Abstract

Recent advances and applications of language technology and artificial intelligence have enabled much success across multiple domains like law, medical and mental health. AI-based Language Models, like Judgement Prediction, have recently been proposed for the legal sector. However, these models are strife with encoded social biases picked up from the training data. While bias and fairness have been studied across NLP, most studies primarily locate themselves within a Western context. In this work, we present an initial investigation of fairness from the Indian perspective in the legal domain. We highlight the propagation of learnt algorithmic biases in the bail prediction task for models trained on Hindi legal documents. We evaluate the fairness gap using demographic parity and show that a decision tree model trained for the bail prediction task has an overall fairness disparity of 0.237 between input features associated with Hindus and Muslims. Additionally, we highlight the need for further research and studies in the avenues of fairness/bias in applying AI in the legal sector with a specific focus on the Indian context.

Abstract

Information Disguise (ID), a part of computational ethics in Natural Language Processing (NLP), is concerned with best practices of textual paraphrasing to prevent the non-consensual use of authors’ posts on the Internet. Research on ID becomes important when authors’ written online communication pertains to sensitive domains, e.g., mental health. Over time, researchers have utilized AI-based automated word spinners (e.g., SpinRewriter, WordAI) for paraphrasing content. However, these tools fail to satisfy the purpose of ID as their paraphrased content still leads to the source when queried on search engines. There is limited prior work on judging the effectiveness of paraphrasing methods for ID on search engines or their proxies, neural retriever (NeurIR) models. We propose a framework where, for a given sentence from an author’s post, we perform iterative perturbation on the sentence in the direction of paraphrasing with an attempt to confuse the search mechanism of a NeurIR system when the sentence is queried on it. Our experiments involve the subreddit “r/AmItheAsshole” as the source of public content and Dense Passage Retriever as a NeurIR system-based proxy for search engines. Our work introduces a novel method of phrase-importance rankings using perplexity scores and involves multi-level phrase substitutions via beam search. Our multi-phrase substitution scheme succeeds in disguising sentences 82% of the time and hence takes an essential step towards enabling researchers to disguise sensitive content effectively before making it public. We also release the code of our approach

Abstract

E-commerce features like easy cancellations, returns, and refunds can be exploited by bad actors or uninformed customers, leading to revenue loss for organization. One such problem faced by e-commerce platforms is Return To Origin (RTO), where the user cancels an order while it is in transit for delivery. In such a scenario platform faces logistics and opportunity costs. Traditionally, models trained on historical trends are used to predict the propensity of an order becoming RTO. Sociology literature has highlighted clear correlations between socio-economic indicators and users’ tendency to exploit systems to gain financial advantage. Social media profiles have information about location, education, and profession which have been shown to be an estimator of socio-economic condition. We believe combining social media data with e-commerce information can lead to improvements in a variety of tasks like RTO …

Abstract

In legal document writing, one of the key elements is properly citing the case laws and other sources to substantiate claims and arguments. Understanding the legal domain and identifying appropriate citation context or cite-worthy sentences are challenging tasks that demand expensive manual annotation. The presence of jargon, language semantics, and high domain specificity makes legal language complex, making any associated legal task hard for automation. The current work focuses on the problem of citation-worthiness identification. It is designed as the initial step in today's citation recommendation systems to lighten the burden of extracting an adequate set of citation contexts. To accomplish this, we introduce a labeled dataset of 178M sentences for citation-worthiness detection in the legal domain from the Caselaw Access Project (CAP). The performance of various deep learning models was examined on this novel dataset. The domain-specific pre-trained model tends to outperform other models, with an 88% F1-score for the citation-worthiness detection task.

