Keyword extraction is an integral task for many downstream problems like clustering, recommendation, search and classification. Development and evaluation of keyword extraction techniques require an exhaustive dataset; however, currently, the community lacks large-scale multi-lingual datasets. In this paper, we present MAKED, a large-scale multi-lingual keyword extraction dataset comprising of 540K+ news articles from British Broadcasting Corporation News (BBC News) spanning 20 languages. It is the first keyword extraction dataset for 11 of these 20 languages. The quality of the dataset is examined by experimentation with several baselines. We believe that the proposed dataset will help advance the field of automatic keyword extraction given its size, diversity in terms of languages used, topics covered and time periods as well as its focus on under-studied languages.

The social NLP researchers and mental health practitioners have witnessed exponential growth in the field of mental health detection and analysis on social media. It has become important to identify the reason behind mental illness. In this context, we introduce a new dataset for Causal Analysis of Mental health in Social media posts (CAMS). We first introduce the annotation schema for this task of causal analysis. The causal analysis comprises of two types of annotations, viz, causal interpretation and causal categorization. We show the efficacy of our scheme in two ways: (i) crawling and annotating 3155 Reddit data and (ii) re-annotate the publicly available SDCNL dataset of 1896 instances for interpretable causal analysis. We further combine them as CAMS dataset and make it available along with the other source codes https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CAMS1/. Our experimental results show that the hybrid CNN-LSTM model gives the best performance over CAMS dataset.

Dialogue Act Classification (DAC) that determines the communicative intention of an utterance has been investigated widely over the years as a standalone task. But the emotional state of the speaker has a considerable effect on its pragmatic content. Sentiment as a human behavior is also closely related to emotion and one aids in the better understanding of the other. Thus, their role in identification of DAs needs to be explored. As a first step, we extend the newly released multi-modal EMOTyDA dataset to enclose sentiment tags for each utterance. In order to incorporate these multiple aspects, we propose a Dual Attention Mechanism (DAM) based multi-modal, multi-tasking conversational framework. The DAM module encompasses intra-modal and interactive inter-modal attentions with multiple loss optimization at various hierarchies to fuse multiple modalities efficiently and learn generalized features across all the tasks. Additionally, to counter the class-imbalance issue in dialogues, we introduce a 2-step Deferred Optimisation Schedule (DOS) that involves Meta-Net (MN) learning and deferred re-weighting where the former helps to learn an explicit weighting function from data automatically and the latter deploys a re-weighted multi-task loss with a smaller learning rate. Empirically, we establish that the joint optimisation of multi-modal DAC, SA and ER tasks along with the incorporation of 2-step DOS and MN learning produces better results compared to its different counterparts and outperforms state-of-the-art model.

Task-oriented conversational agents are gaining immense popularity and success in a wide range of tasks, from flight ticket booking to online shopping. However, the existing systems presume that end-users will always have a pre-determined and servable task goal, which results in dialogue failure in hostile scenarios, such as goal unavailability. On the other hand, human agents accomplish users’ tasks even in a large number of goal unavailability scenarios by persuading them towards a very similar and servable goal. Motivated by the limitation, we propose and build a novel end-to-end multi-modal persuasive dialogue system incorporated with a personalized persuasive module aided goal controller and goal persuader. The goal controller recognizes goal conflicting/unavailability scenarios and formulates a new goal, while the goal persuader persuades users using a personalized persuasive strategy identified through dialogue context. We also present a novel automatic evaluation metric called Persuasiveness Measurement Rate (PMeR) for quantifying the persuasive capability of a conversational agent. The obtained improvements (both quantitative and qualitative) firmly establish the superiority and need of the proposed context-guided, personalized persuasive virtual agent over existing traditional task-oriented virtual agents. Furthermore, we also curated a multi-modal persuasive conversational dialogue corpus annotated with intent, slot, sentiment, and dialogue act for e-commerce domain.

