Abstract

Text articles with false claims, especially news, have recently become aggravating for the Internet users. These articles are in wide circulation and readers face difficulty discerning fact from fiction. Previous work on credibility assessment has focused on factual analysis and linguistic features. The task's main challenge is the distinction between the features of true and false articles. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Credibility Outcome (CREDO) which aims at scoring the credibility of an article in an open domain setting. CREDO consists of different modules for capturing various features responsible for the credibility of an article. These features includes credibility of the article's source and author, semantic similarity between the article and related credible articles retrieved from a knowledge base, and sentiments conveyed by the article. A neural network architecture learns the contribution of each of these modules to the overall credibility of an article. Experiments on Snopes dataset reveals that CREDO outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches based on linguistic features.

Abstract

Code-mixed data is an important challenge of natural language processing because its characteristics completely vary from the traditional structures of standard languages. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Text (SACMT) to classify sentences into their corresponding sentiment-positive, negative or neutral, using contrastive learning. We utilize the shared parameters of siamese networks to map the sentences of code-mixed and standard languages to a common sentiment space. Also, we introduce a basic clustering based preprocessing method to capture variations of code-mixed transliterated words. Our experiments reveal that SACMT outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in sentiment analysis for code-mixed text by 7.6% in accuracy and 10.1% in F-score.

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are becoming popular in multilingual societies. This trend induces portmanteau of South Asian languages with English. The blend of multiple languages as code-mixed data has recently become popular in research communities for various NLP tasks. Code-mixed data consist of anomalies such as grammatical errors and spelling variations. In this paper, we leverage the contextual property of words where the different spelling variation of words share similar context in a large noisy social media text. We capture different variations of words belonging to same context in an unsupervised manner using distributed representations of words. Our experiments reveal that preprocessing of the code-mixed dataset based on our approach improves the performance in state-of-the-art part-of-speech tagging (POS-tagging) and sentiment analysis tasks.

Abstract

The introduction of emojis (or emoticons) in social media platforms has given the users an increased potential for expression. We propose a novel method called Classification of Emojis using Siamese Network Architecture (CESNA) to learn emoji-based representations of resource-poor languages by jointly training them with resource-rich languages using a siamese network. CESNA model consists of twin Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (Bi-LSTM RNN) with shared parameters joined by a contrastive loss function based on a similarity metric. The model learns the representations of resource-poor and resource-rich language in a common emoji space by using a similarity metric based on the emojis present in sentences from both languages. The model, hence, projects sentences with similar emojis closer to each other and the sentences with different emojis farther from one another. Experiments on large-scale Twitter datasets of resource-rich languages-English and Spanish and resource-poor languages-Hindi and Telugu reveal that CESNA outperforms the state-of-the-art emoji prediction approaches based on distributional semantics, semantic rules, lexicon lists and deep neural network representations without shared parameters.

Abstract

Causality detection and identification is centered on identifying semantic and cognitive connections in a sentence. In this paper, we describe the effort of team LTRC for Causal News Corpus - Event Causality Shared Task 2022 at the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Sociopolitical Events from Text (CASE 2022) (Tan et al., 2022a). The shared task consisted of two subtasks: 1) identifying if a sentence contains a causality relation, and 2) identifying spans of text that correspond to cause, effect and signals. We fine-tuned transformer-based models with adapters for both subtasks. Our best-performing models obtained a binary F1 score of 0.853 on held-out data for subtask 1 and a macro F1 score of 0.032 on held-out data for subtask 2. Our approach is ranked third in subtask 1 and fourth in subtask 2. The paper describes our experiments, solutions, and analysis in detail.

Abstract

Automatic extraction of “significant” components of a legal contract, has the potential to simplify the end user’s comprehension. In essence, “significant” pieces of information have 1) information pertaining to material/practical details about a specific contract and 2) information that is novel or comes as a “surprise” for a specific type of contract. It indicates that the significance of a component may be defined at an individual contract level and at a contract-type level. A component, sentence, or paragraph, may be considered significant at a contract level if it contains contract-specific information (CSI), like names, dates, or currency terms. At a contract-type level, components that deviate significantly from the norm for the type may be considered significant (type-specific information (TSI)). In this paper, we present approaches to extract “significant” components from a contract at both these levels. We attempt to do this by identifying patterns in a pool of documents of the same kind. Consequently, in our approach, the solution is formulated in two parts: identifying CSI using a BERT-based contract-specific information extractor and identifying TSI by scoring sentences in a contract for their likelihood. In this paper, we even describe the annotated corpus of contract documents that we created as a first step toward the development of such a language-processing system. We also release a dataset of contract samples containing sentences belonging to CSI and TSI.

Abstract

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a critical task in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and is also a sub-task of Information Extraction. There has been a significant amount of work done in entity extraction and Named Entity Recognition for resource-rich languages. Entity extraction from code-mixed social media data like tweets from twitter complicates the problem due to its unstructured, informal, and incomplete information available in tweets. Here, we present work on NER in Kannada-English code-mixed social media corpus with corresponding named entity tags referring to Organisation (Org), Person (Pers), and Location (Loc). We experimented with machine learning classification models like Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Bi-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM-CRF models on our corpus.

Abstract

Often questions provided to open-domain question answering systems are ambiguous. Traditional QA systems that provide a single answer are incapable of answering ambiguous questions since the question may be interpreted in several ways and may have multiple distinct answers. In this paper, we address multi-answer retrieval which entails retrieving passages that can capture majority of the diverse answers to the question. We propose a re-ranking based approach using Determinantal point processes utilizing BERT as kernels. Our method jointly considers query-passage relevance and passage-passage correlation to retrieve passages that are both query-relevant and diverse. Results demonstrate that our re-ranking technique outperforms state-of-the-art method on the AmbigQA dataset.

Abstract

Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of usergenerated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways - transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task - STAN, BOUN - are small in size and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and also account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We show that the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation drops substantially on proposed dataset, indicating that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models. Datasets and results are released publicly and can be accessed from https://github.com/prashantkodali/HashSet

Abstract

Code mixing is the linguistic phenomenon where bilingual speakers tend to switch between two or more languages in conversations. Recent work on code-mixing in computational settings has leveraged social media code mixed texts to train NLP models. For capturing the variety of code mixing in, and across corpus, Language ID (LID) tags based measures (CMI) have been proposed. Syntactical variety/patterns of code-mixing and their relationship vis-a-vis computational model’s performance is under explored. In this work, we investigate a collection of English(en)-Hindi(hi) code-mixed datasets from a syntactic lens to propose, SyMCoM, an indicator of syntactic variety in code-mixed text, with intuitive theoretical bounds. We train SoTA en-hi PoS tagger, accuracy of 93.4%, to reliably compute PoS tags on a corpus, and demonstrate the utility of SyMCoM by applying it on various syntactical categories on a collection of datasets, and compare datasets using the measure.