Automating AI Failure Tracking: Semantic Association of Reports in AI Incident Database

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are transforming critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and transportation, enhancing operational efficiency and decision-making processes. However, their deployment in high-stakes domains has exposed vulnerabilities that can result in significant societal harm. To systematically study and mitigate these risk, initiatives like the AI Incident Database (AIID) have emerged, cataloging over 3,000 real-world AI failure reports. Currently, associating a new report with the appropriate AI Incident relies on manual expert intervention, limiting scalability and delaying the identification of emerging failure patterns. To address this limitation, we propose a retrieval-based framework that automates the association of new reports with existing AI Incidents through semantic similarity modeling. We formalize the task as a ranking problem, where each report-comprising a title and a full textual description-is compared to previously documented AI Incidents based on embedding cosine similarity. Benchmarking traditional lexical methods, cross-encoder architectures, and transformer-based sentence embedding models, we find that the latter consistently achieve superior performance. Our analysis further shows that combining titles and descriptions yields substantial improvements in ranking accuracy compared to using titles alone. Moreover, retrieval performance remains stable across variations in description length, highlighting the robustness of the framework. Finally, we find that retrieval performance consistently improves as the training set expands. Our approach provides a scalable and efficient solution for supporting the maintenance of the AIID.

Assessing the Potential of Generative Agents in Crowdsourced Fact-Checking

The growing spread of online misinformation has created an urgent need for scalable, reliable fact-checking solutions. Crowdsourced fact-checking - where non-experts evaluate claim veracity - offers a cost-effective alternative to expert verification, despite concerns about variability in quality and bias. Encouraged by promising results in certain contexts, major platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram have begun shifting from centralized moderation to decentralized, crowd-based approaches. In parallel, advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across core fact-checking tasks, including claim detection and evidence evaluation. However, their potential role in crowdsourced workflows remains unexplored. This paper investigates whether LLM-powered generative agents - autonomous entities that emulate human behavior and decision-making - can meaningfully contribute to fact-checking tasks traditionally reserved for human crowds. Using the protocol of La Barbera et al. (2024), we simulate crowds of generative agents with diverse demographic and ideological profiles. Agents retrieve evidence, assess claims along multiple quality dimensions, and issue final veracity judgments. Our results show that agent crowds outperform human crowds in truthfulness classification, exhibit higher internal consistency, and show reduced susceptibility to social and cognitive biases. Compared to humans, agents rely more systematically on informative criteria such as Accuracy, Precision, and Informativeness, suggesting a more structured decision-making process. Overall, our findings highlight the potential of generative agents as scalable, consistent, and less biased contributors to crowd-based fact-checking systems.

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Cloze Questions

Despite the huge and continuous advances in computational linguistics, the lack of annotated data for Named Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging issue, especially in low-resource languages and when domain knowledge is required for high-quality annotations. Recent findings in NLP show the effectiveness of cloze-style questions in enabling language models to leverage the knowledge they acquired during the pre-training phase. In our work, we propose a simple and intuitive adaptation of Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), a recent approach which combines the cloze-questions mechanism and fine-tuning for few-shot learning: the key idea is to rephrase the NER task with patterns. Our approach achieves considerably better performance than standard fine-tuning and comparable or improved results with respect to other few-shot baselines without relying on manually annotated data or distant supervision on three benchmark datasets: NCBI-disease, BC2GM and a private Italian biomedical corpus.