Grigori Sidorov

Hoang-Thang Ta, Duy-Quy Thai, Abu Bakar Siddiqur Rahman et al.

In this paper, we introduce FC-KAN, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) that leverages combinations of popular mathematical functions such as B-splines, wavelets, and radial basis functions on low-dimensional data through element-wise operations. We explore several methods for combining the outputs of these functions, including sum, element-wise product, the addition of sum and element-wise product, representations of quadratic and cubic functions, concatenation, linear transformation of the concatenated output, and others. In our experiments, we compare FC-KAN with a multi-layer perceptron network (MLP) and other existing KANs, such as BSRBF-KAN, EfficientKAN, FastKAN, and FasterKAN, on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. Two variants of FC-KAN, which use a combination of outputs from B-splines and Difference of Gaussians (DoG) and from B-splines and linear transformations in the form of a quadratic function, outperformed overall other models on the average of 5 independent training runs. We expect that FC-KAN can leverage function combinations to design future KANs. Our repository is publicly available at: https://github.com/hoangthangta/FC_KAN.

Maaz Amjad, Sabur Butt, Hamza Imam Amjad et al.

Automatic detection of fake news is a highly important task in the contemporary world. This study reports the 2nd shared task called UrduFake@FIRE2021 on identifying fake news detection in Urdu. The goal of the shared task is to motivate the community to come up with efficient methods for solving this vital problem, particularly for the Urdu language. The task is posed as a binary classification problem to label a given news article as a real or a fake news article. The organizers provide a dataset comprising news in five domains: (i) Health, (ii) Sports, (iii) Showbiz, (iv) Technology, and (v) Business, split into training and testing sets. The training set contains 1300 annotated news articles -- 750 real news, 550 fake news, while the testing set contains 300 news articles -- 200 real, 100 fake news. 34 teams from 7 different countries (China, Egypt, Israel, India, Mexico, Pakistan, and UAE) registered to participate in the UrduFake@FIRE2021 shared task. Out of those, 18 teams submitted their experimental results, and 11 of those submitted their technical reports, which is substantially higher compared to the UrduFake shared task in 2020 when only 6 teams submitted their technical reports. The technical reports submitted by the participants demonstrated different data representation techniques ranging from count-based BoW features to word vector embeddings as well as the use of numerous machine learning algorithms ranging from traditional SVM to various neural network architectures including Transformers such as BERT and RoBERTa. In this year's competition, the best performing system obtained an F1-macro score of 0.679, which is lower than the past year's best result of 0.907 F1-macro. Admittedly, while training sets from the past and the current years overlap to a large extent, the testing set provided this year is completely different.

Maaz Amjad, Grigori Sidorov, Alisa Zhila et al.

This overview paper describes the first shared task on fake news detection in Urdu language. The task was posed as a binary classification task, in which the goal is to differentiate between real and fake news. We provided a dataset divided into 900 annotated news articles for training and 400 news articles for testing. The dataset contained news in five domains: (i) Health, (ii) Sports, (iii) Showbiz, (iv) Technology, and (v) Business. 42 teams from 6 different countries (India, China, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan, and the UK) registered for the task. 9 teams submitted their experimental results. The participants used various machine learning methods ranging from feature-based traditional machine learning to neural networks techniques. The best performing system achieved an F-score value of 0.90, showing that the BERT-based approach outperforms other machine learning techniques

Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Grigori Sidorov, Alexander Gelbukh

