Alok Debnath


2024

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Emo-Gen BART - A Multitask Emotion-Informed Dialogue Generation Framework
Alok Debnath | Yvette Graham | Owen Conlan
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Simulating Conversational Intelligence in Chat (SCI-CHAT 2024)

This paper is the model description for the Emo-Gen BART dialogue generation architecture, as submitted to the SCI-CHAT 2024 Shared Task. The Emotion-Informed Dialogue Generation model is a multi-task BARTbased model which performs dimensional and categorical emotion detection and uses that information to augment the input to the generation models. Our implementation is trained and validated against the IEMOCAP dataset, and compared against contemporary architectures in both dialogue emotion classification and dialogue generation. We show that certain loss function ablations are competitive against the state-of-the-art single-task models.

2021

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A Computational Analysis of Vagueness in Revisions of Instructional Texts
Alok Debnath | Michael Roth
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

WikiHow is an open-domain repository of instructional articles for a variety of tasks, which can be revised by users. In this paper, we extract pairwise versions of an instruction before and after a revision was made. Starting from a noisy dataset of revision histories, we specifically extract and analyze edits that involve cases of vagueness in instructions. We further investigate the ability of a neural model to distinguish between two versions of an instruction in our data by adopting a pairwise ranking task from previous work and showing improvements over existing baselines.

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Enhancing Aspect Extraction for Hindi
Arghya Bhattacharya | Alok Debnath | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP

Aspect extraction is not a well-explored topic in Hindi, with only one corpus having been developed for the task. In this paper, we discuss the merits of the existing corpus in terms of quality, size, sparsity, and performance in aspect extraction tasks using established models. To provide a better baseline corpus for aspect extraction, we translate the SemEval 2014 aspect-based sentiment analysis dataset and annotate the aspects in that data. We provide rigorous guidelines and a replicable methodology for this task. We quantitatively evaluate the translations and annotations using inter-annotator agreement scores. We also evaluate our dataset using state-of-the-art neural aspect extraction models in both monolingual and multilingual settings and show that the models perform far better on our corpus than on the existing Hindi dataset. With this, we establish our corpus as the gold-standard aspect extraction dataset in Hindi.

2020

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Word Embeddings as Tuples of Feature Probabilities
Siddharth Bhat | Alok Debnath | Souvik Banerjee | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

In this paper, we provide an alternate perspective on word representations, by reinterpreting the dimensions of the vector space of a word embedding as a collection of features. In this reinterpretation, every component of the word vector is normalized against all the word vectors in the vocabulary. This idea now allows us to view each vector as an n-tuple (akin to a fuzzy set), where n is the dimensionality of the word representation and each element represents the probability of the word possessing a feature. Indeed, this representation enables the use fuzzy set theoretic operations, such as union, intersection and difference. Unlike previous attempts, we show that this representation of words provides a notion of similarity which is inherently asymmetric and hence closer to human similarity judgements. We compare the performance of this representation with various benchmarks, and explore some of the unique properties including function word detection, detection of polysemous words, and some insight into the interpretability provided by set theoretic operations.

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Hindi TimeBank: An ISO-TimeML Annotated Reference Corpus
Pranav Goel | Suhan Prabhu | Alok Debnath | Priyank Modi | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 16th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

ISO-TimeML is an international standard for multilingual event annotation, detection, categorization and linking. In this paper, we present the Hindi TimeBank, an ISO-TimeML annotated reference corpus for the detection and classification of events, states and time expressions, and the links between them. Based on contemporary developments in Hindi event recognition, we propose language independent and language-specific deviations from the ISO-TimeML guidelines, but preserve the schema. These deviations include the inclusion of annotator confidence, and an independent mechanism of identifying and annotating states such as copulars and existentials) With this paper, we present an open-source corpus, the Hindi TimeBank. The Hindi TimeBank is a 1,000 article dataset, with over 25,000 events, 3,500 states and 2,000 time expressions. We analyze the dataset in detail and provide a class-wise distribution of events, states and time expressions. Our guidelines and dataset are backed by high average inter-annotator agreement scores.

