Combining conversational AI with refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) offers significant potential for creating accessible data visualization for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). To support researchers and developers building accessible data visualizations with RTDs, we present a multimodal data interaction architecture along with an open-source reference implementation. Our system is the first to combine touch input with a conversational agent on an RTD, enabling deictic queries that fuse touch context with spoken language, such as "what is the trend between these points?" The architecture addresses key technical challenges, including touch sensing on RTDs, visual-to-tactile encoding, integrating touch context with conversational AI, and synchronizing multimodal output. Our contributions are twofold: (1) a technical architecture integrating RTD hardware, external touch sensing, and conversational AI to enable multimodal data interaction; and (2) an open-source reference implementation demonstrating its feasibility. This work provides a technical foundation to support future research in multimodal accessible data visualization.

The distractor generation task focuses on generating incorrect but plausible options for objective questions such as fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions.This task is widely utilized in educational settings across various domains and subjects.The effectiveness of these questions in assessments relies on the quality of the distractors, as they challenge examinees to select the correct answer from a set of misleading options.The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has transitioned the task from traditional methods to the use of neural networks and pre-trained language models.This shift has established new benchmarks and expanded the use of advanced deep learning methods in generating distractors.This survey explores distractor generation tasks, datasets, methods, and current evaluation metrics for English objective questions, covering both textbased and multi-modal domains.It also evaluates existing AI models and benchmarks and discusses potential future research directions 1 .Distractor Generation Survey Evaluation (4) Automatic (4.1) Manual (4.2) Auto Metrics N-gram based (4.1.2)E.g.BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) Ranking-based (4.1.1)E.g.NDCG (Järvelin and Kekäläinen, 2002) Methods (3) AI Models Other Models (3.4)

Having an intelligent dialogue agent that can engage in conversational question answering (ConvQA) is now no longer limited to Sci-Fi movies only and has, in fact, turned into a reality. These intelligent agents are required to understand and correctly interpret the sequential turns provided as the context of the given question. However, these sequential questions are sometimes left implicit and thus require the resolution of some natural language phenomena such as anaphora and ellipsis. The task of question rewriting has the potential to address the challenges of resolving dependencies amongst the contextual turns by transforming them into intent-explicit questions. Nonetheless, the solution of rewriting the implicit questions comes with some potential challenges such as resulting in verbose questions and taking conversational aspect out of the scenario by generating the self-contained questions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, CONVSR (CONVQA using Structured Representations) for capturing and generating intermediate representations as conversational cues to enhance the capability of the QA model to better interpret the incomplete questions. We also deliberate how the strengths of this task could be leveraged in a bid to design more engaging and more eloquent conversational agents. We test our model on the QuAC and CANARD data sets and illustrate by experimental results that our proposed framework achieves a better Fl score than the standard question rewriting model.

Abstract Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on conversational question answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy a user’s information needs. While the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers over the recent years. Our findings show that there has been a trend shift from single-turn to multi-turn QA which empowers the field of Conversational AI from different perspectives. This survey is intended to provide an epitome for the research community with the hope of laying a strong foundation for the field of CQA.

With the explosive growth of online information, many recommendation methods have been proposed. This research direction is boosted with deep learning architectures, especially the recently proposed Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). GCNs have shown tremendous potential in graph embedding learning thanks to its inductive inference property. However, most of the existing GCN based methods focus on solving tasks in the homogeneous graph settings, and none of them considers heterogeneous graph settings. In this paper, we bridge the gap by developing a novel framework called HeteGraph based on the GCN principles. HeteGraph can handle heterogeneous graphs in the recommender systems. Specifically, we propose a sampling technique and a graph convolutional operation to learn high quality graph's node embeddings, which differs from the traditional GCN approaches where a full graph adjacency matrix is needed for the embedding learning. For evaluation, we design two models based on the HeteGraph framework to evaluate two important recommendation tasks, namely item rating prediction and diversified item recommendations. Extensive experiments show our HeteGraph's encouraging performance on the first task and state-of-the-art performance on the second task.

The emerging paradigm of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has transformed the traditional notion of the Internet of Things (IoT) into a social network of billions of interconnected smart objects by integrating social networking facets into the same. In SIoT, objects can establish social relationships in an autonomous manner and interact with the other objects in the network based on their social behaviour. A fundamental problem that needs attention is establishing of these relationships in a reliable and trusted way, i.e., establishing trustworthy relationships and building trust amongst objects. In addition, it is also indispensable to ascertain and predict an object’s behaviour in the SIoT network over a period of time. Accordingly, in this paper, we have proposed an efficient time-aware machine learning-driven trust evaluation model to address this particular issue. The envisaged model deliberates social relationships in terms of friendship and community-interest, and further takes into consideration the working relationships and cooperativeness (object-object interactions) as trust parameters to quantify the trustworthiness of an object. Subsequently, in contrast to the traditional weighted sum heuristics, a machine learning-driven aggregation scheme is delineated to synthesize these trust parameters to ascertain a single trust score. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can efficiently segregates the trustworthy and untrustworthy objects within a network, and further provides the insight on how the trust of an object varies with time along with depicting the effect of each trust parameter on a trust score.