Multimodal Summarization (MS) has attracted research interest in the past few years due to the ease with which users perceive multimodal summaries. It is important for MS models to consider the topic a given target content belongs to. In the current paper, we propose a topic-aware MS system which performs two tasks simultaneously: differentiating the images into “on-topic” and “off-topic” categories and further utilizing the “on-topic” images to generate multimodal summaries. The hypothesis is that, the proposed topic similarity classifier will help in generating better multimodal summary by focusing on important components of images and text which are specific to a particular topic. To develop the topic similarity classifier, we have augmented the existing popular MS data set, MSMO, with similar “on-topic” and dissimilar “off-topic” images for each sample. Our experimental results establish that the focus on “on-topic” features helps in generating topic-aware multimodal summaries, which outperforms the state of the art approach by 1.7 % in ROUGE-L metric.

Most research in the area of automatic essay grading (AEG) is geared towards scoring the essay holistically while there has also been little work done on scoring individual essay traits. In this paper, we describe a way to score essays using a multi-task learning (MTL) approach, where scoring the essay holistically is the primary task, and scoring the essay traits is the auxiliary task. We compare our results with a single-task learning (STL) approach, using both LSTMs and BiLSTMs. To find out which traits work best for different types of essays, we conduct ablation tests for each of the essay traits. We also report the runtime and number of training parameters for each system. We find that MTL-based BiLSTM system gives the best results for scoring the essay holistically, as well as performing well on scoring the essay traits. The MTL systems also give a speed-up of between 2.30 to 3.70 times the speed of the STL system, when it comes to scoring the essay and all the traits.

Mental Health Disorders continue plaguing humans worldwide. Aggravating this situation is the severe shortage of qualified and competent mental health professionals (MHPs), which underlines the need for developing Virtual Assistants (VAs) that can assist MHPs. The data+ML for automation can come from platforms that allow visiting and posting messages in peer-to-peer anonymous manner for sharing their experiences (frequently stigmatized) and seeking support. In this paper, we propose a VA that can act as the first point of contact and comfort for mental health patients. We curate a dataset, Motivational VA: MotiVAte comprising of 7k dyadic conversations collected from a peer-to-peer support platform. The system employs two mechanisms: (i) Mental Illness Classification: an attention based BERT classifier that outputs the mental disorder category out of the 4 categories, viz., Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), based on the input ongoing dialog between the support seeker and the VA; and (ii) Mental Illness Conditioned Motivational Dialogue Generation (MI-MDG): a sentiment driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) based motivational response generator. The empirical evaluation demonstrates the system capability by way of outperforming several baselines.

Speech Act Classification determining the communicative intent of an utterance has been investigated widely over the years as a standalone task. This holds true for discussion in any fora including social media platform such as Twitter. But the emotional state of the tweeter which has a considerable effect on the communication has not received the attention it deserves. Closely related to emotion is sentiment, and understanding of one helps understand the other. In this work, we firstly create a new multi-modal, emotion-TA (‘TA’ means tweet act, i.e., speech act in Twitter) dataset called EmoTA collected from open-source Twitter dataset. We propose a Dyadic Attention Mechanism (DAM) based multi-modal, adversarial multi-tasking framework. DAM incorporates intra-modal and inter-modal attention to fuse multiple modalities and learns generalized features across all the tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework boosts the performance of the primary task, i.e., TA classification (TAC) by benefitting from the two secondary tasks, i.e., Sentiment and Emotion Analysis compared to its uni-modal and single task TAC (tweet act classification) variants.

Image captioning is a prominent research area in computer vision and natural language processing, which automatically generates natural language descriptions for images. Most of the existing works have focused on developing models for image captioning in the English language. The current paper introduces a novel deep learning architecture based on encoder-decoder with an attention mechanism for image captioning in the Hindi language. For encoder, decoder, and attention, several deep learning-based architectures have been explored. Hindi, the fourth-most spoken language globally, is widely spoken in India and South Asia and is one of India’s official languages. The proposed encoder-decoder architecture utilizes scaling in convolution neural networks to achieve better accuracy than state-of-the-art image captioning methods in Hindi. The proposed method’s performance is compared with state-of-the-art methods in terms of BLEU scores and manual evaluation (in terms of adequacy and fluency). The obtained results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a method to summarize news events from multiple sources. We pose event summarization as a clustering-based optimization problem and solve it using particle swarm optimization. The proposed methodology uses the search capability of particle swarm optimization, detecting the number of clusters automatically. Experiments are conducted with the Wikipedia Current Events Portal dataset and evaluated using the well-known ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L scores. The obtained results show the efficacy of the proposed methodology over the state-of-the-art methods. It attained improvement of 33.42%, 81.75%, and 57.58% in terms of ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L, respectively.