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Detection and Annotation of Events in Kannada
Suhan Prabhu | Ujwal Narayan | Alok Debnath | Sumukh S | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 16th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

In this paper, we provide the basic guidelines towards the detection and linguistic analysis of events in Kannada. Kannada is a morphologically rich, resource poor Dravidian language spoken in southern India. As most information retrieval and extraction tasks are resource intensive, very little work has been done on Kannada NLP, with almost no efforts in discourse analysis and dataset creation for representing events or other semantic annotations in the text. In this paper, we linguistically analyze what constitutes an event in this language, the challenges faced with discourse level annotation and representation due to the rich derivational morphology of the language that allows free word order, numerous multi-word expressions, adverbial participle constructions and constraints on subject-verb relations. Therefore, this paper is one of the first attempts at a large scale discourse level annotation for Kannada, which can be used for semantic annotation and corpus development for other tasks in the language.

2019

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A Pregroup Representation of Word Order Alternation Using Hindi Syntax
Alok Debnath | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Pregroup calculus has been used for the representation of free word order languages (Sanskrit and Hungarian), using a construction called precyclicity. However, restricted word order alternation has not been handled before. This paper aims at introducing and formally expressing three methods of representing word order alternation in the pregroup representation of any language. This paper describes the word order alternation patterns of Hindi, and creates a basic pregroup representation for the language. In doing so, the shortcoming of correct reductions for ungrammatical sentences due to the current apparatus is highlighted, and the aforementioned methods are invoked for a grammatically accurate representation of restricted word order alternation. The replicability of these methods is explained in the representation of adverbs and prepositional phrases in English.

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SmokEng: Towards Fine-grained Classification of Tobacco-related Social Media Text
Kartikey Pant | Venkata Himakar Yanamandra | Alok Debnath | Radhika Mamidi
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019)

Contemporary datasets on tobacco consumption focus on one of two topics, either public health mentions and disease surveillance, or sentiment analysis on topical tobacco products and services. However, two primary considerations are not accounted for, the language of the demographic affected and a combination of the topics mentioned above in a fine-grained classification mechanism. In this paper, we create a dataset of 3144 tweets, which are selected based on the presence of colloquial slang related to smoking and analyze it based on the semantics of the tweet. Each class is created and annotated based on the content of the tweets such that further hierarchical methods can be easily applied. Further, we prove the efficacy of standard text classification methods on this dataset, by designing experiments which do both binary as well as multi-class classification. Our experiments tackle the identification of either a specific topic (such as tobacco product promotion), a general mention (cigarettes and related products) or a more fine-grained classification. This methodology paves the way for further analysis, such as understanding sentiment or style, which makes this dataset a vital contribution to both disease surveillance and tobacco use research.

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Incorporating Sub-Word Level Information in Language Invariant Neural Event Detection
Suhan Prabhu | Pranav Goel | Alok Debnath | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Natural Language Processing

Detection of TimeML events in text have traditionally been done on corpora such as TimeBanks. However, deep learning methods have not been applied to these corpora, because these datasets seldom contain more than 10,000 event mentions. Traditional architectures revolve around highly feature engineered, language specific statistical models. In this paper, we present a Language Invariant Neural Event Detection (ALINED) architecture. ALINED uses an aggregation of both sub-word level features as well as lexical and structural information. This is achieved by combining convolution over character embeddings, with recurrent layers over contextual word embeddings. We find that our model extracts relevant features for event span identification without relying on language specific features. We compare the performance of our language invariant model to the current state-of-the-art in English, Spanish, Italian and French. We outperform the F1-score of the state of the art in English by 1.65 points. We achieve F1-scores of 84.96, 80.87 and 74.81 on Spanish, Italian and French respectively which is comparable to the current states of the art for these languages. We also introduce the automatic annotation of events in Hindi, a low resource language, with an F1-Score of 77.13.

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Event Centric Entity Linking for Hindi News Articles: A Knowledge Graph Based Approach
Pranav Goel | Suhan Prabhu | Alok Debnath | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Natural Language Processing

We describe the development of a knowledge graph from an event annotated corpus by presenting a pipeline that identifies and extracts the relations between entities and events from Hindi news articles. Due to the semantic implications of argument identification for events in Hindi, we use a combined syntactic argument and semantic role identification methodology. To the best of our knowledge, no other architecture exists for this purpose. The extracted combined role information is incorporated in a knowledge graph that can be queried via subgraph extraction for basic questions. The architectures presented in this paper can be used for participant extraction and event-entity linking in most Indo-Aryan languages, due to similar syntactic and semantic properties of event arguments.