Vivek Gupta

Pranshu Pandya, Vatsal Gupta, Agney S Talwarr et al.

Cognitive textual and visual reasoning tasks, including puzzles, series, and analogies, demand the ability to quickly reason, decipher, and evaluate patterns both textually and spatially. Due to extensive training on vast amounts of human-curated data, LLMs and VLMs excel in common-sense reasoning tasks, however still struggle with more complex reasoning that demands deeper cognitive understanding. We introduce NTSEBench, a new dataset designed to evaluate cognitive multi-modal reasoning and problem-solving skills of large models. The dataset contains 2728 multiple-choice questions, accompanied by a total of 4,642 images, categorized into 26 different types. These questions are drawn from the nationwide NTSE examination in India and feature a mix of visual and textual general aptitude challenges, designed to assess intelligence and critical thinking skills beyond mere rote learning. We establish baselines on the dataset using state-of-the-art LLMs and VLMs. To facilitate a comparison between open source and propriety models, we propose four distinct modeling strategies to handle different modalities -- text and images -- in the dataset instances.

Srija Mukhopadhyay, Adnan Qidwai, Aparna Garimella et al.

Chart question answering (CQA) is a crucial area of Visual Language Understanding. However, the robustness and consistency of current Visual Language Models (VLMs) in this field remain under-explored. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art VLMs on comprehensive datasets, developed specifically for this study, encompassing diverse question categories and chart formats. We investigate two key aspects: 1) the models' ability to handle varying levels of chart and question complexity, and 2) their robustness across different visual representations of the same underlying data. Our analysis reveals significant performance variations based on question and chart types, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses of current models. Additionally, we identify areas for improvement and propose future research directions to build more robust and reliable CQA systems. This study sheds light on the limitations of current models and paves the way for future advancements in the field.

Nikhil Abhyankar, Purvi Chaurasia, Sanchit Kabra et al.

Existing tabular reasoning benchmarks mostly test models on small, uniform tables, underrepresenting the complexity of real-world data and giving an incomplete view of Large Language Models' (LLMs) reasoning abilities. Real tables are long, heterogeneous, and domain-specific, mixing structured fields with free text and requiring multi-hop reasoning across thousands of tokens. To address this gap, we introduce RUST-BENCH, a benchmark of 7966 questions from 2031 real-world tables spanning two domains: i) RB-Science (NSF grant records) and ii) RB-Sports (NBA statistics). Unlike prior work, RUST-BENCH evaluates LLMs jointly across scale, heterogeneity, domain specificity, and reasoning complexity. Experiments with open-source and proprietary models show that LLMs struggle with heterogeneous schemas and complex multi-hop inference, revealing persistent weaknesses in current architectures and prompting strategies. RUST-BENCH establishes a challenging new testbed for advancing tabular reasoning research.

Arun Vignesh Malarkkan, Manan Roy Choudhury, Guangwei Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to financial analysis, yet their ability to audit structured financial statements under explicit accounting principles remains poorly explored. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate question answering, numerical reasoning, or anomaly detection on synthetically corrupted data, making it unclear whether models can reliably verify or localize rule compliance on correct financial statements. We introduce FinRule-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating diagnostic completeness in rule-based financial reasoning over real-world financial tables. FinRule-Bench pairs ground-truth financial statements with explicit, human-curated accounting principles and spans four canonical statement types: Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements, Income Statements, and Statements of Equity. The benchmark defines three auditing tasks that require progressively stronger reasoning capabilities: (i) rule verification, which tests compliance with a single principle; (ii) rule identification, which requires selecting the violated principle from a provided rule set; and (iii) joint rule diagnosis, which requires detecting and localizing multiple simultaneous violations at the record level. We evaluate LLMs under zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and introduce a causal-counterfactual reasoning protocol that enforces consistency between decisions, explanations, and counterfactual judgments. Across tasks and statement types, we find that while models perform well on isolated rule verification, performance degrades sharply for rule discrimination and multi-violation diagnosis. FinRule-Bench provides a principled and reproducible testbed for studying rule-governed reasoning, diagnostic coverage, and failure modes of LLMs in high-stakes financial analysis.