The task of Dialogue Act Classification (DAC) that purports to capture communicative intent has been studied extensively. But these studies limit themselves to text. Non-verbal features (change of tone, facial expressions etc.) can provide cues to identify DAs, thus stressing the benefit of incorporating multi-modal inputs in the task. Also, the emotional state of the speaker has a substantial effect on the choice of the dialogue act, since conversations are often influenced by emotions. Hence, the effect of emotion too on automatic identification of DAs needs to be studied. In this work, we address the role of both multi-modality and emotion recognition (ER) in DAC. DAC and ER help each other by way of multi-task learning. One of the major contributions of this work is a new dataset- multimodal Emotion aware Dialogue Act dataset called EMOTyDA, collected from open-sourced dialogue datasets. To demonstrate the utility of EMOTyDA, we build an attention based (self, inter-modal, inter-task) multi-modal, multi-task Deep Neural Network (DNN) for joint learning of DAs and emotions. We show empirically that multi-modality and multi-tasking achieve better performance of DAC compared to uni-modal and single task DAC variants.

An in-depth exploration of protein-protein interactions (PPI) is essential to understand the metabolism in addition to the regulations of biological entities like proteins, carbohydrates, and many more. Most of the recent PPI tasks in BioNLP domain have been carried out solely using textual data. In this paper, we argue that incorporating multimodal cues can improve the automatic identification of PPI. As a first step towards enabling the development of multimodal approaches for PPI identification, we have developed two multi-modal datasets which are extensions and multi-modal versions of two popular benchmark PPI corpora (BioInfer and HRPD50). Besides, existing textual modalities, two new modalities, 3D protein structure and underlying genomic sequence, are also added to each instance. Further, a novel deep multi-modal architecture is also implemented to efficiently predict the protein interactions from the developed datasets. A detailed experimental analysis reveals the superiority of the multi-modal approach in comparison to the strong baselines including unimodal approaches and state-of the-art methods over both the generated multi-modal datasets. The developed multi-modal datasets are available for use at https://github.com/sduttap16/MM_PPI_NLP.

In this paper, we present the IIIT Bhagalpur and IIT Patna team’s effort to solve the three shared tasks namely, CL-SciSumm 2020, CL-LaySumm 2020, LongSumm 2020 at SDP 2020. The theme of these tasks is to generate medium-scale, lay and long summaries, respectively, for scientific articles. For the first two tasks, unsupervised systems are developed, while for the third one, we develop a supervised system.The performances of all the systems were evaluated on the associated datasets with the shared tasks in term of well-known ROUGE metric.

The publication rate of scientific literature increases rapidly, which poses a challenge for researchers to keep themselves updated with new state-of-the-art. Scientific document summarization solves this problem by summarizing the essential fact and findings of the document. In the current paper, we present the participation of IITP-AI-NLP-ML team in three shared tasks, namely, CL-SciSumm 2020, LaySumm 2020, LongSumm 2020, which aims to generate medium, lay, and long summaries of the scientific articles, respectively. To solve CL-SciSumm 2020 and LongSumm 2020 tasks, three well-known clustering techniques are used, and then various sentence scoring functions, including textual entailment, are used to extract the sentences from each cluster for a summary generation. For LaySumm 2020, an encoder-decoder based deep learning model has been utilized. Performances of our developed systems are evaluated in terms of ROUGE measures on the associated datasets with the shared task.

In visual media, text emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text to convey the intent of the author. Text emphasis in visual media is generally done by using different colors, backgrounds, or font for the text; it helps in conveying the actual meaning of the message to the readers. Emphasis selection is the task of choosing candidate words for emphasis, it helps in automatically designing posters and other media contents with written text. If we consider only the text and do not know the intent, then there can be multiple valid emphasis selections. We propose the use of ensembles for emphasis selection to improve over single emphasis selection models. We show that the use of multi-embedding helps in enhancing the results for base models. To show the efficacy of proposed approach we have also done a comparison of our results with state-of-the-art models.

