Afreen Shaikh

Rajdeep Mukherjee, Abhinav Bohra, Akash Banerjee et al.

Despite tremendous progress in automatic summarization, state-of-the-art methods are predominantly trained to excel in summarizing short newswire articles, or documents with strong layout biases such as scientific articles or government reports. Efficient techniques to summarize financial documents, including facts and figures, have largely been unexplored, majorly due to the unavailability of suitable datasets. In this work, we present ECTSum, a new dataset with transcripts of earnings calls (ECTs), hosted by publicly traded companies, as documents, and short experts-written telegram-style bullet point summaries derived from corresponding Reuters articles. ECTs are long unstructured documents without any prescribed length limit or format. We benchmark our dataset with state-of-the-art summarizers across various metrics evaluating the content quality and factual consistency of the generated summaries. Finally, we present a simple-yet-effective approach, ECT-BPS, to generate a set of bullet points that precisely capture the important facts discussed in the calls.

Afreen Shaikh, Sharmila Botcha, Murali Krishna

This paper proposes an OTSU based differential evolution method for satellite image segmentation and compares it with four other methods such as Modified Artificial Bee Colony Optimizer (MABC), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) using the objective function proposed by Otsu for optimal multilevel thresholding. The experiments conducted and their results illustrate that our proposed DE and OTSU algorithm segmentation can effectively and precisely segment the input image, close to results obtained by the other methods. In the proposed DE and OTSU algorithm, instead of passing the fitness function variables, the entire image is passed as an input to the DE algorithm after obtaining the threshold values for the input number of levels in the OTSU algorithm. The image segmentation results are obtained after learning about the image instead of learning about the fitness variables. In comparison to other segmentation methods examined, the proposed DE and OTSU algorithm yields promising results with minimized computational time compared to some algorithms.

Jennifer Hsia, Afreen Shaikh, Zhiruo Wang et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances language models by integrating external knowledge, but its effectiveness is highly dependent on system configuration. Improper retrieval settings can degrade performance, making RAG less reliable than closed-book generation. In this work, we introduce RAGGED, a framework for systematically evaluating RAG systems across diverse retriever-reader configurations, retrieval depths, and datasets. Our analysis reveals that reader robustness to noise is the key determinant of RAG stability and scalability. Some readers benefit from increased retrieval depth, while others degrade due to their sensitivity to distracting content. Through large-scale experiments on open-domain, multi-hop, and specialized-domain datasets, we show that retrievers, rerankers, and prompts influence performance but do not fundamentally alter these reader-driven trends. By providing a principled framework and new metrics to assess RAG stability and scalability, RAGGED enables systematic evaluation of retrieval-augmented generation systems, guiding future research on optimizing retrieval depth and model robustness.

Sarang Shrivastava, Afreen Shaikh, Shivani Shrivastava et al.

The determination of the reading sequence of text is fundamental to document understanding. This problem is easily solved in pages where the text is organized into a sequence of lines and vertical alignment runs the height of the page (producing multiple columns which can be read from left to right). We present a situation -- the directory page parsing problem -- where information is presented on the page in an irregular, visually-organized, two-dimensional format. Directory pages are fairly common in financial prospectuses and carry information about organizations, their addresses and relationships that is key to business tasks in client onboarding. Interestingly, directory pages sometimes have hierarchical structure, motivating the need to generalize the reading sequence to a reading tree. We present solutions to the problem of identifying directory pages and constructing the reading tree, using (learnt) classifiers for text segments and a bottom-up (right to left, bottom-to-top) traversal of segments. The solution is a key part of a production service supporting automatic extraction of organization, address and relationship information from client onboarding documents.