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Residential outdoor water use in North America accounts for nearly 9 billion gallons daily, with approximately 50\% of this water wasted due to over-watering, particularly in lawns and gardens. This inefficiency highlights the need for smart, data-driven irrigation systems. Traditional approaches to reducing water wastage have focused on centralized data collection and processing, but such methods can raise privacy concerns and may not account for the diverse environmental conditions across different regions. In this paper, we propose a federated learning-based approach to optimize water usage in residential and agricultural settings. By integrating moisture sensors and actuators with a distributed network of edge devices, our system allows each user to locally train a model on their specific environmental data while sharing only model updates with a central server. This preserves user privacy and enables the creation of a global model that can adapt to varying conditions. Our implementation leverages low-cost hardware, including an Arduino Uno microcontroller and soil moisture sensors, to demonstrate how federated learning can be applied to reduce water wastage while maintaining efficient crop production. The proposed system not only addresses the need for water conservation but also provides a scalable, privacy-preserving solution adaptable to diverse environments.

Medication nonadherence significantly reduces the effectiveness of therapies, yet it remains prevalent among patients. Nonadherence has been linked to adverse outcomes, including increased risks of mortality and hospitalization. Although various methods exist to help patients track medication schedules, such as the Intelligent Drug Administration System (IDAS) and Smart Blister, these tools often face challenges that hinder their commercial viability. Building on the principles of dosage measurement and information communication in IoT, we introduce the Smart Pill Case a smart health adherence tool that leverages RFID-based data recording and NFC-based data extraction. This system incorporates a load cell for precise dosage measurement and features an Android app to monitor medication intake, offer suggestions, and issue warnings. To enhance the effectiveness and personalization of the Smart Pill Case, we propose integrating federated learning into the system. Federated learning allows the Smart Pill Case to learn from medication adherence patterns across multiple users without compromising individual privacy. By training machine learning models on decentralized data collected from various Smart Pill Cases, the system can continuously improve its recommendations and warnings, adapting to the diverse needs and behaviors of users. This approach not only enhances the tools ability to support medication adherence but also ensures that sensitive user data remains secure and private.

The rise of computer vision applications in the real world puts the security of the deep neural networks at risk. Recent works demonstrate that convolutional neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples - where the input images look similar to the natural images but are classified incorrectly by the model. To provide a rebuttal to this problem, we propose a new method to build robust deep neural networks against adversarial attacks by reformulating the saddle point optimization problem in \cite{madry2017towards}. Our proposed method offers significant resistance and a concrete security guarantee against multiple adversaries. The goal of this paper is to act as a stepping stone for a new variation of deep learning models which would lead towards fully robust deep learning models.

Kurdish, an Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers, is considered a dialect continuum and known for its diversity in language varieties. Previous studies addressing language and speech technology for Kurdish handle it in a monolithic way as a macro-language, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are few resources and tools available. In this paper, we take a step towards developing resources for language and speech technology for varieties of Central Kurdish, creating a corpus by transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. Additionally, we report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification as downstream tasks evaluated on Central Kurdish varieties. Data and models are publicly available under an open license at https://github.com/sinaahmadi/CORDI., Comment: Accepted to LREC-COLING 2024

The availability of parallel texts is crucial to the performance of machine translation models. However, most of the world's languages face the predominant challenge of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose strategies to synthesize parallel data relying on morpho-syntactic information and using bilingual lexicons along with a small amount of seed parallel data. Our methodology adheres to a realistic scenario backed by the small parallel seed data. It is linguistically informed, as it aims to create augmented data that is more likely to be grammatically correct. We analyze how our synthetic data can be combined with raw parallel data and demonstrate a consistent improvement in performance in our experiments on 14 languages (28 English <-> X pairs) ranging from well- to very low-resource ones. Our method leads to improvements even when using only five seed sentences and a bilingual lexicon.

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems exhibit limited robustness in handling source-side linguistic variations. Their performance tends to degrade when faced with even slight deviations in language usage, such as different domains or variations introduced by second-language speakers. It is intuitive to extend this observation to encompass dialectal variations as well, but the work allowing the community to evaluate MT systems on this dimension is limited. To alleviate this issue, we compile and release CODET, a contrastive dialectal benchmark encompassing 891 different variations from twelve different languages. We also quantitatively demonstrate the challenges large MT models face in effectively translating dialectal variants. All the data and code have been released.

