Manish Shrivastava

Mehrad Moradshahi, Tianhao Shen, Kalika Bali et al. · stanford

Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by translating the Chinese RiSAWOZ to 4 languages: English, French, Hindi, Korean; and a code-mixed English-Hindi language. X-RiSAWOZ has more than 18,000 human-verified dialogue utterances for each language, and unlike most multilingual prior work, is an end-to-end dataset for building fully-functioning agents. The many difficulties we encountered in creating X-RiSAWOZ led us to develop a toolset to accelerate the post-editing of a new language dataset after translation. This toolset improves machine translation with a hybrid entity alignment technique that combines neural with dictionary-based methods, along with many automated and semi-automated validation checks. We establish strong baselines for X-RiSAWOZ by training dialogue agents in the zero- and few-shot settings where limited gold data is available in the target language. Our results suggest that our translation and post-editing methodology and toolset can be used to create new high-quality multilingual dialogue agents cost-effectively. Our dataset, code, and toolkit are released open-source.

Souvik Banerjee, Bamdev Mishra, Pratik Jawanpuria et al. · microsoft-research

This paper aims to provide an unsupervised modelling approach that allows for a more flexible representation of text embeddings. It jointly encodes the words and the paragraphs as individual matrices of arbitrary column dimension with unit Frobenius norm. The representation is also linguistically motivated with the introduction of a novel similarity metric. The proposed modelling and the novel similarity metric exploits the matrix structure of embeddings. We then go on to show that the same matrices can be reshaped into vectors of unit norm and transform our problem into an optimization problem over the spherical manifold. We exploit manifold optimization to efficiently train the matrix embeddings. We also quantitatively verify the quality of our text embeddings by showing that they demonstrate improved results in document classification, document clustering, and semantic textual similarity benchmark tests.

Ashok Urlana, Sahil Manoj Bhatt, Nirmal Surange et al.

The ILSUM shared task focuses on text summarization for two major Indian languages- Hindi and Gujarati, along with English. In this task, we experiment with various pretrained sequence-to-sequence models to find out the best model for each of the languages. We present a detailed overview of the models and our approaches in this paper. We secure the first rank across all three sub-tasks (English, Hindi and Gujarati). This paper also extensively analyzes the impact of k-fold cross-validation while experimenting with limited data size, and we also perform various experiments with a combination of the original and a filtered version of the data to determine the efficacy of the pretrained models.

Prashant Kodali, Tanmay Sachan, Akshay Goindani et al.

Code-Mixing is a phenomenon of mixing two or more languages in a speech event and is prevalent in multilingual societies. Given the low-resource nature of Code-Mixing, machine generation of code-mixed text is a prevalent approach for data augmentation. However, evaluating the quality of such machine generated code-mixed text is an open problem. In our submission to HinglishEval, a shared-task collocated with INLG2022, we attempt to build models factors that impact the quality of synthetically generated code-mix text by predicting ratings for code-mix quality.

Aashna Jena, Vivek Gupta, Manish Shrivastava et al.

Creating challenging tabular inference data is essential for learning complex reasoning. Prior work has mostly relied on two data generation strategies. The first is human annotation, which yields linguistically diverse data but is difficult to scale. The second category for creation is synthetic generation, which is scalable and cost effective but lacks inventiveness. In this research, we present a framework for semi-automatically recasting existing tabular data to make use of the benefits of both approaches. We utilize our framework to build tabular NLI instances from five datasets that were initially intended for tasks like table2text creation, tabular Q/A, and semantic parsing. We demonstrate that recasted data could be used as evaluation benchmarks as well as augmentation data to enhance performance on tabular NLI tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of models trained on recasted data in the zero-shot scenario, and analyse trends in performance across different recasted datasets types.

Poojitha Nandigam, Nikhil Rayaprolu, Manish Shrivastava

Often questions provided to open-domain question answering systems are ambiguous. Traditional QA systems that provide a single answer are incapable of answering ambiguous questions since the question may be interpreted in several ways and may have multiple distinct answers. In this paper, we address multi-answer retrieval which entails retrieving passages that can capture majority of the diverse answers to the question. We propose a re-ranking based approach using Determinantal point processes utilizing BERT as kernels. Our method jointly considers query-passage relevance and passage-passage correlation to retrieve passages that are both query-relevant and diverse. Results demonstrate that our re-ranking technique outperforms state-of-the-art method on the AmbigQA dataset.

Debashish Roy, Manish Shrivastava

In this paper, we have worked on interpretability, trust, and understanding of the decisions made by models in the form of classification tasks. The task is divided into 3 subtasks. The first task consists of determining Binary Sexism Detection. The second task describes the Category of Sexism. The third task describes a more Fine-grained Category of Sexism. Our work explores solving these tasks as a classification problem by fine-tuning transformer-based architecture. We have performed several experiments with our architecture, including combining multiple transformers, using domain adaptive pretraining on the unlabelled dataset provided by Reddit and Gab, Joint learning, and taking different layers of transformers as input to a classification head. Our system (with team name Attention) was able to achieve a macro F1 score of 0.839 for task A, 0.5835 macro F1 score for task B and 0.3356 macro F1 score for task C at the Codalab SemEval Competition. Later we improved the accuracy of Task B to 0.6228 and Task C to 0.3693 in the test set.

