This survey provides an overview of the challenges of misspellings in natural language processing (NLP). Misspellings are ubiquitous in digital communication, and even if humans can generally interpret misspelt text, NLP models frequently struggle to handle it: this causes a decline in performance in common tasks like text classification and machine translation. In this paper, we reconstruct a history of misspellings as a scientific problem. We then discuss the latest advancements to address the challenge of misspellings in NLP. Main strategies to mitigate the effect of misspellings include data augmentation, double step, character-order agnostic, and tuple-based methods, among others. This survey also examines dedicated data challenges and competitions to spur progress in the field. Critical safety and ethical concerns are also examined, for example, the voluntary use of misspellings to inject malicious messages and hate speech on social networks. The survey also explores psycholinguistic perspectives on how humans process misspellings, potentially informing innovative computational techniques for text normalisation and representation. Additionally, the survey explores the challenges that misspellings pose in multilingual contexts. Finally, the misspelling-related challenges and opportunities associated with modern large language models are also analysed, including benchmarks, datasets and performances of the most prominent language models against misspellings. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent research on misspellings and aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to get up to speed on this problem within the rapidly evolving landscape of NLP.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a natural language processing task that traditionally relies on supervised learning and annotated data. Acquiring such data is often a challenge, particularly in specialized fields like medical, legal, and financial sectors. Those are commonly referred to as low-resource domains, which comprise long-tail entities, due to the scarcity of available data. To address this, data augmentation techniques are increasingly being employed to generate additional training instances from the original dataset. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of two prominent text augmentation techniques, Mention Replacement and Contextual Word Replacement, on two widely used NER models, Bi-LSTM + CRF and BERT. We conduct experiments on three datasets from low-resource domains, and we explore the impact of various combinations of training subset sizes and the number of augmented examples. We not only confirm that data augmentation is particularly beneficial for smaller datasets, but we also demonstrate that there is no universally optimal number of augmented examples, i.e., NER practitioners must experiment with different quantities in order to fine-tune their projects.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT), a subfield of Natural Language Processing, has seen significant advancements with the emergence of transformer architectures and generative artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable performance in various languages. However, translating Arabic dialects remains a notable challenge that becomes very pronounced primarily due to their morphological complexity and divergence from standardised grammatical rules. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for translating the Maghrebi dialects into/from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The approach takes advantage of the strengths of the transformer architecture and the BERT language model for transfer learning of representations. To achieve this, we incorporated BERT embeddings into the encoder and decoder stacks of the transformer architecture. The BERT architecture, which we utilised, was trained in a self-supervised manner on Maghrebi dialects and Arabic corpora. The resulting BLEU/BERTScore/ChrF/METEOR scores for the approach were 14.148/79.414/28.885/28.428 and 8.961/20.994/19.465 (BLEU/ChrF/METEOR) for the translation in both directions using the raw data, demonstrating competitive performance compared to ChatGPT and Gemini Large Language Models (LLMs). Furthermore, we evaluated the approach using an ablation study with fine-tuned NLLB-200 and against three combinations of tokeniser techniques used in conjunction with the transformer architecture: Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokeniser, WordPiece tokeniser, and BERT tokeniser. Both evaluations, including human evaluation, confirm the efficacy of our method.

Over the next decade, I expect more and more computing on phones and small computers and less on clouds and supercomputers. Supercomputers are super impressive to engineers, but not to economists because economies of scale have more to do with the size of the market than the size of the machine. Clouds are like wire-wrapped Cray computers; they were never designed for mass production. There was never much supply or demand. Supercomputers and clouds are too expensive and burn too much power. The future is more promising for phones because the market is larger. In addition, there are a number of other advantages to computing on phones and small (commodity) machines designed for mass markets: privacy, power, size, weight, latency, bandwidth, and especially affordability.

In the digital information age, artificial intelligence is increasingly being applied to national governance and judicial decision-making assistance. Existing studies lack case studies and empirical analyses of the effectiveness of large models in aiding judicial decisions. To address this research gap, this study designs a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing five core task dimensions: Task-oriented Information Extraction, Legal Article Citation, Event Extraction, Judicial Decision Generation, and Legal Opinion Generation. By using carefully crafted prompts to activate the legal reasoning capabilities of the models, we conducted extensive testing on 13 mainstream large language models (LLMs). The experimental results demonstrate that large models perform excellently in processing legal texts and providing preliminary legal opinions, but still exhibit shortcomings in complex legal reasoning and precise decision-making. On this basis, we applied a weakly supervised learning strategy to fine-tune the LLMs for targeted improvements. The results indicate that introducing a small amount of task-specific learning can significantly enhance the performance of LLMs in judicial tasks. This further underscores the critical role of data and the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge in applying AI technology to judicial tasks. Additionally, this study briefly discusses the issue of the boundaries of AI’s involvement in judicial activities, aiming to provide theoretical foundations and practical guidance for the deep integration of AI technology with legal practice.