The wide accessibility of social media has provided linguistically under-represented communities with an extraordinary opportunity to create content in their native languages. This, however, comes with certain challenges in script normalization, particularly where the speakers of a language in a bilingual community rely on another script or orthography to write their native language. This paper addresses the problem of script normalization for several such languages that are mainly written in a Perso-Arabic script. Using synthetic data with various levels of noise and a transformer-based model, we demonstrate that the problem can be effectively remediated. We conduct a small-scale evaluation of real data as well. Our experiments indicate that script normalization is also beneficial to improve the performance of downstream tasks such as machine translation and language identification., Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying and extracting subjective information from text. Despite the advances to employ cross-lingual approaches in an automatic way, the implementation and evaluation of sentiment analysis systems require language-specific data to consider various sociocultural and linguistic peculiarities. In this paper, the collection and annotation of a dataset are described for sentiment analysis of Central Kurdish. We explore a few classical machine learning and neural network-based techniques for this task. Additionally, we employ an approach in transfer learning to leverage pretrained models for data augmentation. We demonstrate that data augmentation achieves a high F$_1$ score and accuracy despite the difficulty of the task., Comment: 14 pages - under review at ACM TALLIP

The Perso-Arabic scripts are a family of scripts that are widely adopted and used by various linguistic communities around the globe. Identifying various languages using such scripts is crucial to language technologies and challenging in low-resource setups. As such, this paper sheds light on the challenges of detecting languages using Perso-Arabic scripts, especially in bilingual communities where ``unconventional'' writing is practiced. To address this, we use a set of supervised techniques to classify sentences into their languages. Building on these, we also propose a hierarchical model that targets clusters of languages that are more often confused by the classifiers. Our experiment results indicate the effectiveness of our solutions., Comment: 13 pages - accepted at VarDial at EACL 2023

One of the major challenges that under-represented and endangered language communities face in language technology is the lack or paucity of language data. This is also the case of the Southern varieties of the Kurdish and Laki languages for which very limited resources are available with insubstantial progress in tools. To tackle this, we provide a few approaches that rely on the content of local news websites, a local radio station that broadcasts content in Southern Kurdish and fieldwork for Laki. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges of such under-represented languages, particularly in writing and standardization, and also, in retrieving sources of data and retro-digitizing handwritten content to create a corpus for Southern Kurdish and Laki. In addition, we study the task of language identification in light of the other variants of Kurdish and Zaza-Gorani languages., Comment: 12 pages, accepted at FieldMatters at EACL 2023

The focus of this thesis is broadly on the alignment of lexicographical data, particularly dictionaries. In order to tackle some of the challenges in this field, two main tasks of word sense alignment and translation inference are addressed. The first task aims to find an optimal alignment given the sense definitions of a headword in two different monolingual dictionaries. This is a challenging task, especially due to differences in sense granularity, coverage and description in two resources. After describing the characteristics of various lexical semantic resources, we introduce a benchmark containing 17 datasets of 15 languages where monolingual word senses and definitions are manually annotated across different resources by experts. In the creation of the benchmark, lexicographers' knowledge is incorporated through the annotations where a semantic relation, namely exact, narrower, broader, related or none, is selected for each sense pair. This benchmark can be used for evaluation purposes of word-sense alignment systems. The performance of a few alignment techniques based on textual and non-textual semantic similarity detection and semantic relation induction is evaluated using the benchmark. Finally, we extend this work to translation inference where translation pairs are induced to generate bilingual lexicons in an unsupervised way using various approaches based on graph analysis. This task is of particular interest for the creation of lexicographical resources for less-resourced and under-represented languages and also, assists in increasing coverage of the existing resources. From a practical point of view, the techniques and methods that are developed in this thesis are implemented within a tool that can facilitate the alignment task., Comment: Ph.D. thesis defended at NUI Galway (10.5281/zenodo.5559522)

Spell checking and morphological analysis are two fundamental tasks in text and natural language processing and are addressed in the early stages of the development of language technology. Despite the previous efforts, there is no progress in open-source to create such tools for Sorani Kurdish, also known as Central Kurdish, as a less-resourced language. In this paper, we present our efforts in annotating a lexicon with morphosyntactic tags and also, extracting morphological rules of Sorani Kurdish to build a morphological analyzer, a stemmer and a spell-checking system using Hunspell. This implementation can be used for further developments in the field by researchers and also, be integrated into text editors under a publicly available license., Comment: 15 pages

Sorani Kurdish, also known as Central Kurdish, has a complex morphology, particularly due to the patterns in which morphemes appear. Although several aspects of Kurdish morphology have been studied, such as pronominal endoclitics and Izafa constructions, Sorani Kurdish morphology has received trivial attention in computational linguistics. Moreover, some morphemes, such as the emphasis endoclitic =\^i\c{s}, and derivational morphemes have not been previously studied. To tackle the complex morphology of Sorani, we provide a thorough description of Sorani Kurdish morphological and morphophonological constructions in a formal way such that they can be used as finite-state transducers for morphological analysis and synthesis., Comment: It should be noted that the current manuscript is being completed. Any suggestions or reporting of errors will be highly appreciated. 36 Pages

