Ayushman Dash

Kushal Jain, Adwait Deshpande, Kumar Shridhar et al.

Language models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks such as text classification, question-answering, and token classification. However, this performance is usually tested and reported on high-resource languages, like English, French, Spanish, and German. Indian languages, on the other hand, are underrepresented in such benchmarks. Despite some Indian languages being included in training multilingual Transformer models, they have not been the primary focus of such work. In order to evaluate the performance on Indian languages specifically, we analyze these language models through extensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks in Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu language. Here, we compare the efficacy of fine-tuning model parameters of pre-trained models against that of training a language model from scratch. Moreover, we empirically argue against the strict dependency between the dataset size and model performance, but rather encourage task-specific model and method selection. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on Hindi and Bengali languages for text classification task. Finally, we present effective strategies for handling the modeling of Indian languages and we release our model checkpoints for the community : https://huggingface.co/neuralspace-reverie.

Kumar Shridhar, Ayushman Dash, Amit Sahu et al.

In this paper, we introduce the use of Semantic Hashing as embedding for the task of Intent Classification and achieve state-of-the-art performance on three frequently used benchmarks. Intent Classification on a small dataset is a challenging task for data-hungry state-of-the-art Deep Learning based systems. Semantic Hashing is an attempt to overcome such a challenge and learn robust text classification. Current word embedding based are dependent on vocabularies. One of the major drawbacks of such methods is out-of-vocabulary terms, especially when having small training datasets and using a wider vocabulary. This is the case in Intent Classification for chatbots, where typically small datasets are extracted from internet communication. Two problems arise by the use of internet communication. First, such datasets miss a lot of terms in the vocabulary to use word embeddings efficiently. Second, users frequently make spelling errors. Typically, the models for intent classification are not trained with spelling errors and it is difficult to think about ways in which users will make mistakes. Models depending on a word vocabulary will always face such issues. An ideal classifier should handle spelling errors inherently. With Semantic Hashing, we overcome these challenges and achieve state-of-the-art results on three datasets: AskUbuntu, Chatbot, and Web Application. Our benchmarks are available online: https://github.com/kumar-shridhar/Know-Your-Intent

Mehar Bhatia, Tenzin Singhay Bhotia, Akshat Agarwal et al.

This paper is a contribution to the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC) 2021 shared task. Social media today is a hotbed of toxic and hateful conversations, in various languages. Recent news reports have shown that current models struggle to automatically identify hate posted in minority languages. Therefore, efficiently curbing hate speech is a critical challenge and problem of interest. We present a multilingual architecture using state-of-the-art transformer language models to jointly learn hate and offensive speech detection across three languages namely, English, Hindi, and Marathi. On the provided testing corpora, we achieve Macro F1 scores of 0.7996, 0.7748, 0.8651 for sub-task 1A and 0.6268, 0.5603 during the fine-grained classification of sub-task 1B. These results show the efficacy of exploiting a multilingual training scheme.

Ayushman Dash, Amit Sahu, Rajveer Shringi et al.

This paper presents a novel approach, called AirScript, for creating, recognizing and visualizing documents in air. We present a novel algorithm, called 2-DifViz, that converts the hand movements in air (captured by a Myo-armband worn by a user) into a sequence of x, y coordinates on a 2D Cartesian plane, and visualizes them on a canvas. Existing sensor-based approaches either do not provide visual feedback or represent the recognized characters using prefixed templates. In contrast, AirScript stands out by giving freedom of movement to the user, as well as by providing a real-time visual feedback of the written characters, making the interaction natural. AirScript provides a recognition module to predict the content of the document created in air. To do so, we present a novel approach based on deep learning, which uses the sensor data and the visualizations created by 2-DifViz. The recognition module consists of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and two Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Networks. The output from these three networks is fused to get the final prediction about the characters written in air. AirScript can be used in highly sophisticated environments like a smart classroom, a smart factory or a smart laboratory, where it would enable people to annotate pieces of texts wherever they want without any reference surface. We have evaluated AirScript against various well-known learning models (HMM, KNN, SVM, etc.) on the data of 12 participants. Evaluation results show that the recognition module of AirScript largely outperforms all of these models by achieving an accuracy of 91.7% in a person independent evaluation and a 96.7% accuracy in a person dependent evaluation.

Ayushman Dash, John Cristian Borges Gamboa, Sheraz Ahmed et al.

In this work, we present the Text Conditioned Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network, (TAC-GAN) a text to image Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for synthesizing images from their text descriptions. Former approaches have tried to condition the generative process on the textual data; but allying it to the usage of class information, known to diversify the generated samples and improve their structural coherence, has not been explored. We trained the presented TAC-GAN model on the Oxford-102 dataset of flowers, and evaluated the discriminability of the generated images with Inception-Score, as well as their diversity using the Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Index (MS-SSIM). Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models, i.e., its inception score is 3.45, corresponding to a relative increase of 7.8% compared to the recently introduced StackGan. A comparison of the mean MS-SSIM scores of the training and generated samples per class shows that our approach is able to generate highly diverse images with an average MS-SSIM of 0.14 over all generated classes.