Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

Also published as: Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi


2024

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Elizabeth Sherly | Rajeswari Nadarajan | Manikandan Ravikiran
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

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From Dataset to Detection: A Comprehensive Approach to Combating Malayalam Fake News
Devika K | Hariprasath .s.b | Haripriya B | Vigneshwar E | Premjith B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Identifying fake news hidden as real news is crucial to fight misinformation and ensure reliable information, especially in resource-scarce languages like Malayalam. To recognize the unique challenges of fake news in languages like Malayalam, we present a dataset curated specifically for classifying fake news in Malayalam. This fake news is categorized based on the degree of misinformation, marking the first of its kind in this language. Further, we propose baseline models employing multilingual BERT and diverse machine learning classifiers. Our findings indicate that logistic regression trained on LaBSE features demonstrates promising initial performance with an F1 score of 0.3393. However, addressing the significant data imbalance remains essential for further improvement in model accuracy.

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Findings of the First Shared Task on Offensive Span Identification from Code-Mixed Kannada-English Comments
Manikandan Ravikiran | Ratnavel Rajalakshmi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Sajeetha Thavareesan
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Effectively managing offensive content is crucial on social media platforms to encourage positive online interactions. However, addressing offensive contents in code-mixed Dravidian languages faces challenges, as current moderation methods focus on flagging entire comments rather than pinpointing specific offensive segments. This limitation stems from a lack of annotated data and accessible systems designed to identify offensive language sections. To address this, our shared task presents a dataset comprising Kannada-English code-mixed social comments, encompassing offensive comments. This paper outlines the dataset, the utilized algorithms, and the results obtained by systems participating in this shared task.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLD-Telugu)@DravidianLangTech 2024
Premjith B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Saranya Rajiakodi | Sai Karnati | Sai Mangamuru | Chandu Janakiram
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper examines the submissions of various participating teams to the task on Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLD-Telugu) organized as part of DravidianLangTech 2024. In order to identify the contents containing harmful information in Telugu codemixed social media text, the shared task pushes researchers and academicians to build models. The dataset for the task was created by gathering YouTube comments and annotated manually. A total of 23 teams participated and submitted their results to the shared task. The rank list was created by assessing the submitted results using the macro F1-score.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Multimodal Social Media Data Analysis in Dravidian Languages (MSMDA-DL)@DravidianLangTech 2024
Premjith B | Jyothish G | Sowmya V | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | K Nandhini | Rajeswari Natarajan | Abirami Murugappan | Bharathi B | Saranya Rajiakodi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Jayanth Mohan | Mekapati Reddy
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper presents the findings of the shared task on multimodal sentiment analysis, abusive language detection and hate speech detection in Dravidian languages. Through this shared task, researchers worldwide can submit models for three crucial social media data analysis challenges in Dravidian languages: sentiment analysis, abusive language detection, and hate speech detection. The aim is to build models for deriving fine-grained sentiment analysis from multimodal data in Tamil and Malayalam, identifying abusive and hate content from multimodal data in Tamil. Three modalities make up the multimodal data: text, audio, and video. YouTube videos were gathered to create the datasets for the tasks. Thirty-nine teams took part in the competition. However, only two teams, though, turned in their findings. The macro F1-score was used to assess the submissions

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Overview of Second Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis in Code-mixed Tamil and Tulu
Lavanya Sambath Kumar | Asha Hegde | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Hosahalli Shashirekha | Rajeswari Natarajan | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Ratnasingam Sakuntharaj | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Charmathi Rajkumar
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Dravidian codemixed text is a hot research area right now. In this regard, the “Second Shared Task on SA in Code-mixed Tamil and Tulu” at Dravidian- LangTech (EACL-2024) is organized. Two tasks namely SA in Tamil-English and Tulu- English code-mixed data, make up this shared assignment. In total, 64 teams registered for the shared task, out of which 19 and 17 systems were received for Tamil and Tulu, respectively. The performance of the systems submitted by the participants was evaluated based on the macro F1-score. The best method obtained macro F1-scores of 0.260 and 0.584 for code-mixed Tamil and Tulu texts, respectively.

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Overview of the Second Shared Task on Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages: DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024
Malliga Subramanian | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Santhiya Pandiyan | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Balasubramanian Palani | Premjith B | Vanaja K | Mithunja S | Devika K | Hariprasath S.b | Haripriya B | Vigneshwar E
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

The rise of online social media has revolutionized communication, offering users a convenient way to share information and stay updated on current events. However, this surge in connectivity has also led to the proliferation of misinformation, commonly known as fake news. This misleading content, often disguised as legitimate news, poses a significant challenge as it can distort public perception and erode trust in reliable sources. This shared task consists of two subtasks such as task 1 and task 2. Task 1 aims to classify a given social media text into original or fake. The goal of the FakeDetect-Malayalam task2 is to encourage participants to develop effective models capable of accurately detecting and classifying fake news articles in the Malayalam language into different categories like False, Half True, Mostly False, Partly False, and Mostly True. For this shared task, 33 participants submitted their results.

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Bharathi B | Paul Buitelaar | Thenmozhi Durairaj | György Kovács | Miguel Ángel García Cumbreras
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion

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Overview of Third Shared Task on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Prasanna Kumaresan | Ruba Priyadharshini | Paul Buitelaar | Asha Hegde | Hosahalli Shashirekha | Saranya Rajiakodi | Miguel Ángel García | Salud María Jiménez-Zafra | José García-Díaz | Rafael Valencia-García | Kishore Ponnusamy | Poorvi Shetty | Daniel García-Baena
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion

This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the “Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments” shared task, which was held at the LT-EDI@EACL 2024. The objective of this task was to develop systems capable of identifying instances of homophobia and transphobia within social media comments. This challenge was extended across ten languages: English, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Spanish, and Tulu. Each comment in the dataset was annotated into three categories. The shared task attracted significant interest, with over 60 teams participating through the CodaLab platform. The submission of prediction from the participants was evaluated with the macro F1 score.

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Overview of the Third Shared Task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil
Bharathi B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Sripriya N | Rajeswari Natarajan | Suhasini S
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion

The overview of the shared task on speech recognition for vulnerable individuals in Tamil (LT-EDI-2024) is described in this paper. The work comes with a Tamil dataset that was gath- ered from elderly individuals who identify as male, female, or transgender. The audio sam- ples were taken in public places such as marketplaces, vegetable shops, hospitals, etc. The training phase and the testing phase are when the dataset is made available. The task required of the participants was to handle audio signals using various models and techniques, and then turn in their results as transcriptions of the pro- vided test samples. The participant’s results were assessed using WER (Word Error Rate). The transformer-based approach was employed by the participants to achieve automatic voice recognition. This overview paper discusses the findings and various pre-trained transformer- based models that the participants employed.

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Overview of Shared Task on Multitask Meme Classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Saranya Rajiakodi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Kathiravan Pannerselvam | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Ramachandran Rajalakshmi | Hariharan LekshmiAmmal | Anshid Kizhakkeparambil | Susminu S Kumar | Bhuvaneswari Sivagnanam | Charmathi Rajkumar
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion

This paper offers a detailed overview of the first shared task on “Multitask Meme Classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes,” organized as part of the LT-EDI@EACL 2024 conference. The task was set to classify misogynistic content and troll memes within online platforms, focusing specifically on memes in Tamil and Malayalam languages. A total of 52 teams registered for the competition, with four submitting systems for the Tamil meme classification task and three for the Malayalam task. The outcomes of this shared task are significant, providing insights into the current state of misogynistic content in digital memes and highlighting the effectiveness of various computational approaches in identifying such detrimental content. The top-performing model got a macro F1 score of 0.73 in Tamil and 0.87 in Malayalam.