Machine translation is the task of translating texts from one language to another using computers. It has been one of the major tasks in natural language processing and computational linguistics and has been motivating to facilitate human communication. Kurdish, an Indo-European language, has received little attention in this realm due to the language being less-resourced. Therefore, in this paper, we are addressing the main issues in creating a machine translation system for the Kurdish language, with a focus on the Sorani dialect. We describe the available scarce parallel data suitable for training a neural machine translation model for Sorani Kurdish-English translation. We also discuss some of the major challenges in Kurdish language translation and demonstrate how fundamental text processing tasks, such as tokenization, can improve translation performance., Comment: 12 pages - under review in the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP)

Machine translation has been a major motivation of development in natural language processing. Despite the burgeoning achievements in creating more efficient machine translation systems thanks to deep learning methods, parallel corpora have remained indispensable for progress in the field. In an attempt to create parallel corpora for the Kurdish language, in this paper, we describe our approach in retrieving potentially-alignable news articles from multi-language websites and manually align them across dialects and languages based on lexical similarity and transliteration of scripts. We present a corpus containing 12,327 translation pairs in the two major dialects of Kurdish, Sorani and Kurmanji. We also provide 1,797 and 650 translation pairs in English-Kurmanji and English-Sorani. The corpus is publicly available under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license., Comment: 11 pages, under review in the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP) Corpus available at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/InterdialectCorpus

Morphological analysis is the study of the formation and structure of words. It plays a crucial role in various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL) such as machine translation and text and speech generation. Kurdish is a less-resourced multi-dialect Indo-European language with highly inflectional morphology. In this paper, as the first attempt of its kind, the morphology of the Kurdish language (Sorani dialect) is described from a computational point of view. We extract morphological rules which are transformed into finite-state transducers for generating and analyzing words. The result of this research assists in conducting studies on language generation for Kurdish and enhances the Information Retrieval (IR) capacity for the language while leveraging the Kurdish NLP and CL into a more advanced computational level., Comment: Manuscript submitted to ACM-TALLIP

Kurdish is a less-resourced language consisting of different dialects written in various scripts. Approximately 30 million people in different countries speak the language. The lack of corpora is one of the main obstacles in Kurdish language processing. In this paper, we present KTC-the Kurdish Textbooks Corpus, which is composed of 31 K-12 textbooks in Sorani dialect. The corpus is normalized and categorized into 12 educational subjects containing 693,800 tokens (110,297 types). Our resource is publicly available for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license., Comment: 4 pages, 1 table, 1 figure

In this article, we present a rule-based approach for transliterating two mostly used orthographies in Sorani Kurdish. Our work consists of detecting a character in a word by removing the possible ambiguities and mapping it into the target orthography. We describe different challenges in Kurdish text mining and propose novel ideas concerning the transliteration task for Sorani Kurdish. Our transliteration system, named Wergor, achieves 82.79% overall precision and more than 99% in detecting the double-usage characters. We also present a manually transliterated corpus for Kurdish., Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), 18:2

Morphological declension, which aims to inflect nouns to indicate number, case and gender, is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). This research proposal seeks to address the degree to which Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are efficient in learning to decline noun cases. Given the challenge of data sparsity in processing morphologically rich languages and also, the flexibility of sentence structures in such languages, we believe that modeling morphological dependencies can improve the performance of neural network models. It is suggested to carry out various experiments to understand the interpretable features that may lead to a better generalization of the learned models on cross-lingual tasks., Comment: 3 pages research proposal

The present paper aims at presenting a lemmatization and a word-level error correction system for Sorani Kurdish. We propose a hybrid approach based on the morphological rules and a n-gram language model. We have called our lemmatization and error correction systems Peyv and R\^en\^us respectively, which are the first tools presented for Sorani Kurdish to the best of our knowledge. The Peyv lemmatizer has shown 86.7% accuracy. As for R\^en\^us, using a lexicon, we have obtained 96.4% accuracy while without a lexicon, the correction system has 87% accuracy. As two fundamental text processing tools, these tools can pave the way for further researches on more natural language processing applications for Sorani Kurdish., Comment: 6 pages article, published in LTC'17 The 8th Language & Technology Conference, Poznan, Poland

Automatic spelling and grammatical correction systems are one of the most widely used tools within natural language applications. In this thesis, we assume the task of error correction as a type of monolingual machine translation where the source sentence is potentially erroneous and the target sentence should be the corrected form of the input. Our main focus in this project is building neural network models for the task of error correction. In particular, we investigate sequence-to-sequence and attention-based models which have recently shown a higher performance than the state-of-the-art of many language processing problems. We demonstrate that neural machine translation models can be successfully applied to the task of error correction. While the experiments of this research are performed on an Arabic corpus, our methods in this thesis can be easily applied to any language., Comment: 75 pages, 20 figures, submitted as a Master's thesis at the University of Paris Descartes