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.

Vatsal Gupta, Pranshu Pandya, Tushar Kataria et al.

Language models, characterized by their black-box nature, often hallucinate and display sensitivity to input perturbations, causing concerns about trust. To enhance trust, it is imperative to gain a comprehensive understanding of the model's failure modes and develop effective strategies to improve their performance. In this study, we introduce a methodology designed to examine how input perturbations affect language models across various scales, including pre-trained models and large language models (LLMs). Utilizing fine-tuning, we enhance the model's robustness to input perturbations. Additionally, we investigate whether exposure to one perturbation enhances or diminishes the model's performance with respect to other perturbations. To address robustness against multiple perturbations, we present three distinct fine-tuning strategies. Furthermore, we broaden the scope of our methodology to encompass large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach augmented with exemplars. We employ the Tabular-NLI task to showcase how our proposed strategies adeptly train a robust model, enabling it to address diverse perturbations while maintaining accuracy on the original dataset. https://msin-infotabs.github.io/

Srija Mukhopadhyay, Abhishek Rajgaria, Prerana Khatiwada et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at tasks requiring joint understanding of visual and linguistic information. A particularly promising yet under-explored application for these models lies in answering questions based on various kinds of maps. This study investigates the efficacy of VLMs in answering questions based on choropleth maps, which are widely used for data analysis and representation. To facilitate and encourage research in this area, we introduce a novel map-based question-answering benchmark, consisting of maps from three geographical regions (United States, India, China), each containing 1000 questions. Our benchmark incorporates 43 diverse question templates, requiring nuanced understanding of relative spatial relationships, intricate map features, and complex reasoning. It also includes maps with discrete and continuous values, encompassing variations in color-mapping, category ordering, and stylistic patterns, enabling comprehensive analysis. We evaluate the performance of multiple VLMs on this benchmark, highlighting gaps in their abilities and providing insights for improving such models.

Shubhankar Singh, Purvi Chaurasia, Yerram Varun et al.

Existing benchmarks for visual question answering lack in visual grounding and complexity, particularly in evaluating spatial reasoning skills. We introduce FlowVQA, a novel benchmark aimed at assessing the capabilities of visual question-answering multimodal language models in reasoning with flowcharts as visual contexts. FlowVQA comprises 2,272 carefully generated and human-verified flowchart images from three distinct content sources, along with 22,413 diverse question-answer pairs, to test a spectrum of reasoning tasks, including information localization, decision-making, and logical progression. We conduct a thorough baseline evaluation on a suite of both open-source and proprietary multimodal language models using various strategies, followed by an analysis of directional bias. The results underscore the benchmark's potential as a vital tool for advancing the field of multimodal modeling, providing a focused and challenging environment for enhancing model performance in visual and logical reasoning tasks.

Naman Ahuja, Fenil Bardoliya, Chitta Baral et al.

Transforming dense, detailed, unstructured text into an interpretable and summarised table, also colloquially known as Text-to-Table generation, is an essential task for information retrieval. Current methods, however, miss out on how and what complex information to extract; they also lack the ability to infer data from the text. In this paper, we introduce a versatile approach, Map&Make, which "dissects" text into propositional atomic statements. This facilitates granular decomposition to extract the latent schema. The schema is then used to populate the tables that capture the qualitative nuances and the quantitative facts in the original text. Our approach is tested against two challenging datasets, Rotowire, renowned for its complex and multi-table schema, and Livesum, which demands numerical aggregation. By carefully identifying and correcting hallucination errors in Rotowire, we aim to achieve a cleaner and more reliable benchmark. We evaluate our method rigorously on a comprehensive suite of comparative and referenceless metrics. Our findings demonstrate significant improvement results across both datasets with better interpretability in Text-to-Table generation. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to superior performance and validate the practicality of our framework in structured summarization tasks.

Ritam Upadhyay, Naman Ahuja, Rishabh Baral et al.

