Halo: Estimation and Reduction of Hallucinations in Open-Source Weak Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP). Although convenient for research and practical applications, open-source LLMs with fewer parameters often suffer from severe hallucinations compared to their larger counterparts. This paper focuses on measuring and reducing hallucinations in BLOOM 7B, a representative of such weaker open-source LLMs that are publicly available for research and commercial applications. We introduce HaloCheck, a lightweight BlackBox knowledge-free framework designed to quantify the severity of hallucinations in LLMs. Additionally, we explore techniques like knowledge injection and teacher-student approaches to alleviate hallucinations in low-parameter LLMs. Our experiments effectively demonstrate the reduction of hallucinations in challenging domains for these LLMs

Towards an integrative framework of leadership development in the South African banking industry

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The thesis is a qualitative, multi-site case study of leadership development within the South African retail banking sector. It responds to the call for qualitative research to explore and give voice to the South African and other developing contexts within the predominantly Western-centric literature. It poses questions on the day-to-day organisational and lived realities of leadership and its development within this context. It is an enquiry of the forms and realities of aligning, designing and integrating leadership development, which leads to deliberation on the possibility of integrative frameworks. This follows from the thesis drawing together the reviews of the state of leadership and leadership development and how the thematic of alignment and integration is approached therein and within the human resource, management and organisational literature. Through this it develops an argument that the mainstream assumptions and programme-based approach to leadership development, including the remedial attempts to address this, do not provide the space to theoretically and empirically attend to, and engage with, the realities, complexities, contingencies and contestations at the individual, team, organisational, sector, national and global levels. The thesis explores this within the South African retail banking sector. This is done through qualitative interviews on, and thematic analysis of, the various mandates, purposes, funding and ways of configuring and managing leadership development within the banks’ Leadership Development Centres and the Banking Sector Education and Training Authority’s (BankSeta) International Executive Development Programme (IEDP) which is hosted at a local Business School. The thesis explores how leadership development is formalised, shaped, configured and managed as a function, purpose, programme and developmental process within the above sites, and how these are navigated, negotiated, enacted and embodied over time by the various stakeholders. It draws out the thematic of layered journeys; that is, the evolving and ongoing organisational, programmatic, pedagogic, personal and individualised journeys within the banks, BankSeta and the Business School. The journeys illustrate how leadership development evolves, opens up and differentiates over time at the different sites and levels as well as foregrounds the realities, complexities, contingencies and contestations therein. Through these journeys one appreciates the varied forms, perspectives, basis, sites, agency and spaces for designing and integrating leadership development and how these evolve, including how the standardisation, tailoring and customisation evolves. The deliberate, emergent, contingent and relational nature of designing and integrating, and the journey’s thematic, point to the limits of the mainstream assumptions and programme-based approach to leadership development. The thesis suggests a critical theoretical stance as an alternative as it provides space to critically attend to, engage with, and undertake the journey, task and process of aligning, designing, integrating and managing leadership development. It proposes ways to locate this task and process within the integrative theoretical models of leadership and the fields of instructional design, curriculum design and design of artefacts as well as the literature on the evolving human resources function, the identity work therein, and on space and place. It then suggests an organising model that can serve both as a guide for developing an open, modular platform and an analytical framework. In this way, the thesis contributes to the question and task of integrative frameworks of leadership development. Keywords: context, post-Apartheid, banking, leadership, leadership development, alignment, design, customisation, integration, pedagogy, journey, programme, function, centre, modular, platformGR201

Recent studies in the nineteenth century

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the nineteenth century and some general observations on the state of the profession.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Language modeling approaches to question answering

In today’s environment of information overload, Question Answering (QA) is a critically important research area. QA is the task of automatically extracting a precise answer from one or more data sources to a question posed in natural language. A twostage strategy is typically adopted when designing a QA system; the first stage is an Information Retrieval (IR) process which returns a set of candidate documents relevant to the question and the second stage narrows the information contained in those passages down to a single response (sentence or entity) that answers the question, typically using Information Extraction (IE) or Natural Language Processing methods. This research proposes novel techniques for QA by enhancing the user’s original query with latent semantic information from the corpus. This enhanced query is then applied to both the first and second stages of the QA architecture. To build the enhanced query, we propose the Aspect-Based Relevance Language Model as an approach that uses statistical language modeling techniques to measure the likelihood of relevance of a concept (oraspect as defined by Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis) to a question. We then use terms from the aspects that have the highest likelihood of relevance to design a model for a semantic Question Context, which includes sense-disambiguated terms than amplify the user’s query. Question Context is incorporated into the first state of QA as query expansion to improve recall. We then derive a novel measure called Answer Credibility from the Question Context. Answer Credibility may be thought of as a statistical measure of the reliability of a candidate answer with respect to a question and the source text from which the candidate answer was derived. We incorporate Answer Credibility in the Answer Validation process; the answer with the highest score after the application of Answer Credibility is returned to the user. Our techniques show performance improvements over state-of-the-art approaches, and have the advantage that they use statistical techniques to derive semantic information to aid the process of QA.Ph.D., Information Science and Technology -- Drexel University, 200

