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Unsupervised Question Answering: Challenges, Trends, and Outlook
No full textQuestion answering (QA) is considered to be a central aspect of natural language processing (NLP) and has seen remarkable progress in the last decade, brought-about by transformer-based language models trained on large human-annotated text corpora. However, several pitfalls of supervised training have been identified, especially when considering performance of such systems on new domains, linguistic styles, and adversarial samples. Unsupervised question answering – the ability to answer questions without explicit supervision from human-annotated training data, has emerged as a research direcftion that could potentially mitigate these pitfalls. This paper reviews recent trends in unsupervised question answering and provides a unifying perspective of work in this area, along with a survey of the closely related directions of weakly and partially supervised QA models. We provide insights into associated challenges and potential research directions towards robust unsupervised QA models.https://pratyay-banerjee.github.io/files/QA_Survey.pd
Introduction to the Special Issue on Large Language Models, Conversational Systems, and Generative AI in Health - Part 1
No full textDialogue systems are designed to offer human users social support or functional services through natural language interactions. Traditional conversation research has put significant emphasis on a system’s response-ability, including its capacity to understand dialogue context and generate appropriate responses. However, the key element of proactive behavior—a crucial aspect of intelligent conversations—is often overlooked in these studies. Proactivity empowers conversational agents to lead conversations towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling specific goals on the system side. Proactive dialogue systems are equipped with advanced techniques to handle complex tasks, requiring strategic and motivational interactions, thus representing a significant step towards artificial general intelligence. Motivated by the necessity and challenges of building proactive dialogue systems, we provide a comprehensive review of various prominent problems and advanced designs for implementing proactivity into different types of dialogue systems, including open-domain dialogues, task-oriented dialogues, and information-seeking dialogues. We also discuss real-world challenges that require further research attention to meet application needs in the future, such as proactivity in dialogue systems that are based on large language models, proactivity in hybrid dialogues, evaluation protocols and ethical considerations for proactive dialogue systems. By providing a quick access and overall picture of the proactive dialogue systems domain, we aim to inspire new research directions and stimulate further advancements towards achieving the next level of conversational AI capabilities, paving the way for more dynamic and intelligent interactions within various application domains.https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/372345
Broadway, the Media, and Framing Theory
No full textThis paper examines the growing relationship between Broadway and media, with a focus on the way media framing is used to portray historical Broadway shows that include difficult topics. Using reviews from internal and external publications of shows, this paper analyzes the specific media frames portrayed for each show. It also analyzes emerging trends and the future of the relationship between Broadway and the media.
All publications cited were selected for their geographical relevance to Broadway, and history of covering Broadway shows up to the relevant review. Newspapers include The New York Times, Variety, Playbill, New York Magazine, Dance Magazine, and The Washington Post and Times Herald. Reviews were largely pulled from the database Newspapers.Com, and were published within the first month following the show’s debut. This paper specifically covers the shows West Side Story, Hair, Rent, and The Colour Purple
Characterization of papillomaviruses in African Lions (Panthera leo): A Look at Tanzania
No full textResearch into the characterization of papillomaviruses is a growing field that has yielded valuable results for the human species in the form of treatments such as vaccines. Other species, such as the Felidae family, have yet to receive as much characterization as human papillomavirus (HPV). Particularly, reports of FPV for the African lion (Panthera leo) species is nonexistent which this project attempted to resolve with a characterization of papillomavirus in this species. To this end, samples were collected from African lions in Serengeti National Park for characterization. The L1 sequence of these samples were amplified using PCR and cleaned before undergoing phylogenetic and distance analysis to determine any potential variation in the reference sequence. The results of this study have identified three novel papillomavirus types in the African lion species. For the types identified, it is proposed that they be classified under “Panthera leo Papillomavirus” of the Lambdapapillomavirus genus, abbreviated as “PlePV”
Dèyè mòn, gen mòn: Qualitative Examination of Drivers and Facilitators of Stigma as a Barrier to Sexual and Maternal Healthcare in Haiti