Hope is characterized as openness of spirit toward the future, a desire, expectation, and wish for something to happen or to be true that remarkably affects human's state of mind, emotions, behaviors, and decisions. Hope is usually associated with concepts of desired expectations and possibility/probability concerning the future. Despite its importance, hope has rarely been studied as a social media analysis task. This paper presents a hope speech dataset that classifies each tweet first into "Hope" and "Not Hope", then into three fine-grained hope categories: "Generalized Hope", "Realistic Hope", and "Unrealistic Hope" (along with "Not Hope"). English tweets in the first half of 2022 were collected to build this dataset. Furthermore, we describe our annotation process and guidelines in detail and discuss the challenges of classifying hope and the limitations of the existing hope speech detection corpora. In addition, we reported several baselines based on different learning approaches, such as traditional machine learning, deep learning, and transformers, to benchmark our dataset. We evaluated our baselines using weighted-averaged and macro-averaged F1-scores. Observations show that a strict process for annotator selection and detailed annotation guidelines enhanced the dataset's quality. This strict annotation process resulted in promising performance for simple machine learning classifiers with only bi-grams; however, binary and multiclass hope speech detection results reveal that contextual embedding models have higher performance in this dataset.

Iqra Ameer, Muhammad Arif, Grigori Sidorov et al.

Given the current social distance restrictions across the world, most individuals now use social media as their major medium of communication. Millions of people suffering from mental diseases have been isolated due to this, and they are unable to get help in person. They have become more reliant on online venues to express themselves and seek advice on dealing with their mental disorders. According to the World health organization (WHO), approximately 450 million people are affected. Mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, etc., are immensely common and have affected an individuals' physical health. Recently Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been presented to help mental health providers, including psychiatrists and psychologists, in decision making based on patients' authentic information (e.g., medical records, behavioral data, social media utilization, etc.). AI innovations have demonstrated predominant execution in numerous real-world applications broadening from computer vision to healthcare. This study analyzes unstructured user data on the Reddit platform and classifies five common mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and PTSD. We trained traditional machine learning, deep learning, and transfer learning multi-class models to detect mental disorders of individuals. This effort will benefit the public health system by automating the detection process and informing appropriate authorities about people who require emergency assistance.

Oxana Vitman, Yevhen Kostiuk, Grigori Sidorov et al.

Sarcasm detection is an essential task that can help identify the actual sentiment in user-generated data, such as discussion forums or tweets. Sarcasm is a sophisticated form of linguistic expression because its surface meaning usually contradicts its inner, deeper meaning. Such incongruity is the essential component of sarcasm, however, it makes sarcasm detection quite a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a model, that incorporates different features to capture the incongruity intrinsic to sarcasm. We use a pre-trained transformer and CNN to capture context features, and we use transformers pre-trained on emotions detection and sentiment analysis tasks. Our approach outperformed previous state-of-the-art results on four datasets from social networking platforms and online media.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

Using code-mixed data in natural language processing (NLP) research currently gets a lot of attention. Language identification of social media code-mixed text has been an interesting problem of study in recent years due to the advancement and influences of social media in communication. This paper presents the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Centro de Investigación en Computación (CIC) team's system description paper for the CoLI-Kanglish shared task at ICON2022. In this paper, we propose the use of a Transformer based model for word-level language identification in code-mixed Kannada English texts. The proposed model on the CoLI-Kenglish dataset achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.84 and a macro F1-score of 0.61.

Maaz Amjad, Sabur Butt, Hamza Imam Amjad et al.

This study reports the second shared task named as UrduFake@FIRE2021 on identifying fake news detection in Urdu language. This is a binary classification problem in which the task is to classify a given news article into two classes: (i) real news, or (ii) fake news. In this shared task, 34 teams from 7 different countries (China, Egypt, Israel, India, Mexico, Pakistan, and UAE) registered to participate in the shared task, 18 teams submitted their experimental results and 11 teams submitted their technical reports. The proposed systems were based on various count-based features and used different classifiers as well as neural network architectures. The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm outperformed other classifiers and achieved 0.679 F-score.

Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt, Grigori Sidorov et al.

In this paper, we present a study of regret and its expression on social media platforms. Specifically, we present a novel dataset of Reddit texts that have been classified into three classes: Regret by Action, Regret by Inaction, and No Regret. We then use this dataset to investigate the language used to express regret on Reddit and to identify the domains of text that are most commonly associated with regret. Our findings show that Reddit users are most likely to express regret for past actions, particularly in the domain of relationships. We also found that deep learning models using GloVe embedding outperformed other models in all experiments, indicating the effectiveness of GloVe for representing the meaning and context of words in the domain of regret. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the nature and prevalence of regret on social media, as well as the potential of deep learning and word embeddings for analyzing and understanding emotional language in online text. These findings have implications for the development of natural language processing algorithms and the design of social media platforms that support emotional expression and communication.