Abstract

Deaths due to drug overdose in the US have doubled in the last decade. Drug-related content on social media has also exploded in the same time frame. The pseudo-anonymous nature of social media platforms enables users to discourse about taboo and sometimes illegal topics like drug consumption. User-generated content (UGC) about drugs on social media can be used as an online proxy to detect offline drug consumption. UGC also gets exposed to the praise and criticism of the community. Law of effect proposes that positive reinforcement on an experience can incentivize the users to engage in the experience repeatedly. Therefore, we hypothesize that positive community feedback on a user's online drug consumption disclosure will increase the probability of the user doing an online drug consumption disclosure post again. To this end, we collect data from 10 drug-related subreddits. First, we build a deep learning model to classify UGC as indicative of drug consumption offline or not, and analyze the extent of such activities. Further, we use matching-based causal inference techniques to unravel community feedback's effect on users' future drug consumption behavior. We discover that 84% of posts and 55% comments on drug-related subreddits indicate real-life drug consumption. Users who get positive feedback generate up to two times more drugs consumption content in the future. Finally, we conducted an anonymous user study on drug-related subreddits to compare members' opinions with our experimental findings and show that user tends to underestimate the effect community peers can have on their decision to interact with drugs

Abstract

Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by translating the Chinese RiSAWOZ to 4 languages: English, French, Hindi, Korean; and a code-mixed EnglishHindi language. X-RiSAWOZ has more than 18,000 human-verified dialogue utterances for each language, and unlike most multilingual prior work, is an end-to-end dataset for building fully-functioning agents. The many difficulties we encountered in creating X-RiSAWOZ led us to develop a toolset to accelerate the post-editing of a new language dataset after translation. This toolset improves machine translation with a hybrid entity alignment technique that combines neural with

Abstract

Individuals choose varying music listening strategies to fulfill particular mood-regulation goals. However, ineffective musical choices and a lack of cognizance of the effects thereof can be detrimental to their well-being and may lead to adverse outcomes like anxiety or depression. In our study, we use the social media platform Reddit to perform a large-scale analysis to unearth the several music-mediated mood-regulation goals that individuals opt for in the context of depression. A mixed-methods approach involving natural language processing techniques followed by qualitative analysis was performed on all music-related posts to identify the various music-listening strategies and group them into healthy and unhealthy associations. Analysis of the music content (acoustic features and lyrical themes) accompanying healthy and unhealthy associations showed significant differences. Individuals resorting to unhealthy strategies gravitate towards low-valence tracks. Moreover, lyrical themes associated with unhealthy strategies incorporated tracks with low optimism, high blame, and high self-reference. Our findings demonstrate that being mindful of the objectives of using music, the subsequent effects thereof, and aligning both for well-being outcomes is imperative for comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of music

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that predominantly occurs in children. Previous brain research in ASD has mainly studied biomarkers based on the functional connectivity characterized by the correlation of static temporal signals. However, brain connectivity is dynamic and varies extensively among brain states. The main aim of the paper is to understand the fundamental group differences between ASD patients and typically developing (TD) subjects using dynamic functional connectivity (dFNC) analysis. In this study, we investigated the dFNC between 53 independent components among 188 ASD and 195 TD subjects. We estimated dFNC using sliding window-based approaches and identified four distinct dynamic states through hard-clustering analysis. Hyper-connectivity within the cognitive control domain, between cognitive control and default mode network, has been …

Abstract

One of the challenges in stroke rehabilitation is to identify bio-markers that correlate with amelioratory changes in the recovery of brain function that can be verified by a clinician. For strokes related to upper extremity, clinicians use Fugl Meyer Assessment - Upper Extremity (FMA-UE) score for verification. We hypothesize that even before clinical measures of function recovery (FMA-UE) show facilitatory changes, structural and functional changes in the brain connectome indicate early changes in stroke patients. Toward establishing such early bio-markers of rehabilitation related changes in the brain plasticity, we propose to use graph theoretic measures on the structural (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) matrices. We used longitudinal multi-modal neuroimaging data acquired within 1 to 6 months of the onset of stroke and after 3 months of rehabilitation for 15 acute ischemic stroke subjects with deficit in motor

Abstract

Deep Reinforcement learning is beginning to be useful for studying neural representations in the brain because of its ability to combine decision-making and representation. Here, we use it to study a dot motion perceptual decision-making task in a high-dimensional setting where the inputs are akin to those used in psychological experiments. This end-to-end model gives a unique insight into how these networks solve the task providing a background on how the brain could solve this task. We find that the network can show properties similar to the middle temporal visual area (MT) in the brain, which code for direction and motion strength. We find the emergence of direction selectivity purely through reward-based training and graded firing coding motion strength and make a testable prediction that the MT population would also have coherence-selective neurons.