Abstract

Social media has become one of the main channels for peo-ple to communicate and share their views with the society. We can often detect from these views whether the person is in favor, against or neu-tral towards a given topic. These opinions from social media are very useful for various companies. We present a new dataset that consists of 3545 English-Hindi code-mixed tweets with opinion towards Demoneti-sation that was implemented in India in 2016 which was followed by a large countrywide debate. We present a baseline supervised classification system for stance detection developed using the same dataset that uses various machine learning techniques to achieve an accuracy of 58.7% on 10-fold cross validation.

Abstract

Hate speech detection in social media texts is an important Natural language Processing task, which has several crucial applications like sentiment analysis, investigating cyberbullying and examining socio-political controversies. While relevant research has been done independently on code-mixed social media texts and hate speech detection, our work is the first attempt in detecting hate speech in Hindi-English code-mixed social media text. In this paper, we analyze the problem of hate speech detection in code-mixed texts and present a Hindi-English code-mixed dataset consisting of tweets posted online on Twitter. The tweets are annotated with the language at word level and the class they belong to (Hate Speech or Normal Speech). We also propose a supervised classification system for detecting hate speech in the text using various character level, word level, and lexicon based features.

Abstract

Machine learning approaches in sentiment analysis principally rely on the abundance of resources. To limit this dependence, we propose a novel method called Siamese Network Architecture for Sentiment Analysis (SNASA) to learn representations of resource-poor languages by jointly training them with resource-rich languages using a siamese network. SNASA 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 sentence representations of resource-poor and resource-rich language in a common sentiment space by using a similarity metric based on their individual sentiments. The model, hence, projects sentences with similar sentiment closer to each other and the sentences with different sentiment farther from each other. Experiments on large-scale datasets of resource-rich languages-English and Spanish and resource-poor languages-Hindi and Telugu reveal that SNASA outperforms the state-of-the-art sentiment analysis approaches based on distributional semantics, semantic rules, lexicon lists and deep neural network representations without shared parameters.

Abstract

Previous research shows that performance is better when a high pitch is responded with up or right responses and a low pitch is responded with down or left responses, called the spatial-pitch association of response codes (SPARC) effect. Despite the intuitive coupling of perception-action, studies investigating the SPARC effect have, however, used feedback to manipulate the stimulus-response mapping. Feedback contradicts the purpose of intuitive stimulus-response mapping by enabling short-term learning. This study primarily investigates the role of feedback on SPARC effect. We believe that feedback can facilitate incongruent mapping and can, therefore, reduce the cost between incongruent and congruent mapping resulting in a diminished SPARC effect. Our results, however, show that feedback has no influence on the SPARC effect indicating that long-term associations can not be overcome by short-term learning due to robust perception-action coupling. Further, unlike previous studies, we observed a strong horizontal SPARC effect in nonmusicians as well.

Abstract

POS Tagging serves as a preliminary task for many NLP applications. Kannada is a relatively poor Indian language with very limited number of quality NLP tools available for use. An accurate and reliable POS Tagger is essential for many NLP tasks like shallow parsing, dependency parsing, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition. We present a statistical POS tagger for Kannada using different machine learning and neural network models. Our Kannada POS tagger outperforms the state-of-the-art Kannada POS tagger by 6%. Our contribution in this paper is three folds - building a generic POS Tagger, comparing the performances of different modeling techniques, exploring the use of character and word embeddings together for Kannada POS Tagging.