Suyash Vardhan Mathur, Jainit Sushil Bafna, Kunal Kartik et al.

Existing datasets for tabular question answering typically focus exclusively on text within cells. However, real-world data is inherently multimodal, often blending images such as symbols, faces, icons, patterns, and charts with textual content in tables. With the evolution of AI models capable of multimodal reasoning, it is pertinent to assess their efficacy in handling such structured data. This study investigates whether current AI models can perform knowledge-aware reasoning on multimodal structured data. We explore their ability to reason on tables that integrate both images and text, introducing MMTabQA, a new dataset designed for this purpose. Our experiments highlight substantial challenges for current AI models in effectively integrating and interpreting multiple text and image inputs, understanding visual context, and comparing visual content across images. These findings establish our dataset as a robust benchmark for advancing AI's comprehension and capabilities in analyzing multimodal structured data.

Lokesh Madasu, Gopichand Kanumolu, Nirmal Surange et al.

The task of headline generation within the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP) holds immense significance, as it strives to distill the true essence of textual content into concise and attention-grabbing summaries. While noteworthy progress has been made in headline generation for widely spoken languages like English, there persist numerous challenges when it comes to generating headlines in low-resource languages, such as the rich and diverse Indian languages. A prominent obstacle that specifically hinders headline generation in Indian languages is the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. To address this crucial gap, we proudly present Mukhyansh, an extensive multilingual dataset, tailored for Indian language headline generation. Comprising an impressive collection of over 3.39 million article-headline pairs, Mukhyansh spans across eight prominent Indian languages, namely Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati. We present a comprehensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art baseline models. Additionally, through an empirical analysis of existing works, we demonstrate that Mukhyansh outperforms all other models, achieving an impressive average ROUGE-L score of 31.43 across all 8 languages.

Jainit Sushil Bafna, Hardik Mittal, Suyash Sethia et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive abilities in generating fluent responses to diverse user queries. However, concerns regarding the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, educational, and academic contexts have surfaced. SemEval 2024 introduces the task of Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection, aiming to develop automated systems for identifying machine-generated text and detecting potential misuse. In this paper, we i) propose a RoBERTa-BiLSTM based classifier designed to classify text into two categories: AI-generated or human ii) conduct a comparative study of our model with baseline approaches to evaluate its effectiveness. This paper contributes to the advancement of automatic text detection systems in addressing the challenges posed by machine-generated text misuse. Our architecture ranked 46th on the official leaderboard with an accuracy of 80.83 among 125.

Saumitra Yadav, Manish Shrivastava

Data curation is a critical yet under-researched step in the machine translation training paradigm. To train translation systems, data acquisition relies primarily on human translations and digital parallel sources or, to a limited degree, synthetic generation. But, for low-resource languages, human translation to generate sufficient data is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a framework that screens source sentences to form efficient parallel text, ensuring optimal MT system performance in low-resource environments. We approach this by evaluating English-Hindi bi-text to determine effective sentence selection strategies for optimal MT system training. Our extensively tested framework, (Lexical And Linguistically Informed Text Analysis) LALITA, targets source sentence selection using lexical and linguistic features to curate parallel corpora. We find that by training mostly on complex sentences from both existing and synthetic datasets, our method significantly improves translation quality. We test this by simulating low-resource data availabilty with curated datasets of 50K to 800K English sentences and report improved performances on all data sizes. LALITA demonstrates remarkable efficiency, reducing data needs by more than half across multiple languages (Hindi, Odia, Nepali, Norwegian Nynorsk, and German). This approach not only reduces MT systems training cost by reducing training data requirement, but also showcases LALITA's utility in data augmentation.

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin et al.

People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. Although emotion recognition--an umbrella term for several NLP tasks--impacts various applications within NLP and beyond, most work in this area has focused on high-resource languages. This has led to significant disparities in research efforts and proposed solutions, particularly for under-resourced languages, which often lack high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we present BRIGHTER--a collection of multi-labeled, emotion-annotated datasets in 28 different languages and across several domains. BRIGHTER primarily covers low-resource languages from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, with instances labeled by fluent speakers. We highlight the challenges related to the data collection and annotation processes, and then report experimental results for monolingual and crosslingual multi-label emotion identification, as well as emotion intensity recognition. We analyse the variability in performance across languages and text domains, both with and without the use of LLMs, and show that the BRIGHTER datasets represent a meaningful step towards addressing the gap in text-based emotion recognition.