No full textHaitian women face heightened risk of contracting HIV and encounter challenges in accessing quality care due to sociocultural and economic barriers. Stigma compounds these challenges, especially for pregnant women living with HIV. Globally, HIV-related stigma is a recognized barrier to testing, treatment, and prevention, contributing to low testing rates and substandard treatment and care. This study examines sources and origins of stigma that impact pregnant women's access to and experience with sexual and maternal healthcare. Qualitative data was collected from 85 participants via focus groups with HIV-positive pregnant women (n = 26) and HIV-negative pregnant women (n = 35). We also conducted 24 interviews with maternal health care providers, HIV prevention specialists, and traditional healers. We used thematic analysis to identify key themes related to drivers and facilitators of stigma and its impact on access to healthcare among pregnant women in rural Haiti. Drivers of stigma were: 1) Lack of Knowledge, 2) Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Blaming People Living with HIV (PLHIV), 3) Lack of Hospital Resources and Protocols. Facilitators of stigma were: 1) Underdeveloped Healthcare Infrastructure, 2) Classism, 3) Healthcare as a Commodity, 4) Hospital Policies and Practices, and 5) Patriarchal Society. Each of these facilitators uniquely influence HIV stigma experiences and practices. Our study identified complex multilevel drivers and facilitators of HIV and class related stigma and its impact on sexual and maternal healthcare access in Haiti, emphasizing the need for more comprehensive interventions that address psycho-socio-cultural determinants of health.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266732152500034
Extragalactic Magnetar Giant Flares: Population Implications, Rates, and Prospects for Gamma-Rays, Gravitational Waves, and Neutrinos
No full textMagnetar giant flares (MGFs) are the most energetic non-catastrophic transients known to originate from stellar objects. The first discovered events were nearby. In recent years, several extragalactic events have been identified, implying an extremely high volumetric rate. We show that future instruments with a sensitivity ≲5 × 10⁻⁹ erg cm⁻² at ∼1 MeV will be dominated by extragalactic MGFs over short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs). Clear discrimination of MGFs requires intrinsic GRB localization capability to identify host galaxies. As MGFs involve a release of a sizable fraction of the neutron star's magnetic free energy reservoir in a single event, they provide us with invaluable tools for better understanding magnetar birth properties and the evolution of their magnetic fields. A major obstacle is to identify a (currently) small subpopulation of MGFs in a larger sample of more energetic and distant sGRBs. We develop the tools to analyze the properties of detected events and their occurrence rate relative to sGRBs. Even with the current (limited) number of events, we can constrain the initial internal magnetic field of a typical magnetar at formation to be B₀ ≈ 4 × 10¹⁴–2 × 10¹⁵ G. Larger samples will constrain the distribution of birth fields. We also estimate the contribution of MGFs to the gravitational-wave (GW) stochastic background. Depending on the acceleration time of baryon-loaded ejecta involved in MGFs, their GW emission may reach beyond 10 kHz and, if so, will likely dominate over other conventional astrophysical sources in that frequency range.We thank Sam Lander, Abhishek Desai, Jessie Thwaites, Marcos Santander, Dan Kocevski, and Cole Miller for helpful discussions. P.B. acknowledges support from a NASA grant 80NSSC24K0770, grant No. 2020747 from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel and by grant No. 1649/23 from the Israel Science Foundation. C.C. and Z.W. acknowledge support by NASA under award Nos. 80GSFC21M0002 and 80GSFC24M0006. This research has made use of the NASA Astrophysics Data System.https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ada94
The Proxima Centauri Campaign—First Constraints on Millimeter Flare Rates from ALMA
No full textProxima Centauri (Cen) has been the subject of many flaring studies due to its proximity and potential to host habitable planets. The discovery of millimeter flares from this M dwarf with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has opened a new window into the flaring process and the space-weather environments of exoplanets like Proxima b. Using a total of ~50 hr of ALMA observations of Proxima Cen at 1.3 mm (233 GHz), we add a new piece to the stellar flaring picture and report the first cumulative flare frequency distribution (FFD) at millimeter wavelengths of any M dwarf. We detect 463 flares ranging from energies 10²⁴ to 10²⁷ erg. The brightest and most energetic flare in our sample reached a flux density of 119 ± 7 mJy, increasing by a factor of 1000× the quiescent flux, and reaching an energy of 10²⁷ erg in the ALMA bandpass, with t₁/₂ ≈ 16 s. From a log–log linear regression fit to the FFD, we obtain a power-law index of αFFD = 2.92 ± 0.02, much steeper than αFFD values (~2) observed at X-ray to optical wavelengths. If millimeter flare rates are predictive of flare rates at extreme-UV wavelengths, the contribution of small flares to the radiation environment of Proxima b may be much higher than expected based on the shallower power-law slopes observed at optical wavelengths.M.A.M. acknowledges support for part of this research from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under award number 19-ICAR19_2-0041. T.B. acknowledges support from the GSFC Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC), which is funded in part by the NASA Planetary Science Divisions Internal Scientist Funding Model.https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ada5f
