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Effectively integrating knowledge into end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems remains a challenge. It typically requires incorporation of an external knowledge base (KB) and capture of the intrinsic semantics of the dialog history. Recent research shows promising results by using Sequence-to-Sequence models, Memory Networks, and even Graph Convolutional Networks. However, current state-of-the-art models are less effective at integrating dialog history and KB into task-oriented dialog systems in the following ways: 1. The KB representation is not fully context-aware. The dynamic interaction between the dialog history and KB is seldom explored. 2. Both the sequential and structural information in the dialog history can contribute to capturing the dialog semantics, but they are not studied concurrently. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Memory Network (GMN) based Seq2Seq model, GraphMemDialog, to effectively learn the inherent structural information hidden in dialog history, and to model the dynamic interaction between dialog history and KBs. We adopt a modified graph attention network to learn the rich structural representation of the dialog history, whereas the context-aware representation of KB entities are learnt by our novel GMN. To fully exploit this dynamic interaction, we design a learnable memory controller coupled with external KB entity memories to recurrently incorporate dialog history context into KB entities through a multi-hop reasoning mechanism. Experiments on three public datasets show that our GraphMemDialog model achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms strong baselines by a large margin, especially on datatests with more complicated KB information. 

Abstract. Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesize datasets and methodologies to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFOS) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change (ELUC) are based on land-use and land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly, and its growth rate (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The global net uptake of CO2 by the ocean (SOCEAN, called the ocean sink) is estimated with global ocean biogeochemistry models and observation-based fCO2 products (fCO2 is the fugacity of CO2). The global net uptake of CO2 by the land (SLAND, called the land sink) is estimated with dynamic global vegetation models. Additional lines of evidence on land and ocean sinks are provided by atmospheric inversions, atmospheric oxygen measurements, and Earth system models. The sum of all sources and sinks results in the carbon budget imbalance (BIM), a measure of imperfect data and incomplete understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the year 2023, EFOS increased by 1.3 % relative to 2022, with fossil emissions at 10.1 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1 (10.3 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1 when the cement carbonation sink is not included), and ELUC was 1.0 ± 0.7 GtC yr−1, for a total anthropogenic CO2 emission (including the cement carbonation sink) of 11.1 ± 0.9 GtC yr−1 (40.6 ± 3.2 GtCO2 yr−1). Also, for 2023, GATM was 5.9 ± 0.2 GtC yr−1 (2.79 ± 0.1 ppm yr−1; ppm denotes parts per million), SOCEAN was 2.9 ± 0.4 GtC yr−1, and SLAND was 2.3 ± 1.0 GtC yr−1, with a near-zero BIM (−0.02 GtC yr−1). The global atmospheric CO2 concentration averaged over 2023 reached 419.31 ± 0.1 ppm. Preliminary data for 2024 suggest an increase in EFOS relative to 2023 of +0.8 % (−0.2 % to 1.7 %) globally and an atmospheric CO2 concentration increase by 2.87 ppm, reaching 422.45 ppm, 52 % above the pre-industrial level (around 278 ppm in 1750). Overall, the mean of and trend in the components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2023, with a near-zero overall budget imbalance, although discrepancies of up to around 1 GtC yr−1 persist for the representation of annual to semi-decadal variability in CO2 fluxes. Comparison of estimates from multiple approaches and observations shows the following: (1) a persistent large uncertainty in the estimate of land-use change emissions, (2) low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) a discrepancy between the different methods on the mean ocean sink. This living-data update documents changes in methods and datasets applied to this most recent global carbon budget as well as evolving community understanding of the global carbon cycle. The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2024 (Friedlingstein et al., 2024). 

We present the results of a research study in which participants were subjected to social engineering attacks via telephone, telephone scams, in order to determine the features of scams which peopleare most susceptible to. The study has involved 186 university participants who were attacked with one of 27 different attack scripts which span different independent variables including the pretext used and the method of elicitation. In order to ensure informed consent, each participant was warned that they would receive a scam phone call within 3 months. One independent variable used is the time between the warning and launching the scam. In spite of this warning, a large fraction of participants were still deceived by the scam. A limitation to research in the study of telephone scams is the lack of a dataset of real phone scams for examination. Each phone call in our study was recorded and we present the dataset of these recordings, and their transcripts. To our knowledge, there is no similar publicly-available dataset or phone scams. We hope that our dataset will support future research in phone scams and their detection.