MRT at SemEval-2025 Task 8: Maximizing Recovery from Tables with Multiple Steps

In this paper we expose our approach to solve the \textit{SemEval 2025 Task 8: Question-Answering over Tabular Data} challenge. Our strategy leverages Python code generation with LLMs to interact with the table and get the answer to the questions. The process is composed of multiple steps: understanding the content of the table, generating natural language instructions in the form of steps to follow in order to get the answer, translating these instructions to code, running it and handling potential errors or exceptions. These steps use open source LLMs and fine grained optimized prompts for each task (step). With this approach, we achieved a score of $70.50\%$ for subtask 1.

Discovering Geo-dependent Stories by Combining Density-based Clustering and Thread-based Aggregation techniques

Citizens are actively interacting with their surroundings, especially through social media. Not only do shared posts give important information about what is happening (from the users' perspective), but also the metadata linked to these posts offer relevant data, such as the GPS-location in Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs). In this paper we introduce a global analysis of the geo-tagged posts in social media which supports (i) the detection of unexpected behavior in the city and (ii) the analysis of the posts to infer what is happening. The former is obtained by applying density-based clustering techniques, whereas the latter is consequence of applying natural language processing. We have applied our methodology to a dataset obtained from Instagram activity in New York City for seven months obtaining promising results. The developed algorithms require very low resources, being able to analyze millions of data-points in commodity hardware in less than one hour without applying complex parallelization techniques. Furthermore, the solution can be easily adapted to other geo-tagged data sources without extra effort.