Sabur Butt

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.

Muhammad Ali Shafique, Kanwal Mehreen, Muhammad Arham et al.

Developing a high-performing large language models (LLMs) for low-resource languages such as Urdu, present several challenges. These challenges include the scarcity of high-quality datasets, multilingual inconsistencies, and safety concerns. Existing multilingual LLMs often address these issues by translating large volumes of available data. However, such translations often lack quality and cultural nuance while also incurring significant costs for data curation and training. To address these issues, we propose Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct, a multilingual Urdu-English model, that tackles these challenges with a unique approach. We train the model on a high-quality, multilingual synthetic dataset (Urdu-Instruct), developed using a modified self-instruct technique. By using unique prompts and seed values for each task along with a global task pool, this dataset incorporates Urdu-native chain-of-thought based reasoning, bilingual translation, cultural relevance, and ethical safety alignments. This technique significantly enhances the comprehension of Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct model for Urdu-specific tasks. As a result, Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct, built upon the pretrained Llama-3.1-8B, demonstrates superior performance compared to Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct for Urdu specific-tasks. It also outperformed leading multilingual LLMs, including Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, and Cohere-Aya-Expanse-8B, all within a training budget of under $100. Our results demonstrate that high-performance and low-resource language LLMs can be developed efficiently and culturally aligned using our modified self-instruct approach. All datasets, models, and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/traversaal-ai/alif-urdu-llm.

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt et al.

The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages and the risk they face of being overlooked in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to bridge the gap between these communities and researchers, emphasizing the need for inclusive technological advancements that respect indigenous community perspectives. We show the NLP progress of indigenous Latin American languages and the survey that covers the status of indigenous languages in Latin America, their representation in NLP, and the challenges and innovations required for their preservation and development. The paper contributes to the current literature in understanding the need and progress of NLP for indigenous communities of Latin America, specifically low-resource and indigenous communities in general.

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.

Sabur Butt, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Ahmad Imam Amjad et al.

Hope is a complex and underexplored emotional state that plays a significant role in education, mental health, and social interaction. Unlike basic emotions, hope manifests in nuanced forms ranging from grounded optimism to exaggerated wishfulness or sarcasm, making it difficult for Natural Language Processing systems to detect accurately. This study introduces PolyHope V2, a multilingual, fine-grained hope speech dataset comprising over 30,000 annotated tweets in English and Spanish. This resource distinguishes between four hope subtypes Generalized, Realistic, Unrealistic, and Sarcastic and enhances existing datasets by explicitly labeling sarcastic instances. We benchmark multiple pretrained transformer models and compare them with large language models (LLMs) such as GPT 4 and Llama 3 under zero-shot and few-shot regimes. Our findings show that fine-tuned transformers outperform prompt-based LLMs, especially in distinguishing nuanced hope categories and sarcasm. Through qualitative analysis and confusion matrices, we highlight systematic challenges in separating closely related hope subtypes. The dataset and results provide a robust foundation for future emotion recognition tasks that demand greater semantic and contextual sensitivity across languages.

Sabur Butt, Hector G. Ceballos, Diana P. Madera

Job application and assessment processes have evolved significantly in recent years, largely due to advancements in technology and changes in the way companies operate. Skill extraction and classification remain an important component of the modern hiring process as it provides a more objective way to evaluate candidates and automatically align their skills with the job requirements. However, to effectively evaluate the skills, the skill extraction tools must recognize varied mentions of skills on resumes, including direct mentions, implications, synonyms, acronyms, phrases, and proficiency levels, and differentiate between hard and soft skills. While tools like LLMs (Large Model Models) help extract and categorize skills from job applications, there's a lack of comprehensive datasets for evaluating the effectiveness of these models in accurately identifying and classifying skills in Spanish-language job applications. This gap hinders our ability to assess the reliability and precision of the models, which is crucial for ensuring that the selected candidates truly possess the required skills for the job. In this paper, we develop a Spanish language dataset for skill extraction and classification, provide annotation methodology to distinguish between knowledge, skill, and abilities, and provide deep learning baselines to advance robust solutions for skill classification.

Renuka Sharma, Sushama Nagpal, Sangeeta Sabharwal et al.

The number of Hindi speakers on social media has increased dramatically in recent years. Regret is a common emotional experience in our everyday life. Many speakers on social media, share their regretful experiences and opinions regularly. It might cause a re-evaluation of one's choices and a desire to make a different option if given the chance. As a result, knowing the source of regret is critical for investigating its impact on behavior and decision-making. This study focuses on regret and how it is expressed, specifically in Hindi, on various social media platforms. In our study, we present a novel dataset from three different sources, where each sentence has been manually classified into one of three classes "Regret by action", "Regret by inaction", and "No regret". Next, we use this dataset to investigate the linguistic expressions of regret in Hindi text and also identify the textual domains that are most frequently associated with regret. Our findings indicate that individuals on social media platforms frequently express regret for both past inactions and actions, particularly within the domain of interpersonal relationships. We use a pre-trained BERT model to generate word embeddings for the Hindi dataset and also compare deep learning models with conventional machine learning models in order to demonstrate accuracy. Our results show that BERT embedding with CNN consistently surpassed other models. This described the effectiveness of BERT for conveying the context and meaning of words in the regret domain.

Sabur Butt, Shakshi Sharma, Rajesh Sharma et al.

In recent years, the problem of rumours on online social media (OSM) has attracted lots of attention. Researchers have started investigating from two main directions. First is the descriptive analysis of rumours and secondly, proposing techniques to detect (or classify) rumours. In the descriptive line of works, where researchers have tried to analyse rumours using NLP approaches, there isnt much emphasis on psycho-linguistics analyses of social media text. These kinds of analyses on rumour case studies are vital for drawing meaningful conclusions to mitigate misinformation. For our analysis, we explored the PHEME9 rumour dataset (consisting of 9 events), including source tweets (both rumour and non-rumour categories) and response tweets. We compared the rumour and nonrumour source tweets and then their corresponding reply (response) tweets to understand how they differ linguistically for every incident. Furthermore, we also evaluated if these features can be used for classifying rumour vs. non-rumour tweets through machine learning models. To this end, we employed various classical and ensemble-based approaches. To filter out the highly discriminative psycholinguistic features, we explored the SHAP AI Explainability tool. To summarise, this research contributes by performing an in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of rumours related to various kinds of events.