Mahsa Shafaei


2021

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From None to Severe: Predicting Severity in Movie Scripts
Yigeng Zhang | Mahsa Shafaei | Fabio Gonzalez | Thamar Solorio
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

In this paper, we introduce the task of predicting severity of age-restricted aspects of movie content based solely on the dialogue script. We first investigate categorizing the ordinal severity of movies on 5 aspects: Sex, Violence, Profanity, Substance consumption, and Frightening scenes. The problem is handled using a siamese network-based multitask framework which concurrently improves the interpretability of the predictions. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model and provides useful information to interpret model predictions. The proposed dataset and source code are publicly available at our GitHub repository.

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ParsiNLU: A Suite of Language Understanding Challenges for Persian
Daniel Khashabi | Arman Cohan | Siamak Shakeri | Pedram Hosseini | Pouya Pezeshkpour | Malihe Alikhani | Moin Aminnaseri | Marzieh Bitaab | Faeze Brahman | Sarik Ghazarian | Mozhdeh Gheini | Arman Kabiri | Rabeeh Karimi Mahabagdi | Omid Memarrast | Ahmadreza Mosallanezhad | Erfan Noury | Shahab Raji | Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli | Sepideh Sadeghi | Erfan Sadeqi Azer | Niloofar Safi Samghabadi | Mahsa Shafaei | Saber Sheybani | Ali Tazarv | Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of language understanding tasks—reading comprehension, textual entailment, and so on. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5k new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Additionally, we present the first results on state-of-the-art monolingual and multilingual pre-trained language models on this benchmark and compare them with human performance, which provides valuable insights into our ability to tackle natural language understanding challenges in Persian. We hope ParsiNLU fosters further research and advances in Persian language understanding.1

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A Case Study of Deep Learning-Based Multi-Modal Methods for Labeling the Presence of Questionable Content in Movie Trailers
Mahsa Shafaei | Christos Smailis | Ioannis Kakadiaris | Thamar Solorio
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

In this work, we explore different approaches to combine modalities for the problem of automated age-suitability rating of movie trailers. First, we introduce a new dataset containing videos of movie trailers in English downloaded from IMDB and YouTube, along with their corresponding age-suitability rating labels. Secondly, we propose a multi-modal deep learning pipeline addressing the movie trailer age suitability rating problem. This is the first attempt to combine video, audio, and speech information for this problem, and our experimental results show that multi-modal approaches significantly outperform the best mono and bimodal models in this task.

2020

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Attending the Emotions to Detect Online Abusive Language
Niloofar Safi Samghabadi | Afsheen Hatami | Mahsa Shafaei | Sudipta Kar | Thamar Solorio
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms

In recent years, abusive behavior has become a serious issue in online social networks. In this paper, we present a new corpus for the task of abusive language detection that is collected from a semi-anonymous online platform, and unlike the majority of other available resources, is not created based on a specific list of bad words. We also develop computational models to incorporate emotions into textual cues to improve aggression identification. We evaluate our proposed methods on a set of corpora related to the task and show promising results with respect to abusive language detection.

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Age Suitability Rating: Predicting the MPAA Rating Based on Movie Dialogues
Mahsa Shafaei | Niloofar Safi Samghabadi | Sudipta Kar | Thamar Solorio
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Movies help us learn and inspire societal change. But they can also contain objectionable content that negatively affects viewers’ behaviour, especially children. In this paper, our goal is to predict the suitability of movie content for children and young adults based on scripts. The criterion that we use to measure suitability is the MPAA rating that is specifically designed for this purpose. We create a corpus for movie MPAA ratings and propose an RNN based architecture with attention that jointly models the genre and the emotions in the script to predict the MPAA rating. We achieve 81% weighted F1-score for the classification model that outperforms the traditional machine learning method by 7%.