Sayan Sinha


2021

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ResPer: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversations
Ritam Dutt | Sayan Sinha | Rishabh Joshi | Surya Shekhar Chakraborty | Meredith Riggs | Xinru Yan | Haogang Bao | Carolyn Rose
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the resisting strategies employed by an individual to foil such persuasion attempts. Grounded in prior literature in cognitive and social psychology, we propose a generalised framework for identifying resisting strategies in persuasive conversations. We instantiate our framework on two distinct datasets comprising persuasion and negotiation conversations. We also leverage a hierarchical sequence-labelling neural architecture to infer the aforementioned resisting strategies automatically. Our experiments reveal the asymmetry of power roles in non-collaborative goal-directed conversations and the benefits accrued from incorporating resisting strategies on the final conversation outcome. We also investigate the role of different resisting strategies on the conversation outcome and glean insights that corroborate with past findings. We also make the code and the dataset of this work publicly available at https://github.com/americast/resper.

2020

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NARMADA: Need and Available Resource Managing Assistant for Disasters and Adversities
Kaustubh Hiware | Ritam Dutt | Sayan Sinha | Sohan Patro | Kripa Ghosh | Saptarshi Ghosh
Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

Although a lot of research has been done on utilising Online Social Media during disasters, there exists no system for a specific task that is critical in a post-disaster scenario – identifying resource-needs and resource-availabilities in the disaster-affected region, coupled with their subsequent matching. To this end, we present NARMADA, a semi-automated platform which leverages the crowd-sourced information from social media posts for assisting post-disaster relief coordination efforts. The system employs Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval techniques for identifying resource-needs and resource-availabilities from microblogs, extracting resources from the posts, and also matching the needs to suitable availabilities. The system is thus capable of facilitating the judicious management of resources during post-disaster relief operations.