The SemEval-2020 Task 12 (OffensEval) challenge focuses on detection of signs of offensiveness using posts or comments over social media. This task has been organized for several languages, e.g., Arabic, Danish, English, Greek and Turkish. It has featured three related sub-tasks for English language: sub-task A was to discriminate between offensive and non-offensive posts, the focus of sub-task B was on the type of offensive content in the post and finally, in sub-task C, proposed systems had to identify the target of the offensive posts. The corpus for each of the languages is developed using the posts and comments over Twitter, a popular social media platform. We have participated in this challenge and submitted results for different languages. The current work presents different machine learning and deep learning techniques and analyzes their performance for offensiveness prediction which involves various classifiers and feature engineering schemes. The experimental analysis on the training set shows that SVM using language specific pre-trained word embedding (Fasttext) outperforms the other methods. Our system achieves a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.45 for Arabic language, 0.43 for Greek language and 0.54 for Turkish language.

The anthology of spoken languages today is inundated with textual information, necessitating the development of automatic summarization models. In this manuscript, we propose an extractor-paraphraser based abstractive summarization system that exploits semantic overlap as opposed to its predecessors that focus more on syntactic information overlap. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of ROUGE, METEOR and word mover similarity (WMS), establishing the superiority of the proposed system via extensive ablation experiments. We have also challenged the summarization capabilities of the state of the art Pointer Generator Network (PGN), and through thorough experimentation, shown that PGN is more of a paraphraser, contrary to the prevailing notion of a summarizer; illustrating it’s incapability to accumulate information across multiple sentences.

Automatic prediction of personality traits has many real-life applications, e.g., in forensics, recommender systems, personalized services etc.. In this work, we have proposed a solution framework for solving the problem of predicting the personality traits of a user from videos. Ambient, facial and the audio features are extracted from the video of the user. These features are used for the final output prediction. The visual and audio modalities are combined in two different ways: averaging of predictions obtained from the individual modalities, and concatenation of features in multi-modal setting. The dataset released in Chalearn-16 is used for evaluating the performance of the system. Experimental results illustrate that it is possible to obtain better performance with a hand full of images, rather than using all the images present in the video

Smart devices are often deployed in some edge-devices, which require quality solutions in limited amount of memory usage. In most of the user-interaction based smart devices, coreference resolution is often required. Keeping this in view, we have developed a fast and lightweight coreference resolution model which meets the minimum memory requirement and converges faster. In order to generate the embeddings for solving the task of coreference resolution, DistilBERT, a light weight BERT module is utilized. DistilBERT consumes less memory (only 60% of memory in comparison to BERT-based heavy model) and it is suitable for deployment in edge devices. DistilBERT embedding helps in 60% faster convergence with an accuracy compromise of 2.59%, and 6.49% with respect to its base model and current state-of-the-art, respectively.

Emotion recognition is a very well-attended problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Most of the existing works on emotion recognition focus on the general domain and in some cases to specific domains like fairy tales, blogs, weather, Twitter etc. But emotion analysis systems in the domains of security, social issues, technology, politics, sports, etc. are very rare. In this paper, we create a benchmark setup for emotion recognition in these specialised domains. First, we construct a corpus of 18,921 tweets in English annotated with Paul Ekman’s six basic emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Surprise) and a non-emotive class Others. Thereafter, we propose a deep neural framework to perform emotion recognition in an end-to-end setting. We build various models based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU). We propose a Hierarchical Attention-based deep neural network for Emotion Detection (HAtED). We also develop multiple systems by considering different sets of emotion classes for each system and report the detailed comparative analysis of the results. Experiments show the hierarchical attention-based model achieves best results among the considered baselines with accuracy of 69%.

The mining of adverse drug reaction (ADR) has a crucial role in the pharmacovigilance. The traditional ways of identifying ADR are reliable but time-consuming, non-scalable and offer a very limited amount of ADR relevant information. With the unprecedented growth of information sources in the forms of social media texts (Twitter, Blogs, Reviews etc.), biomedical literature, and Electronic Medical Records (EMR), it has become crucial to extract the most pertinent ADR related information from these free-form texts. In this paper, we propose a neural network inspired multi- task learning framework that can simultaneously extract ADRs from various sources. We adopt a novel adversarial learning-based approach to learn features across multiple ADR information sources. Unlike the other existing techniques, our approach is capable to extracting fine-grained information (such as ‘Indications’, ‘Symptoms’, ‘Finding’, ‘Disease’, ‘Drug’) which provide important cues in pharmacovigilance. We evaluate our proposed approach on three publicly available real- world benchmark pharmacovigilance datasets, a Twitter dataset from PSB 2016 Social Me- dia Shared Task, CADEC corpus and Medline ADR corpus. Experiments show that our unified framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on individual tasks associated with the different benchmark datasets. This establishes the fact that our proposed approach is generic, which enables it to achieve high performance on the diverse datasets.