LLM Driven text-to-table (T2T) systems often rely on extensive prompt-engineering or iterative event extraction in code-parsable formats, which boosts scores but are computationally expensive and obscure how models actually reason over temporal evolving narratives to summarise key information. We present CMT-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark built from live cricket commentary that requires dynamic table generation across two evolving schemas under a dense, rule-governed policy. CMT-Bench is designed to probe robustness via three semantics-preserving dimensions: (i) extractive-cue ablation to separate extractive shortcuts from state tracking, (ii) temporal prefixing to test long-context stability, and (iii) entity-form perturbations (anonymization, outof-distribution substitutions, role-entangling paraphrases) to assess sensitivity to surface variation. Across diverse long-context stateof-the-art LLMs, we find large drops without extractive summaries, monotonic degradation with input length, and consistent accuracy drop under entity-form changes. Complementary distributional tests confirm significant shifts in numeric error patterns, indicating drift in reasoning rather than mere noise. Our results show that current LLMs are brittle in dynamic Textto-table generation, motivating robustness-first evaluation as a prerequisite for developing efficient and scalable approaches for this task.

Anirudh Iyengar Kaniyar Narayana Iyengar, Srija Mukhopadhyay, Adnan Qidwai et al.

We introduce InterChart, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how well vision-language models (VLMs) reason across multiple related charts, a task central to real-world applications such as scientific reporting, financial analysis, and public policy dashboards. Unlike prior benchmarks focusing on isolated, visually uniform charts, InterChart challenges models with diverse question types ranging from entity inference and trend correlation to numerical estimation and abstract multi-step reasoning grounded in 2-3 thematically or structurally related charts. We organize the benchmark into three tiers of increasing difficulty: (1) factual reasoning over individual charts, (2) integrative analysis across synthetically aligned chart sets, and (3) semantic inference over visually complex, real-world chart pairs. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art open and closed-source VLMs reveals consistent and steep accuracy declines as chart complexity increases. We find that models perform better when we decompose multi-entity charts into simpler visual units, underscoring their struggles with cross-chart integration. By exposing these systematic limitations, InterChart provides a rigorous framework for advancing multimodal reasoning in complex, multi-visual environments.

Varun Srivastava, Fan Lei, Srija Mukhopadhyay et al.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have driven researchers to explore how well these models read data visualizations, e.g., bar charts, scatter plots. More recently, attention has shifted to visual question answering with maps (Map-VQA). However, Map-VQA research has primarily focused on choropleth maps, which cover only a limited range of thematic categories and visual analytical tasks. To address these gaps, we introduce MapIQ, a benchmark dataset comprising 14,706 question-answer pairs across three map types: choropleth maps, cartograms, and proportional symbol maps spanning topics from six distinct themes (e.g., housing, crime). We evaluate multiple MLLMs using six visual analytical tasks, comparing their performance against one another and a human baseline. An additional experiment examining the impact of map design changes (e.g., altered color schemes, modified legend designs, and removal of map elements) provides insights into the robustness and sensitivity of MLLMs, their reliance on internal geographic knowledge, and potential avenues for improving Map-VQA performance.

Nikhil Abhyankar, Vivek Gupta, Dan Roth et al.

Tabular reasoning involves interpreting natural language queries about tabular data, which presents a unique challenge of combining language understanding with structured data analysis. Existing methods employ either textual reasoning, which excels in semantic interpretation but struggles with mathematical operations, or symbolic reasoning, which handles computations well but lacks semantic understanding. This paper introduces a novel algorithm H-STAR that integrates both symbolic and semantic (textual) approaches in a two-stage process to address these limitations. H-STAR employs: (1) step-wise table extraction using `multi-view' column retrieval followed by row extraction, and (2) adaptive reasoning that adapts reasoning strategies based on question types, utilizing semantic reasoning for direct lookup and complex lexical queries while augmenting textual reasoning with symbolic reasoning support for quantitative and logical tasks. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that H-STAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three tabular question-answering (QA) and fact-verification datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and efficiency.