Maaz Amjad, Alisa Zhila, Grigori Sidorov et al.

With the growth of social media platform influence, the effect of their misuse becomes more and more impactful. The importance of automatic detection of threatening and abusive language can not be overestimated. However, most of the existing studies and state-of-the-art methods focus on English as the target language, with limited work on low- and medium-resource languages. In this paper, we present two shared tasks of abusive and threatening language detection for the Urdu language which has more than 170 million speakers worldwide. Both are posed as binary classification tasks where participating systems are required to classify tweets in Urdu into two classes, namely: (i) Abusive and Non-Abusive for the first task, and (ii) Threatening and Non-Threatening for the second. We present two manually annotated datasets containing tweets labelled as (i) Abusive and Non-Abusive, and (ii) Threatening and Non-Threatening. The abusive dataset contains 2400 annotated tweets in the train part and 1100 annotated tweets in the test part. The threatening dataset contains 6000 annotated tweets in the train part and 3950 annotated tweets in the test part. We also provide logistic regression and BERT-based baseline classifiers for both tasks. In this shared task, 21 teams from six countries registered for participation (India, Pakistan, China, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, and Taiwan), 10 teams submitted their runs for Subtask A, which is Abusive Language Detection and 9 teams submitted their runs for Subtask B, which is Threatening Language detection, and seven teams submitted their technical reports. The best performing system achieved an F1-score value of 0.880 for Subtask A and 0.545 for Subtask B. For both subtasks, m-Bert based transformer model showed the best performance.

Olumide Ebenezer Ojo, Hoang Thang Ta, Alexander Gelbukh et al.

The use of transfer learning methods is largely responsible for the present breakthrough in Natural Learning Processing (NLP) tasks across multiple domains. In order to solve the problem of sentiment detection, we examined the performance of four different types of well-known state-of-the-art transformer models for text classification. Models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-training Approach (RoBERTa), a distilled version of BERT (DistilBERT), and a large bidirectional neural network architecture (XLNet) were proposed. The performance of the four models that were used to detect disaster in the text was compared. All the models performed well enough, indicating that transformer-based models are suitable for the detection of disaster in text. The RoBERTa transformer model performs best on the test dataset with a score of 82.6% and is highly recommended for quality predictions. Furthermore, we discovered that the learning algorithms' performance was influenced by the pre-processing techniques, the nature of words in the vocabulary, unbalanced labeling, and the model parameters.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

Machine translation (MT) is one of the main tasks in natural language processing whose objective is to translate texts automatically from one natural language to another. Nowadays, using deep neural networks for MT tasks has received great attention. These networks require lots of data to learn abstract representations of the input and store it in continuous vectors. This paper presents the first relatively large-scale Amharic-English parallel sentence dataset. Using these compiled data, we build bi-directional Amharic-English translation models by fine-tuning the existing Facebook M2M100 pre-trained model achieving a BLEU score of 37.79 in Amharic-English 32.74 in English-Amharic translation. Additionally, we explore the effects of Amharic homophone normalization on the machine translation task. The results show that the normalization of Amharic homophone characters increases the performance of Amharic-English machine translation in both directions.

Abdul Gafar Manuel Meque, Nisar Hussain, Grigori Sidorov et al.

We introduce a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) task called Guilt detection, which focuses on detecting guilt in text. We identify guilt as a complex and vital emotion that has not been previously studied in NLP, and we aim to provide a more fine-grained analysis of it. To address the lack of publicly available corpora for guilt detection, we created VIC, a dataset containing 4622 texts from three existing emotion detection datasets that we binarized into guilt and no-guilt classes. We experimented with traditional machine learning methods using bag-of-words and term frequency-inverse document frequency features, achieving a 72% f1 score with the highest-performing model. Our study provides a first step towards understanding guilt in text and opens the door for future research in this area.

