Abstract

We describe the system submitted to IBEREVAL-2017 for stance and gender detection in tweets on Catalan Independence [1]. We developed a supervised system using Support Vector Machines with radial basis function kernel to identify the stance and gender of the tweeter using various character level and word level features. Our system achieves a macro-average of F-score(FAVOR) and F-score(AGAINST) of 0.46 for stance detection in both Spanish and Catalan and an accuracy of 64.85% and 44.59% for Gender detection in Spanish and Catalan respectively.

Abstract

In this paper, we report our participation in the Task 2: Triple Scoring of WSDM Cup challenge 2017. In this task, we were provided with triples of "type-like" relations which were given human-annotated relevance scores ranging from 0 to 7, with 7 being the "most relevant" and 0 being the "least relevant". The task focuses on two such relations: profession and nationality. We built a system which could automatically predict the relevance scores for unseen triples. Our model is primarily a supervised machine learning based one in which we use well-designed features which are used to a make a Logistic Ordinal Regression based classification model. The proposed system achieves an overall accuracy score of 0.73 and Kendall’s tau score of 0.36.

Abstract

Trivia is any fact about an entity which is interesting due to its unusualness, uniqueness or unexpectedness. Trivia could be successfully employed to promote user engagement in various product experiences featuring the given entity. A Knowledge Graph (KG) is a semantic network which encodes various facts about entities and their relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called DBpedia Trivia Miner (DTM) to automatically mine trivia for entities of a given domain in KGs. The essence of DTM lies in learning an Interestingness Model (IM), for a given domain, from human annotated training data provided in the form of interesting facts from the KG. The IM thus learnt is applied to extract trivia for other entities of the same domain in the KG. We propose two different approaches for learning the IM - a) A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approach and b) Fusion Based CNN (F-CNN) approach which combines both hand-crafted and CNN features. Experiments across two different domains - Bollywood Actors and Music Artists reveal that CNN automatically learns features which are relevant to the task and shows competitive performance relative to hand-crafted feature based baselines whereas FCNN significantly improves the performance over the baseline approaches which use hand-crafted features alone. Overall, DTM achieves an F1 score of 0.81 and 0.65 in Bollywood Actors and Music Artists domains respectively.

Abstract

With the advent of word representations, word similarity tasks are becoming increasing popular as an evaluation metric for the quality of the representations. In this paper, we present manually annotated monolingual word similarity datasets of six Indian languages – Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Gujarati. These languages are most spoken Indian languages worldwide after Hindi and Bengali. For the construction of these datasets, our approach relies on translation and re-annotation of word similarity datasets of English. We also present baseline scores for word representation models using state-of-the-art techniques for Urdu, Telugu and Marathi by evaluating them on newly created word similarity datasets.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose efficient and less resource-intensive strategies for parsing of code-mixed data. These strategies are not constrained by in-domain annotations, rather they leverage pre-existing monolingual annotated resources for training. We show that these methods can produce significantly better results as compared to an informed baseline. Due to lack of an evaluation set for code-mixed structures, we also present a data set of 450 Hindi and English code-mixed tweets of Hindi multilingual speakers for evaluation.

Abstract

Language identification (LID) is vital frontend for spoken dialogue systems operating in diverse linguistic settings to reduce recognition and understanding errors. Existing LID systems which use low-level signal information for classification do not scale well due to exponential growth of parameters as the classes increase. They also suffer performance degradation due to the inherent variabilities of speech signal. In the proposed approach, we model the language-specific phonotactic information in speech using recurrent neural network for developing an LID system. The input speech signal is tokenized to phone sequences by using a common language-independent phone recognizer with varying phonetic coverage. We establish a causal relationship between phonetic coverage and LID performance. The phonotactics in the observed phone sequences are modeled using statistical and recurrent neural network language models to predict language-specific symbol from a universal phonetic inventory. Proposed approach is robust, computationally light weight and highly scalable. Experiments show that the convex combination of statistical and recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) based phonotactic models significantly outperform a strong baseline system of Deep Neural Network (DNN) which is shown to surpass the performance of i-vector based approach for LID. The proposed approach outperforms the baseline models in terms of mean F1 score over 176 languages. Further we provide significant information-theoretic evidence to analyze the mechanism of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Recent improvement in usage of digital media has led people to share their opinions about specific entity through audio. In this paper, an approach to detect the sentiment of an online spoken reviews based on relative prosody features is presented. Most of the existing systems for audio based sentiment analysis use conventional audio features, but they are not problem specific features to extract the sentiment. In this work, relative prosody features are extracted from normal and stressed regions of audio signal to detect the sentiment. Stressed regions are identified using the strength of excitation. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifiers are used to build the sentiment models. MOUD database is used for the proposed study. Experimental results show that, the rate of detecting the sentiment is improved with relative prosody features compared with the prosody and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) because the relative prosody features has more sentiment specific discrimination compared to prosody features.

Abstract

We present a simple, fast and unsupervised approach for exploiting morphological regularities present in high dimensional vector spaces. We propose a novel method for generating embeddings of words from their morphological variants using morphological transformation operators. We evaluate this approach on MSR word analogy test set (Mikolov et al.,2013d) with an accuracy of 85% which is 12% higher than the previous best known system.

Abstract

Code-Mixing (CM) is a natural phenomenon observed in many multilingual societies and is becoming the preferred medium of expression and communication in online and social media fora. In spite of this, current Question Answering (QA) systems do not support CM and are only designed to work with a single interaction language. This assumption makes it inconvenient for multi-lingual users to interact naturally with the QA system especially in scenarios where they do not know the right word in the target language. In this paper, we present WebShodh - an end-end web-based Factoid QA system for CM languages. We demonstrate our system with two CM language pairs: Hinglish (Matrix language: Hindi, Embedded language: English) and Tenglish (Matrix language: Telugu, Embedded language: English). Lack of language resources such as annotated corpora, POS taggers or parsers for CM languages poses a huge challenge for automated processing and analysis. In view of this resource scarcity, we only assume the existence of bi-lingual dictionaries from the matrix languages to English and use it for lexically translating the question into English. Later, we use this loosely translated question for our downstream analysis such as Answer Type(AType) prediction, answer retrieval and ranking. Evaluation of our system reveals that we achieve an MRR of 0.37 and 0.32 for Hinglish and Tenglish respectively. We hosted this system online and plan to leverage it for collecting more CM questions and answers data for further improvement.

Abstract

Word embeddings learned from text corpus can be improved by injecting knowledge from external resources, while at the same time also specializing them for similarity or relatedness. These knowledge resources (like WordNet, Paraphrase Database) may not exist for all languages. In this work we introduce a method to inject word embeddings of a language with knowledge resource of another language by leveraging bilingual embeddings. First we improve word embeddings of German, Italian, French and Spanish using resources of English and test them on variety of word similarity tasks. Then we demonstrate the utility of our method by creating improved embeddings for Urdu and Telugu languages using Hindi WordNet, beating the previously established baseline for Urdu.