Ankur Gupta, Vivek Gupta

Several NLP tasks need the effective representation of text documents. Arora et. al., 2017 demonstrate that simple weighted averaging of word vectors frequently outperforms neural models. SCDV (Mekala et. al., 2017) further extends this from sentences to documents by employing soft and sparse clustering over pre-computed word vectors. However, both techniques ignore the polysemy and contextual character of words. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing SCDV+BERT(ctxd), a simple and effective unsupervised representation that combines contextualized BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) based word embedding for word sense disambiguation with SCDV soft clustering approach. We show that our embeddings outperform original SCDV, pre-train BERT, and several other baselines on many classification datasets. We also demonstrate our embeddings effectiveness on other tasks, such as concept matching and sentence similarity. In addition, we show that SCDV+BERT(ctxd) outperforms fine-tune BERT and different embedding approaches in scenarios with limited data and only few shots examples.

Nupur Jain, Vivek Gupta, Anshul Rai et al.

To truly grasp reasoning ability, a Natural Language Inference model should be evaluated on counterfactual data. TabPert facilitates this by assisting in the generation of such counterfactual data for assessing model tabular reasoning issues. TabPert allows a user to update a table, change its associated hypotheses, change their labels, and highlight rows that are important for hypothesis classification. TabPert also captures information about the techniques used to automatically produce the table, as well as the strategies employed to generate the challenging hypotheses. These counterfactual tables and hypotheses, as well as the metadata, can then be used to explore an existing model's shortcomings methodically and quantitatively.

J. Neeraja, Vivek Gupta, Vivek Srikumar

Reasoning about tabular information presents unique challenges to modern NLP approaches which largely rely on pre-trained contextualized embeddings of text. In this paper, we study these challenges through the problem of tabular natural language inference. We propose easy and effective modifications to how information is presented to a model for this task. We show via systematic experiments that these strategies substantially improve tabular inference performance.

Vikas Raunak, Siddharth Dalmia, Vivek Gupta et al.

State-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models struggle with generating low-frequency tokens, tackling which remains a major challenge. The analysis of long-tailed phenomena in the context of structured prediction tasks is further hindered by the added complexities of search during inference. In this work, we quantitatively characterize such long-tailed phenomena at two levels of abstraction, namely, token classification and sequence generation. We propose a new loss function, the Anti-Focal loss, to better adapt model training to the structural dependencies of conditional text generation by incorporating the inductive biases of beam search in the training process. We show the efficacy of the proposed technique on a number of Machine Translation (MT) datasets, demonstrating that it leads to significant gains over cross-entropy across different language pairs, especially on the generation of low-frequency words. We have released the code to reproduce our results.

Vivek Gupta, Ankit Saw, Pegah Nokhiz et al.

Simple weighted averaging of word vectors often yields effective representations for sentences which outperform sophisticated seq2seq neural models in many tasks. While it is desirable to use the same method to represent documents as well, unfortunately, the effectiveness is lost when representing long documents involving multiple sentences. One of the key reasons is that a longer document is likely to contain words from many different topics; hence, creating a single vector while ignoring all the topical structure is unlikely to yield an effective document representation. This problem is less acute in single sentences and other short text fragments where the presence of a single topic is most likely. To alleviate this problem, we present P-SIF, a partitioned word averaging model to represent long documents. P-SIF retains the simplicity of simple weighted word averaging while taking a document's topical structure into account. In particular, P-SIF learns topic-specific vectors from a document and finally concatenates them all to represent the overall document. We provide theoretical justifications on the correctness of P-SIF. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, we demonstrate P-SIF's effectiveness compared to simple weighted averaging and many other baselines.

Vivek Gupta, Maitrey Mehta, Pegah Nokhiz et al.

In this paper, we observe that semi-structured tabulated text is ubiquitous; understanding them requires not only comprehending the meaning of text fragments, but also implicit relationships between them. We argue that such data can prove as a testing ground for understanding how we reason about information. To study this, we introduce a new dataset called INFOTABS, comprising of human-written textual hypotheses based on premises that are tables extracted from Wikipedia info-boxes. Our analysis shows that the semi-structured, multi-domain and heterogeneous nature of the premises admits complex, multi-faceted reasoning. Experiments reveal that, while human annotators agree on the relationships between a table-hypothesis pair, several standard modeling strategies are unsuccessful at the task, suggesting that reasoning about tables can pose a difficult modeling challenge.