Hoang Thang Ta, Alexander Gelbukha, Grigori Sidorov

Acknowledged as one of the most successful online cooperative projects in human society, Wikipedia has obtained rapid growth in recent years and desires continuously to expand content and disseminate knowledge values for everyone globally. The shortage of volunteers brings to Wikipedia many issues, including developing content for over 300 languages at the present. Therefore, the benefit that machines can automatically generate content to reduce human efforts on Wikipedia language projects could be considerable. In this paper, we propose our mapping process for the task of converting Wikidata statements to natural language text (WS2T) for Wikipedia projects at the sentence level. The main step is to organize statements, represented as a group of quadruples and triples, and then to map them to corresponding sentences in English Wikipedia. We evaluate the output corpus in various aspects: sentence structure analysis, noise filtering, and relationships between sentence components based on word embedding models. The results are helpful not only for the data-to-text generation task but also for other relevant works in the field.

Germán Ortiz, Gemma Bel Enguix, Helena Gómez-Adorno et al.

Both policy and research benefit from a better understanding of individuals' jobs. However, as large-scale administrative records are increasingly employed to represent labor market activity, new automatic methods to classify jobs will become necessary. We developed an automatic job offers classifier using a dataset collected from the largest job bank of Mexico known as Bumeran https://www.bumeran.com.mx/ Last visited: 19-01-2022.. We applied machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machines, Naive-Bayes, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and deep learning Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). Using these algorithms, we trained multi-class models to classify job offers in one of the 23 classes (not uniformly distributed): Sales, Administration, Call Center, Technology, Trades, Human Resources, Logistics, Marketing, Health, Gastronomy, Financing, Secretary, Production, Engineering, Education, Design, Legal, Construction, Insurance, Communication, Management, Foreign Trade, and Mining. We used the SMOTE, Geometric-SMOTE, and ADASYN synthetic oversampling algorithms to handle imbalanced classes. The proposed convolutional neural network architecture achieved the best results when applied the Geometric-SMOTE algorithm.

Yevhen Kostiuk, Grigori Sidorov, Olga Kolesnikova

In natural language processing (NLP), lexical function is a concept to unambiguously represent semantic and syntactic features of words and phrases in text first crafted in the Meaning-Text Theory. Hierarchical classification of lexical functions involves organizing these features into a tree-like hierarchy of categories or labels. This is a challenging task as it requires a good understanding of the context and the relationships among words and phrases in text. It also needs large amounts of labeled data to train language models effectively. In this paper, we present a dataset of most frequent Spanish verb-noun collocations and sentences where they occur, each collocation is assigned to one of 37 lexical functions defined as classes for a hierarchical classification task. Each class represents a relation between the noun and the verb in a collocation involving their semantic and syntactic features. We combine the classes in a tree-based structure, and introduce classification objectives for each level of the structure. The dataset was created by dependency tree parsing and matching of the phrases in Spanish news. We provide baselines and data splits for each objective.

Yevhen Kostiuk, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Grigori Sidorov et al.

In this paper, we investigate the issue of hate speech by presenting a novel task of translating hate speech into non-hate speech text while preserving its meaning. As a case study, we use Spanish texts. We provide a dataset and several baselines as a starting point for further research in the task. We evaluated our baseline results using multiple metrics, including BLEU scores. The aim of this study is to contribute to the development of more effective methods for reducing the spread of hate speech in online communities.

Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani, Mohim Tash et al.