Abstract

Automatic Word problem solving has always posed a great challenge for the NLP community. Usually a word problem is a narrative comprising of a few sentences and a question is asked about a quantity referred in the sentences. Solving word problem involves reasoning across sentences, identification of operations, their order, relevant quantities and discarding irrelevant quantities. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automatic arithmetic word problem solving. Our approach starts with frame identification. Each frame can either be classified as a state or an action frame. The frame identification is dependent on the verb in a sentence. Every frame is unique and is identified by its slots. The slots are filled using dependency parsed output of a sentence. The slots are entity holder, entity, quantity of the entity, recipient, additional information like place, time. The slots and frames helps to identify the type of question asked and the entity referred. Action frames act on state frame(s) which causes a change in quantities of the state frames. The frames are then used to build a graph where any change in quantities can be propagated to the neighboring nodes. Most of the current solvers can only answer questions related to the quantity, while our system can answer different kinds of questions like ‘who’, ‘what’ other than the quantity related questions ‘how many’. There are three major contributions of this paper. 1. Frame Annotated Corpus (with a frame annotation tool) 2. Frame Identification Module 3. A new easily understandable Framework for word problem solving

Abstract

The Part-Of-Speech tag of a word can provide crucial information for a large number of tasks, and so, it is of utmost importance that the POS tagged data is accurate. However, manually checking the data is a tedious and time consuming task. Thus, there is a need for an Automatic Error Correction and Validation model for any POS Tagged Data. In this paper,we work towards achieving the aforementioned goal for Hindi POS Tagging. This is achieved by using an ensemble model consisting of three POS Tagging Models. Based on the predictions made by the three models, and the POS tag present in the dataset, the ensemble model predicts the presence of an error. The POS tagging models explored were the Hidden Markov Model, Support Vector Machine, Conditional Random Fields, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Networks, Bidirectional LSTM Networks, and Logistic Regression. A Fully Connected Neural Network was used to build the ensemble model, and it achieved an accuracy of 94.02%.

Abstract

Code-switching is a phenomenon of mixing grammatical structures of two or more languages under varied social constraints. The code-switching data differ so radically from the benchmark corpora used in NLP community that the application of standard technologies to these data degrades their performance sharply. Unlike standard corpora, these data often need to go through additional processes such as language identification, normalization and/or back-transliteration for their efficient processing. In this paper, we investigate these indispensable processes and other problems associated with syntactic parsing of code-switching data and propose methods to mitigate their effects. In particular, we study dependency parsing of code-switching data of Hindi and English multilingual speakers from Twitter. We present a treebank of Hindi-English code-switching tweets under Universal Dependencies scheme and propose a neural stacking model for parsing that efficiently leverages part-of-speech tag and syntactic tree annotations in the code-switching treebank and the preexisting Hindi and English treebanks. We also present normalization and back-transliteration models with a decoding process tailored for code-switching data. Results show that our neural stacking parser is 1.5% LAS points better than the augmented parsing model and our decoding process improves results by 3.8% LAS points over the first-best normalization and/or backtransliteration.

Abstract

One of the major challenges in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the handling of idioms; seemingly ordinary phrases which could be further conjugated or even spread across the sentence to fit the context. Since idioms are a part of natural language, the ability to tackle them brings us closer to creating efficient NLP tools. This paper presents a multilingual parallel idiom dataset for seven Indian languages in addition to English and demonstrates its usefulness for two NLP applications - Machine Translation and Sentiment Analysis. We observe significant improvement for both the subtasks over baseline models trained without employing the idiom dataset.

Abstract

This paper describes the systems submitted by IIT (BHU), Varanasi/IIIT Hyderabad (IITBHU–IIITH) for Task 1 of CoNLL– SIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task on Universal Morphological Reinflection (Cotterell et al., 2018). The task is to generate the inflected form given a lemma and set of morphological features. The systems are evaluated on over 100 distinct languages and three different resource settings (low, medium and high). We formulate the task as a sequence to sequence learning problem. As most of the characters in inflected form are copied from the lemma, we use Pointer-Generator Network (See et al., 2017) which makes it easier for the system to copy characters from the lemma. PointerGenerator Network also helps in dealing with out-of-vocabulary characters during inference. Our best performing system stood 4th among 28 systems, 3rd among 23 systems and 4th among 23 systems for the low, medium and high resource setting respectively