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Overview of Shared Task on Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection
Saranya Rajiakodi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Prasanna Kumaresan | Sathiyaraj Thangasamy | Bhuvaneswari Sivagnanam | Charmathi Rajkumar
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion

We present an overview of the first shared task on “Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection.” The shared task is organized as part of LTEDI@EACL 2024. The system must delineate between binary outcomes, ascertaining whether the text is categorized as a caste/migration hate speech or not. The dataset presented in this shared task is in Tamil, which is one of the under-resource languages. There are a total of 51 teams participated in this task. Among them, 15 teams submitted their research results for the task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the shared task has been conducted on textual hate speech detection concerning caste and migration. In this study, we have conducted a systematic analysis and detailed presentation of all the contributions of the participants as well as the statistics of the dataset, which is the social media comments in Tamil language to detect hate speech. It also further goes into the details of a comprehensive analysis of the participants’ methodology and their findings.

2023

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MG2P: An Empirical Study Of Multilingual Training for Manx G2P
Shubhanker Banerjee | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge

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On the Errors in Code-Mixed Tamil-English Offensive Span Identification
Manikandan Ravikiran | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

In recent times, offensive span identification in code-mixed Tamil-English language has seen traction with the release of datasets, shared tasks, and the development of multiple methods. However, the details of various errors shown by these methods are currently unclear. This paper presents a detailed analysis of various errors in state-of-the-art Tamil-English offensive span identification methods. Our study reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the widely used sequence labeling and zero-shot models for offensive span identification. In the due process, we identify data-related errors, improve data annotation and release additional diagnostic data to evaluate models’ quality and stability. Disclaimer: This paper contains examples that may be considered profane, vulgar, or offensive. The examples do not represent the views of the authors or their employers/graduate schools towards any person(s), group(s), practice(s), or entity/entities. Instead, they emphasize the complexity of various errors and linguistic research challenges.

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Hate and Offensive Keyword Extraction from CodeMix Malayalam Social Media Text Using Contextual Embedding
Mariya Raphel | Premjith B | Sreelakshmi K | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper focuses on identifying hate and offensive keywords from codemix Malayalam social media text. As part of this work, a dataset for hate and offensive keyword extraction for codemix Malayalam language was created. Two different methods were experimented to extract Hate and Offensive language (HOL) keywords from social media text. In the first method, intrinsic evaluation was performed on the dataset to identify the hate and offensive keywords. Three different approaches namely – unigram approach, bigram approach and trigram approach were performed to extract the HOL keywords, sequence of HOL words and the sequence that contribute HOL meaning even in the absence of a HOL word. Five different transformer models were used in each of the pproaches for extracting the embeddings for the ngrams. Later, HOL keywords were extracted based on the similarity score obtained using the cosine similarity. Out of the five transformer models, the best results were obtained with multilingual BERT. In the second method, multilingual BERT transformer model was fine tuned with the dataset to develop a HOL keyword tagger model. This work is a new beginning for HOL keyword identification in Dravidian language – Malayalam.

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Findings of the Second Shared Task on Offensive Span Identification from Code-Mixed Tamil-English Comments
Manikandan Ravikiran | Ananth Ganesh | Anand Kumar M | R Rajalakshmi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Maintaining effective control over offensive content is essential on social media platforms to foster constructive online discussions. Yet, when it comes to code-mixed Dravidian languages, the current prevalence of offensive content moderation is restricted to categorizing entire comments, failing to identify specific portions that contribute to the offensiveness. Such limitation is primarily due to the lack of annotated data and open source systems for offensive spans. To alleviate this issue, in this shared task, we offer a collection of Tamil-English code-mixed social comments that include offensive comments. This paper provides an overview of the released dataset, the algorithms employed, and the outcomes achieved by the systems submitted for this task.

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Overview of the shared task on Fake News Detection from Social Media Text
Malliga S | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Kogilavani S V | Santhiya Pandiyan | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Balasubramanian Palani | Muskaan Singh
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This document contains the instructions for preparing a manuscript for the proceedings of RANLP 2023. The document itself conforms to its own specifications and is therefore an example of what your manuscript should look like. These instructions should be used for both papers submitted for review and for final versions of accepted papers. Authors are asked to conform to all the directions reported in this document.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu Code-Mixed Text
Asha Hegde | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Hosahalli Lakshmaiah Shashirekha | Rahul Ponnusamy | Subalalitha Cn | Lavanya S K | Thenmozhi D. | Martha Karunakar | Shreya Shreeram | Sarah Aymen
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on Sentiment Analysis (SA) of code-mixed Dravidian languages. However, the majority of social media text in these languages is code-mixed, presenting a unique challenge. Despite this, there is currently lack of research on SA specifically tailored for code-mixed Dravidian languages, highlighting the need for further exploration and development in this domain. In this view, “Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu- DravidianLangTech” shared task at Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP)- 2023 is organized. This shred consists two language tracks: code-mixed Tamil and Tulu and Tulu text is first ever explored in public domain for SA. We describe the task, its organization, and the submitted systems followed by the results. 57 research teams registered for the shared task and We received 27 systems each for code-mixed Tamil and Tulu texts. The performance of the systems (developed by participants) has been evaluated in terms of macro average F1 score. The top system for code-mixed Tamil and Tulu texts scored macro average F1 score of 0.32, and 0.542 respectively. The high quality and substantial quantity of submissions demonstrate a significant interest and attention in the analysis of code-mixed Dravidian languages. However, the current state of the art in this domain indicates the need for further advancements and improvements to effectively address the challenges posed by code-mixed Dravidian language SA.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Multimodal Abusive Language Detection and Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Malayalam
Premjith B | Jyothish Lal G | Sowmya V | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Rajeswari Natarajan | Nandhini K | Abirami Murugappan | Bharathi B | Kaushik M | Prasanth Sn | Aswin Raj R | Vijai Simmon S
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper summarizes the shared task on multimodal abusive language detection and sentiment analysis in Dravidian languages as part of the third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at RANLP 2023. This shared task provides a platform for researchers worldwide to submit their models on two crucial social media data analysis problems in Dravidian languages - abusive language detection and sentiment analysis. Abusive language detection identifies social media content with abusive information, whereas sentiment analysis refers to the problem of determining the sentiments expressed in a text. This task aims to build models for detecting abusive content and analyzing fine-grained sentiment from multimodal data in Tamil and Malayalam. The multimodal data consists of three modalities - video, audio and text. The datasets for both tasks were prepared by collecting videos from YouTube. Sixty teams participated in both tasks. However, only two teams submitted their results. The submissions were evaluated using macro F1-score.

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Overview of Shared-task on Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil and Telugu
Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Malliga S | Subalalitha Cn | Kogilavani S V | Premjith B | Abirami Murugappan | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper discusses the submissions to the shared task on abusive comment detection in Tamil and Telugu codemixed social media text conducted as part of the third Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at RANLP 20239. The task encourages researchers to develop models to detect the contents containing abusive information in Tamil and Telugu codemixed social media text. The task has three subtasks - abusive comment detection in Tamil, Tamil-English and Telugu-English. The dataset for all the tasks was developed by collecting comments from YouTube. The submitted models were evaluated using macro F1-score, and prepared the rank list accordingly.

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Exploring Techniques to Detect and Mitigate Non-Inclusive Language Bias in Marketing Communications Using a Dictionary-Based Approach
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Rahul Ponnusamy | John P. McCrae | Michaela Comerford | Jay Megaro | Deniz Keles | Last Feremenga
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

We propose a new dataset for detecting non-inclusive language in sentences in English. These sentences were gathered from public sites, explaining what is inclusive and what is non-inclusive. We also extracted potentially non-inclusive keywords/phrases from the guidelines from business websites. A phrase dictionary was created by using an automatic extension with a word embedding trained on a massive corpus of general English text. In the end, a phrase dictionary was constructed by hand-editing the previous one to exclude inappropriate expansions and add the keywords from the guidelines. In a business context, the words individuals use can significantly impact the culture of inclusion and the quality of interactions with clients and prospects. Knowing the right words to avoid helps customers of different backgrounds and historically excluded groups feel included. They can make it easier to have productive, engaging, and positive communications. You can find the dictionaries, the code, and the method for making requests for the corpus at (we will release the link for data and code once the paper is accepted).

