Abstract

Online abuse and offensive language on social media have become widespread problems in today’s digital age. In this paper, we contribute a Reddit-based dataset, consisting of 68,159 insults and 51,102 compliments targeted at individuals instead of targeting a particular community or race. Secondly, we benchmark multiple existing state-of-the-art models for both classification and unsupervised style transfer on the dataset. Finally, we analyse the experimental results and conclude that the transfer task is challenging, requiring the models to understand the high degree of creativity exhibited in the data.

Abstract

The intensity of online abuse has increased in recent years. Automated tools are being developed to prevent the use of hate speech and offensive content. Most of the technologies use natural language and machine learning tools to identify offensive text. In a multilingual society, where code-mixing is a norm, the hate content would be delivered in a code-mixed form in social media, which makes offensive content identification, further challenging. In this work, we participated in the EACL task to detect offensive content in the code-mixed social media scenario. The methodology uses a transformer model with transliteration and class balancing loss for offensive content identification. In this task, our model has been ranked 2 nd in Malayalam-English and 4 th in Tamil-English code-mixed languages.

Abstract

Code-mixing (CM) is a frequently observed phenomenon that uses multiple languages in an utterance or sentence. There are no strict grammatical constraints observed in codemixing, and it consists of non-standard variations of spelling. The linguistic complexity resulting from the above factors made the computational analysis of the code-mixed language a challenging task. Language identification (LI) and part of speech (POS) tagging are the fundamental steps that help analyze the structure of the code-mixed text. Often, the LI and POS tagging tasks are interdependent in the code-mixing scenario. We project the problem of dealing with multilingualism and grammatical structure while analyzing the code-mixed sentence as a joint learning task. In this paper, we jointly train and optimize language detection and part of speech tagging models in the code-mixed scenario. We used a Transformer with convolutional neural network architecture. We train a joint learning method by combining POS tagging and LI models on code-mixed social media text obtained from the ICON shared task.

Abstract

This paper presents a learning assistant that tests one’s knowledge and gives feedback that helps a person learn at a faster pace. A learning assistant (based on automated question generation) has extensive uses in education, information websites, self-assessment, FAQs, testing ML agents, research, etc. Multiple researchers, and companies have worked on Virtual Assistance, but majorly in English. We built our learning assistant for Telugu language to help with teaching in the mother tongue, which is the most efficient way of learning. Our system is built primarily based on Question Generation in Telugu. Many experiments were conducted on Question Generation in English in multiple ways. We have built the first hybrid machine learning and rule-based solution in Telugu, which proves efficient for short stories or short passages in children’s books. Our work covers the fundamental question forms with question types: adjective, yes/no, adverb, verb, when, where, whose, quotative, and quantitative (how many/how much). We constructed rules for question generation using Part of Speech (POS) tags and Universal Dependency (UD) tags along with linguistic information of the surrounding relevant context of the word. We used keyword matching, multilingual sentence embedding to evaluate the answer. Our system is primarily built on question generation in Telugu, and is also capable of evaluating the user’s answers to the generated questions.

Abstract

In recent years, given the exponential increase in social media content also led to an increase in online hate speech. We need automatic hate speech detection methods due to the volume of data on the web. Various approaches have been proposed to address hate speech and offensive content on social media. This paper surveys how neural-based models have rapidly evolved to address hate speech on multilingual code-mixed data. We discuss the current state of the research in hate speech and offensive language detection on code-mixed Indian datasets.

Abstract

Contemporary tobacco-related studies are mostly concerned with a single social media platform while missing out on a broader audience. Moreover, they are heavily reliant on labeled datasets, which are expensive to make. In this work, we explore sentiment and product identification on tobacco-related text from two social media platforms. We release SentiSmoke-Twitter and SentiSmoke-Reddit datasets, along with a comprehensive annotation schema for identifying tobacco products’ sentiment. We then perform benchmarking text classification experiments using state-of-the-art models, including BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT. Our experiments show F1 scores as high as 0.72 for sentiment identification in the Twitter dataset, 0.46 for sentiment identification, and 0.57 for product identification using semi-supervised learning for Reddit.

Abstract

Code-Mixing (CM) is a common phenomenon in multilingual societies. CM plays a significant role in technology and medical fields where terminologies in the native language are not available or known. Language Identification (LID) of the CM data will help solve NLP tasks such as Spell Checking, Named Entity Recognition, Part-Of-Speech tagging, and Semantic Parsing. In the current era of machine learning, a common problem to the above-mentioned tasks is the availability of Learning data to train models. In this paper, we introduce two Telugu-English CM manually annotated datasets (Twitter dataset and Blog dataset). The Twitter dataset contains more romanization variability and misspelled words than the blog dataset. We compare across various classification models and perform extensive bench-marking using both Classical and Deep Learning Models for LID compared to existing models. We propose two architectures for language classification (Telugu and English) in CM data:(1) Word Level Classification (2) Sentence Level word-by-word Classification and compare these approaches presenting two strong baselines for LID on these datasets.

Abstract

In a multilingual society, people communicate in more than one language, leading to Code-Mixed data. Sentimental analysis on Code-Mixed Telugu-English Text (CMTET) poses unique challenges. The unstructured nature of the Code-Mixed Data is due to the informal language, informal transliterations, and spelling errors. In this paper, we introduce an annotated dataset for Sentiment Analysis in CMTET. Also, we report an accuracy of 80.22% on this dataset using novel unsupervised data normalization with a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model. This proposed data normalization technique can be extended to any NLP task involving CMTET. Further, we report an increase of 2.53% accuracy due to this data normalization approach in our best model.

Abstract

In the field of humor research, there has been a recent surge of interest in the sub-domain of Conversational Humor (CH). This study has two main objectives.(a) develop a conversational (humorous and non-humorous) dataset in Telugu.(b) detect CH in the compiled dataset. In this paper, the challenges faced while collecting the data and experiments carried out are elucidated. Transfer learning and non-transfer learning techniques are implemented by utilizing pre-trained models such as FastText word embeddings, BERT language models and Text GCN, which learns the word and document embeddings simultaneously of the corpus given. State-of-the-art results are observed with a 99.3% accuracy and a 98.5% f1 score achieved by BERT.

Abstract

Sentiment analysis aims to detect the overall sentiment, i.e., the polarity of a sentence, paragraph, or text span, without considering the entities mentioned and their aspects. Aspectbased sentiment analysis aims to extract the aspects of the given target entities and their respective sentiments. Prior works formulate this as a sequence tagging problem or solve this task using a span-based extract-thenclassify framework where first all the opinion targets are extracted from the sentence, and then with the help of span representations, the targets are classified as positive, negative, or neutral. The sequence tagging problem suffers from issues like sentiment inconsistency and colossal search space. Whereas, Span-based extract-then-classify framework suffers from issues such as half-word coverage and overlapping spans. To overcome this, we propose a similar span-based extract-then-classify framework with a novel and improved heuristic. Experiments on the three benchmark datasets (Restaurant14, Laptop14, Restaurant15) show our model consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, we also present a novel supervised movie reviews dataset (Movie20) and a pseudo-labeled movie reviews dataset (moviesLarge) made explicitly for this task in English language and report the results on the novel Movie20 dataset as well.