Existing Machine Learning techniques yield close to human performance on text-based classification tasks. However, the presence of multi-modal noise in chat data such as emoticons, slang, spelling mistakes, code-mixed data, etc. makes existing deep-learning solutions perform poorly. The inability of deep-learning systems to robustly capture these covariates puts a cap on their performance. We propose NELEC: Neural and Lexical Combiner, a system which elegantly combines textual and deep-learning based methods for sentiment classification. We evaluate our system as part of the third task of ‘Contextual Emotion Detection in Text’ as part of SemEval-2019. Our system performs significantly better than the baseline, as well as our deep-learning model benchmarks. It achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.7765, ranking 3rd on the test-set leader-board. Our code is available at https://github.com/iamgroot42/nelec

The Intelligent Conversation Engine: Code and Pre-trained Systems (Microsoft Icecaps) is an upcoming open-source natural language processing repository. Icecaps wraps TensorFlow functionality in a modular component-based architecture, presenting an intuitive and flexible paradigm for constructing sophisticated learning setups. Capabilities include multitask learning between models with shared parameters, upgraded language model decoding features, a range of built-in architectures, and a user-friendly data processing pipeline. The system is targeted toward conversational tasks, exploring diverse response generation, coherence, and knowledge grounding. Icecaps also provides pre-trained conversational models that can be either used directly or loaded for fine-tuning or bootstrapping other models; these models power an online demo of our framework.