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Overview of the shared task on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text
Kayalvizhi S | Thenmozhi D. | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Jerin Mahibha C | Kogilavani S V | Pratik Anil Rahood
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Social media has become a vital platform for personal communication. Its widespread use as a primary means of public communication offers an exciting opportunity for early detection and management of mental health issues. People often share their emotions on social media, but understanding the true depth of their feelings can be challenging. Depression, a prevalent problem among young people, is of particular concern due to its link with rising suicide rates. Identifying depression levels in social media texts is crucial for timely support and prevention of negative outcomes. However, it’s a complex task because human emotions are dynamic and can change significantly over time. The DepSign-LT-EDI@RANLP 2023 shared task aims to classify social media text into three depression levels: “Not Depressed,” “Moderately Depressed,” and “Severely Depressed.” This overview covers task details, dataset, methodologies used, and results analysis. Roberta-based models emerged as top performers, with the best result achieving an impressive macro F1-score of 0.584 among 31 participating teams.

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Overview of the Second Shared Task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil
Bharathi B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Subalalitha Cn | Sripriya Natarajan | Rajeswari Natarajan | S Suhasini | Swetha Valli
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

This paper manifest the overview of the shared task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable individuals in Tamil(LT-EDI-ACL2023). Task is provided with an Tamil dataset, which is collected from elderly people of three different genders, male, female and transgender. The audio samples were recorded from the public locations like hospitals, markets, vegetable shop, etc. The dataset is released in two phase, training and testing phase. The partcipants were asked to use different models and methods to handle audio signals and submit the result as transcription of the test samples given. The result submitted by the participants was evaluated using WER (Word Error Rate). The participants used the transformer-based model for automatic speech recognition. The results and different pre-trained transformer based models used by the participants is discussed in this overview paper.

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Overview of Second Shared Task on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Malliga S | Paul Buitelaar | Miguel Ángel García-Cumbreras | Salud María Jimenez-Zafra | Jose Antonio Garcia-Diaz | Rafael Valencia-Garcia | Nitesh Jindal
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

We present an overview of the second shared task on homophobia/transphobia Detection in social media comments. Given a comment, a system must predict whether or not it contains any form of homophobia/transphobia. The shared task included five languages: English, Spanish, Tamil, Hindi, and Malayalam. The data was given for two tasks. Task A was given three labels, and Task B fine-grained seven labels. In total, 75 teams enrolled for the shared task in Codalab. For task A, 12 teams submitted systems for English, eight teams for Tamil, eight teams for Spanish, and seven teams for Hindi. For task B, nine teams submitted for English, 7 teams for Tamil, 6 teams for Malayalam. We present and analyze all submissions in this paper.

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Overview of the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Subalalitha Cn | Miguel Ángel García-Cumbreras | Salud María Jiménez Zafra | José Antonio García-Díaz | Rafael Valencia-García | Momchil Hardalov | Ivan Koychev | Preslav Nakov | Daniel García-Baena | Kishore Kumar Ponnusamy
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Hope serves as a powerful driving force that encourages individuals to persevere in the face of the unpredictable nature of human existence. It instills motivation within us to remain steadfast in our pursuit of important goals, regardless of the uncertainties that lie ahead. In today’s digital age, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have emerged as prominent social media outlets where people freely express their views and opinions. These platforms have also become crucial for marginalized individuals seeking online assistance and support[1][2][3]. The outbreak of the pandemic has exacerbated people’s fears around the world, as they grapple with the possibility of losing loved ones and the lack of access to essential services such as schools, hospitals, and mental health facilities.

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KaustubhSharedTask@LT-EDI 2023: Homophobia-Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments with NLPAUG-driven Data Augmentation
Kaustubh Lande | Rahul Ponnusamy | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Our research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) aims to detect hate speech comments specifically targeted at the LGBTQ+ community within the YouTube platform shared task conducted by LTEDI workshop. The dataset provided by the organizers exhibited a high degree of class imbalance, and to mitigate this, we employed NLPAUG, a data augmentation library. We employed several classification methods and reported the results using recall, precision, and F1-score metrics. The classification models discussed in this paper include a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model trained with Word2Vec embeddings, a BiLSTM model trained with Twitter GloVe embeddings, transformer models such as BERT, DistiBERT, RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa, all of which were trained and fine-tuned. We achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.699 on the test data and secured fifth place in task B with 7 classes for the English language.

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VEL@LT-EDI-2023: Automatic Detection of Hope Speech in Bulgarian Language using Embedding Techniques
Rahul Ponnusamy | Malliga S | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Many people may find motivation in their lives by spreading content on social media that is encouraging or hopeful. Creating an effective model that helps in accurately predicting the target class is a challenging task. The problem of Hope speech identification is dealt with in this work using machine learning and deep learning methods. This paper presents the description of the system submitted by our team(VEL) to the Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion(HSD-EDI) LT-EDI-RANLP 2023 shared task for the Bulgarian language. The main goal of this shared task is to identify the given text into the Hope speech or Non-Hope speech category. The proposed method used the H2O deep learning model with MPNet embeddings and achieved the second rank for the Bulgarian language with the Macro F1 score of 0.69.

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VEL@LT-EDI: Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Code-Mixed Spanish Social Media Comments
Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Kishore Kumar Ponnusamy | Kogilavani S V | Subalalitha Cn | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Our research aims to address the task of detecting homophobia and transphobia in social media code-mixed comments written in Spanish. Code-mixed text in social media often violates strict grammar rules and incorporates non-native scripts, posing challenges for identification. To tackle this problem, we perform pre-processing by removing unnecessary content and establishing a baseline for detecting homophobia and transphobia. Furthermore, we explore the effectiveness of various traditional machine-learning models with feature extraction and pre-trained transformer model techniques. Our best configurations achieve macro F1 scores of 0.84 on the test set and 0.82 on the development set for Spanish, demonstrating promising results in detecting instances of homophobia and transphobia in code-mixed comments.

2022

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Incorporating Medical Knowledge to Transformer-based Language Models for Medical Dialogue Generation
Usman Naseem | Ajay Bandi | Shaina Raza | Junaid Rashid | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

Medical dialogue systems have the potential to assist doctors in expanding access to medical care, improving the quality of patient experiences, and lowering medical expenses. The computational methods are still in their early stages and are not ready for widespread application despite their great potential. Existing transformer-based language models have shown promising results but lack domain-specific knowledge. However, to diagnose like doctors, an automatic medical diagnosis necessitates more stringent requirements for the rationality of the dialogue in the context of relevant knowledge. In this study, we propose a new method that addresses the challenges of medical dialogue generation by incorporating medical knowledge into transformer-based language models. We present a method that leverages an external medical knowledge graph and injects triples as domain knowledge into the utterances. Automatic and human evaluation on a publicly available dataset demonstrates that incorporating medical knowledge outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline methods.