Vivek Gupta, Ankit Saw, Pegah Nokhiz et al.

Efficient representation of text documents is an important building block in many NLP tasks. Research on long text categorization has shown that simple weighted averaging of word vectors for sentence representation often outperforms more sophisticated neural models. Recently proposed Sparse Composite Document Vector (SCDV) (Mekala et. al, 2017) extends this approach from sentences to documents using soft clustering over word vectors. However, SCDV disregards the multi-sense nature of words, and it also suffers from the curse of higher dimensionality. In this work, we address these shortcomings and propose SCDV-MS. SCDV-MS utilizes multi-sense word embeddings and learns a lower dimensional manifold. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we show that SCDV-MS embeddings outperform previous state-of-the-art embeddings on multi-class and multi-label text categorization tasks. Furthermore, SCDV-MS embeddings are more efficient than SCDV in terms of time and space complexity on textual classification tasks.

Vikas Raunak, Vaibhav Kumar, Vivek Gupta et al.

Word embeddings have become a staple of several natural language processing tasks, yet much remains to be understood about their properties. In this work, we analyze word embeddings in terms of their principal components and arrive at a number of novel and counterintuitive observations. In particular, we characterize the utility of variance explained by the principal components as a proxy for downstream performance. Furthermore, through syntactic probing of the principal embedding space, we show that the syntactic information captured by a principal component does not correlate with the amount of variance it explains. Consequently, we investigate the limitations of variance based embedding post-processing and demonstrate that such post-processing is counter-productive in sentence classification and machine translation tasks. Finally, we offer a few precautionary guidelines on applying variance based embedding post-processing and explain why non-isotropic geometry might be integral to word embedding performance.

Vivek Gupta, Pegah Nokhiz, Chitradeep Dutta Roy et al.

The rise in machine learning-assisted decision-making has led to concerns about the fairness of the decisions and techniques to mitigate problems of discrimination. If a negative decision is made about an individual (denying a loan, rejecting an application for housing, and so on) justice dictates that we be able to ask how we might change circumstances to get a favorable decision the next time. Moreover, the ability to change circumstances (a better education, improved credentials) should not be limited to only those with access to expensive resources. In other words, \emph{recourse} for negative decisions should be considered a desirable value that can be equalized across (demographically defined) groups. This paper describes how to build models that make accurate predictions while still ensuring that the penalties for a negative outcome do not disadvantage different groups disproportionately. We measure recourse as the distance of an individual from the decision boundary of a classifier. We then introduce a regularized objective to minimize the difference in recourse across groups. We explore linear settings and further extend recourse to non-linear settings as well as model-agnostic settings where the exact distance from boundary cannot be calculated. Our results show that we can successfully decrease the unfairness in recourse while maintaining classifier performance.

Tao Li, Vivek Gupta, Maitrey Mehta et al.

While neural models show remarkable accuracy on individual predictions, their internal beliefs can be inconsistent across examples. In this paper, we formalize such inconsistency as a generalization of prediction error. We propose a learning framework for constraining models using logic rules to regularize them away from inconsistency. Our framework can leverage both labeled and unlabeled examples and is directly compatible with off-the-shelf learning schemes without model redesign. We instantiate our framework on natural language inference, where experiments show that enforcing invariants stated in logic can help make the predictions of neural models both accurate and consistent.

Dheeraj Mekala, Vivek Gupta, Purushottam Kar et al.

Hierarchical classification is supervised multi-class classification problem over the set of class labels organized according to a hierarchy. In this report, we study the work by Ramaswamy et. al. on hierarchical classification over symmetric tree distance loss. We extend the consistency of hierarchical classification algorithm over asymmetric tree distance loss. We design a $\mathcal{O}(nk\log{}n)$ algorithm to find Bayes optimal classification for a k-ary tree as a hierarchy. We show that under reasonable assumptions over asymmetric loss function, the Bayes optimal classification over this asymmetric loss can be found in $\mathcal{O}(k\log{}n)$. We exploit this insight and attempt to extend the Ova-Cascade algorithm \citet{ramaswamy2015convex} for hierarchical classification over the asymmetric loss.

