Somesh Mohapatra

Sovesh Mohapatra, Somesh Mohapatra

Election speeches play an integral role in communicating the vision and mission of the candidates. From lofty promises to mud-slinging, the electoral candidate accounts for all. However, there remains an open question about what exactly wins over the voters. In this work, we used state-of-the-art natural language processing methods to study the speeches and sentiments of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, and Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, fighting for the 2020 US Presidential election. Comparing the racial dichotomy of the United States, we analyze what led to the victory and defeat of the different candidates. We believe this work will inform the election campaigning strategy and provide a basis for communicating to diverse crowds.

Sovesh Mohapatra, Somesh Mohapatra

Transfer learning from large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful technique to enable knowledge-based fine-tuning for a number of tasks, adaptation of models for different domains and even languages. However, it remains an open question, if and when transfer learning will work, i.e. leading to positive or negative transfer. In this paper, we analyze the knowledge transfer across three natural language processing (NLP) tasks - text classification, sentimental analysis, and sentence similarity, using three LLMs - BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet - and analyzing their performance, by fine-tuning on target datasets for domain and cross-lingual adaptation tasks, with and without an intermediate task training on a larger dataset. Our experiments showed that fine-tuning without an intermediate task training can lead to a better performance for most tasks, while more generalized tasks might necessitate a preceding intermediate task training step. We hope that this work will act as a guide on transfer learning to NLP practitioners.

Somesh Mohapatra, Joyce An, Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli

The near-infinite chemical diversity of natural and artificial macromolecules arises from the vast range of possible component monomers, linkages, and polymers topologies. This enormous variety contributes to the ubiquity and indispensability of macromolecules but hinders the development of general machine learning methods with macromolecules as input. To address this, we developed GLAMOUR, a framework for chemistry-informed graph representation of macromolecules that enables quantifying structural similarity, and interpretable supervised learning for macromolecules.