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Parameswari Krishnamurthy | Elizabeth Sherly | Sinnathamby Mahesan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

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DE-ABUSE@TamilNLP-ACL 2022: Transliteration as Data Augmentation for Abuse Detection in Tamil
Vasanth Palanikumar | Sean Benhur | Adeep Hande | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

With the rise of social media and internet, thereis a necessity to provide an inclusive space andprevent the abusive topics against any gender,race or community. This paper describes thesystem submitted to the ACL-2022 shared taskon fine-grained abuse detection in Tamil. In ourapproach we transliterated code-mixed datasetas an augmentation technique to increase thesize of the data. Using this method we wereable to rank 3rd on the task with a 0.290 macroaverage F1 score and a 0.590 weighted F1score

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Zero-shot Code-Mixed Offensive Span Identification through Rationale Extraction
Manikandan Ravikiran | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper investigates the effectiveness of sentence-level transformers for zero-shot offensive span identification on a code-mixed Tamil dataset. More specifically, we evaluate rationale extraction methods of Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanations (LIME) (CITATION) and Integrated Gradients (IG) (CITATION) for adapting transformer based offensive language classification models for zero-shot offensive span identification. To this end, we find that LIME and IG show baseline F1 of 26.35% and 44.83%, respectively. Besides, we study the effect of data set size and training process on the overall accuracy of span identification. As a result, we find both LIME and IG to show significant improvement with Masked Data Augmentation and Multilabel Training, with F1 of 50.23% and 47.38% respectively. Disclaimer : This paper contains examples that may be considered profane, vulgar, or offensive. The examples do not represent the views of the authors or their employers/graduate schools towards any person(s), group(s), practice(s), or entity/entities. Instead they are used to emphasize only the linguistic research challenges.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Troll Meme Classification in Dravidian Languages
Premjith B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Malliga Subramanian | Bharathi B | Soman Kp | Dhanalakshmi V | Sreelakshmi K | Arunaggiri Pandian | Prasanna Kumaresan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper presents the findings of the shared task on Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Troll meme classification in Dravidian languages held at ACL 2022. Multimodal sentiment analysis deals with the identification of sentiment from video. In addition to video data, the task requires the analysis of corresponding text and audio features for the classification of movie reviews into five classes. We created a dataset for this task in Malayalam and Tamil. The Troll meme classification task aims to classify multimodal Troll memes into two categories. This task assumes the analysis of both text and image features for making better predictions. The performance of the participating teams was analysed using the F1-score. Only one team submitted their results in the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis task, whereas we received six submissions in the Troll meme classification task. The only team that participated in the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis shared task obtained an F1-score of 0.24. In the Troll meme classification task, the winning team achieved an F1-score of 0.596.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Offensive Span Identification fromCode-Mixed Tamil-English Comments
Manikandan Ravikiran | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Sangeetha S | Ratnavel Rajalakshmi | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Rahul Ponnusamy | Shankar Mahadevan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Offensive content moderation is vital in social media platforms to support healthy online discussions. However, their prevalence in code-mixed Dravidian languages is limited to classifying whole comments without identifying part of it contributing to offensiveness. Such limitation is primarily due to the lack of annotated data for offensive spans. Accordingly, in this shared task, we provide Tamil-English code-mixed social comments with offensive spans. This paper outlines the dataset so released, methods, and results of the submitted systems.

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Overview of the Shared Task on Machine Translation in Dravidian Languages
Anand Kumar Madasamy | Asha Hegde | Shubhanker Banerjee | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Hosahalli Shashirekha | John McCrae
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper presents an outline of the shared task on translation of under-resourced Dravidian languages at DravidianLangTech-2022 workshop to be held jointly with ACL 2022. A description of the datasets used, approach taken for analysis of submissions and the results have been illustrated in this paper. Five sub-tasks organized as a part of the shared task include the following translation pairs: Kannada to Tamil, Kannada to Telugu, Kannada to Sanskrit, Kannada to Malayalam and Kannada to Tulu. Training, development and test datasets were provided to all participants and results were evaluated on the gold standard datasets. A total of 16 research groups participated in the shared task and a total of 12 submission runs were made for evaluation. Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score was used for evaluation of the translations.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Emotion Analysis in Tamil
Anbukkarasi Sampath | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Subalalitha Cn | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Sathiyaraj Thangasamy | Parameswari Krishnamurthy | Adeep Hande | Sean Benhur | Kishore Ponnusamy | Santhiya Pandiyan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper presents the overview of the shared task on emotional analysis in Tamil. The result of the shared task is presented at the workshop. This paper presents the dataset used in the shared task, task description, and the methodology used by the participants and the evaluation results of the submission. This task is organized as two Tasks. Task A is carried with 11 emotions annotated data for social media comments in Tamil and Task B is organized with 31 fine-grained emotion annotated data for social media comments in Tamil. For conducting experiments, training and development datasets were provided to the participants and results are evaluated for the unseen data. Totally we have received around 24 submissions from 13 teams. For evaluating the models, Precision, Recall, micro average metrics are used.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Multi-task Learning in Dravidian Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Subalalitha Cn | Sangeetha S | Malliga Subramanian | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Parameswari Krishnamurthy | Adeep Hande | Siddhanth U Hegde | Roshan Nayak | Swetha Valli
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

We present our findings from the first shared task on Multi-task Learning in Dravidian Languages at the second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages. In this task, a sentence in any of three Dravidian Languages is required to be classified into two closely related tasks namely Sentiment Analyis (SA) and Offensive Language Identification (OLI). The task spans over three Dravidian Languages, namely, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil. It is one of the first shared tasks that focuses on Multi-task Learning for closely related tasks, especially for a very low-resourced language family such as the Dravidian language family. In total, 55 people signed up to participate in the task, and due to the intricate nature of the task, especially in its first iteration, 3 submissions have been received.

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Overview of Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil-ACL 2022
Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Subalalitha Cn | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Malliga Subramanian | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Siddhanth U Hegde | Prasanna Kumaresan
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

The social media is one of the significantdigital platforms that create a huge im-pact in peoples of all levels. The commentsposted on social media is powerful enoughto even change the political and businessscenarios in very few hours. They alsotend to attack a particular individual ora group of individuals. This shared taskaims at detecting the abusive comments in-volving, Homophobia, Misandry, Counter-speech, Misogyny, Xenophobia, Transpho-bic. The hope speech is also identified. Adataset collected from social media taggedwith the above said categories in Tamiland Tamil-English code-mixed languagesare given to the participants. The par-ticipants used different machine learningand deep learning algorithms. This paperpresents the overview of this task compris-ing the dataset details and results of theparticipants.

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Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON): Shared Task on Word Level Language Identification in Code-mixed Kannada-English Texts
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Abirami Murugappan | Dhivya Chinnappa | Adeep Hane | Prasanna Kumar Kumeresan | Rahul Ponnusamy
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON): Shared Task on Word Level Language Identification in Code-mixed Kannada-English Texts

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Thirumurai: A Large Dataset of Tamil Shaivite Poems and Classification of Tamil Pann
Shankar Mahadevan | Rahul Ponnusamy | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Prabakaran Chandran | Ruba Priyadharshini | Sangeetha S | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Thirumurai, also known as Panniru Thirumurai, is a collection of Tamil Shaivite poems dating back to the Hindu revival period between the 6th and the 10th century. These poems are par excellence, in both literary and musical terms. They have been composed based on the ancient, now non-existent Tamil Pann system and can be set to music. We present a large dataset containing all the Thirumurai poems and also attempt to classify the Pann and author of each poem using transformer based architectures. Our work is the first of its kind in dealing with ancient Tamil text datasets, which are severely under-resourced. We explore several Deep Learning-based techniques for solving this challenge effectively and provide essential insights into the problem and how to address it.

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A Dataset for Term Extraction in Hindi
Shubhanker Banerjee | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | John Philip McCrae
Proceedings of the Workshop on Terminology in the 21st century: many faces, many places

Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) is one of the core problems in natural language processing and forms a key component of text mining pipelines of domain specific corpora. Complex low-level tasks such as machine translation and summarization for domain specific texts necessitate the use of term extraction systems. However, the development of these systems requires the use of large annotated datasets and thus there has been little progress made on this front for under-resourced languages. As a part of ongoing research, we present a dataset for term extraction from Hindi texts in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides term annotated documents for Hindi. Furthermore, we have evaluated this dataset on statistical term extraction methods and the results obtained indicate the problems associated with development of term extractors for under-resourced languages.