Saumitra Yadav, Manish Shrivastava

Existing Machine Translation (MT) research often suggests a single, fixed set of hyperparameters for word segmentation models, symmetric Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which applies the same number of merge operations (NMO) to train tokenizers for both source and target languages. However, we demonstrate that this uniform approach doesn't guarantee optimal MT performance across different language pairs and data sizes. This work investigates BPE segmentation recipes across various data volumes and language pairs to evaluate MT system performance. We find that utilizing asymmetric BPE, where the source and target languages have different NMOs, significantly improves results over the symmetric approach, especially in low-resource settings (50K, 100K, and 500K sentence pairs). Specifically, asymmetric BPE yield statistically significant ($p<0.05$) average gains of 5.32, 4.46, and 0.7 CHRF++ on English-Hindi in low-resource setups (50K, 100K, and 500K sentence pairs, respectively). We validated this trend across six additional language pairs (English and Telugu, Shona, Norwegian, Kyrgyz, Hausa, and Inuktitut), observing statistically significant improvement in 10 out of 12 systems compared to symmetric BPE. Our findings indicate a high NMO for the source (4K to 32K) and a low NMO for the target (0.5K to 2K) provides optimal results, particularly benefiting low-resource MT.

Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla et al.

Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language and holds significant implications across various NLP tasks. While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English language context, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness. In this paper, we present \textit{SemRel}, a new semantic relatedness dataset collection annotated by native speakers across 13 languages: \textit{Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish,} and \textit{Telugu}. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by a relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the SemRel datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. The scores are obtained using a comparative annotation framework. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, challenges when building the datasets, baseline experiments, and their impact and utility in NLP.

Abhinav Menon, Manish Shrivastava, David Krueger et al.

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a lack of corresponding results, both qualitative and quantitative, for the text domain. We aim to address this gap by training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on a synthetic testbed of formal languages. Specifically, we train SAEs on the hidden representations of models trained on formal languages (Dyck-2, Expr, and English PCFG) under a wide variety of hyperparameter settings, finding interpretable latents often emerge in the features learned by our SAEs. However, similar to vision, we find performance turns out to be highly sensitive to inductive biases of the training pipeline. Moreover, we show latents correlating to certain features of the input do not always induce a causal impact on model's computation. We thus argue that causality has to become a central target in SAE training: learning of causal features should be incentivized from the ground-up. Motivated by this, we propose and perform preliminary investigations for an approach that promotes learning of causally relevant features in our formal language setting.

Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla et al.

We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks.

Kalahasti Ganesh Srivatsa, Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay, Ganesh Katrapati et al.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a revolutionary approach which has gained significant prominence in the Industry. IaC manages and provisions IT infrastructure using machine-readable code by enabling automation, consistency across the environments, reproducibility, version control, error reduction and enhancement in scalability. However, IaC orchestration is often a painstaking effort which requires specialised skills as well as a lot of manual effort. Automation of IaC is a necessity in the present conditions of the Industry and in this survey, we study the feasibility of applying Large Language Models (LLM) to address this problem. LLMs are large neural network-based models which have demonstrated significant language processing abilities and shown to be capable of following a range of instructions within a broad scope. Recently, they have also been adapted for code understanding and generation tasks successfully, which makes them a promising choice for the automatic generation of IaC configurations. In this survey, we delve into the details of IaC, usage of IaC in different platforms, their challenges, LLMs in terms of code-generation aspects and the importance of LLMs in IaC along with our own experiments. Finally, we conclude by presenting the challenges in this area and highlighting the scope for future research.

Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, Ujwal Narayan, Manish Shrivastava

Character arcs are important theoretical devices employed in literary studies to understand character journeys, identify tropes across literary genres, and establish similarities between narratives. This work addresses the novel task of computationally generating event-centric, relation-based character arcs from narratives. Providing a quantitative representation for arcs brings tangibility to a theoretical concept and paves the way for subsequent applications. We present MARCUS (Modelling Arcs for Understanding Stories), an NLP pipeline that extracts events, participant characters, implied emotion, and sentiment to model inter-character relations. MARCUS tracks and aggregates these relations across the narrative to generate character arcs as graphical plots. We generate character arcs from two extended fantasy series, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. We evaluate our approach before outlining existing challenges, suggesting applications of our pipeline, and discussing future work.

Gopichand Kanumolu, Lokesh Madasu, Nirmal Surange et al.

News headline generation is a crucial task in increasing productivity for both the readers and producers of news. This task can easily be aided by automated News headline-generation models. However, the presence of irrelevant headlines in scraped news articles results in sub-optimal performance of generation models. We propose that relevance-based headline classification can greatly aid the task of generating relevant headlines. Relevance-based headline classification involves categorizing news headlines based on their relevance to the corresponding news articles. While this task is well-established in English, it remains under-explored in low-resource languages like Telugu due to a lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we present TeClass, the first-ever human-annotated Telugu news headline classification dataset, containing 78,534 annotations across 26,178 article-headline pairs. We experiment with various baseline models and provide a comprehensive analysis of their results. We further demonstrate the impact of this work by fine-tuning various headline generation models using TeClass dataset. The headlines generated by the models fine-tuned on highly relevant article-headline pairs, showed about a 5 point increment in the ROUGE-L scores. To encourage future research, the annotated dataset as well as the annotation guidelines will be made publicly available.

Vihang Pancholi, Jainit Bafna, Tejas Anvekar et al.

