In this work, we present our approach for solving the SemEval 2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC). The task is a sentence pair classification problem where the goal is to detect whether a given word common to both the sentences evokes the same meaning. We submit systems for both the settings - Multilingual (the pair’s sentences belong to the same language) and Cross-Lingual (the pair’s sentences belong to different languages). The training data is provided only in English. Consequently, we employ cross-lingual transfer techniques. Our approach employs fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based language models, like ELECTRA and ALBERT, for the English task and XLM-R for all other tasks. To improve these systems’ performance, we propose adding a signal to the word to be disambiguated and augmenting our data by sentence pair reversal. We further augment the dataset provided to us with WiC, XL-WiC and SemCor 3.0. Using ensembles, we achieve strong performance in the Multilingual task, placing first in the EN-EN and FR-FR sub-tasks. For the Cross-Lingual setting, we employed translate-test methods and a zero-shot method, using our multilingual models, with the latter performing slightly better.

This paper describes our contribution to the WASSA 2021 shared task on Empathy Prediction and Emotion Classification. The broad goal of this task was to model an empathy score, a distress score and the overall level of emotion of an essay written in response to a newspaper article associated with harm to someone. We have used the ELECTRA model abundantly and also advanced deep learning approaches like multi-task learning. Additionally, we also leveraged standard machine learning techniques like ensembling. Our system achieves a Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.533 on sub-task I and a macro F1 score of 0.5528 on sub-task II. We ranked 1st in Emotion Classification sub-task and 3rd in Empathy Prediction sub-task.

Recent efforts to develop deep learning models for text generation tasks such as extractive and abstractive summarization have resulted in state-of-the-art performances on various datasets. However, obtaining the best model configuration for a given dataset requires an extensive knowledge of deep learning specifics like model architecture, tuning parameters etc., and is often extremely challenging for a non-expert. In this paper, we propose methods to automatically create deep learning models for the tasks of extractive and abstractive text summarization. Based on the recent advances in Automated Machine Learning and the success of large language models such as BERT and GPT-2 in encoding knowledge, we use a combination of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and Knowledge Distillation (KD) techniques to perform model search and compression using the vast knowledge provided by these language models to develop smaller, customized models for any given dataset. We present extensive empirical results to illustrate the effectiveness of our model creation methods in terms of inference time and model size, while achieving near state-of-the-art performances in terms of accuracy across a range of datasets.