Soumajit Pramanik

Debarghya Datta, Soumajit Pramanik

In the ever-evolving landscape of natural language processing and information retrieval, the need for robust and domain-specific entity linking algorithms has become increasingly apparent. It is crucial in a considerable number of fields such as humanities, technical writing and biomedical sciences to enrich texts with semantics and discover more knowledge. The use of Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) in such domains requires handling noisy texts, low resource settings and domain-specific KBs. Existing approaches are mostly inappropriate for such scenarios, as they either depend on training data or are not flexible enough to work with domain-specific KBs. Thus in this work, we present an unsupervised approach leveraging the concept of Group Steiner Trees (GST), which can identify the most relevant candidates for entity disambiguation using the contextual similarities across candidate entities for all the mentions present in a document. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by more than 40\% (in avg.) in terms of Precision@1 across various domain-specific datasets.

Gagan Raj Gupta, Anshul Kumar, Manish Rai et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for automating complex reasoning and decision-making tasks. In telecommunications, they hold the potential to transform network optimization, automate troubleshooting, enhance customer support, and ensure regulatory compliance. However, their deployment in telecom is hindered by domain-specific challenges that demand specialized adaptation. To overcome these challenges and to accelerate the adaptation of LLMs for telecom, we propose MM-Telco, a comprehensive suite of multimodal benchmarks and models tailored for the telecom domain. The benchmark introduces various tasks (both text based and image based) that address various practical real-life use cases such as network operations, network management, improving documentation quality, and retrieval of relevant text and images. Further, we perform baseline experiments with various LLMs and VLMs. The models fine-tuned on our dataset exhibit a significant boost in performance. Our experiments also help analyze the weak areas in the working of current state-of-art multimodal LLMs, thus guiding towards further development and research.

Somnath Mondal, Tinkal Mondal, Soumajit Pramanik et al.

The interaction between proteins and nucleic acids is crucial for processes that sustain cellular function, including DNA maintenance and the regulation of gene expression and translation. Amino acid mutations in protein-nucleic acid complexes often lead to vital diseases. Experimental techniques have their own specific limitations in predicting mutational effects in protein-nucleic acid complexes. In this study, we compiled a large dataset of 1951 mutations including both protein-DNA and protein-RNA complexes and integrated structural and sequential features to build a deep learning-based regression model named DeepPNI. This model estimates mutation-induced binding free energy changes in protein-nucleic acid complexes. The structural features are encoded via edge-aware RGCN and the sequential features are extracted using protein language model ESM-2. We have achieved a high average Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.76 in the large dataset via five-fold cross-validation. Consistent performance across individual dataset of protein-DNA, protein-RNA complexes, and different experimental temperature split dataset make the model generalizable. Our model showed good performance in complex-based five-fold cross-validation, which proved its robustness. In addition, DeepPNI outperformed in external dataset validation, and comparison with existing tools

Zhen Jia, Soumajit Pramanik, Rishiraj Saha Roy et al.

Question answering over knowledge graphs (KG-QA) is a vital topic in IR. Questions with temporal intent are a special class of practical importance, but have not received much attention in research. This work presents EXAQT, the first end-to-end system for answering complex temporal questions that have multiple entities and predicates, and associated temporal conditions. EXAQT answers natural language questions over KGs in two stages, one geared towards high recall, the other towards precision at top ranks. The first step computes question-relevant compact subgraphs within the KG, and judiciously enhances them with pertinent temporal facts, using Group Steiner Trees and fine-tuned BERT models. The second step constructs relational graph convolutional networks (R-GCNs) from the first step's output, and enhances the R-GCNs with time-aware entity embeddings and attention over temporal relations. We evaluate EXAQT on TimeQuestions, a large dataset of 16k temporal questions we compiled from a variety of general purpose KG-QA benchmarks. Results show that EXAQT outperforms three state-of-the-art systems for answering complex questions over KGs, thereby justifying specialized treatment of temporal QA.

Soumajit Pramanik, Jesujoba Alabi, Rishiraj Saha Roy et al.

Question answering over RDF data like knowledge graphs has been greatly advanced, with a number of good systems providing crisp answers for natural language questions or telegraphic queries. Some of these systems incorporate textual sources as additional evidence for the answering process, but cannot compute answers that are present in text alone. Conversely, the IR and NLP communities have addressed QA over text, but such systems barely utilize semantic data and knowledge. This paper presents a method for complex questions that can seamlessly operate over a mixture of RDF datasets and text corpora, or individual sources, in a unified framework. Our method, called UNIQORN, builds a context graph on-the-fly, by retrieving question-relevant evidences from the RDF data and/or a text corpus, using fine-tuned BERT models. The resulting graph typically contains all question-relevant evidences but also a lot of noise. UNIQORN copes with this input by a graph algorithm for Group Steiner Trees, that identifies the best answer candidates in the context graph. Experimental results on several benchmarks of complex questions with multiple entities and relations, show that UNIQORN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for heterogeneous QA - in a full training mode, as well as in zero-shot settings. The graph-based methodology provides user-interpretable evidence for the complete answering process.

Azin Ghazimatin, Soumajit Pramanik, Rishiraj Saha Roy et al.

System-provided explanations for recommendations are an important component towards transparent and trustworthy AI. In state-of-the-art research, this is a one-way signal, though, to improve user acceptance. In this paper, we turn the role of explanations around and investigate how they can contribute to enhancing the quality of the generated recommendations themselves. We devise a human-in-the-loop framework, called ELIXIR, where user feedback on explanations is leveraged for pairwise learning of user preferences. ELIXIR leverages feedback on pairs of recommendations and explanations to learn user-specific latent preference vectors, overcoming sparseness by label propagation with item-similarity-based neighborhoods. Our framework is instantiated using generalized graph recommendation via Random Walk with Restart. Insightful experiments with a real user study show significant improvements in movie and book recommendations over item-level feedback.

Xiaolu Lu, Soumajit Pramanik, Rishiraj Saha Roy et al.

Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Amiya Halder, Soumajit Pramanik

This paper proposes a Genetic Algorithm based segmentation method that can automatically segment gray-scale images. The proposed method mainly consists of spatial unsupervised grayscale image segmentation that divides an image into regions. The aim of this algorithm is to produce precise segmentation of images using intensity information along with neighborhood relationships. In this paper, Fuzzy Hopfield Neural Network (FHNN) clustering helps in generating the population of Genetic algorithm which there by automatically segments the image. This technique is a powerful method for image segmentation and works for both single and multiple-feature data with spatial information. Validity index has been utilized for introducing a robust technique for finding the optimum number of components in an image. Experimental results shown that the algorithm generates good quality segmented image.