Evaluating tables qualitatively and quantitatively poses a significant challenge, as standard metrics often overlook subtle structural and content-level discrepancies. To address this, we propose a rubric-based evaluation framework that integrates multi-level structural descriptors with fine-grained contextual signals, enabling more precise and consistent table comparison. Building on this, we introduce TabXEval, an eXhaustive and eXplainable two-phase evaluation framework. TabXEval first aligns reference and predicted tables structurally via TabAlign, then performs semantic and syntactic comparison using TabCompare, offering interpretable and granular feedback. We evaluate TabXEval on TabXBench, a diverse, multi-domain benchmark featuring realistic table perturbations and human annotations. A sensitivity-specificity analysis further demonstrates the robustness and explainability of TabXEval across varied table tasks. Code and data are available at https://coral-lab-asu.github.io/tabxeval/

Maitreya Prafulla Chitale, Ketaki Mangesh Shetye, Harshit Gupta et al.

Enhancing the quality and efficiency of academic publishing is critical for both authors and reviewers, as research papers are central to scholarly communication and a major source of high-quality content on the web. To support this goal, we propose AutoRev, an automatic peer-review system designed to provide actionable, high-quality feedback to both reviewers and authors. AutoRev leverages a novel Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that combines textual and graphical representations of academic papers. By modelling documents as graphs, AutoRev effectively retrieves the most pertinent information, significantly reducing the input context length for LLMs and thereby enhancing their review generation capabilities. Experimental results show that AutoRev outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 58.72% and demonstrates competitive performance in human evaluations against ground truth reviews. We envision AutoRev as a powerful tool to streamline the peer-review workflow, alleviating challenges and enabling scalable, high-quality scholarly publishing. By guiding both authors and reviewers, AutoRev has the potential to accelerate the dissemination of quality research on the web at a larger scale. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Suyash Vardhan Mathur, Akshett Rai Jindal, Manish Shrivastava

While significant work has been done in the field of NLP on vertical thinking, which involves primarily logical thinking, little work has been done towards lateral thinking, which involves looking at problems from an unconventional perspective and defying existing conceptions and notions. Towards this direction, SemEval 2024 introduces the task of BRAINTEASER, which involves two types of questions -- Sentence Puzzles and Word Puzzles that defy conventional common-sense reasoning and constraints. In this paper, we tackle both types of questions using few-shot prompting on GPT-3.5 and gain insights regarding the difference in the nature of the two types. Our prompting strategy placed us 26th on the leaderboard for the Sentence Puzzle and 15th on the Word Puzzle task.

Suyash Vardhan Mathur, Akshett Rai Jindal, Hardik Mittal et al.

Conversation is the most natural form of human communication, where each utterance can range over a variety of possible emotions. While significant work has been done towards the detection of emotions in text, relatively little work has been done towards finding the cause of the said emotions, especially in multimodal settings. SemEval 2024 introduces the task of Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations, which aims to extract emotions reflected in individual utterances in a conversation involving multiple modalities (textual, audio, and visual modalities) along with the corresponding utterances that were the cause for the emotion. In this paper, we propose models that tackle this task as an utterance labeling and a sequence labeling problem and perform a comparative study of these models, involving baselines using different encoders, using BiLSTM for adding contextual information of the conversation, and finally adding a CRF layer to try to model the inter-dependencies between adjacent utterances more effectively. In the official leaderboard for the task, our architecture was ranked 8th, achieving an F1-score of 0.1759 on the leaderboard.

Patanjali Bhamidipati, Advaith Malladi, Manish Shrivastava et al.

In recent studies, the extensive utilization of large language models has underscored the importance of robust evaluation methodologies for assessing text generation quality and relevance to specific tasks. This has revealed a prevalent issue known as hallucination, an emergent condition in the model where generated text lacks faithfulness to the source and deviates from the evaluation criteria. In this study, we formally define hallucination and propose a framework for its quantitative detection in a zero-shot setting, leveraging our definition and the assumption that model outputs entail task and sample specific inputs. In detecting hallucinations, our solution achieves an accuracy of 0.78 in a model-aware setting and 0.61 in a model-agnostic setting. Notably, our solution maintains computational efficiency, requiring far less computational resources than other SOTA approaches, aligning with the trend towards lightweight and compressed models.

Prashant Kodali, Vaishnavi Shivkumar, Swarang Joshi et al.

We study model merging as a practical alternative to conventional adaptation strategies for code-mixed NLP. Starting from a multilingual base model, we: (i) perform continued pre-training (CPT) on unlabeled code-mixed text to obtain an adapted checkpoint, (ii) merge checkpoint with the base model, and (iii) fine-tune (FT) on the downstream task data. We evaluate our approach for sentence classification (sentiment and hate speech) task in English-Hindi (En-Hi) and English-Spanish (En-Es) using XLM-R and Llama-3.2-1B models. Our results show that merged models consistently outperform full fine-tuning and CPT->FT. We observe gains of 2--5 points in F1 over full fine-tuning and ~1-2 points over CPT->FT, indicating that unlabeled data is leveraged more effectively via merging than via CPT alone. Zero-/few-shot prompting with larger LLMs (e.g., Llama-3.3-70B) lags behind fine-tuned and merged checkpoints, underscoring limits of in-context learning for code-mixed inputs. We further test cross-pair transfer by training on En-Hi and evaluating on En-Ta and En-Ml: merged checkpoints transfer more strongly than monolingual-English baselines (e.g., TV/TIES variants reaching 0.65-0.68 F1 vs 0.61-0.63 for full fine-tuning), suggesting that code-mixed knowledge is a more reliable substrate for low-resource pairs. We conclude with adaptation recipes matched to common data regimes (labeled only; labeled+unlabeled; transfer-only) and discuss limitations and scaling considerations for broader tasks and larger models.

