John P. McCrae

Koustava Goswami, Priya Rani, Theodorus Fransen et al.

Exploiting cognates for transfer learning in under-resourced languages is an exciting opportunity for language understanding tasks, including unsupervised machine translation, named entity recognition and information retrieval. Previous approaches mainly focused on supervised cognate detection tasks based on orthographic, phonetic or state-of-the-art contextual language models, which under-perform for most under-resourced languages. This paper proposes a novel language-agnostic weakly-supervised deep cognate detection framework for under-resourced languages using morphological knowledge from closely related languages. We train an encoder to gain morphological knowledge of a language and transfer the knowledge to perform unsupervised and weakly-supervised cognate detection tasks with and without the pivot language for the closely-related languages. While unsupervised, it overcomes the need for hand-crafted annotation of cognates. We performed experiments on different published cognate detection datasets across language families and observed not only significant improvement over the state-of-the-art but also our method outperformed the state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods. Our model can be extended to a wide range of languages from any language family as it overcomes the requirement of the annotation of the cognate pairs for training. The code and dataset building scripts can be found at https://github.com/koustavagoswami/Weakly_supervised-Cognate_Detection

Ghanshyam Verma, Shovon Sengupta, Simon Simanta et al.

Personalized recommender systems play a crucial role in direct marketing, particularly in financial services, where delivering relevant content can enhance customer engagement and promote informed decision-making. This study explores interpretable knowledge graph (KG)-based recommender systems by proposing two distinct approaches for personalized article recommendations within a multinational financial services firm. The first approach leverages Reinforcement Learning (RL) to traverse a KG constructed from both structured (tabular) and unstructured (textual) data, enabling interpretability through Path Directed Reasoning (PDR). The second approach employs the XGBoost algorithm, with post-hoc explainability techniques such as SHAP and ELI5 to enhance transparency. By integrating machine learning with automatically generated KGs, our methods not only improve recommendation accuracy but also provide interpretable insights, facilitating more informed decision-making in customer relationship management.

Alamgir Munir Qazi, John P. McCrae, Jamal Abdul Nasir

The proliferation of misinformation necessitates robust yet computationally efficient fact verification systems. While current state-of-the-art approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating explanatory rationales, these methods face significant computational barriers and hallucination risks in real-world deployments. We present DeReC (Dense Retrieval Classification), a lightweight framework that demonstrates how general-purpose text embeddings can effectively replace autoregressive LLM-based approaches in fact verification tasks. By combining dense retrieval with specialized classification, our system achieves better accuracy while being significantly more efficient. DeReC outperforms explanation-generating LLMs in efficiency, reducing runtime by 95% on RAWFC (23 minutes 36 seconds compared to 454 minutes 12 seconds) and by 92% on LIAR-RAW (134 minutes 14 seconds compared to 1692 minutes 23 seconds), showcasing its effectiveness across varying dataset sizes. On the RAWFC dataset, DeReC achieves an F1 score of 65.58%, surpassing the state-of-the-art method L-Defense (61.20%). Our results demonstrate that carefully engineered retrieval-based systems can match or exceed LLM performance in specialized tasks while being significantly more practical for real-world deployment.

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Vigneshwaran Muralidaran et al.

This paper describes the development of a multilingual, manually annotated dataset for three under-resourced Dravidian languages generated from social media comments. The dataset was annotated for sentiment analysis and offensive language identification for a total of more than 60,000 YouTube comments. The dataset consists of around 44,000 comments in Tamil-English, around 7,000 comments in Kannada-English, and around 20,000 comments in Malayalam-English. The data was manually annotated by volunteer annotators and has a high inter-annotator agreement in Krippendorff's alpha. The dataset contains all types of code-mixing phenomena since it comprises user-generated content from a multilingual country. We also present baseline experiments to establish benchmarks on the dataset using machine learning methods. The dataset is available on Github (https://github.com/bharathichezhiyan/DravidianCodeMix-Dataset) and Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4750858\#.YJtw0SYo\_0M).

Narumol Prangnawarat, John P. McCrae, Conor Hayes

Many researchers have made use of the Wikipedia network for relatedness and similarity tasks. However, most approaches use only the most recent information and not historical changes in the network. We provide an analysis of entity relatedness using temporal graph-based approaches over different versions of the Wikipedia article link network and DBpedia, which is an open-source knowledge base extracted from Wikipedia. We consider creating the Wikipedia article link network as both a union and intersection of edges over multiple time points and present a novel variation of the Jaccard index to weight edges based on their transience. We evaluate our results against the KORE dataset, which was created in 2010, and show that using the 2010 Wikipedia article link network produces the strongest result, suggesting that semantic similarity is time sensitive. We then show that integrating multiple time frames in our methods can give a better overall similarity demonstrating that temporal evolution can have an important effect on entity relatedness.

Sourabrata Mukherjee, Akanksha Bansal, Atul Kr. Ojha et al.