Dhruv Mahajan, Vivek Gupta, S Sathiya Keerthi et al.

For many applications, an ensemble of base classifiers is an effective solution. The tuning of its parameters(number of classes, amount of data on which each classifier is to be trained on, etc.) requires G, the generalization error of a given ensemble. The efficient estimation of G is the focus of this paper. The key idea is to approximate the variance of the class scores/probabilities of the base classifiers over the randomness imposed by the training subset by normal/beta distribution at each point x in the input feature space. We estimate the parameters of the distribution using a small set of randomly chosen base classifiers and use those parameters to give efficient estimation schemes for G. We give empirical evidence for the quality of the various estimators. We also demonstrate their usefulness in making design choices such as the number of classifiers in the ensemble and the size of a subset of data used for training that is needed to achieve a certain value of generalization error. Our approach also has great potential for designing distributed ensemble classifiers.

Rahul Wadbude, Vivek Gupta, Piyush Rai et al.

We present a novel and scalable label embedding framework for large-scale multi-label learning a.k.a ExMLDS (Extreme Multi-Label Learning using Distributional Semantics). Our approach draws inspiration from ideas rooted in distributional semantics, specifically the Skip Gram Negative Sampling (SGNS) approach, widely used to learn word embeddings for natural language processing tasks. Learning such embeddings can be reduced to a certain matrix factorization. Our approach is novel in that it highlights interesting connections between label embedding methods used for multi-label learning and paragraph/document embedding methods commonly used for learning representations of text data. The framework can also be easily extended to incorporate auxiliary information such as label-label correlations; this is crucial especially when there are a lot of missing labels in the training data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through an extensive set of experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, and show that the proposed learning methods perform favorably compared to several baselines and state-of-the-art methods for large-scale multi-label learning. To facilitate end-to-end learning, we develop a joint learning algorithm that can learn the embeddings as well as a regression model that predicts these embeddings given input features, via efficient gradient-based methods.

Rahul Wadbude, Vivek Gupta, Dheeraj Mekala et al.

Review score prediction of text reviews has recently gained a lot of attention in recommendation systems. A major problem in models for review score prediction is the presence of noise due to user-bias in review scores. We propose two simple statistical methods to remove such noise and improve review score prediction. Compared to other methods that use multiple classifiers, one for each user, our model uses a single global classifier to predict review scores. We empirically evaluate our methods on two major categories (\textit{Electronics} and \textit{Movies and TV}) of the SNAP published Amazon e-Commerce Reviews data-set and Amazon \textit{Fine Food} reviews data-set. We obtain improved review score prediction for three commonly used text feature representations.

Dheeraj Mekala, Vivek Gupta, Bhargavi Paranjape et al.

We present a feature vector formation technique for documents - Sparse Composite Document Vector (SCDV) - which overcomes several shortcomings of the current distributional paragraph vector representations that are widely used for text representation. In SCDV, word embedding's are clustered to capture multiple semantic contexts in which words occur. They are then chained together to form document topic-vectors that can express complex, multi-topic documents. Through extensive experiments on multi-class and multi-label classification tasks, we outperform the previous state-of-the-art method, NTSG (Liu et al., 2015a). We also show that SCDV embedding's perform well on heterogeneous tasks like Topic Coherence, context-sensitive Learning and Information Retrieval. Moreover, we achieve significant reduction in training and prediction times compared to other representation methods. SCDV achieves best of both worlds - better performance with lower time and space complexity.

Vivek Gupta, Harish Karnick, Ashendra Bansal et al.

Product classification is the task of automatically predicting a taxonomy path for a product in a predefined taxonomy hierarchy given a textual product description or title. For efficient product classification we require a suitable representation for a document (the textual description of a product) feature vector and efficient and fast algorithms for prediction. To address the above challenges, we propose a new distributional semantics representation for document vector formation. We also develop a new two-level ensemble approach utilizing (with respect to the taxonomy tree) a path-wise, node-wise and depth-wise classifiers for error reduction in the final product classification. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the distributional representation and the ensemble approach on data sets from a leading e-commerce platform and achieve better results on various evaluation metrics compared to earlier approaches.