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When asked in Arabic about the number of civilian casualties killed in the Middle East conflict, ChatGPT gives significantly higher casualty numbers than when the prompt was written in Hebrew, as a new study by the Universities of Zurich and Constance shows. These systematic discrepancies can reinforce biases in armed conflicts and encourage information bubbles.

Researchers have found that AI large language models, like GPT-4, are better at predicting what comes next than what came before in a sentence. This "Arrow of Time" effect could reshape our understanding of the structure of natural language, and the way these models understand it. Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have become indispensable for tasks like text generation, coding, operating chatbots, translation and others.

Wikipedia is the largest platform for open and freely accessible knowledge online yet, in a new study, researchers have found that around 15% of the content is effectively invisible to readers browsing within Wikipedia. They have developed a new tool to help overcome this. With 60 million articles in more than 300 language versions, Wikipedia's available content grows continuously at a rate of around 200 thousand new articles each month.

Scientists have produced a series of maps showing historical migration events, including the migration of mountain farmers native to Upper Valais who began to settle in German-speaking Switzerland in the 13th century, by applying methods from population genetics - but using linguistic data rather than genes.

Humans have been always on the move, creating a complex history of languages and cultural traditions dispersed over the globe. An international team under UZH's lead has now traced families of related languages over more than 10,000 years by combining data from genetics, linguistics and musicology using novel digital methods.

Diet-induced changes in the human bite resulted in new sounds such as "f" in languages all over the world, a study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Zurich has shown. The findings contradict the theory that the range of human sounds has remained fixed throughout human history.

For 250 years, the extensive set of manuscripts and papers lay unnoticed in the University Library's basement.

Switzerland deals flexibly and pragmatically with plurilingualism. It does this successfully. Nevertheless, immigration and increasing international integration are posing new challenges to schools, economy and administration.