This paper focuses on text detoxification, i.e., automatically converting toxic text into non-toxic text. This task contributes to safer and more respectful online communication and can be considered a Text Style Transfer (TST) task, where the text style changes while its content is preserved. We present three approaches: knowledge transfer from a similar task, multi-task learning approach, combining sequence-to-sequence modeling with various toxicity classification tasks, and delete and reconstruct approach. To support our research, we utilize a dataset provided by Dementieva et al.(2021), which contains multiple versions of detoxified texts corresponding to toxic texts. In our experiments, we selected the best variants through expert human annotators, creating a dataset where each toxic sentence is paired with a single, appropriate detoxified version. Additionally, we introduced a small Hindi parallel dataset, aligning with a part of the English dataset, suitable for evaluation purposes. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively balances text detoxication while preserving the actual content and maintaining fluency.

Priya Rani, Gaurav Negi, Theodorus Fransen et al.

The present paper introduces new sentiment data, MaCMS, for Magahi-Hindi-English (MHE) code-mixed language, where Magahi is a less-resourced minority language. This dataset is the first Magahi-Hindi-English code-mixed dataset for sentiment analysis tasks. Further, we also provide a linguistics analysis of the dataset to understand the structure of code-mixing and a statistical study to understand the language preferences of speakers with different polarities. With these analyses, we also train baseline models to evaluate the dataset's quality.

Sourabrata Mukherjee, Atul Kr. Ojha, John P. McCrae et al.

Text style transfer (TST) is the task of transforming a text to reflect a particular style while preserving its original content. Evaluating TST outputs is a multidimensional challenge, requiring the assessment of style transfer accuracy, content preservation, and naturalness. Using human evaluation is ideal but costly, as is common in other natural language processing (NLP) tasks, however, automatic metrics for TST have not received as much attention as metrics for, e.g., machine translation or summarization. In this paper, we examine both set of existing and novel metrics from broader NLP tasks for TST evaluation, focusing on two popular subtasks, sentiment transfer and detoxification, in a multilingual context comprising English, Hindi, and Bengali. By conducting meta-evaluation through correlation with human judgments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these metrics when used individually and in ensembles. Additionally, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) as tools for TST evaluation. Our findings highlight newly applied advanced NLP metrics and LLM-based evaluations provide better insights than existing TST metrics. Our oracle ensemble approaches show even more potential.

Lorenzo Augello, John P. McCrae

Open English Wordnet is a key resource published in OntoLex-lemon as part of the linguistic linked open data cloud. There are, however, many links missing in the resource, and in this paper, we look at how we can establish hypernymy between adjectives. We present a theoretical discussion of the hypernymy relation and how it differs for adjectives in contrast to nouns and verbs. We develop a new resource for adjective hypernymy and fine-tune large language models to predict adjective hypernymy, showing that the methodology of TaxoLLaMa can be adapted to this task.

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Sajeetha Thavareesan et al.

We present the results of the Dravidian-CodeMix shared task held at FIRE 2021, a track on sentiment analysis for Dravidian Languages in Code-Mixed Text. We describe the task, its organization, and the submitted systems. This shared task is the continuation of last year's Dravidian-CodeMix shared task held at FIRE 2020. This year's tasks included code-mixing at the intra-token and inter-token levels. Additionally, apart from Tamil and Malayalam, Kannada was also introduced. We received 22 systems for Tamil-English, 15 systems for Malayalam-English, and 15 for Kannada-English. The top system for Tamil-English, Malayalam-English and Kannada-English scored weighted average F1-score of 0.711, 0.804, and 0.630, respectively. In summary, the quality and quantity of the submission show that there is great interest in Dravidian languages in code-mixed setting and state of the art in this domain still needs more improvement.

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Jishnu Parameswaran P. K, Premjith B et al.

Human communication is inherently multimodal and asynchronous. Analyzing human emotions and sentiment is an emerging field of artificial intelligence. We are witnessing an increasing amount of multimodal content in local languages on social media about products and other topics. However, there are not many multimodal resources available for under-resourced Dravidian languages. Our study aims to create a multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for the under-resourced Tamil and Malayalam languages. First, we downloaded product or movies review videos from YouTube for Tamil and Malayalam. Next, we created captions for the videos with the help of annotators. Then we labelled the videos for sentiment, and verified the inter-annotator agreement using Fleiss's Kappa. This is the first multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for Tamil and Malayalam by volunteer annotators.

Omnia Zayed, John P. McCrae, Paul Buitelaar

Identifying metaphors in text is very challenging and requires comprehending the underlying comparison. The automation of this cognitive process has gained wide attention lately. However, the majority of existing approaches concentrate on word-level identification by treating the task as either single-word classification or sequential labelling without explicitly modelling the interaction between the metaphor components. On the other hand, while existing relation-level approaches implicitly model this interaction, they ignore the context where the metaphor occurs. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing a novel architecture for identifying relation-level metaphoric expressions of certain grammatical relations based on contextual modulation. In a methodology inspired by works in visual reasoning, our approach is based on conditioning the neural network computation on the deep contextualised features of the candidate expressions using feature-wise linear modulation. We demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. The proposed methodology is generic and could be applied to other textual classification problems that benefit from contextual interaction.

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Priya Rani, Mihael Arcan et al.

