Abstract

Humor research is a multifaceted field that has led to a better understanding of humor’s psychological effects and the development of different theories of humor. This paper’s main objective is to develop a hierarchical schema for a fine-grained annotation of Conversational Humor. Based on the Benign Violation Theory, the benignity or non-benignity of the interlocutor’s intentions is included within the framework. Under the categories mentioned above, in addition to different types of humor, the techniques utilized by these types are identified. Furthermore, a prominent play from Telugu, Kanyasulkam, is annotated to substantiate the work across cultures at multiple levels. The inter-annotator agreement is calculated to assess the accuracy and validity of the dataset. An in-depth analysis of the disagreement is performed to understand the subjectivity of humor better.

Abstract

Human dialogue often contains utterances having meanings entirely different from the sentences used and are clearly understood by the interlocutors. But in human-computer interactions, the machine fails to understand the implicated meaning unless it is trained with a dataset containing the implicated meaning of an utterance along with the utterance and the context in which it is uttered. In linguistic terms, conversational implicatures are the meanings of the speaker’s utterance that are not part of what is explicitly said. In this paper, we introduce a dataset of dialogue snippets with three constituents, which are the context, the utterance, and the implicated meanings. These implicated meanings are the conversational implicatures. The utterances are collected by transcribing from listening comprehension sections of English tests like TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) as well as scraping dialogues from movie scripts available on IMSDb (Internet Movie Script Database). The utterances are manually annotated with implicatures

Abstract

In this work, we explore the fine-grained classification of tweets involving tobacco focused on identifying tobacco products. We release the SmokPro dataset, along with an extensible method of labeling the tweets through a comprehensive annotation schema. We then perform benchmarking experiments using state-of-the-art text classification models, exploiting contextual word embeddings and achieve F1 scores as high as 0.971, hence showing the efficacy of the dataset and the suitability of the models for the task.

Abstract

Subjective bias detection is critical for applications like propaganda detection, content recommendation, sentiment analysis, and bias neutralization. This bias is introduced in natural language via inflammatory words and phrases, casting doubt over facts, and presupposing the truth. In this work, we perform comprehensive experiments for detecting subjective bias using BERT-based models on the Wiki Neutrality Corpus(WNC). The dataset consists of 360𝑘 labeled instances, from Wikipedia edits that remove various instances of the bias. We further propose BERT-based ensembles that outperform state-of-the-art methods like 𝐵𝐸𝑅𝑇𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒 by a margin of 5.6 F1 score

Abstract

Subjective bias detection is critical for applications like propaganda detection, content recommendation, sentiment analysis, and bias neutralization. This bias is introduced in natural language via inflammatory words and phrases, casting doubt over facts, and presupposing the truth. In this work, we perform comprehensive experiments for detecting subjective bias using BERT-based models on the Wiki Neutrality Corpus(WNC). The dataset consists of 360𝑘 labeled instances, from Wikipedia edits that remove various instances of the bias. We further propose BERT-based ensembles that outperform state-of-the-art methods like 𝐵𝐸𝑅𝑇𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒 by a margin of 5.6 F1 score.

Abstract

In recent years, sentiment analysis has gained popularity as it is essential to moderate and analyse the information across the internet. It has various applications like opinion mining, social media monitoring, and market research. Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is an area of sentiment analysis which deals with sentiment at a finer level. ABSA classifies sentiment with respect to each aspect to gain greater insights into the sentiment expressed. Significant contributions have been made in ABSA, but this progress is limited only to a few languages with adequate resources. Telugu lags behind in this area of research despite being one of the most spoken languages in India and an enormous amount of data being created each day. In this paper, we create a reliable resource for aspect based sentiment analysis in Telugu. The data is annotated for three tasks namely Aspect Term Extraction, Aspect Polarity Classification and Aspect Categorisation. Further, we develop baselines for the tasks using deep learning methods demonstrating the reliability and usefulness of the resource.

Abstract

Given the lack of an annotated corpus of non-traditional Odia literature which serves as the standard when it comes sentiment analysis, we have created an annotated corpus of Odia sentences and made it publicly available to promote research in the field. Secondly, in order to test the usability of currently available Odia sentiment lexicon, we experimented with various classifiers by training and testing on the sentiment annotated corpus while using identified affective words from the same as features. Annotation and classification are done at sentence level as the usage of sentiment lexicon is best suited to sentiment analysis at this level. The created corpus contains 2045 Odia sentences from news domain annotated with sentiment labels using a well-defined annotation scheme. An inter-annotator agreement score of 0.79 is reported for the corpus.

Abstract

In today’s era of globalisation, the increased outreach for every event across the world has been leading to conflicting opinions, arguments and disagreements, often reflected in print media and online social platforms. It is necessary to distinguish factual observations from personal judgements in news, as subjectivity in reporting can influence the audience’s perception of reality. Several studies conducted on the different styles of reporting in journalism are essential in understanding phenomena such as media bias and multiple interpretations of the same event. This domain finds applications in fields such as Media Studies, Discourse Analysis, Information Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, and Opinion Mining. We present an event corpus “Manovaad-v1.0” consisting of 1035 news articles corresponding to 65 events from 3 levels of newspapers viz., Local, National, and International levels. Using this novel format, we correlate the trends in the degree of subjectivity with the geographical closeness of reporting using a Bi-RNN model. We also analyse the role of background and focus in event reporting and capture the focus shift patterns within a global discourse structure for an event. We do this across different levels of reporting and compare the results with the existing work on discourse processing.

Abstract

Curriculum Learning (CL) is the idea that learning on a training set sequenced or ordered in a manner where samples range from easy to difficult, results in an increment in performance over otherwise random ordering. The idea parallels cognitive science’s theory of how human brains learn, and that learning a difficult task can be made easier by phrasing it as a sequence of easy to difficult tasks. This idea has gained a lot of traction in machine learning and image processing for a while and recently in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper, we apply the ideas of curriculum learning, driven by SentiWordNet in a sentiment analysis setting. In this setting, given a text segment, our aim is to extract its sentiment or polarity. SentiWordNet is a lexical resource with sentiment polarity annotations. By comparing performance with other curriculum strategies and with no curriculum, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is presented. Convolutional, Recurrence, and Attention-based architectures are employed to assess this improvement. The models are evaluated on a standard sentiment dataset, Stanford Sentiment Treebank.

Abstract

There is a growing interest in understanding how humans initiate and hold conversations. The affective understanding of conversations focuses on the problem of how speakers use emotions to react to a situation and to each other. In the CL-Aff Shared Task, the organizers released Get it #OffMyChest dataset, which contains Reddit comments from casual and confessional conversations, labeled for their disclosure and supportiveness characteristics. In this paper, we introduce a predictive ensemble model exploiting the finetuned contextualized word embeddings, RoBERTa and ALBERT. We show that our model outperforms the base models in all considered metrics, achieving an improvement of 3% in the F1 score. We further conduct statistical analysis and outline deeper insights into the given dataset while providing a new characterization of impact for the dataset.