Data Mining in Promoting Flight Safety

The incredible rapid development to huge volumes of air travel, mainly because of jet airliners that appeared to the sky in the 1950s, created the need for systematic research for aviation safety and collecting data about air traffic. The structured data can be analysed easily using queries from databases and running theseresults through graphic tools. However, in analysing narratives that often give more accurate information about the case, mining tools are needed. The analysis of textual data with computers has not been possible until data mining tools have been developed. Their use, at least among aviation, is still at a moderate level. The research aims at discovering lethal trends in the flight safety reports. The narratives of 1,200 flight safety reports from years 1994 – 1996 in Finnish were processed with three text mining tools. One of them was totally language independent, the other had a specific configuration for Finnish and the third originally created for English, but encouraging results had been achieved with Spanish and that is why a Finnish test was undertaken, too. The global rate of accidents is stabilising and the situation can now be regarded as satisfactory, but because of the growth in air traffic, the absolute number of fatal accidents per year might increase, if the flight safety will not be improved. The collection of data and reporting systems have reached their top level. The focal point in increasing the flight safety is analysis. The air traffic has generally been forecasted to grow 5 – 6 per cent annually over the next two decades. During this period, the global air travel will probably double also with relatively conservative expectations of economic growth. This development makes the airline management confront growing pressure due to increasing competition, signify cant rise in fuel prices and the need to reduce the incident rate due to expected growth in air traffic volumes. All this emphasises the urgent need for new tools and methods. All systems provided encouraging results, as well as proved challenges still to be won. Flight safety can be improved through the development and utilisation of sophisticated analysis tools and methods, like data mining, using its results supporting the decision process of the executives.Lentoliikenne kasvoi huomattavasti 1950-luvulla pääasiassa suihkumatkustajakoneiden myötä, mikä aiheutti poikkeamatietojen järjestelmällisen keräämisen ja tutkimuksen tarpeen. Määrämuotoinen tieto voidaan helposti analysoida tietokantakyselyillä esittäen tulokset käyttäen graafisia työkaluja, mutta tekstianalyysiin, jonka avulla tapauksista saadaan usein tarkempia tietoja, tarvitaan louhintatyökaluja. Tekstimuotoisen tiedon automaattinen analysointi ei ole ollut mahdollista ennen louhintatyökalujen kehittämistä. Silti niiden käyttö, ainakin ilmailun piirissä, on edelleen vähäistä. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli havaita vaarallisia kehityskulkuja lentoturvallisuusraporteissa. 1 200 lentoturvallisuusraportin selostusosiot vuosilta 1994 –1996 käsiteltiin kolmella tekstinlouhintatyökalulla. Yksi näistä oli täysin kieliriippumaton, toisessa oli lisäosa, jossa oli mahdollisuus käsitellä suomen kieltä ja kolmas oli rakennettu alun perin ainoastaan englanninkielisen tekstin louhintaan, mutta espanjan kielellä saavutettujen rohkaisevien tulosten pohjalta päätettiin kokeilla myös suomenkielistä tekstiä. Lento-onnettomuuksien määrä liikenteeseen nähden on vakiintumassa maailmanlaajuisesti katsottuna ja turvallisuustaso voidaan katsoa tyydyttäväksi. Kuitenkin liikenteen kasvaessa myös onnettomuuksien määrä lisääntyy vuosittain, mikäli lentoturvallisuutta ei kyetä parantamaan. Turvallisuustiedon kerääminen ja raportointijärjestelmät ovat jo saavuttaneet huippunsa. Analysoinnin parantaminen on avain lentoturvallisuuden parantamiseen. Lentoliikenteen on ennustettu kasvavan 5 – 6 prosenttia vuodessa seuraavien kahden vuosikymmenen ajan. Samana aikana lentoliikenne saattaa kaksinkertaistua jopa vaatimattomimpien talouskasvuennusteiden mukaan. Tällainen kehitys asettaa lentoliikenteen päättäjille yhä kasvavia paineita kiristyvän kilpailun, polttoaineiden hinnannousun ja liikenteen kasvun aiheuttaman onnettomuuksien määrän vähentämiseksi. Tämä korostaa uusien menetelmien ja työkalujen kiireellistä tarvetta. Kaikilla louhintajärjestelmillä saatiin rohkaisevia tuloksia mutta ne nostivat samalla esille haasteita, jotka tulisi vielä voittaa. Lentoturvallisuutta voidaan vielä parantaa käyttämällä tässä esille tuotuja analyysimenetelmiä ja –työkaluja kuten tiedonlouhintaa ja soveltamalla näin saatuja tuloksia johdon päätöksenteon tukena.Siirretty Doriast