful Messages: A Conversational Data Set of Hate Speech produced by Adolescents on Discord

With the rise of social media, a rise of hateful content can be observed. Even though the understanding and definitions of hate speech varies, platforms, communities, and legislature all acknowledge the problem. Therefore, adolescents are a new and active group of social media users. The majority of adolescents experience or witness online hate speech. Research in the field of automated hate speech classification has been on the rise and focuses on aspects such as bias, generalizability, and performance. To increase generalizability and performance, it is important to understand biases within the data. This research addresses the bias of youth language within hate speech classification and contributes by providing a modern and anonymized hate speech youth language data set consisting of 88.395 annotated chat messages. The data set consists of publicly available online messages from the chat platform Discord. ~6,42% of the messages were classified by a self-developed annotation schema as hate speech. For 35.553 messages, the user profiles provided age annotations setting the average author age to under 20 years old.