In “Heinsight”: Breaking Ground on Advocacy for Academic Library Database Trials Using HeinOnline
No full textHeinOnline is a legal research database much like NexisUni or Westlaw. HeinOnline is a commercial legal research database used for searching case law, law review articles, proceedings, government documents and more. The Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery (AOK), which is the heart of the research campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which, at the time of writing this piece, subscribed to 446 databases, only one of which covered legal research. Though not a law library, AOK had been formerly using NexisUni from July 2017 to June 2023. The two authors, a faculty librarian and a library services specialist–decided to address this deficit by closely documenting the onboarding process of HeinOnline from trial to acquisition. At their institution, there has been little to no documentation recorded that outlined the necessary steps and checkpoints needed for a database trial. The Reference team noted that the previous database, NexisUni, was not only costly (especially at a university without a law program), but that the user interface and search functions could be improved. The authors recognized that, by closely documenting the process of offering a new database and measuring faculty and student engagement, they could establish the groundwork for standardizing database trials as well as provide insights for other librarians as they consider evaluating or adding new databases.https://creativelibrarypractice.org/2025/03/02/in-heinsight
Elvis: A Highly Scalable Virtual Internet Simulator
No full textElvis is a highly scalable virtual Internet simulator that can simulate up to a hundred thousand networked machines communicating over TCP/IP on a single off-the-shelf desktop computer. This research describes the construction of Elvis in Rust, a new memory-safe systems programming language, and the design patterns that enabled us to reach scalability targets. Traffic in the simulation is generated from models based on user behavior research and profiling of large web servers. Additionally, a Network Description Language (NDL) was designed to describe large Internet simulations.https://irojournals.com/iroei/article/view/6/4/
Hydrogen escaping from a pair of exoplanets smaller than Neptune
No full textExoplanet surveys have shown a class of abundant exoplanets smaller than Neptune on close, <100-day orbits1,2,3,4. These planets form two populations separated by a natural division at about 1.8 R⊕ termed the radius valley. It is uncertain whether these populations arose from separate dry versus water-rich formation channels, evolved apart because of long-term atmospheric loss or a combination of both5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14. Here we report observations of ongoing hydrogen loss from two sibling planets, TOI-776 b (1.85 ± 0.13 R⊕) and TOI-776 c (2.02 ± 0.14 R⊕), the sizes of which near the radius valley and mature (1–4 Gyr) age make them valuable for investigating the origins of the divided population of which they are a part. During the transits of these planets, absorption appeared against the Lyman-α emission of the host star, compatible with hydrogen escape at rates equivalent to 0.03–0.6% and 0.1–0.9% of the total mass per billion years of each planet, respectively. Observations of the outer planet, TOI-776 c, are incompatible with an outflow of dissociated steam, suggesting both it and its inner sibling formed in a dry environment. These observations support the strong role of hydrogen loss in the evolution of close-orbiting sub-Neptunes5,6,7,8,15,16.Contributions by R.O.P.L were supported by NASA through programme HST-GO-16456. Additional support for R.O.P.L., M.I.B. and R.M.-C. was provided through programme HST-GO-16731. These programmes are administered through grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Associations of Universities for Research in Astronomy, under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. E.S. and J.E.O. received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 853022, PEVAP). J.E.O. is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Contributions by S.P. were supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC24M0006. R.M.-C. and E.S. acknowledge support from NASA XRP grant 80NSSC23K0282. This research is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA HST, obtained from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, under NASA contract NAS 526555. These observations are associated with programmes 16456 and 16701. We thank R. Burn et al. for sharing detailed results of their formation–evolution model.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08490-