Reliable Academic Conference Question Answering: A Study Based on Large Language Model

The rapid growth of computer science has led to a proliferation of research presented at academic conferences, fostering global scholarly communication. Researchers consistently seek accurate, current information about these events at all stages. This data surge necessitates an intelligent question-answering system to efficiently address researchers' queries and ensure awareness of the latest advancements. The information of conferences is usually published on their official website, organized in a semi-structured way with a lot of text. To address this need, we have developed the ConferenceQA dataset for 7 diverse academic conferences with human annotations. Firstly, we employ a combination of manual and automated methods to organize academic conference data in a semi-structured JSON format. Subsequently, we annotate nearly 100 question-answer pairs for each conference. Each pair is classified into four different dimensions. To ensure the reliability of the data, we manually annotate the source of each answer. In light of recent advancements, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various NLP tasks. They have demonstrated impressive capabilities in information-seeking question answering after instruction fine-tuning, and as such, we present our conference QA study based on LLM. Due to hallucination and outdated knowledge of LLMs, we adopt retrieval based methods to enhance LLMs' question-answering abilities. We have proposed a structure-aware retrieval method, specifically designed to leverage inherent structural information during the retrieval process. Empirical validation on the ConferenceQA dataset has demonstrated the effectiveness of this method. The dataset and code are readily accessible on https://github.com/zjukg/ConferenceQA.

A Fully-autonomous Framework of Unmanned Surface Vehicles in Maritime Environments using Gaussian Process Motion Planning

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are of increasing importance to a growing number of sectors in the maritime industry, including offshore exploration, marine transportation and defence operations. A major factor in the growth in use and deployment of USVs is the increased operational flexibility that is offered through use of autonomous navigation systems that generate optimised trajectories. Unlike path planning in terrestrial environments, planning in the maritime environment is more demanding as there is need to assure mitigating action is taken against the significant, random and often unpredictable environmental influences from winds and ocean currents. With the focus of these necessary requirements as the main basis of motivation, this paper proposes a novel motion planner, denoted as GPMP2*, extending the application scope of the fundamental GP-based motion planner, GPMP2, into complex maritime environments. An interpolation strategy based on Monte-Carlo stochasticity has been innovatively added to GPMP2* to produce a new algorithm named GPMP2* with Monte-Carlo stochasticity (MC-GPMP2*), which can increase the diversity of the paths generated. In parallel with algorithm design, a ROS based fully-autonomous framework for an advanced unmanned surface vehicle, the WAM-V 20 USV, has been proposed. The practicability of the proposed motion planner as well as the fully-autonomous framework have been functionally validated in a simulated inspection missions for an offshore wind farm in ROS.