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Transformers at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Feature Extraction based Approach for Misogynous Meme Detection
Shankar Mahadevan | Sean Benhur | Roshan Nayak | Malliga Subramanian | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Kanchana Sivanraju | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Social media is an idea created to make theworld smaller and more connected. Recently,it has become a hub of fake news and sexistmemes that target women. Social Media shouldensure proper women’s safety and equality. Filteringsuch information from social media is ofparamount importance to achieving this goal. In this paper, we describe the system developedby our team for SemEval-2022 Task 5: MultimediaAutomatic Misogyny Identification. Wepropose a multimodal training methodologythat achieves good performance on both thesubtasks, ranking 4th for Subtask A (0.718macro F1-score) and 9th for Subtask B (0.695macro F1-score) while exceeding the baselineresults by good margins.

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Corpus Creation for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tulu Text
Asha Hegde | Mudoor Devadas Anusha | Sharal Coelho | Hosahalli Lakshmaiah Shashirekha | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages

Sentiment Analysis (SA) employing code-mixed data from social media helps in getting insights to the data and decision making for various applications. One such application is to analyze users’ emotions from comments of videos on YouTube. Social media comments do not adhere to the grammatical norms of any language and they often comprise a mix of languages and scripts. The lack of annotated code-mixed data for SA in a low-resource language like Tulu makes the SA a challenging task. To address the lack of annotated code-mixed Tulu data for SA, a gold standard trlingual code-mixed Tulu annotated corpus of 7,171 YouTube comments is created. Further, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are employed as baseline models to evaluate the developed dataset and the performance of the ML algorithms are found to be encouraging.

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multimodal Machine Learning in Low-resource Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Abirami Murugappan | Dhivya Chinnappa | Adeep Hane | Prasanna Kumar Kumeresan | Rahul Ponnusamy
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multimodal Machine Learning in Low-resource Languages

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Understanding the role of Emojis for emotion detection in Tamil
Ratnavel Rajalakshmi | Faerie Mattins R | Srivarshan Selvaraj | Antonette Shibani | Anand Kumar M | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multimodal Machine Learning in Low-resource Languages

of expressing relevant idea through social media platforms and forums. At the same time, these memes are trolled by a person who tries to get identified from the other internet users like social media users, chat rooms and blogs. The memes contain both textual and visual information. Based on the content of memes, they are trolled in online community. There is no restriction for language usage in online media. The present work focuses on whether memes are trolled or not trolled. The proposed multi modal approach achieved considerably better weighted average F1 score of 0.5437 compared to Unimodal approaches. The other performance metrics like precision, recall, accuracy and macro average have also been studied to observe the proposed system.

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | B Bharathi | John P McCrae | Manel Zarrouk | Kalika Bali | Paul Buitelaar
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

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IIITSurat@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Hope Speech Detection using Machine Learning
Pradeep Roy | Snehaan Bhawal | Abhinav Kumar | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

This paper addresses the issue of Hope Speech detection using machine learning techniques. Designing a robust model that helps in predicting the target class with higher accuracy is a challenging task in machine learning, especially when the distribution of the class labels is highly imbalanced. This study uses and compares the experimental outcomes of the different oversampling techniques. Many models are implemented to classify the comments into Hope and Non-Hope speech, and it found that machine learning algorithms perform better than deep learning models. The English language dataset used in this research was developed by collecting YouTube comments and is part of the task “ACL-2022:Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion”. The proposed model achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.55 on the test dataset and secured the first rank among the participated teams.

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The Best of both Worlds: Dual Channel Language modeling for Hope Speech Detection in low-resourced Kannada
Adeep Hande | Siddhanth U Hegde | Sangeetha S | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

In recent years, various methods have been developed to control the spread of negativity by removing profane, aggressive, and offensive comments from social media platforms. There is, however, a scarcity of research focusing on embracing positivity and reinforcing supportive and reassuring content in online forums. As a result, we concentrate our research on developing systems to detect hope speech in code-mixed Kannada. As a result, we present DC-LM, a dual-channel language model that sees hope speech by using the English translations of the code-mixed dataset for additional training. The approach is jointly modelled on both English and code-mixed Kannada to enable effective cross-lingual transfer between the languages. With a weighted F1-score of 0.756, the method outperforms other models. We aim to initiate research in Kannada while encouraging researchers to take a pragmatic approach to inspire positive and supportive online content.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media
Kayalvizhi S | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Jerin Mahibha C
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Social media is considered as a platform whereusers express themselves. The rise of social me-dia as one of humanity’s most important publiccommunication platforms presents a potentialprospect for early identification and manage-ment of mental illness. Depression is one suchillness that can lead to a variety of emotionaland physical problems. It is necessary to mea-sure the level of depression from the socialmedia text to treat them and to avoid the nega-tive consequences. Detecting levels of depres-sion is a challenging task since it involves themindset of the people which can change period-ically. The aim of the DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022 shared task is to classify the social me-dia text into three levels of depression namely“Not Depressed”, “Moderately Depressed”, and“Severely Depressed”. This overview presentsa description on the task, the data set, method-ologies used and an analysis on the results ofthe submissions. The models that were submit-ted as a part of the shared task had used a va-riety of technologies from traditional machinelearning algorithms to deep learning models. It could be observed from the result that thetransformer based models have outperformedthe other models. Among the 31 teams whohad submitted their results for the shared task,the best macro F1-score of 0.583 was obtainedusing transformer based model.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil
Bharathi B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Subalalitha Cn | Sripriya N | Arunaggiri Pandian | Swetha Valli
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

This paper illustrates the overview of the sharedtask on automatic speech recognition in the Tamillanguage. In the shared task, spontaneousTamil speech data gathered from elderly andtransgender people was given for recognitionand evaluation. These utterances were collected from people when they communicatedin the public locations such as hospitals, markets, vegetable shop, etc. The speech corpusincludes utterances of male, female, and transgender and was split into training and testingdata. The given task was evaluated using WER(Word Error Rate). The participants used thetransformer-based model for automatic speechrecognition. Different results using differentpre-trained transformer models are discussedin this overview paper.

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Overview of The Shared Task on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Thenmozhi Durairaj | John McCrae | Paul Buitelaar | Prasanna Kumaresan | Rahul Ponnusamy
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Homophobia and Transphobia Detection is the task of identifying homophobia, transphobia, and non-anti-LGBT+ content from the given corpus. Homophobia and transphobia are both toxic languages directed at LGBTQ+ individuals that are described as hate speech. This paper summarizes our findings on the “Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in social media comments” shared task held at LT-EDI 2022 - ACL 2022 1. This shared taskfocused on three sub-tasks for Tamil, English, and Tamil-English (code-mixed) languages. It received 10 systems for Tamil, 13 systems for English, and 11 systems for Tamil-English. The best systems for Tamil, English, and Tamil-English scored 0.570, 0.870, and 0.610, respectively, on average macro F1-score.

