Transformer-based language models trained on large natural language corpora have been very useful in downstream entity extraction tasks. However, they often result in poor performances when applied to domains that are different from those they are pretrained on. Continued pretraining using unlabeled data from target domains can help improve the performances of these language models on the downstream tasks. However, using all of the available unlabeled data for pretraining can be time-intensive; also, it can be detrimental to the performance of the downstream tasks, if the unlabeled data is not aligned with the data distribution for the target tasks. Previous works employed external supervision in the form of ontologies for selecting appropriate data samples for pretraining, but external supervision can be quite hard to obtain in low-resource domains. In this paper, we introduce effective ways to select data from unlabeled corpora of target domains for language model pretraining to improve the performances in target entity extraction tasks. Our data selection strategies do not require any external supervision. We conduct extensive experiments for the task of named entity recognition (NER) on seven different domains and show that language models pretrained on target domain unlabeled data obtained using our data selection strategies achieve better performances compared to those using data selection strategies in previous works that use external supervision. We also show that these pretrained language models using our data selection strategies outperform those pretrained on all of the available unlabeled target domain data.

We describe our system for the SemEval 2022 task on detecting misogynous content in memes. This is a pressing problem and we explore various methods ranging from traditional machine learning to deep learning models such as multimodal transformers. We propose a multimodal BERT architecture that uses information from both image and text. We further incorporate common world knowledge from pretrained CLIP and Urban dictionary. We also provide qualitative analysis to support out model. Our best performing model achieves an F1 score of 0.679 on Task A (Rank 5) and 0.680 on Task B (Rank 13) of the hidden test set. Our code is available at https://github.com/paridhimaheshwari2708/MAMI.

Disentanglement of latent representations into content and style spaces has been a commonly employed method for unsupervised text style transfer. These techniques aim to learn the disentangled representations and tweak them to modify the style of a sentence. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual-based method to modify the latent representation, by posing a ‘what-if’ scenario. This simple and disciplined approach also enables a fine-grained control on the transfer strength. We conduct experiments with the proposed methodology on multiple attribute transfer tasks like Sentiment, Formality and Excitement to support our hypothesis.

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.