Ananya Ganesh


2022

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Response Construct Tagging: NLP-Aided Assessment for Engineering Education
Ananya Ganesh | Hugh Scribner | Jasdeep Singh | Katherine Goodman | Jean Hertzberg | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022)

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have greatly helped educational applications, for both teachers and students. In higher education, there is great potential to use NLP tools for advancing pedagogical research. In this paper, we focus on how NLP can help understand student experiences in engineering, thus facilitating engineering educators to carry out large scale analysis that is helpful for re-designing the curriculum. Here, we introduce a new task we call response construct tagging (RCT), in which student responses to tailored survey questions are automatically tagged for six constructs measuring transformative experiences and engineering identity of students.We experiment with state-of-the-art classification models for this task and investigate the effects of different sources of additional information. Our best model achieves an F1 score of 48. We further investigate multi-task training on the related task of sentiment classification, which improves our model’s performance to 55 F1. Finally, we provide a detailed qualitative analysis of model performance.

2021

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What Would a Teacher Do? Predicting Future Talk Moves
Ananya Ganesh | Martha Palmer | Katharina Kann
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Training and Domain Adaptation for Supervised Text Segmentation
Goran Glavaš | Ananya Ganesh | Swapna Somasundaran
Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Unlike traditional unsupervised text segmentation methods, recent supervised segmentation models rely on Wikipedia as the source of large-scale segmentation supervision. These models have, however, predominantly been evaluated on the in-domain (Wikipedia-based) test sets, preventing conclusions about their general segmentation efficacy. In this work, we focus on the domain transfer performance of supervised neural text segmentation in the educational domain. To this end, we first introduce K12Seg, a new dataset for evaluation of supervised segmentation, created from educational reading material for grade-1 to college-level students. We then benchmark a hierarchical text segmentation model (HITS), based on RoBERTa, in both in-domain and domain-transfer segmentation experiments. While HITS produces state-of-the-art in-domain performance (on three Wikipedia-based test sets), we show that, subject to the standard full-blown fine-tuning, it is susceptible to domain overfitting. We identify adapter-based fine-tuning as a remedy that substantially improves transfer performance.

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Don’t Rule Out Monolingual Speakers: A Method For Crowdsourcing Machine Translation Data
Rajat Bhatnagar | Ananya Ganesh | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

High-performing machine translation (MT) systems can help overcome language barriers while making it possible for everyone to communicate and use language technologies in the language of their choice. However, such systems require large amounts of parallel sentences for training, and translators can be difficult to find and expensive. Here, we present a data collection strategy for MT which, in contrast, is cheap and simple, as it does not require bilingual speakers. Based on the insight that humans pay specific attention to movements, we use graphics interchange formats (GIFs) as a pivot to collect parallel sentences from monolingual annotators. We use our strategy to collect data in Hindi, Tamil and English. As a baseline, we also collect data using images as a pivot. We perform an intrinsic evaluation by manually evaluating a subset of the sentence pairs and an extrinsic evaluation by finetuning mBART (Liu et al., 2020) on the collected data. We find that sentences collected via GIFs are indeed of higher quality.

2019

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Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP
Emma Strubell | Ananya Ganesh | Andrew McCallum
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent progress in hardware and methodology for training neural networks has ushered in a new generation of large networks trained on abundant data. These models have obtained notable gains in accuracy across many NLP tasks. However, these accuracy improvements depend on the availability of exceptionally large computational resources that necessitate similarly substantial energy consumption. As a result these models are costly to train and develop, both financially, due to the cost of hardware and electricity or cloud compute time, and environmentally, due to the carbon footprint required to fuel modern tensor processing hardware. In this paper we bring this issue to the attention of NLP researchers by quantifying the approximate financial and environmental costs of training a variety of recently successful neural network models for NLP. Based on these findings, we propose actionable recommendations to reduce costs and improve equity in NLP research and practice.

2018

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Efficient Graph-based Word Sense Induction by Distributional Inclusion Vector Embeddings
Haw-Shiuan Chang | Amol Agrawal | Ananya Ganesh | Anirudha Desai | Vinayak Mathur | Alfred Hough | Andrew McCallum
Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-12)

Word sense induction (WSI), which addresses polysemy by unsupervised discovery of multiple word senses, resolves ambiguities for downstream NLP tasks and also makes word representations more interpretable. This paper proposes an accurate and efficient graph-based method for WSI that builds a global non-negative vector embedding basis (which are interpretable like topics) and clusters the basis indexes in the ego network of each polysemous word. By adopting distributional inclusion vector embeddings as our basis formation model, we avoid the expensive step of nearest neighbor search that plagues other graph-based methods without sacrificing the quality of sense clusters. Experiments on three datasets show that our proposed method produces similar or better sense clusters and embeddings compared with previous state-of-the-art methods while being significantly more efficient.