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Overview of the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Vigneshwaran Muralidaran | Ruba Priyadharshini | Subalalitha Cn | John McCrae | Miguel Ángel García | Salud María Jiménez-Zafra | Rafael Valencia-García | Prasanna Kumaresan | Rahul Ponnusamy | Daniel García-Baena | José García-Díaz
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Hope Speech detection is the task of classifying a sentence as hope speech or non-hope speech given a corpus of sentences. Hope speech is any message or content that is positive, encouraging, reassuring, inclusive and supportive that inspires and engenders optimism in the minds of people. In contrast to identifying and censoring negative speech patterns, hope speech detection is focussed on recognising and promoting positive speech patterns online. In this paper, we report an overview of the findings and results from the shared task on hope speech detection for Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English and Spanish languages conducted in the second workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2022) organised as a part of ACL 2022. The participants were provided with annotated training & development datasets and unlabelled test datasets in all the five languages. The goal of the shared task is to classify the given sentences into one of the two hope speech classes. The performances of the systems submitted by the participants were evaluated in terms of micro-F1 score and weighted-F1 score. The datasets for this challenge are openly available

2021

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Anand Kumar M | Parameswari Krishnamurthy | Elizabeth Sherly
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

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Findings of the Shared Task on Machine Translation in Dravidian languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Shubhanker Banerjee | Richard Saldanha | John P. McCrae | Anand Kumar M | Parameswari Krishnamurthy | Melvin Johnson
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper presents an overview of the shared task on machine translation of Dravidian languages. We presented the shared task results at the EACL 2021 workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages. This paper describes the datasets used, the methodology used for the evaluation of participants, and the experiments’ overall results. As a part of this shared task, we organized four sub-tasks corresponding to machine translation of the following language pairs: English to Tamil, English to Malayalam, English to Telugu and Tamil to Telugu which are available at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27650. We provided the participants with training and development datasets to perform experiments, and the results were evaluated on unseen test data. In total, 46 research groups participated in the shared task and 7 experimental runs were submitted for evaluation. We used BLEU scores for assessment of the translations.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Troll Meme Classification in Tamil
Shardul Suryawanshi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

The internet has facilitated its user-base with a platform to communicate and express their views without any censorship. On the other hand, this freedom of expression or free speech can be abused by its user or a troll to demean an individual or a group. Demeaning people based on their gender, sexual orientation, religious believes or any other characteristics –trolling– could cause great distress in the online community. Hence, the content posted by a troll needs to be identified and dealt with before causing any more damage. Amongst all the forms of troll content, memes are most prevalent due to their popularity and ability to propagate across cultures. A troll uses a meme to demean, attack or offend its targetted audience. In this shared task, we provide a resource (TamilMemes) that could be used to train a system capable of identifying a troll meme in the Tamil language. In our TamilMemes dataset, each meme has been categorized into either a “troll” or a “not_troll” class. Along with the meme images, we also provided the Latin transcripted text from memes. We received 10 system submissions from the participants which were evaluated using the weighted average F1-score. The system with the weighted average F1-score of 0.55 secured the first rank.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Offensive Language Identification in Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Navya Jose | Anand Kumar M | Thomas Mandl | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Rahul Ponnusamy | Hariharan R L | John P. McCrae | Elizabeth Sherly
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Detecting offensive language in social media in local languages is critical for moderating user-generated content. Thus, the field of offensive language identification in under-resourced Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada languages are essential. As the user-generated content is more code-mixed and not well studied for under-resourced languages, it is imperative to create resources and conduct benchmarking studies to encourage research in under-resourced Dravidian languages. We created a shared task on offensive language detection in Dravidian languages. We summarize here the dataset for this challenge which are openly available at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27654, and present an overview of the methods and the results of the competing systems.

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UVCE-IIITT@DravidianLangTech-EACL2021: Tamil Troll Meme Classification: You need to Pay more Attention
Siddhanth U Hegde | Adeep Hande | Ruba Priyadharshini | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Tamil is a Dravidian language that is commonly used and spoken in the southern part of Asia. During the 21st century and in the era of social media, memes have been a fun moment during the day to day life of people. Here, we try to analyze the true meaning of Tamil memes by classifying them as troll or non-troll. We present an ingenious model consisting of transformer-transformer architecture that tries to attain state of the art by using attention as its main component. The dataset consists of troll and non-troll images with their captions as texts. The task is a binary classification task. The objective of the model was to pay more and more attention to the extracted features and to ignore the noise in both images and text.

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IIITT@DravidianLangTech-EACL2021: Transfer Learning for Offensive Language Detection in Dravidian Languages
Konthala Yasaswini | Karthik Puranik | Adeep Hande | Ruba Priyadharshini | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper demonstrates our work for the shared task on Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages-EACL 2021. Offensive language detection in the various social media platforms was identified previously. But with the increase in diversity of users, there is a need to identify the offensive language in multilingual posts that are largely code-mixed or written in a non-native script. We approach this challenge with various transfer learning-based models to classify a given post or comment in Dravidian languages (Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada) into 6 categories. The source codes for our systems are published.

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IIITK@DravidianLangTech-EACL2021: Offensive Language Identification and Meme Classification in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada
Nikhil Ghanghor | Parameswari Krishnamurthy | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

This paper describes the IIITK team’s submissions to the offensive language identification, and troll memes classification shared tasks for Dravidian languages at DravidianLangTech 2021 workshop@EACL 2021. Our best configuration for Tamil troll meme classification achieved 0.55 weighted average F1 score, and for offensive language identification, our system achieved weighted F1 scores of 0.75 for Tamil, 0.95 for Malayalam, and 0.71 for Kannada. Our rank on Tamil troll meme classification is 2, and offensive language identification in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada are 3, 3 and 4 respectively.

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Findings of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2021
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Gaman Mihaela | Radu Tudor Ionescu | Heidi Jauhiainen | Tommi Jauhiainen | Krister Lindén | Nikola Ljubešić | Niko Partanen | Ruba Priyadharshini | Christoph Purschke | Eswari Rajagopal | Yves Scherrer | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

This paper describes the results of the shared tasks organized as part of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2021. The campaign was part of the eighth workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), co-located with EACL 2021. Four separate shared tasks were included this year: Dravidian Language Identification (DLI), Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI), Social Media Variety Geolocation (SMG), and Uralic Language Identification (ULI). DLI was organized for the first time and the other three continued a series of tasks from previous evaluation campaigns.

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IIITT at CASE 2021 Task 1: Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Multilingual Protest Detection
Pawan Kalyan | Duddukunta Reddy | Adeep Hande | Ruba Priyadharshini | Ratnasingam Sakuntharaj | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2021)

In a world abounding in constant protests resulting from events like a global pandemic, climate change, religious or political conflicts, there has always been a need to detect events/protests before getting amplified by news media or social media. This paper demonstrates our work on the sentence classification subtask of multilingual protest detection in CASE@ACL-IJCNLP 2021. We approached this task by employing various multilingual pre-trained transformer models to classify if any sentence contains information about an event that has transpired or not. We performed soft voting over the models, achieving the best results among the models, accomplishing a macro F1-Score of 0.8291, 0.7578, and 0.7951 in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, respectively.

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Attentive fine-tuning of Transformers for Translation of low-resourced languages @LoResMT 2021
Karthik Puranik | Adeep Hande | Ruba Priyadharshini | Thenmozi Durairaj | Anbukkarasi Sampath | Kingston Pal Thamburaj | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021)

This paper reports the Machine Translation (MT) systems submitted by the IIITT team for the English→Marathi and English⇔Irish language pairs LoResMT 2021 shared task. The task focuses on getting exceptional translations for rather low-resourced languages like Irish and Marathi. We fine-tune IndicTrans, a pretrained multilingual NMT model for English→Marathi, using external parallel corpus as input for additional training. We have used a pretrained Helsinki-NLP Opus MT English⇔Irish model for the latter language pair. Our approaches yield relatively promising results on the BLEU metrics. Under the team name IIITT, our systems ranked 1, 1, and 2 in English→Marathi, Irish→English, and English→Irish respectively. The codes for our systems are published1 .

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | John P. McCrae | Manel Zarrouk | Kalika Bali | Paul Buitelaar
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

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An Overview of Fairness in Data – Illuminating the Bias in Data Pipeline
Senthil Kumar B | Aravindan Chandrabose | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Data in general encodes human biases by default; being aware of this is a good start, and the research around how to handle it is ongoing. The term ‘bias’ is extensively used in various contexts in NLP systems. In our research the focus is specific to biases such as gender, racism, religion, demographic and other intersectional views on biases that prevail in text processing systems responsible for systematically discriminating specific population, which is not ethical in NLP. These biases exacerbate the lack of equality, diversity and inclusion of specific population while utilizing the NLP applications. The tools and technology at the intermediate level utilize biased data, and transfer or amplify this bias to the downstream applications. However, it is not enough to be colourblind, gender-neutral alone when designing a unbiased technology – instead, we should take a conscious effort by designing a unified framework to measure and benchmark the bias. In this paper, we recommend six measures and one augment measure based on the observations of the bias in data, annotations, text representations and debiasing techniques.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Vigneshwaran Muralidaran
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Hope is considered significant for the well-being, recuperation and restoration of human life by health professionals. Hope speech reflects the belief that one can discover pathways to their desired objectives and become roused to utilise those pathways. To encourage research in natural language processing towards positive reinforcement approach, we created a hope speech detection dataset. This paper reports on the shared task of hope speech detection for Tamil, English, and Malayalam languages. The shared task was conducted as a part of the EACL 2021 workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2021). We summarize here the datasets for this challenge which are openly available at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27653, and present an overview of the methods and the results of the competing systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first shared task to conduct hope speech detection.