This study performs analysis of Predictive statements, Hope speech, and Regret Detection behaviors within cryptocurrency-related discussions, leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques. We introduce a novel classification scheme named "Prediction statements," categorizing comments into Predictive Incremental, Predictive Decremental, Predictive Neutral, or Non-Predictive categories. Employing GPT-4o, a cutting-edge large language model, we explore sentiment dynamics across five prominent cryptocurrencies: Cardano, Binance, Matic, Fantom, and Ripple. Our analysis reveals distinct patterns in predictive sentiments, with Matic demonstrating a notably higher propensity for optimistic predictions. Additionally, we investigate hope and regret sentiments, uncovering nuanced interplay between these emotions and predictive behaviors. Despite encountering limitations related to data volume and resource availability, our study reports valuable discoveries concerning investor behavior and sentiment trends within the cryptocurrency market, informing strategic decision-making and future research endeavors.

Hoang-Thang Ta, Duy-Quy Thai, Anh Tran et al.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) represent an innovation in neural network architectures, offering a compelling alternative to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) in models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. By advancing network design, KANs drive groundbreaking research and enable transformative applications across various scientific domains involving neural networks. However, existing KANs often require significantly more parameters in their network layers than MLPs. To address this limitation, this paper introduces PRKANs (Parameter-Reduced Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks), which employ several methods to reduce the parameter count in KAN layers, making them comparable to MLP layers. Experimental results on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets demonstrate that PRKANs outperform several existing KANs, and their variant with attention mechanisms rivals the performance of MLPs, albeit with slightly longer training times. Furthermore, the study highlights the advantages of Gaussian Radial Basis Functions (GRBFs) and layer normalization in KAN designs. The repository for this work is available at: https://github.com/hoangthangta/All-KAN.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christian Maldonado-Sifuentes, David Alejandro Mendoza Castillo et al.

In this paper, we present a parallel Spanish-Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec corpus for machine translation (MT) tasks, where Mazatec and Mixtec are two indigenous Mexican languages. We evaluated the usability of the collected corpus using three different approaches: transformer, transfer learning, and fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual MT models. Fine-tuning the Facebook M2M100-48 model outperformed the other approaches, with BLEU scores of 12.09 and 22.25 for Mazatec-Spanish and Spanish-Mazatec translations, respectively, and 16.75 and 22.15 for Mixtec-Spanish and Spanish-Mixtec translations, respectively. The findings show that the dataset size (9,799 sentences in Mazatec and 13,235 sentences in Mixtec) affects translation performance and that indigenous languages work better when used as target languages. The findings emphasize the importance of creating parallel corpora for indigenous languages and fine-tuning models for low-resource translation tasks. Future research will investigate zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to further improve translation performance in low-resource settings. The dataset and scripts are available at \url{https://github.com/atnafuatx/Machine-Translation-Resources}

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation tasks are under-explored in LLMs. In this paper, we present EthioEmo, a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages, namely, Amharic (amh), Afan Oromo (orm), Somali (som), and Tigrinya (tir). We perform extensive experiments with an additional English multi-label emotion dataset from SemEval 2018 Task 1. Our evaluation includes encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only language models. We compare zero and few-shot approaches of LLMs to fine-tuning smaller language models. The results show that accurate multi-label emotion classification is still insufficient even for high-resource languages such as English, and there is a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages. The results also show varying performance levels depending on the language and model type. EthioEmo is available publicly to further improve the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin Grissom et al.

NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions required for deeper emotion understanding, and (2) many are created by translating English-annotated data into other languages, leading to potentially unreliable evaluation. To address these issues, we introduce Cultural Lenses on Emotion (CuLEmo), the first benchmark designed to evaluate culture-aware emotion prediction across six languages: Amharic, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, and Spanish. CuLEmo comprises 400 crafted questions per language, each requiring nuanced cultural reasoning and understanding. We use this benchmark to evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. Our findings reveal that (1) emotion conceptualizations vary significantly across languages and cultures, (2) LLMs performance likewise varies by language and cultural context, and (3) prompting in English with explicit country context often outperforms in-language prompts for culture-aware emotion and sentiment understanding. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.

Muhammad Ahmad, Muhammad Waqas, Ameer Hamza et al.

