Abstract

Software Requirement Specification documents provide natural language descriptions of the core functional requirements as a set of use-cases. Essentially, each use-case contains a set of actors and sequences of steps describing the interactions among them. Goals of usecase reviews and analyses include their correctness, completeness, detection of ambiguities, prototyping, verification, test case generation and traceability. Message Sequence Charts (MSC) have been proposed as an expressive, rigorous yet intuitive visual representation of use-cases. In this paper, we describe a linguistic knowledge-based approach to extract MSCs from use-cases. Compared to existing techniques, we extract richer constructs of the MSC notation such as timers, conditions and alt-boxes. We apply this tool to extract MSCs from several real-life software use-case descriptions and show that it performs better than the existing techniques.

Abstract

This paper describes our system (Fermi) for Task 5 of SemEval-2019: HatEval: Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women on Twitter. We participated in the subtask A for English and ranked first in the evaluation on the test set. We evaluate the quality of multiple sentence embeddings and explore multiple training models to evaluate the performance of simple yet effective embedding-ML combination algorithms. Our team - Fermi’s model achieved an accuracy of 65.00% for English language in task A. Our models, which use pretrained Universal Encoder sentence embeddings for transforming the input and SVM (with RBF kernel) for classification, scored first position (among 68) in the leaderboard on the test set for Subtask A in English language. In this paper we provide a detailed description of the approach, as well as the results obtained in the task.

Abstract

This paper describes our system (Fermi) for Task 6: OffensEval: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media of SemEval-2019. We participated in all the three sub-tasks within Task 6. We evaluate multiple sentence embeddings in conjunction with various supervised machine learning algorithms and evaluate the performance of simple yet effective embedding-ML combination algorithms. Our team (Fermi)’s model achieved an F1-score of 64.40%, 62.00% and 62.60% for sub-task A, B and C respectively on the official leaderboard. Our model for subtask C which uses pretrained ELMo embeddings for transforming the input and uses SVM (RBF kernel) for training, scored third position on the official leaderboard. Through the paper we provide a detailed description of the approach, as well as the results obtained for the task.

Abstract

Online Community Question Answering Forums (cQA) have gained massive popularity within recent years. The rise in users for such forums have led to the increase in the need for automated evaluation for question comprehension and fact evaluation of the answers provided by various participants in the forum. Our team, Fermi, participated in sub-task A of Task 8 at SemEval 2019 - which tackles the first problem in the pipeline of factual evaluation in cQA forums, i.e., deciding whether a posed question asks for a factual information, an opinion/advice or is just socializing. This information is highly useful in segregating factual questions from non-factual ones which highly helps in organizing the questions into useful categories and trims down the problem space for the next task in the pipeline for fact evaluation among the available answers. Our system uses the embeddings obtained from Universal Sentence Encoder combined with XGBoost for the classification subtask A. We also evaluate other combinations of embeddings and off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms to demonstrate the efficacy of the various representations and their combinations. Our results across the evaluation test set gave an accuracy of 84% and received the first position in the final standings judged by the organizers.

Abstract

Automatic research paper summarization is a fairly interesting topic that has garnered significant interest in the research community in recent years. In this paper, we introduce team Helium’s system description for the CL-SciSumm shared task colocated with SIGIR 2019. We specifically attempt the first task, targeting in building an improved recall system of reference text spans from a given citing research paper (Task 1A) and constructing better models for comprehension of scientific facets (Task 1B). Our architecture incorporates transfer learning by utilising a combination of pretrained embeddings which are subsequently used for building models for the given tasks. In particular - for task 1A, we locate the related text spans referred to by the citation text by creating paired text representations and employ pre-trained embedding mechanisms in conjunction with XGBoost, a gradient boosted decision tree algorithm to identify textual entailment. For task 1B, we make use of the same pretrained embeddings and use the RAKEL algorithm for multi-label classification. Our goal is to enable better scientific research comprehension and we believe that a new approach involving transfer learning will certainly add value to the research community working on these tasks.

Abstract

Given the explosion in availability of scientific documents (books and research papers), automatically extracting cause–effect (CE) relation mentions, along with other arguments such as polarity, uncertainty and evidence, is becoming crucial for creating scientific knowledge bases from scientific text documents. Such knowledge bases can be used for multiple tasks, such as question answering, exploring research hypotheses and identifying opportunities for new research. Linguistically complex constructs are used to express CE relations in text, which requires complex natural language processing techniques for CE relation extraction. In this paper, we propose two machine learning techniques for automatically extracting CE relation mentions from documents in metallurgy and materials science domains. We show experimentally that our algorithms outperform several baselines for extracting intrasentence CE relation mentions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for extraction of CE relations from documents in metallurgy and materials science domains.

Abstract

Sexism, an injustice that subjects women and girls to enormous suffering, manifests in blatant as well as subtle ways. In the wake of growing documentation of experiences of sexism on the web, the automatic categorization of accounts of sexism has the potential to assist social scientists and policy makers in studying and countering sexism better. The existing work on sexism classification, which is different from sexism detection, has certain limitations in terms of the categories of sexism used and/or whether they can co-occur. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the multi-label classification of sexism of any kind(s), and we contribute the largest dataset for sexism categorization. We develop a neural solution for this multi-label classification that can combine sentence representations obtained using models such as BERT with distributional and linguistic word embeddings using a flexible, hierarchical architecture involving recurrent components and optional convolutional ones. Further, we leverage unlabeled accounts of sexism to infuse domain-specific elements into our framework. The best propose method outperforms several deep learning as well as traditional machine learning baselines by an appreciable margin.

Abstract

INDIA IS A software superpower today. This achievement rests on more than four decades of work spanning software processes, rigorous engineering and value-adding technologies, among others. In this article, we present highlights of some of these activities. This regional section also contains other articles that complement this account of exciting work in software systems stemming from India.

Abstract

Prediction of trust relations between users of social networks is critical for finding credible information. Inferring trust is challenging, since userspecified trust relations are highly sparse and power-law distributed. In this paper, we explore utilizing community memberships for trust prediction in a principled manner. We also propose a novel method to model homophily that complements existing work. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that mathematically formulates an insight based on community memberships for unsupervised trust prediction. We propose and model the hypothesis that a user is more likely to develop a trust relation within the user’s community than outside it. Unlike existing work, our approach for encoding homophily directly links user-user similarities with the pair-wise trust model. We derive mathematical factors that model our hypothesis relating community memberships to trust relations and the homophily effect. Along with low-rank matrix factorization, they are combined into chTrust, the proposed multi-faceted optimization framework. Our experiments on the standard Ciao and Epinions datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms multiple unsupervised trust prediction baselines for all test user pairs as well as the low-degree segment, across evaluation setting

Abstract

The task of fact-checking has been formalised as the assessment of the truthfulness of a claim. Be it a political proclamation or a technological development, verification of a new tidbit of information before its propagation to the general public is of utmost importance. Failing to do so leads to the spread of misinformation, which is a devious tool. Fact-checking is commonly performed by journalists, manually looking up information pertaining to the statement in question. This is a drawn out and tedious process with a chance of the concerned person not covering the domain exhaustively. Some of this effort is reduced by the use of knowledge bases created over a period of time. In this work under Task 2 (Factuality) of the CLEF 2018 CheckThat! Lab, we detail a neural network based methodology which models the textual data of a claim based on various representations of its words and characters. An affixed attention mechanism allows us to encapsulate linguistic features common in false claims. We achieve an accuracy of 39.57% on the task dataset.