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IIITT@LT-EDI-EACL2021-Hope Speech Detection: There is always hope in Transformers
Karthik Puranik | Adeep Hande | Ruba Priyadharshini | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

In a world with serious challenges like climate change, religious and political conflicts, global pandemics, terrorism, and racial discrimination, an internet full of hate speech, abusive and offensive content is the last thing we desire for. In this paper, we work to identify and promote positive and supportive content on these platforms. We work with several transformer-based models to classify social media comments as hope speech or not hope speech in English, Malayalam, and Tamil languages. This paper portrays our work for the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at LT-EDI 2021- EACL 2021. The codes for our best submission can be viewed.

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IIITK@LT-EDI-EACL2021: Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Tamil , Malayalam and English
Nikhil Ghanghor | Rahul Ponnusamy | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Ruba Priyadharshini | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

This paper describes the IIITK’s team submissions to the hope speech detection for equality, diversity and inclusion in Dravidian languages shared task organized by LT-EDI 2021 workshop@EACL 2021. Our best configurations for the shared tasks achieve weighted F1 scores of 0.60 for Tamil, 0.83 for Malayalam, and 0.93 for English. We have secured ranks of 4, 3, 2 in Tamil, Malayalam and English respectively.

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ULD-NUIG at Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) Shared Task 2021
Atul Kr. Ojha | Priya Rani | Koustava Goswami | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the Sixth Social Media Mining for Health (#SMM4H) Workshop and Shared Task

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been utilised for various research studies, from the cohort-level discussion to community-driven approaches to address the challenges in utilizing social media data for health, clinical and biomedical information. Detection of medical jargon’s, named entity recognition, multi-word expression becomes the primary, fundamental steps in solving those challenges. In this paper, we enumerate the ULD-NUIG team’s system, designed as part of Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) Shared Task 2021. The team conducted a series of experiments to explore the challenges of task 6 and task 5. The submitted systems achieve F-1 0.84 and 0.53 score for task 6 and 5 respectively.

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Hypers at ComMA@ICON: Modelling Aggressive, Gender Bias and Communal Bias Identification
Sean Benhur | Roshan Nayak | Kanchana Sivanraju | Adeep Hande | Cn Subalalitha | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing: Shared Task on Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification

Due to the exponential increasing reach of social media, it is essential to focus on its negative aspects as it can potentially divide society and incite people into violence. In this paper, we present our system description of work on the shared task ComMA@ICON, where we have to classify how aggressive the sentence is and if the sentence is gender-biased or communal biased. These three could be the primary reasons to cause significant problems in society. Our approach utilizes different pretrained models with Attention and mean pooling methods. We were able to get Rank 1 with 0.253 Instance F1 score on Bengali, Rank 2 with 0.323 Instance F1 score on multilingual set, Rank 4 with 0.129 Instance F1 score on meitei and Rank 5 with 0.336 Instance F1 score on Hindi. The source code and the pretrained models of this work can be found here.

2020

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Multimodal Meme Dataset (MultiOFF) for Identifying Offensive Content in Image and Text
Shardul Suryawanshi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Mihael Arcan | Paul Buitelaar
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying

A meme is a form of media that spreads an idea or emotion across the internet. As posting meme has become a new form of communication of the web, due to the multimodal nature of memes, postings of hateful memes or related events like trolling, cyberbullying are increasing day by day. Hate speech, offensive content and aggression content detection have been extensively explored in a single modality such as text or image. However, combining two modalities to detect offensive content is still a developing area. Memes make it even more challenging since they express humour and sarcasm in an implicit way, because of which the meme may not be offensive if we only consider the text or the image. Therefore, it is necessary to combine both modalities to identify whether a given meme is offensive or not. Since there was no publicly available dataset for multimodal offensive meme content detection, we leveraged the memes related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and created the MultiOFF multimodal meme dataset for offensive content detection dataset. We subsequently developed a classifier for this task using the MultiOFF dataset. We use an early fusion technique to combine the image and text modality and compare it with a text- and an image-only baseline to investigate its effectiveness. Our results show improvements in terms of Precision, Recall, and F-Score. The code and dataset for this paper is published in https://github.com/bharathichezhiyan/Multimodal-Meme-Classification-Identifying-Offensive-Content-in-Image-and-Text

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A Comparative Study of Different State-of-the-Art Hate Speech Detection Methods in Hindi-English Code-Mixed Data
Priya Rani | Shardul Suryawanshi | Koustava Goswami | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Theodorus Fransen | John Philip McCrae
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying

Hate speech detection in social media communication has become one of the primary concerns to avoid conflicts and curb undesired activities. In an environment where multilingual speakers switch among multiple languages, hate speech detection becomes a challenging task using methods that are designed for monolingual corpora. In our work, we attempt to analyze, detect and provide a comparative study of hate speech in a code-mixed social media text. We also provide a Hindi-English code-mixed data set consisting of Facebook and Twitter posts and comments. Our experiments show that deep learning models trained on this code-mixed corpus perform better.

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A Dataset for Troll Classification of TamilMemes
Shardul Suryawanshi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Pranav Verma | Mihael Arcan | John Philip McCrae | Paul Buitelaar
Proceedings of the WILDRE5– 5th Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation

Social media are interactive platforms that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas or other forms of expression among people. This exchange is not free from offensive, trolling or malicious contents targeting users or communities. One way of trolling is by making memes, which in most cases combines an image with a concept or catchphrase. The challenge of dealing with memes is that they are region-specific and their meaning is often obscured in humour or sarcasm. To facilitate the computational modelling of trolling in the memes for Indian languages, we created a meme dataset for Tamil (TamilMemes). We annotated and released the dataset containing suspected trolls and not-troll memes. In this paper, we use the a image classification to address the difficulties involved in the classification of troll memes with the existing methods. We found that the identification of a troll meme with such an image classifier is not feasible which has been corroborated with precision, recall and F1-score.

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ULD@NUIG at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Generative Morphemes with an Attention Model for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Text
Koustava Goswami | Priya Rani | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Theodorus Fransen | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Code mixing is a common phenomena in multilingual societies where people switch from one language to another for various reasons. Recent advances in public communication over different social media sites have led to an increase in the frequency of code-mixed usage in written language. In this paper, we present the Generative Morphemes with Attention (GenMA) Model sentiment analysis system contributed to SemEval 2020 Task 9 SentiMix. The system aims to predict the sentiments of the given English-Hindi code-mixed tweets without using word-level language tags instead inferring this automatically using a morphological model. The system is based on a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, which has outperformed the baseline F1-score on the test data-set as well as the validation data-set. Our results can be found under the user name “koustava” on the “Sentimix Hindi English” page.