Hope is a positive emotional state involving the expectation of favorable future outcomes, while hope speech refers to communication that promotes optimism, resilience, and support, particularly in adverse contexts. Although hope speech detection has gained attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP), existing research mainly focuses on high-resource languages and standardized scripts, often overlooking informal and underrepresented forms such as Roman Urdu. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to address hope speech detection in code-mixed Roman Urdu by introducing a carefully annotated dataset, thereby filling a critical gap in inclusive NLP research for low-resource, informal language varieties. This study makes four key contributions: (1) it introduces the first multi-class annotated dataset for Roman Urdu hope speech, comprising Generalized Hope, Realistic Hope, Unrealistic Hope, and Not Hope categories; (2) it explores the psychological foundations of hope and analyzes its linguistic patterns in code-mixed Roman Urdu to inform dataset development; (3) it proposes a custom attention-based transformer model optimized for the syntactic and semantic variability of Roman Urdu, evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation; and (4) it verifies the statistical significance of performance gains using a t-test. The proposed model, XLM-R, achieves the best performance with a cross-validation score of 0.78, outperforming the baseline SVM (0.75) and BiLSTM (0.76), with gains of 4% and 2.63% respectively.

Abdul Gafar Manuel Meque, Jason Angel, Grigori Sidorov et al.

In recent years, language models and deep learning techniques have revolutionized natural language processing tasks, including emotion detection. However, the specific emotion of guilt has received limited attention in this field. In this research, we explore the applicability of three transformer-based language models for detecting guilt in text and compare their performance for general emotion detection and guilt detection. Our proposed model outformed BERT and RoBERTa models by two and one points respectively. Additionally, we analyze the challenges in developing accurate guilt-detection models and evaluate our model's effectiveness in detecting related emotions like "shame" through qualitative analysis of results.

Nisar Hussain, Amna Qasim, Gull Mehak et al.

The use of derogatory terms in languages that employ code mixing, such as Roman Urdu, presents challenges for Natural Language Processing systems due to unstated grammar, inconsistent spelling, and a scarcity of labeled data. In this work, we propose a QLoRA based fine tuning framework to improve offensive language detection in Roman Urdu-English text. We translated the Roman Urdu-English code mixed dataset into English using Google Translate to leverage English LLMs, while acknowledging that this translation reduces direct engagement with code mixing features. Our focus is on classification performance using English translated low resource inputs. We fine tuned several transformers and large language models, including Meta LLaMA 3 8B, Mistral 7B v0.1, LLaMA 2 7B, ModernBERT, and RoBERTa, with QLoRA for memory efficient adaptation. Models were trained and evaluated on a manually annotated Roman Urdu dataset for offensive vs non offensive content. Of all tested models, the highest F1 score of 91.45 was attained by Meta LLaMA 3 8B, followed by Mistral 7B at 89.66, surpassing traditional transformer baselines. These results demonstrate the efficacy of QLoRA in fine tuning high performing models for low resource environments such as code mixed offensive language detection, and confirm the potential of LLMs for this task. This work advances a scalable approach to Roman Urdu moderation and paves the way for future multilingual offensive detection systems based on LLMs.

Anvi Alex Eponon, Moein Shahiki-Tash, Ildar Batyrshin et al.

This study presents a question-based knowledge encoding approach that improves retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems without requiring fine-tuning or traditional chunking. We encode textual content using generated questions that span the lexical and semantic space, creating targeted retrieval cues combined with a custom syntactic reranking method. In single-hop retrieval over 109 scientific papers, our approach achieves a Recall@3 of 0.84, outperforming traditional chunking methods by 60 percent. We also introduce "paper-cards", concise paper summaries under 300 characters, which enhance BM25 retrieval, increasing MRR@3 from 0.56 to 0.85 on simplified technical queries. For multihop tasks, our reranking method reaches an F1 score of 0.52 with LLaMA2-Chat-7B on the LongBench 2WikiMultihopQA dataset, surpassing chunking and fine-tuned baselines which score 0.328 and 0.412 respectively. This method eliminates fine-tuning requirements, reduces retrieval latency, enables intuitive question-driven knowledge access, and decreases vector storage demands by 80%, positioning it as a scalable and efficient RAG alternative.