Ganesh Katrapati, Manish Shrivastava

Sequence to Sequence models struggle at compositionality and systematic generalisation even while they excel at many other tasks. We attribute this limitation to their failure to internalise constructions conventionalised form meaning pairings that license productive recombination. Building on these insights, we introduce an unsupervised procedure for mining pseudo-constructions: variable-slot templates automatically extracted from training data. When applied to the SCAN dataset, our method yields large gains out-of-distribution splits: accuracy rises to 47.8 %on ADD JUMP and to 20.3% on AROUND RIGHT without any architectural changes or additional supervision. The model also attains competitive performance with? 40% of the original training data, demonstrating strong data efAciency. Our findings highlight the promise of construction-aware preprocessing as an alternative to heavy architectural or training-regime interventions.

Prashant Kodali, Anmol Goel, Likhith Asapu et al.

Current computational approaches for analysing or generating code-mixed sentences do not explicitly model ``naturalness'' or ``acceptability'' of code-mixed sentences, but rely on training corpora to reflect distribution of acceptable code-mixed sentences. Modelling human judgement for the acceptability of code-mixed text can help in distinguishing natural code-mixed text and enable quality-controlled generation of code-mixed text. To this end, we construct Cline - a dataset containing human acceptability judgements for English-Hindi~(en-hi) code-mixed text. Cline is the largest of its kind with 16,642 sentences, consisting of samples sourced from two sources: synthetically generated code-mixed text and samples collected from online social media. Our analysis establishes that popular code-mixing metrics such as CMI, Number of Switch Points, Burstines, which are used to filter/curate/compare code-mixed corpora have low correlation with human acceptability judgements, underlining the necessity of our dataset. Experiments using Cline demonstrate that simple Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models when trained solely using code-mixing metrics as features are outperformed by fine-tuned pre-trained Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, among Encoder models XLM-Roberta and Bernice outperform IndicBERT across different configurations. Among Encoder-Decoder models, mBART performs better than mT5, however Encoder-Decoder models are not able to outperform Encoder-only models. Decoder-only models perform the best when compared to all other MLLMS, with Llama 3.2 - 3B models outperforming similarly sized Qwen, Phi models. Comparison with zero and fewshot capabilitites of ChatGPT show that MLLMs fine-tuned on larger data outperform ChatGPT, providing scope for improvement in code-mixed tasks. Zero-shot transfer from En-Hi to En-Te acceptability judgments are better than random baselines.

Harshit Sandilya, Peehu Raj, Jainit Sushil Bafna et al.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical tasks, prone to "hallucinating" incorrect answers due to their reliance on statistical patterns. This limitation is further amplified in average Small LangSLMs with limited context and training data. To address this challenge, we propose an "Inductive Learning" approach utilizing a distributed network of SLMs. This network leverages error-based learning and hint incorporation to refine the reasoning capabilities of SLMs. Our goal is to provide a framework that empowers SLMs to approach the level of logic-based applications achieved by high-parameter models, potentially benefiting any language model. Ultimately, this novel concept paves the way for bridging the logical gap between humans and LLMs across various fields.

Ashok Urlana, Pinzhen Chen, Zheng Zhao et al.

This paper introduces PMIndiaSum, a multilingual and massively parallel summarization corpus focused on languages in India. Our corpus provides a training and testing ground for four language families, 14 languages, and the largest to date with 196 language pairs. We detail our construction workflow including data acquisition, processing, and quality assurance. Furthermore, we publish benchmarks for monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual summarization by fine-tuning, prompting, as well as translate-and-summarize. Experimental results confirm the crucial role of our data in aiding summarization between Indian languages. Our dataset is publicly available and can be freely modified and re-distributed.

Prashant Kodali, Akshala Bhatnagar, Naman Ahuja et al.

Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways -- transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task -- STAN, BOUN -- are small in size and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and also account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We show that the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation drops substantially on proposed dataset, indicating that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models.

Aditya Kadam, Anmol Goel, Jivitesh Jain et al.

The extensive rise in consumption of online social media (OSMs) by a large number of people poses a critical problem of curbing the spread of hateful content on these platforms. With the growing usage of OSMs in multiple languages, the task of detecting and characterizing hate becomes more complex. The subtle variations of code-mixed texts along with switching scripts only add to the complexity. This paper presents a solution for the HASOC 2021 Multilingual Twitter Hate-Speech Detection challenge by team PreCog IIIT Hyderabad. We adopt a multilingual transformer based approach and describe our architecture for all 6 subtasks as part of the challenge. Out of the 6 teams that participated in all the subtasks, our submissions rank 3rd overall.