Machine translation is one of the applications of natural language processing which has been explored in different languages. Recently researchers started paying attention towards machine translation for resource-poor languages and closely related languages. A widespread and underlying problem for these machine translation systems is the variation in orthographic conventions which causes many issues to traditional approaches. Two languages written in two different orthographies are not easily comparable, but orthographic information can also be used to improve the machine translation system. This article offers a survey of research regarding orthography's influence on machine translation of under-resourced languages. It introduces under-resourced languages in terms of machine translation and how orthographic information can be utilised to improve machine translation. We describe previous work in this area, discussing what underlying assumptions were made, and showing how orthographic knowledge improves the performance of machine translation of under-resourced languages. We discuss different types of machine translation and demonstrate a recent trend that seeks to link orthographic information with well-established machine translation methods. Considerable attention is given to current efforts of cognates information at different levels of machine translation and the lessons that can be drawn from this. Additionally, multilingual neural machine translation of closely related languages is given a particular focus in this survey. This article ends with a discussion of the way forward in machine translation with orthographic information, focusing on multilingual settings and bilingual lexicon induction.

Koustava Goswami, Priya Rani, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi et al.

Code mixing is a common phenomena in multilingual societies where people switch from one language to another for various reasons. Recent advances in public communication over different social media sites have led to an increase in the frequency of code-mixed usage in written language. In this paper, we present the Generative Morphemes with Attention (GenMA) Model sentiment analysis system contributed to SemEval 2020 Task 9 SentiMix. The system aims to predict the sentiments of the given English-Hindi code-mixed tweets without using word-level language tags instead inferring this automatically using a morphological model. The system is based on a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, which has outperformed the baseline F1-score on the test data-set as well as the validation data-set. Our results can be found under the user name "koustava" on the "Sentimix Hindi English" page

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Navya Jose, Shardul Suryawanshi et al.

There is an increasing demand for sentiment analysis of text from social media which are mostly code-mixed. Systems trained on monolingual data fail for code-mixed data due to the complexity of mixing at different levels of the text. However, very few resources are available for code-mixed data to create models specific for this data. Although much research in multilingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has used semi-supervised or unsupervised methods, supervised methods still performs better. Only a few datasets for popular languages such as English-Spanish, English-Hindi, and English-Chinese are available. There are no resources available for Malayalam-English code-mixed data. This paper presents a new gold standard corpus for sentiment analysis of code-mixed text in Malayalam-English annotated by voluntary annotators. This gold standard corpus obtained a Krippendorff's alpha above 0.8 for the dataset. We use this new corpus to provide the benchmark for sentiment analysis in Malayalam-English code-mixed texts.

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Vigneshwaran Muralidaran, Ruba Priyadharshini et al.

Understanding the sentiment of a comment from a video or an image is an essential task in many applications. Sentiment analysis of a text can be useful for various decision-making processes. One such application is to analyse the popular sentiments of videos on social media based on viewer comments. However, comments from social media do not follow strict rules of grammar, and they contain mixing of more than one language, often written in non-native scripts. Non-availability of annotated code-mixed data for a low-resourced language like Tamil also adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we created a gold standard Tamil-English code-switched, sentiment-annotated corpus containing 15,744 comment posts from YouTube. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the corpus and assigning polarities. We present inter-annotator agreement and show the results of sentiment analysis trained on this corpus as a benchmark.

Georg Rehm, Dimitrios Galanis, Penny Labropoulou et al.

With regard to the wider area of AI/LT platform interoperability, we concentrate on two core aspects: (1) cross-platform search and discovery of resources and services; (2) composition of cross-platform service workflows. We devise five different levels (of increasing complexity) of platform interoperability that we suggest to implement in a wider federation of AI/LT platforms. We illustrate the approach using the five emerging AI/LT platforms AI4EU, ELG, Lynx, QURATOR and SPEAKER.

Md. Rezaul Karim, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, John P. McCrae et al.

Exponential growths of social media and micro-blogging sites not only provide platforms for empowering freedom of expressions and individual voices but also enables people to express anti-social behaviour like online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. Numerous works have been proposed to utilize these data for social and anti-social behaviours analysis, document characterization, and sentiment analysis by predicting the contexts mostly for highly resourced languages such as English. However, there are languages that are under-resources, e.g., South Asian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Assamese, Telugu that lack of computational resources for the NLP tasks. In this paper, we provide several classification benchmarks for Bengali, an under-resourced language. We prepared three datasets of expressing hate, commonly used topics, and opinions for hate speech detection, document classification, and sentiment analysis, respectively. We built the largest Bengali word embedding models to date based on 250 million articles, which we call BengFastText. We perform three different experiments, covering document classification, sentiment analysis, and hate speech detection. We incorporate word embeddings into a Multichannel Convolutional-LSTM (MConv-LSTM) network for predicting different types of hate speech, document classification, and sentiment analysis. Experiments demonstrate that BengFastText can capture the semantics of words from respective contexts correctly. Evaluations against several baseline embedding models, e.g., Word2Vec and GloVe yield up to 92.30%, 82.25%, and 90.45% F1-scores in case of document classification, sentiment analysis, and hate speech detection, respectively during 5-fold cross-validation tests.