Shreya Goyal

Sumanth Doddapaneni, Rahul Aralikatte, Gowtham Ramesh et al. · microsoft-research, mila

Building Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities for Indic languages, which have a collective speaker base of more than one billion speakers is absolutely crucial. In this work, we aim to improve the NLU capabilities of Indic languages by making contributions along 3 important axes (i) monolingual corpora (ii) NLU testsets (iii) multilingual LLMs focusing on Indic languages. Specifically, we curate the largest monolingual corpora, IndicCorp, with 20.9B tokens covering 24 languages from 4 language families - a 2.3x increase over prior work, while supporting 12 additional languages. Next, we create a human-supervised benchmark, IndicXTREME, consisting of nine diverse NLU tasks covering 20 languages. Across languages and tasks, IndicXTREME contains a total of 105 evaluation sets, of which 52 are new contributions to the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort towards creating a standard benchmark for Indic languages that aims to test the multilingual zero-shot capabilities of pretrained language models. Finally, we train IndicBERT v2, a state-of-the-art model supporting all the languages. Averaged across languages and tasks, the model achieves an absolute improvement of 2 points over a strong baseline. The data and models are available at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/IndicBERT.

Sahil Girhepuje, Anmol Goel, Gokul S Krishnan et al.

Recent advances and applications of language technology and artificial intelligence have enabled much success across multiple domains like law, medical and mental health. AI-based Language Models, like Judgement Prediction, have recently been proposed for the legal sector. However, these models are strife with encoded social biases picked up from the training data. While bias and fairness have been studied across NLP, most studies primarily locate themselves within a Western context. In this work, we present an initial investigation of fairness from the Indian perspective in the legal domain. We highlight the propagation of learnt algorithmic biases in the bail prediction task for models trained on Hindi legal documents. We evaluate the fairness gap using demographic parity and show that a decision tree model trained for the bail prediction task has an overall fairness disparity of 0.237 between input features associated with Hindus and Muslims. Additionally, we highlight the need for further research and studies in the avenues of fairness/bias in applying AI in the legal sector with a specific focus on the Indian context.

Shreya Goyal, Sumanth Doddapaneni, Mitesh M. Khapra et al.

In the past few years, it has become increasingly evident that deep neural networks are not resilient enough to withstand adversarial perturbations in input data, leaving them vulnerable to attack. Various authors have proposed strong adversarial attacks for computer vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. As a response, many defense mechanisms have also been proposed to prevent these networks from failing. The significance of defending neural networks against adversarial attacks lies in ensuring that the model's predictions remain unchanged even if the input data is perturbed. Several methods for adversarial defense in NLP have been proposed, catering to different NLP tasks such as text classification, named entity recognition, and natural language inference. Some of these methods not only defend neural networks against adversarial attacks but also act as a regularization mechanism during training, saving the model from overfitting. This survey aims to review the various methods proposed for adversarial defenses in NLP over the past few years by introducing a novel taxonomy. The survey also highlights the fragility of advanced deep neural networks in NLP and the challenges involved in defending them.

Yogesh Tripathi, Raghav Donakanti, Sahil Girhepuje et al.

Recent advancements in language technology and Artificial Intelligence have resulted in numerous Language Models being proposed to perform various tasks in the legal domain ranging from predicting judgments to generating summaries. Despite their immense potential, these models have been proven to learn and exhibit societal biases and make unfair predictions. In this study, we explore the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform legal tasks in the Indian landscape when social factors are involved. We present a novel metric, $β$-weighted $\textit{Legal Safety Score ($LSS_β$)}$, which encapsulates both the fairness and accuracy aspects of the LLM. We assess LLMs' safety by considering its performance in the $\textit{Binary Statutory Reasoning}$ task and its fairness exhibition with respect to various axes of disparities in the Indian society. Task performance and fairness scores of LLaMA and LLaMA--2 models indicate that the proposed $LSS_β$ metric can effectively determine the readiness of a model for safe usage in the legal sector. We also propose finetuning pipelines, utilising specialised legal datasets, as a potential method to mitigate bias and improve model safety. The finetuning procedures on LLaMA and LLaMA--2 models increase the $LSS_β$, improving their usability in the Indian legal domain. Our code is publicly released.

Aadit Deshpande, Shreya Goyal, Prateek Nagwanshi et al.

With the recent advances in social media, the use of NLP techniques in social media data analysis has become an emerging research direction. Business organizations can particularly benefit from such an analysis of social media discourse, providing an external perspective on consumer behavior. Some of the NLP applications such as intent detection, sentiment classification, text summarization can help FinTech organizations to utilize the social media language data to find useful external insights and can be further utilized for downstream NLP tasks. Particularly, a summary which highlights the intents and sentiments of the users can be very useful for these organizations to get an external perspective. This external perspective can help organizations to better manage their products, offers, promotional campaigns, etc. However, certain challenges, such as a lack of labeled domain-specific datasets impede further exploration of these tasks in the FinTech domain. To overcome these challenges, we design an unsupervised phrase-based summary generation from social media data, using 'Action-Object' pairs (intent phrases). We evaluated the proposed method with other key-phrase based summary generation methods in the direction of contextual information of various Reddit discussion threads, available in the different summaries. We introduce certain "Context Metrics" such as the number of Unique words, Action-Object pairs, and Noun chunks to evaluate the contextual information retrieved from the source text in these phrase-based summaries. We demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform the baseline on these metrics, thus providing a qualitative and quantitative measure of their efficacy. Proposed framework has been leveraged as a web utility portal hosted within Amex.