Sabur Butt, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Abdul Gafar Manuel Meque et al.

The intricate relationship between human decision-making and emotions, particularly guilt and regret, has significant implications on behavior and well-being. Yet, these emotions subtle distinctions and interplay are often overlooked in computational models. This paper introduces a dataset tailored to dissect the relationship between guilt and regret and their unique textual markers, filling a notable gap in affective computing research. Our approach treats guilt and regret recognition as a binary classification task and employs three machine learning and six transformer-based deep learning techniques to benchmark the newly created dataset. The study further implements innovative reasoning methods like chain-of-thought and tree-of-thought to assess the models interpretive logic. The results indicate a clear performance edge for transformer-based models, achieving a 90.4% macro F1 score compared to the 85.3% scored by the best machine learning classifier, demonstrating their superior capability in distinguishing complex emotional states.

Tadesse Destaw Belay, Kedir Yassin Hussen, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam et al.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is undergoing constant transformation, as Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving daily breakthroughs in research and practice. In this regard, tracking the progress of NLP research and automatically analyzing the contributions of research papers provides key insights into the nature of the field and the researchers. This study explores the progress of African NLP (AfricaNLP) by asking (and answering) basic research questions such as: i) How has the nature of NLP evolved over the last two decades?, ii) What are the contributions of AfricaNLP papers?, and iii) Which individuals and organizations (authors, affiliated institutions, and funding bodies) have been involved in the development of AfricaNLP? We quantitatively examine the contributions of AfricaNLP research using 1.9K NLP paper abstracts, 4.9K author contributors, and 7.8K human-annotated contribution sentences (AfricaNLPContributions) along with benchmark results. Our dataset and continuously existing NLP progress tracking website provide a powerful lens for tracing AfricaNLP research trends and hold potential for generating data-driven literature surveys.

Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Ahmad, M. Shahiki Tash et al.

Social media platforms are critical spaces for public discourse, shaping opinions and community dynamics, yet their widespread use has amplified harmful content, particularly hate speech, threatening online safety and inclusivity. While hate speech detection has been extensively studied in languages like English and Spanish, Urdu remains underexplored, especially using translation-based approaches. To address this gap, we introduce a trilingual dataset of 10,193 tweets in English (3,834 samples), Urdu (3,197 samples), and Spanish (3,162 samples), collected via keyword filtering, with a balanced distribution of 4,849 Hateful and 5,344 Not-Hateful labels. Our methodology leverages attention layers as a precursor to transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs), enhancing feature extraction for multilingual hate speech detection. For non-transformer models, we use TF-IDF for feature extraction. The dataset is benchmarked using state-of-the-art models, including GPT-3.5 Turbo and Qwen 2.5 72B, alongside traditional machine learning models like SVM and other transformers (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa). Three annotators, following rigorous guidelines, ensured high dataset quality, achieving a Fleiss' Kappa of 0.821. Our approach, integrating attention layers with GPT-3.5 Turbo and Qwen 2.5 72B, achieves strong performance, with macro F1 scores of 0.87 for English (GPT-3.5 Turbo), 0.85 for Spanish (GPT-3.5 Turbo), 0.81 for Urdu (Qwen 2.5 72B), and 0.88 for the joint multilingual model (Qwen 2.5 72B). These results reflect improvements of 8.75% in English (over SVM baseline 0.80), 8.97% in Spanish (over SVM baseline 0.78), 5.19% in Urdu (over SVM baseline 0.77), and 7.32% in the joint multilingual model (over SVM baseline 0.82). Our framework offers a robust solution for multilingual hate speech detection, fostering safer digital communities worldwide.

