Vasudev Awatramani


2021

The proliferation of Hate Speech and misinformation in social media is fast becoming a menace to society. In compliment, the dissemination of hate-diffusing, promising and anti-oppressive messages become a unique alternative. Unfortunately, due to its complex nature as well as the relatively limited manifestation in comparison to hostile and neutral content, the identification of Hope Speech becomes a challenge. This work revolves around the detection of Hope Speech in Youtube comments, for the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. We achieve an f-score of 0.93, ranking 1st on the leaderboard for English comments.

2020

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a surge of digital content on social media. The content ranges from news articles, academic reports, tweets, videos, and even memes. Among such an overabundance of data, it is crucial to distinguish which information is actually informative or merely sensational, redundant or false. This work focuses on developing such a language system that can differentiate between Informative or Uninformative tweets associated with COVID-19 for WNUT-2020 Shared Task 2. For this purpose, we employ deep transfer learning models such as BERT along other techniques such as Noisy Data Augmentation and Progress Training. The approach achieves a competitive F1-score of 0.8715 on the final testing dataset.