Akshay Goindani, Manish Shrivastava

Multiple parallel attention mechanisms that use multiple attention heads facilitate greater performance of the Transformer model for various applications e.g., Neural Machine Translation (NMT), text classification. In multi-head attention mechanism, different heads attend to different parts of the input. However, the limitation is that multiple heads might attend to the same part of the input, resulting in multiple heads being redundant. Thus, the model resources are under-utilized. One approach to avoid this is to prune least important heads based on certain importance score. In this work, we focus on designing a Dynamic Head Importance Computation Mechanism (DHICM) to dynamically calculate the importance of a head with respect to the input. Our insight is to design an additional attention layer together with multi-head attention, and utilize the outputs of the multi-head attention along with the input, to compute the importance for each head. Additionally, we add an extra loss function to prevent the model from assigning same score to all heads, to identify more important heads and improvise performance. We analyzed performance of DHICM for NMT with different languages. Experiments on different datasets show that DHICM outperforms traditional Transformer-based approach by large margin, especially, when less training data is available.

Vivek Gupta, Riyaz A. Bhat, Atreya Ghosal et al.

Neural models command state-of-the-art performance across NLP tasks, including ones involving "reasoning". Models claiming to reason about the evidence presented to them should attend to the correct parts of the input avoiding spurious patterns therein, be self-consistent in their predictions across inputs, and be immune to biases derived from their pre-training in a nuanced, context-sensitive fashion. {\em Do the prevalent *BERT-family of models do so?} In this paper, we study this question using the problem of reasoning on tabular data. Tabular inputs are especially well-suited for the study -- they admit systematic probes targeting the properties listed above. Our experiments demonstrate that a RoBERTa-based model, representative of the current state-of-the-art, fails at reasoning on the following counts: it (a) ignores relevant parts of the evidence, (b) is over-sensitive to annotation artifacts, and (c) relies on the knowledge encoded in the pre-trained language model rather than the evidence presented in its tabular inputs. Finally, through inoculation experiments, we show that fine-tuning the model on perturbed data does not help it overcome the above challenges.

Devansh Gautam, Kshitij Gupta, Manish Shrivastava

Tables are widely used in various kinds of documents to present information concisely. Understanding tables is a challenging problem that requires an understanding of language and table structure, along with numerical and logical reasoning. In this paper, we present our systems to solve Task 9 of SemEval-2021: Statement Verification and Evidence Finding with Tables (SEM-TAB-FACTS). The task consists of two subtasks: (A) Given a table and a statement, predicting whether the table supports the statement and (B) Predicting which cells in the table provide evidence for/against the statement. We fine-tune TAPAS (a model which extends BERT's architecture to capture tabular structure) for both the subtasks as it has shown state-of-the-art performance in various table understanding tasks. In subtask A, we evaluate how transfer learning and standardizing tables to have a single header row improves TAPAS' performance. In subtask B, we evaluate how different fine-tuning strategies can improve TAPAS' performance. Our systems achieve an F1 score of 67.34 in subtask A three-way classification, 72.89 in subtask A two-way classification, and 62.95 in subtask B.

Mohit Chandra, Dheeraj Pailla, Himanshu Bhatia et al.

The exponential rise of online social media has enabled the creation, distribution, and consumption of information at an unprecedented rate. However, it has also led to the burgeoning of various forms of online abuse. Increasing cases of online antisemitism have become one of the major concerns because of its socio-political consequences. Unlike other major forms of online abuse like racism, sexism, etc., online antisemitism has not been studied much from a machine learning perspective. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first work in the direction of automated multimodal detection of online antisemitism. The task poses multiple challenges that include extracting signals across multiple modalities, contextual references, and handling multiple aspects of antisemitism. Unfortunately, there does not exist any publicly available benchmark corpus for this critical task. Hence, we collect and label two datasets with 3,102 and 3,509 social media posts from Twitter and Gab respectively. Further, we present a multimodal deep learning system that detects the presence of antisemitic content and its specific antisemitism category using text and images from posts. We perform an extensive set of experiments on the two datasets to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed system. Finally, we also present a qualitative analysis of our study.

Mohit Chandra, Ashwin Pathak, Eesha Dutta et al.

While extensive popularity of online social media platforms has made information dissemination faster, it has also resulted in widespread online abuse of different types like hate speech, offensive language, sexist and racist opinions, etc. Detection and curtailment of such abusive content is critical for avoiding its psychological impact on victim communities, and thereby preventing hate crimes. Previous works have focused on classifying user posts into various forms of abusive behavior. But there has hardly been any focus on estimating the severity of abuse and the target. In this paper, we present a first of the kind dataset with 7601 posts from Gab which looks at online abuse from the perspective of presence of abuse, severity and target of abusive behavior. We also propose a system to address these tasks, obtaining an accuracy of ~80% for abuse presence, ~82% for abuse target prediction, and ~65% for abuse severity prediction.

Aayush Surana, Yash Goyal, Manish Shrivastava et al.

