This paper presents the system that we have developed while solving this shared task on violence inciting text detection in Bangla. We explain both the traditional and the recent approaches that we have used to make our models learn. Our proposed system helps to classify if the given text contains any threat. We studied the impact of data augmentation when there is a limited dataset available. Our quantitative results show that finetuning a multilingual-e5-base model performed the best in our task compared to other transformer-based architectures. We obtained a macro F1 of 68.11% in the test set and our performance in this shared task is ranked at 23 in the leaderboard.

Bangla is the 7th most widely spoken language globally, with a staggering 234 million native speakers primarily hailing from India and Bangladesh. This morphologically rich language boasts a rich literary tradition, encompassing diverse dialects and language-specific challenges. Despite its linguistic richness and history, Bangla remains categorized as a low-resource language within the natural language processing (NLP) and speech community. This paper presents our submission to Task 2 (Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts) of the BLP Workshop. We experimented with various Transformer-based architectures to solve this task. Our quantitative results show that transfer learning really helps in better learning of the models in this low-resource language scenario. This becomes evident when we further finetuned a model that had already been finetuned on Twitter data for sentiment analysis task and that finetuned model performed the best among all other models. We also performed a detailed error analysis where we found some instances where ground truth labels need to be looked at. We obtained a micro-F1 of 67.02% on the test set and our performance in this shared task is ranked at 21 in the leaderboard.

In recent years, we have seen many Transformer based models being created to address Dialog Summarization problem. While there has been a lot of work on understanding how these models stack against each other in summarizing regular conversations such as the ones found in DialogSum dataset, there haven’t been many analysis of these models on Clinical Dialog Summarization. In this article, we describe our solution to MEDIQA-Chat 2023 Shared Tasks as part of ACL-ClinicalNLP 2023 workshop which benchmarks some of the popular Transformer Architectures such as BioBart, Flan-T5, DialogLED, and OpenAI GPT3 on the problem of Clinical Dialog Summarization. We analyse their performance on two tasks - summarizing short conversations and long conversations. In addition to this, we also benchmark two popular summarization ensemble methods and report their performance.

We explore the ability of pre-trained language models BART, an encoder-decoder model, GPT2 and GPT-Neo, both decoder-only models for generating sentences from structured MR tags as input. We observe best results on several metrics for the YelpNLG and E2E datasets. Style based implicit tags such as emotion, sentiment, length etc., allows for controlled generation but it is typically not present in MR. We present an analysis on YelpNLG showing BART can express the content with stylistic variations in the structure of the sentence. Motivated with the results, we define a new task of emotional situation generation from various POS tags and emotion label values as MR using EmpatheticDialogues dataset and report a baseline. Encoder-Decoder attention analysis shows that BART learns different aspects in MR at various layers and heads.

We consider the task of automatically classifying the persuasion strategy employed by an utterance in a dialog. We base our work on the PERSUASION-FOR-GOOD dataset, which is composed of conversations between crowdworkers trying to convince each other to make donations to a charity. Currently, the best known performance on this dataset, for classification of persuader’s strategy, is not derived by employing pretrained language models like BERT. We observe that a straightforward fine-tuning of BERT does not provide significant performance gain. Nevertheless, nonuniformly sampling to account for the class imbalance and a cost function enforcing a hierarchical probabilistic structure on the classes provides an absolute improvement of 10.79% F1 over the previously reported results. On the same dataset, we replicate the framework for classifying the persuadee’s response.

Event Extraction is an important task in the widespread field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Though this task is adequately addressed in English with sufficient resources, we are unaware of any benchmark setup in Indian languages. Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. In this paper, we present an Event Extraction framework for Hindi language by creating an annotated resource for benchmarking, and then developing deep learning based models to set as the baselines. We crawl more than seventeen hundred disaster related Hindi news articles from the various news sources. We also develop deep learning based models for Event Trigger Detection and Classification, Argument Detection and Classification and Event-Argument Linking.

In this paper we present a deep multi-task learning framework for multilingual event and argument trigger detection and classification. In our current work, we identify detection and classification of both event and argument triggers as related tasks and follow a multi-tasking approach to solve them simultaneously in contrast to the previous works where these tasks were solved separately or learning some of the above mentioned tasks jointly. We evaluate the proposed approach with multiple low-resource Indian languages. As there were no datasets available for the Indian languages, we have annotated disaster related news data crawled from the online news portal for different low-resource Indian languages for our experiments. Our empirical evaluation shows that multi-task model performs better than the single task model, and classification helps in trigger detection and vice-versa.