Shreya Goyal, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay, Gaurav Bhatnagar

Image captioning is a widely known problem in the area of AI. Caption generation from floor plan images has applications in indoor path planning, real estate, and providing architectural solutions. Several methods have been explored in literature for generating captions or semi-structured descriptions from floor plan images. Since only the caption is insufficient to capture fine-grained details, researchers also proposed descriptive paragraphs from images. However, these descriptions have a rigid structure and lack flexibility, making it difficult to use them in real-time scenarios. This paper offers two models, Description Synthesis from Image Cue (DSIC) and Transformer Based Description Generation (TBDG), for the floor plan image to text generation to fill the gaps in existing methods. These two models take advantage of modern deep neural networks for visual feature extraction and text generation. The difference between both models is in the way they take input from the floor plan image. The DSIC model takes only visual features automatically extracted by a deep neural network, while the TBDG model learns textual captions extracted from input floor plan images with paragraphs. The specific keywords generated in TBDG and understanding them with paragraphs make it more robust in a general floor plan image. Experiments were carried out on a large-scale publicly available dataset and compared with state-of-the-art techniques to show the proposed model's superiority.

Shreya Goyal, Naimul Khan, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay et al.

Reconstructing an indoor scene and generating a layout/floor plan in 3D or 2D is a widely known problem. Quite a few algorithms have been proposed in the literature recently. However, most existing methods either use RGB-D images, thus requiring a depth camera, or depending on panoramic photos, assuming that there is little to no occlusion in the rooms. In this work, we proposed GRIHA (Generating Room Interior of a House using ARCore), a framework for generating a layout using an RGB image captured using a simple mobile phone camera. We take advantage of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to assess the 3D transformations required for layout generation. SLAM technology is built-in in recent mobile libraries such as ARCore by Google. Hence, the proposed method is fast and efficient. It gives the user freedom to generate layout by merely taking a few conventional photos, rather than relying on specialized depth hardware or occlusion-free panoramic images. We have compared GRIHA with other existing methods and obtained superior results. Also, the system is tested on multiple hardware platforms to test the dependency and efficiency.

Saptarshi Purkayastha, Shreya Goyal, Bolu Oluwalade et al.

We conducted a survey of 67 graduate students enrolled in the Privacy and Security in Healthcare course at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. This was done to measure user preference and their understanding of usability and security of three different Electronic Health Records authentication methods: single authentication method (username and password), Single sign-on with Central Authentication Service (CAS) authentication method, and a bio-capsule facial authentication method. This research aims to explore the relationship between security and usability, and measure the effect of perceived security on usability in these three aforementioned authentication methods. We developed a formative-formative Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) model to measure the relationship between the latent variables of Usability, and Security. The measurement model was developed using five observed variables (measures). - Efficiency and Effectiveness, Satisfaction, Preference, Concerns, and Confidence. The results obtained highlight the importance and impact of these measures on the latent variables and the relationship among the latent variables. From the PLS-SEM analysis, it was found that security has a positive impact on usability for Single sign-on and bio-capsule facial authentication methods. We conclude that the facial authentication method was the most secure and usable among the three authentication methods. Further, descriptive analysis was done to draw out the interesting findings from the survey regarding the observed variables.

Shreya Goyal, Saptarshi Purkayastha, Tyler Phillips et al.

Dynaswap project reports on developing a coherently integrated and trustworthy holistic secure workflow protection architecture for cyberinfrastructures which can be used on virtual machines deployed through cyberinfrastructure (CI) services such as JetStream. This service creates a user-friendly cloud environment designed to give researchers access to interactive computing and data analysis resources on demand. The Dynaswap cybersecurity architecture supports roles, role hierarchies, and data hierarchies, as well as dynamic changes of roles and hierarchical relations within the scientific infrastructure. Dynaswap combines existing cutting-edge security frameworks (including an Authentication Authorization-Accounting framework, Multi-Factor Authentication, Secure Digital Provenance, and Blockchain) with advanced security tools (e.g., Biometric-Capsule, Cryptography-based Hierarchical Access Control, and Dual-level Key Management). The CI is being validated in life-science research environments and in the education settings of Health Informatics.

Mahak Jain, Anurag Sanyal, Shreya Goyal et al.

Human beings understand natural language description and could able to imagine a corresponding visual for the same. For example, given a description of the interior of a house, we could imagine its structure and arrangements of furniture. Automatic synthesis of real-world images from text descriptions has been explored in the computer vision community. However, there is no such attempt in the area of document images, like floor plans. Floor plan synthesis from sketches, as well as data-driven models, were proposed earlier. Ours is the first attempt to render building floor plan images from textual description automatically. Here, the input is a natural language description of the internal structure and furniture arrangements within a house, and the output is the 2D floor plan image of the same. We have experimented on publicly available benchmark floor plan datasets. We were able to render realistic synthesized floor plan images from the description written in English.

Shreya Goyal, Satya Bhavsar, Shreya Patel et al.

In this paper, we propose SUGAMAN (Supervised and Unified framework using Grammar and Annotation Model for Access and Navigation). SUGAMAN is a Hindi word meaning "easy passage from one place to another". SUGAMAN synthesizes textual description from a given floor plan image for the visually impaired. A visually impaired person can navigate in an indoor environment using the textual description generated by SUGAMAN. With the help of a text reader software, the target user can understand the rooms within the building and arrangement of furniture to navigate. SUGAMAN is the first framework for describing a floor plan and giving direction for obstacle-free movement within a building. We learn $5$ classes of room categories from $1355$ room image samples under a supervised learning paradigm. These learned annotations are fed into a description synthesis framework to yield a holistic description of a floor plan image. We demonstrate the performance of various supervised classifiers on room learning. We also provide a comparative analysis of system generated and human written descriptions. SUGAMAN gives state of the art performance on challenging, real-world floor plan images. This work can be applied to areas like understanding floor plans of historical monuments, stability analysis of buildings, and retrieval.