Musical preferences have been considered a mirror of the self. In this age of Big Data, online music streaming services allow us to capture ecologically valid music listening behavior and provide a rich source of information to identify several user-specific aspects. Studies have shown musical engagement to be an indirect representation of internal states including internalized symptomatology and depression. The current study aims at unearthing patterns and trends in the individuals at risk for depression as it manifests in naturally occurring music listening behavior. Mental well-being scores, musical engagement measures, and listening histories of Last.fm users (N=541) were acquired. Social tags associated with each listener's most popular tracks were analyzed to unearth the mood/emotions and genres associated with the users. Results revealed that social tags prevalent in the users at risk for depression were predominantly related to emotions depicting Sadness associated with genre tags representing neo-psychedelic-, avant garde-, dream-pop. This study will open up avenues for an MIR-based approach to characterizing and predicting risk for depression which can be helpful in early detection and additionally provide bases for designing music recommendations accordingly.

Vaishali Pal, Manish Shrivastava, Laurent Besacier

Conversational and task-oriented dialogue systems aim to interact with the user using natural responses through multi-modal interfaces, such as text or speech. These desired responses are in the form of full-length natural answers generated over facts retrieved from a knowledge source. While the task of generating natural answers to questions from an answer span has been widely studied, there has been little research on natural sentence generation over spoken content. We propose a novel system to generate full length natural language answers from spoken questions and factoid answers. The spoken sequence is compactly represented as a confusion network extracted from a pre-trained Automatic Speech Recognizer. This is the first attempt towards generating full-length natural answers from a graph input(confusion network) to the best of our knowledge. We release a large-scale dataset of 259,788 samples of spoken questions, their factoid answers and corresponding full-length textual answers. Following our proposed approach, we achieve comparable performance with best ASR hypothesis.

Vaishali Pal, Fabien Guillot, Manish Shrivastava et al.

Spoken dialogue systems typically use a list of top-N ASR hypotheses for inferring the semantic meaning and tracking the state of the dialogue. However ASR graphs, such as confusion networks (confnets), provide a compact representation of a richer hypothesis space than a top-N ASR list. In this paper, we study the benefits of using confusion networks with a state-of-the-art neural dialogue state tracker (DST). We encode the 2-dimensional confnet into a 1-dimensional sequence of embeddings using an attentional confusion network encoder which can be used with any DST system. Our confnet encoder is plugged into the state-of-the-art 'Global-locally Self-Attentive Dialogue State Tacker' (GLAD) model for DST and obtains significant improvements in both accuracy and inference time compared to using top-N ASR hypotheses.

Ratish Puduppully, Yue Zhang, Manish Shrivastava

Traditional methods for deep NLG adopt pipeline approaches comprising stages such as constructing syntactic input, predicting function words, linearizing the syntactic input and generating the surface forms. Though easier to visualize, pipeline approaches suffer from error propagation. In addition, information available across modules cannot be leveraged by all modules. We construct a transition-based model to jointly perform linearization, function word prediction and morphological generation, which considerably improves upon the accuracy compared to a pipelined baseline system. On a standard deep input linearization shared task, our system achieves the best results reported so far.

Anirudh Dahiya, Neeraj Battan, Manish Shrivastava et al.

Sentiment Analysis and other semantic tasks are commonly used for social media textual analysis to gauge public opinion and make sense from the noise on social media. The language used on social media not only commonly diverges from the formal language, but is compounded by codemixing between languages, especially in large multilingual societies like India. Traditional methods for learning semantic NLP tasks have long relied on end to end task specific training, requiring expensive data creation process, even more so for deep learning methods. This challenge is even more severe for resource scarce texts like codemixed language pairs, with lack of well learnt representations as model priors, and task specific datasets can be few and small in quantities to efficiently exploit recent deep learning approaches. To address above challenges, we introduce curriculum learning strategies for semantic tasks in code-mixed Hindi-English (Hi-En) texts, and investigate various training strategies for enhancing model performance. Our method outperforms the state of the art methods for Hi-En codemixed sentiment analysis by 3.31% accuracy, and also shows better model robustness in terms of convergence, and variance in test performance.

Vinayak Athavale, Aayush Naik, Rajas Vanjape et al.

We introduce the task of algorithm class prediction for programming word problems. A programming word problem is a problem written in natural language, which can be solved using an algorithm or a program. We define classes of various programming word problems which correspond to the class of algorithms required to solve the problem. We present four new datasets for this task, two multiclass datasets with 550 and 1159 problems each and two multilabel datasets having 3737 and 3960 problems each. We pose the problem as a text classification problem and train neural network and non-neural network-based models on this task. Our best performing classifier gets an accuracy of 62.7 percent for the multiclass case on the five class classification dataset, Codeforces Multiclass-5 (CFMC5). We also do some human-level analysis and compare human performance with that of our text classification models. Our best classifier has an accuracy only 9 percent lower than that of a human on this task. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first reported results on such a task. We make our code and datasets publicly available.

Vaibhav Kumar, Mrinal Dhar, Dhruv Khattar et al.

