Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

Uncovering the Hidden Threat of Text Watermarking from Users with Cross-Lingual Knowledge

In this study, we delve into the hidden threats posed to text watermarking by users with cross-lingual knowledge. While most research focuses on watermarking methods for English, there is a significant gap in evaluating these methods in cross-lingual contexts. This oversight neglects critical adversary scenarios involving cross-lingual users, creating uncertainty regarding the effectiveness of cross-lingual watermarking. We assess four watermarking techniques across four linguistically rich languages, examining watermark resilience and text quality across various parameters and attacks. Our focus is on a realistic scenario featuring adversaries with cross-lingual expertise, evaluating the adequacy of current watermarking methods against such challenges.

Stacking Neural Network Models for Automatic Short Answer Scoring

Automatic short answer scoring is one of the text classification problems to assess students' answers during exams automatically. Several challenges can arise in making an automatic short answer scoring system, one of which is the quantity and quality of the data. The data labeling process is not easy because it requires a human annotator who is an expert in their field. Further, the data imbalance process is also a challenge because the number of labels for correct answers is always much less than the wrong answers. In this paper, we propose the use of a stacking model based on neural network and XGBoost for classification process with sentence embedding feature. We also propose to use data upsampling method to handle imbalance classes and hyperparameters optimization algorithm to find a robust model automatically. We use Ukara 1.0 Challenge dataset and our best model obtained an F1-score of 0.821 exceeding the previous work at the same dataset.