As online platforms and recommendation algorithms evolve, people are increasingly trapped in echo chambers, leading to biased understandings of various issues. To combat this issue, we have introduced PerSphere, a benchmark designed to facilitate multi-faceted perspective retrieval and summarization, thus breaking free from these information silos. For each query within PerSphere, there are two opposing claims, each supported by distinct, non-overlapping perspectives drawn from one or more documents. Our goal is to accurately summarize these documents, aligning the summaries with the respective claims and their underlying perspectives. This task is structured as a two-step end-to-end pipeline that includes comprehensive document retrieval and multi-faceted summarization. Furthermore, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the retrieval and summarization content. Experimental results on various counterparts for the pipeline show that recent models struggle with such a complex task. Analysis shows that the main challenge lies in long context and perspective extraction, and we propose a simple but effective multi-agent summarization system, offering a promising solution to enhance performance on PerSphere.

Yun Luo, Zhen Yang, Fandong Meng, Yingjie Li, Fang Guo, Qinglin Qi, Jie Zhou, Yue Zhang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Recently, along with the wide application of new generation information technologies (New IT) in manufacturing, many countries issued their national advanced manufacturing development strategies, such as Industrial Internet, Industry 4.0, and Made in China 2025. One common aim of these strategies is to achieve smart manufacturing, which demands the interoperation, integration, and fusion of the physical world and the cyber world of manufacturing. As well, New IT [such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data, mobile Internet, and cyber-physical systems (CPS)] have played pivotal roles in promoting smart manufacturing. Data generated in the physical world can be sensed and transfered to the cyber world through IoT and the Internet, and be processed and analyzed by cloud computing, big data technologies to adjust the physical world. The physical world and the cyber world of manufacturing are integrated based on CPS. On the other hand, servitization has become a prominent trend in the manufacturing. Embracing the concept of “Manufacturing-as-a-Service,” manufacturing is provided as service for users. Because of the characteristics of interoperability and platform independence, services pave the way for large-scale smart applications and manufacturing collaboration. Combining New IT and services, this paper proposes a framework-New IT driven service-oriented smart manufacturing (SoSM). SoSM aims at facilitating the visions of smart manufacturing by making full use of New IT and services. Complementary to the framework of SoSM, the New IT driven typical characteristics of SoSM are also investigated and discussed, respectively.

Smart manufacturing is increasingly becoming the common goal of various national strategies. Smart interconnection is one of the most important issues for implementing smart manufacturing. However, current solutions are not tended to realize smart interconnection in dealing with heterogeneous equipment, quick configuration and implementation, and online service generation. To solve the issues, industrial Internet-of-Things hub (IIHub) is proposed, which consists of customized access module (CA-Module), access hub (A-Hub), and local service pool (LSP). A set of flexible CA-Modules can be configured or programed to connect heterogeneous physical manufacturing resources. Besides, the IIHub supports manufacturing services online generation based on the service encapsulation templates and also supports quick configuration and implementation for smart interconnection. Furthermore, related smart analysis and precise management have the potential to be achieved. Finally, a prototype is given to illustrate the functions of the proposed IIHub, and to show how IIHub realizes smart interconnection.