In order to expand their reach and increase website ad revenue, media outlets have started using clickbait techniques to lure readers to click on articles on their digital platform. Having successfully enticed the user to open the article, the article fails to satiate his curiosity serving only to boost click-through rates. Initial methods for this task were dependent on feature engineering, which varies with each dataset. Industry systems have relied on an exhaustive set of rules to get the job done. Neural networks have barely been explored to perform this task. We propose a novel approach considering different textual embeddings of a news headline and the related article. We generate sub-word level embeddings of the title using Convolutional Neural Networks and use them to train a bidirectional LSTM architecture. An attention layer allows for calculation of significance of each term towards the nature of the post. We also generate Doc2Vec embeddings of the title and article text and model how they interact, following which it is concatenated with the output of the previous component. Finally, this representation is passed through a neural network to obtain a score for the headline. We test our model over 2538 posts (having trained it on 17000 records) and achieve an accuracy of 83.49% outscoring previous state-of-the-art approaches.

Ankush Khandelwal, Sahil Swami, Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar et al.

The rapid expansion in the usage of social media networking sites leads to a huge amount of unprocessed user generated data which can be used for text mining. Author profiling is the problem of automatically determining profiling aspects like the author's gender and age group through a text is gaining much popularity in computational linguistics. Most of the past research in author profiling is concentrated on English texts \cite{1,2}. However many users often change the language while posting on social media which is called code-mixing, and it develops some challenges in the field of text classification and author profiling like variations in spelling, non-grammatical structure and transliteration \cite{3}. There are very few English-Hindi code-mixed annotated datasets of social media content present online \cite{4}. In this paper, we analyze the task of author's gender prediction in code-mixed content and present a corpus of English-Hindi texts collected from Twitter which is annotated with author's gender. We also explore language identification of every word in this corpus. We present a supervised classification baseline system which uses various machine learning algorithms to identify the gender of an author using a text, based on character and word level features.

Ankush Khandelwal, Sahil Swami, Syed S. Akhtar et al.

The tremendous amount of user generated data through social networking sites led to the gaining popularity of automatic text classification in the field of computational linguistics over the past decade. Within this domain, one problem that has drawn the attention of many researchers is automatic humor detection in texts. In depth semantic understanding of the text is required to detect humor which makes the problem difficult to automate. With increase in the number of social media users, many multilingual speakers often interchange between languages while posting on social media which is called code-mixing. It introduces some challenges in the field of linguistic analysis of social media content (Barman et al., 2014), like spelling variations and non-grammatical structures in a sentence. Past researches include detecting puns in texts (Kao et al., 2016) and humor in one-lines (Mihalcea et al., 2010) in a single language, but with the tremendous amount of code-mixed data available online, there is a need to develop techniques which detects humor in code-mixed tweets. In this paper, we analyze the task of humor detection in texts and describe a freely available corpus containing English-Hindi code-mixed tweets annotated with humorous(H) or non-humorous(N) tags. We also tagged the words in the tweets with Language tags (English/Hindi/Others). Moreover, we describe the experiments carried out on the corpus and provide a baseline classification system which distinguishes between humorous and non-humorous texts.

Sanjana Sharma, Saksham Agrawal, Manish Shrivastava

Harmful speech has various forms and it has been plaguing the social media in different ways. If we need to crackdown different degrees of hate speech and abusive behavior amongst it, the classification needs to be based on complex ramifications which needs to be defined and hold accountable for, other than racist, sexist or against some particular group and community. This paper primarily describes how we created an ontological classification of harmful speech based on degree of hateful intent, and used it to annotate twitter data accordingly. The key contribution of this paper is the new dataset of tweets we created based on ontological classes and degrees of harmful speech found in the text. We also propose supervised classification system for recognizing these respective harmful speech classes in the texts hence.

Nurendra Choudhary, Rajat Singh, Manish Shrivastava

Neural network models have shown promising results for text classification. However, these solutions are limited by their dependence on the availability of annotated data. The prospect of leveraging resource-rich languages to enhance the text classification of resource-poor languages is fascinating. The performance on resource-poor languages can significantly improve if the resource availability constraints can be offset. To this end, we present a twin Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network with shared parameters consolidated by a contrastive loss function (based on a similarity metric). The model learns the representation of resource-poor and resource-rich sentences in a common space by using the similarity between their assigned annotation tags. Hence, the model projects sentences with similar tags closer and those with different tags farther from each other. We evaluated our model on the classification tasks of sentiment analysis and emoji prediction for resource-poor languages - Hindi and Telugu and resource-rich languages - English and Spanish. Our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in both the tasks across all metrics.

Sahil Swami, Ankush Khandelwal, Vinay Singh et al.

Social media platforms like twitter and facebook have be- come two of the largest mediums used by people to express their views to- wards different topics. Generation of such large user data has made NLP tasks like sentiment analysis and opinion mining much more important. Using sarcasm in texts on social media has become a popular trend lately. Using sarcasm reverses the meaning and polarity of what is implied by the text which poses challenge for many NLP tasks. The task of sarcasm detection in text is gaining more and more importance for both commer- cial and security services. We present the first English-Hindi code-mixed dataset of tweets marked for presence of sarcasm and irony where each token is also annotated with a language tag. We present a baseline su- pervised classification system developed using the same dataset which achieves an average F-score of 78.4 after using random forest classifier and performing 10-fold cross validation.

Sahil Swami, Ankush Khandelwal, Vinay Singh et al.

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.

Irshad Ahmad Bhat, Riyaz Ahmad Bhat, Manish Shrivastava et al.

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 back-transliteration.