Fact-checking using evidences is the preferred way to tackle the issue of misinformation in the society. The democratization of information through social media has accelerated the spread of information, allowing misinformation to reach and influence a vast audience. The significant impact of these falsehoods on society and public opinion underscores the need for automated approaches to identify and combat this phenomenon.This paper is describes the participation of team IKR3-UNIMIB in AVeriTeC (Automated Verification of Textual Claims) 2024 shared task. We proposed a methods to retrieve evidence in the question and answer format and predict the veracity of a claim. As part of the AVeriTeC shared task, our method combines similarity-based ColBERT re-ranker with traditional keyword search using BM25. Additionally, a recent promising approach, Chain of RAG (CoRAG) is introduced to generate question and answer pairs (QAs) to evaluate performance on this specific dataset. We explore whether generating questions from claims or answers produces more effective QA pairs for veracity prediction. Additionally, we try to generate questions from the claim rather than from evidence (opposite the AVeriTeC dataset paper) to generate effective QA pairs for veracity prediction. Our method achieved an AVeriTeC Score of 0.18 (more than baseline) on the test dataset, demonstrating its potential in automated fact-checking.

This paper presents the participation of team DA-LD-Hildesheim of Information Retrieval and Language Processing lab at DA-IICT, India in Semeval-19 OffenEval track. The aim of this shared task is to identify offensive content at fined-grained level granularity. The task is divided into three sub-tasks. The system is required to check whether social media posts contain any offensive or profane content or not, targeted or untargeted towards any entity and classifying targeted posts into the individual, group or other categories. Social media posts suffer from data sparsity problem, Therefore, the distributed word representation technique is chosen over the Bag-of-Words for the text representation. Since limited labeled data was available for the training, pre-trained word vectors are used and fine-tuned on this classification task. Various deep learning models based on LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, CNN, and Stacked CNN are used for the classification. It has been observed that labeled data was highly affected with class imbalance and our technique to handle the class-balance was not effective, in fact performance was degraded in some of the runs. Macro F1 score is used as a primary evaluation metric for the performance. Our System achieves Macro F1 score = 0.7833 in sub-task A, 0.6456 in the sub-task B and 0.5533 in the sub-task C.

This paper describes the participation of team DA-LD-Hildesheim from the Information Retrieval Lab(IRLAB) at DA-IICT Gandhinagar, India in collaboration with the University of Hildesheim, Germany and LDRP-ITR, Gandhinagar, India in a shared task on Aggression Identification workshop in COLING 2018. The objective of the shared task is to identify the level of aggression from the User-Generated contents within Social media written in English, Devnagiri Hindi and Romanized Hindi. Aggression levels are categorized into three predefined classes namely: ‘Overtly Aggressive‘, ‘Covertly Aggressive‘ and ‘Non-aggressive‘. The participating teams are required to develop a multi-class classifier which classifies User-generated content into these pre-defined classes. Instead of relying on a bag-of-words model, we have used pre-trained vectors for word embedding. We have performed experiments with standard machine learning classifiers. In addition, we have developed various deep learning models for the multi-class classification problem. Using the validation data, we found that validation accuracy of our deep learning models outperform all standard machine learning classifiers and voting based ensemble techniques and results on test data support these findings. We have also found that hyper-parameters of the deep neural network are the keys to improve the results.