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A Sentiment Analysis Dataset for Code-Mixed Malayalam-English
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Navya Jose | Shardul Suryawanshi | Elizabeth Sherly | John Philip McCrae
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL)

There is an increasing demand for sentiment analysis of text from social media which are mostly code-mixed. Systems trained on monolingual data fail for code-mixed data due to the complexity of mixing at different levels of the text. However, very few resources are available for code-mixed data to create models specific for this data. Although much research in multilingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has used semi-supervised or unsupervised methods, supervised methods still performs better. Only a few datasets for popular languages such as English-Spanish, English-Hindi, and English-Chinese are available. There are no resources available for Malayalam-English code-mixed data. This paper presents a new gold standard corpus for sentiment analysis of code-mixed text in Malayalam-English annotated by voluntary annotators. This gold standard corpus obtained a Krippendorff’s alpha above 0.8 for the dataset. We use this new corpus to provide the benchmark for sentiment analysis in Malayalam-English code-mixed texts.

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Corpus Creation for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tamil-English Text
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Vigneshwaran Muralidaran | Ruba Priyadharshini | John Philip McCrae
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL)

Understanding the sentiment of a comment from a video or an image is an essential task in many applications. Sentiment analysis of a text can be useful for various decision-making processes. One such application is to analyse the popular sentiments of videos on social media based on viewer comments. However, comments from social media do not follow strict rules of grammar, and they contain mixing of more than one language, often written in non-native scripts. Non-availability of annotated code-mixed data for a low-resourced language like Tamil also adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we created a gold standard Tamil-English code-switched, sentiment-annotated corpus containing 15,744 comment posts from YouTube. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the corpus and assigning polarities. We present inter-annotator agreement and show the results of sentiment analysis trained on this corpus as a benchmark.

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HopeEDI: A Multilingual Hope Speech Detection Dataset for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media

Over the past few years, systems have been developed to control online content and eliminate abusive, offensive or hate speech content. However, people in power sometimes misuse this form of censorship to obstruct the democratic right of freedom of speech. Therefore, it is imperative that research should take a positive reinforcement approach towards online content that is encouraging, positive and supportive contents. Until now, most studies have focused on solving this problem of negativity in the English language, though the problem is much more than just harmful content. Furthermore, it is multilingual as well. Thus, we have constructed a Hope Speech dataset for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (HopeEDI) containing user-generated comments from the social media platform YouTube with 28,451, 20,198 and 10,705 comments in English, Tamil and Malayalam, respectively, manually labelled as containing hope speech or not. To our knowledge, this is the first research of its kind to annotate hope speech for equality, diversity and inclusion in a multilingual setting. We determined that the inter-annotator agreement of our dataset using Krippendorff’s alpha. Further, we created several baselines to benchmark the resulting dataset and the results have been expressed using precision, recall and F1-score. The dataset is publicly available for the research community. We hope that this resource will spur further research on encouraging inclusive and responsive speech that reinforces positiveness.

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KanCMD: Kannada CodeMixed Dataset for Sentiment Analysis and Offensive Language Detection
Adeep Hande | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media

We introduce Kannada CodeMixed Dataset (KanCMD), a multi-task learning dataset for sentiment analysis and offensive language identification. The KanCMD dataset highlights two real-world issues from the social media text. First, it contains actual comments in code mixed text posted by users on YouTube social media, rather than in monolingual text from the textbook. Second, it has been annotated for two tasks, namely sentiment analysis and offensive language detection for under-resourced Kannada language. Hence, KanCMD is meant to stimulate research in under-resourced Kannada language on real-world code-mixed social media text and multi-task learning. KanCMD was obtained by crawling the YouTube, and a minimum of three annotators annotates each comment. We release KanCMD 7,671 comments for multitask learning research purpose.

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Bilingual Lexicon Induction across Orthographically-distinct Under-Resourced Dravidian Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Navaneethan Rajasekaran | Mihael Arcan | Kevin McGuinness | Noel E. O’Connor | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

Bilingual lexicons are a vital tool for under-resourced languages and recent state-of-the-art approaches to this leverage pretrained monolingual word embeddings using supervised or semi-supervised approaches. However, these approaches require cross-lingual information such as seed dictionaries to train the model and find a linear transformation between the word embedding spaces. Especially in the case of low-resourced languages, seed dictionaries are not readily available, and as such, these methods produce extremely weak results on these languages. In this work, we focus on the Dravidian languages, namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, which are even more challenging as they are written in unique scripts. To take advantage of orthographic information and cognates in these languages, we bring the related languages into a single script. Previous approaches have used linguistically sub-optimal measures such as the Levenshtein edit distance to detect cognates, whereby we demonstrate that the longest common sub-sequence is linguistically more sound and improves the performance of bilingual lexicon induction. We show that our approach can increase the accuracy of bilingual lexicon induction methods on these languages many times, making bilingual lexicon induction approaches feasible for such under-resourced languages.

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Unsupervised Deep Language and Dialect Identification for Short Texts
Koustava Goswami | Rajdeep Sarkar | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Theodorus Fransen | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Automatic Language Identification (LI) or Dialect Identification (DI) of short texts of closely related languages or dialects, is one of the primary steps in many natural language processing pipelines. Language identification is considered a solved task in many cases; however, in the case of very closely related languages, or in an unsupervised scenario (where the languages are not known in advance), performance is still poor. In this paper, we propose the Unsupervised Deep Language and Dialect Identification (UDLDI) method, which can simultaneously learn sentence embeddings and cluster assignments from short texts. The UDLDI model understands the sentence constructions of languages by applying attention to character relations which helps to optimize the clustering of languages. We have performed our experiments on three short-text datasets for different language families, each consisting of closely related languages or dialects, with very minimal training sets. Our experimental evaluations on these datasets have shown significant improvement over state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and our model has outperformed state-of-the-art LI and DI systems in supervised settings.

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NUIG-Panlingua-KMI Hindi-Marathi MT Systems for Similar Language Translation Task @ WMT 2020
Atul Kr. Ojha | Priya Rani | Akanksha Bansal | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ritesh Kumar | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

NUIG-Panlingua-KMI submission to WMT 2020 seeks to push the state-of-the-art in Similar Language Translation Task for Hindi↔Marathi language pair. As part of these efforts, we conducteda series of experiments to address the challenges for translation between similar languages. Among the 4 MT systems prepared under this task, 1 PBSMT systems were prepared for Hindi↔Marathi each and 1 NMT systems were developed for Hindi↔Marathi using Byte PairEn-coding (BPE) into subwords. The results show that different architectures NMT could be an effective method for developing MT systems for closely related languages. Our Hindi-Marathi NMT system was ranked 8th among the 14 teams that participated and our Marathi-Hindi NMT system was ranked 8th among the 11 teams participated for the task.

2019

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Leveraging Rule-Based Machine Translation Knowledge for Under-Resourced Neural Machine Translation Models
Daniel Torregrosa | Nivranshu Pasricha | Maraim Masoud | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Juan Alonso | Noe Casas | Mihael Arcan
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVII: Translator, Project and User Tracks

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Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation for Dravidian Languages utilizing Phonetic Transcription
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bernardo Stearns | Arun Jayapal | Sridevy S | Mihael Arcan | Manel Zarrouk | John P McCrae
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages

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WordNet Gloss Translation for Under-resourced Languages using Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Mihael Arcan | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Multilingualism at the Intersection of Knowledge Bases and Machine Translation

2018

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Improving Wordnets for Under-Resourced Languages Using Machine Translation
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Mihael Arcan | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the 9th Global Wordnet Conference

Wordnets are extensively used in natural language processing, but the current approaches for manually building a wordnet from scratch involves large research groups for a long period of time, which are typically not available for under-resourced languages. Even if wordnet-like resources are available for under-resourced languages, they are often not easily accessible, which can alter the results of applications using these resources. Our proposed method presents an expand approach for improving and generating wordnets with the help of machine translation. We apply our methods to improve and extend wordnets for the Dravidian languages, i.e., Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, which are severly under-resourced languages. We report evaluation results of the generated wordnet senses in term of precision for these languages. In addition to that, we carried out a manual evaluation of the translations for the Tamil language, where we demonstrate that our approach can aid in improving wordnet resources for under-resourced Dravidian languages.
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