Fida Ullah, Muhammad Ahmad, Muhammad Tayyab Zamir et al.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks by identifying and classifying named entities (NEs) from unstructured data into predefined categories such as person, organization, location, date, and time. While extensive research exists for high-resource languages and general domains, NER in Urdu particularly within domain-specific contexts like education remains significantly underexplored. This is Due to lack of annotated datasets for educational content which limits the ability of existing models to accurately identify entities such as academic roles, course names, and institutional terms, underscoring the urgent need for targeted resources in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, no dataset exists in the domain of the Urdu language for this purpose. To achieve this objective this study makes three key contributions. Firstly, we created a manually annotated dataset in the education domain, named EDU-NER-2025, which contains 13 unique most important entities related to education domain. Second, we describe our annotation process and guidelines in detail and discuss the challenges of labelling EDU-NER-2025 dataset. Third, we addressed and analyzed key linguistic challenges, such as morphological complexity and ambiguity, which are prevalent in formal Urdu texts.

Jason Angel, Segun Taofeek Aroyehun, Grigori Sidorov et al.

Identifying misogyny using artificial intelligence is a form of combating online toxicity against women. However, the subjective nature of interpreting misogyny poses a significant challenge to model the phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a multitask learning approach that leverages the subjectivity of this task to enhance the performance of the misogyny identification systems. We incorporated diverse perspectives from annotators in our model design, considering gender and age across six profile groups, and conducted extensive experiments and error analysis using two language models to validate our four alternative designs of the multitask learning technique to identify misogynistic content in English tweets. The results demonstrate that incorporating various viewpoints enhances the language models' ability to interpret different forms of misogyny. This research advances content moderation and highlights the importance of embracing diverse perspectives to build effective online moderation systems.

Jesús Armenta-Segura, Grigori Sidorov

In the japanese anime industry, predicting whether an upcoming product will be popular is crucial. This paper presents a dataset and methods on predicting anime popularity using a multimodal textimage dataset constructed exclusively from freely available internet sources. The dataset was built following rigorous standards based on real-life investment experiences. A deep neural network architecture leveraging GPT-2 and ResNet-50 to embed the data was employed to investigate the correlation between the multimodal text-image input and a popularity score, discovering relevant strengths and weaknesses in the dataset. To measure the accuracy of the model, mean squared error (MSE) was used, obtaining a best result of 0.011 when considering all inputs and the full version of the deep neural network, compared to the benchmark MSE 0.412 obtained with traditional TF-IDF and PILtotensor vectorizations. This is the first proposal to address such task with multimodal datasets, revealing the substantial benefit of incorporating image information, even when a relatively small model (ResNet-50) was used to embed them.

Moein Shahiki Tash, Zahra Ahani, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

This study delves into the relationship between emotional trends from X platform data and the market dynamics of well-known cryptocurrencies Cardano, Binance, Fantom, Matic, and Ripple over the period from October 2022 to March 2023. Leveraging SenticNet, we identified emotions like Fear and Anxiety, Rage and Anger, Grief and Sadness, Delight and Pleasantness, Enthusiasm and Eagerness, and Delight and Joy. Following data extraction, we segmented each month into bi-weekly intervals, replicating this process for price data obtained from Finance-Yahoo. Consequently, a comparative analysis was conducted, establishing connections between emotional trends observed across bi-weekly intervals and cryptocurrency prices, uncovering significant correlations between emotional sentiments and coin valuations.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Olga Kolesnikova et al.

This paper describes CIC NLP's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) -- Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.

Maaz Amjad, Grigori Sidorov, Alisa Zhila et al.

This paper gives the overview of the first shared task at FIRE 2020 on fake news detection in the Urdu language. This is a binary classification task in which the goal is to identify fake news using a dataset composed of 900 annotated news articles for training and 400 news articles for testing. The dataset contains news in five domains: (i) Health, (ii) Sports, (iii) Showbiz, (iv) Technology, and (v) Business. 42 teams from 6 different countries (India, China, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan, and the UK) registered for the task. 9 teams submitted their experimental results. The participants used various machine learning methods ranging from feature-based traditional machine learning to neural network techniques. The best performing system achieved an F-score value of 0.90, showing that the BERT-based approach outperforms other machine learning classifiers.