Srikala Murugan


2020

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Beyond Possession Existence: Duration and Co-Possession
Dhivya Chinnappa | Srikala Murugan | Eduardo Blanco
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces two tasks: determining (a) the duration of possession relations and (b) co-possessions, i.e., whether multiple possessors possess a possessee at the same time. We present new annotations on top of corpora annotating possession existence and experimental results. Regarding possession duration, we derive the time spans we work with empirically from annotations indicating lower and upper bounds. Regarding co-possessions, we use a binary label. Cohen’s kappa coefficients indicate substantial agreement, and experimental results show that text is more useful than the image for solving these tasks.

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Determining Event Outcomes: The Case of #fail
Srikala Murugan | Dhivya Chinnappa | Eduardo Blanco
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

This paper targets the task of determining event outcomes in social media. We work with tweets containing either #cookingFail or #bakingFail, and show that many of the events described in them resulted in something edible. Tweets that contain images are more likely to result in edible albeit imperfect outcomes. Experimental results show that edibility is easier to predict than outcome quality.

2019

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Extracting Possessions from Social Media: Images Complement Language
Dhivya Chinnappa | Srikala Murugan | Eduardo Blanco
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

This paper describes a new dataset and experiments to determine whether authors of tweets possess the objects they tweet about. We work with 5,000 tweets and show that both humans and neural networks benefit from images in addition to text. We also introduce a simple yet effective strategy to incorporate visual information into any neural network beyond weights from pretrained networks. Specifically, we consider the tags identified in an image as an additional textual input, and leverage pretrained word embeddings as usually done with regular text. Experimental results show this novel strategy is beneficial.