In recent past, social media has emerged as an active platform in the context of healthcare and medicine. In this paper, we present a study where medical user’s opinions on health-related issues are analyzed to capture the medical sentiment at a blog level. The medical sentiments can be studied in various facets such as medical condition, treatment, and medication that characterize the overall health status of the user. Considering these facets, we treat analysis of this information as a multi-task classification problem. In this paper, we adopt a novel adversarial learning approach for our multi-task learning framework to learn the sentiment’s strengths expressed in a medical blog. Our evaluation shows promising results for our target tasks.

Current paper explores the use of multi-view learning for search result clustering. A web-snippet can be represented using multiple views. Apart from textual view cued by both the semantic and syntactic information, a complimentary view extracted from images contained in the web-snippets is also utilized in the current framework. A single consensus partitioning is finally obtained after consulting these two individual views by the deployment of a multiobjective based clustering technique. Several objective functions including the values of a cluster quality measure measuring the goodness of partitionings obtained using different views and an agreement-disagreement index, quantifying the amount of oneness among multiple views in generating partitionings are optimized simultaneously using AMOSA. In order to detect the number of clusters automatically, concepts of variable length solutions and a vast range of permutation operators are introduced in the clustering process. Finally, a set of alternative partitioning are obtained on the final Pareto front by the proposed multi-view based multiobjective technique. Experimental results by the proposed approach on several benchmark test datasets of SRC with respect to different performance metrics evidently establish the power of visual and text-based views in achieving better search result clustering.

Automatically estimating a user’s socio-economic profile from their language use in social media can significantly help social science research and various downstream applications ranging from business to politics. The current paper presents the first study where user cognitive structure is used to build a predictive model of income. In particular, we first develop a classifier using a weakly supervised learning framework to automatically time-tag tweets as past, present, or future. We quantify a user’s overall temporal orientation based on their distribution of tweets, and use it to build a predictive model of income. Our analysis uncovers a correlation between future temporal orientation and income. Finally, we measure the predictive power of future temporal orientation on income by performing regression.

Text mining has drawn significant attention in recent past due to the rapid growth in biomedical and clinical records. Entity extraction is one of the fundamental components for biomedical text mining. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of feature selection for entity extraction that exploits the concept of deep learning and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The system utilizes word embedding features along with several other features extracted by studying the properties of the datasets. We obtain an interesting observation that compact word embedding features as determined by PSO are more effective compared to the entire word embedding feature set for entity extraction. The proposed system is evaluated on three benchmark biomedical datasets such as GENIA, GENETAG, and AiMed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evident with significant performance gains over the baseline models as well as the other existing systems. We observe improvements of 7.86%, 5.27% and 7.25% F-measure points over the baseline models for GENIA, GENETAG, and AiMed dataset respectively.

Semi-supervised clustering is an attractive alternative for traditional (unsupervised) clustering in targeted applications. By using the information of a small annotated dataset, semi-supervised clustering can produce clusters that are customized to the application domain. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised clustering technique based on a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II-clus). We apply this technique to the task of clustering medical publications for Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) and observe an improvement of the results against unsupervised and other semi-supervised clustering techniques.

Rapid growth in Electronic Medical Records (EMR) has emerged to an expansion of data in the clinical domain. The majority of the available health care information is sealed in the form of narrative documents which form the rich source of clinical information. Text mining of such clinical records has gained huge attention in various medical applications like treatment and decision making. However, medical records enclose patient Private Health Information (PHI) which can reveal the identities of the patients. In order to retain the privacy of patients, it is mandatory to remove all the PHI information prior to making it publicly available. The aim is to de-identify or encrypt the PHI from the patient medical records. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on deep learning architecture to solve this problem. We perform de-identification of seven PHI terms from the clinical records. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach achieves encouraging performance, which is better than the baseline model developed with Conditional Random Field.

In this paper, we propose classifier ensemble selection for Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a single objective optimization problem. Thereafter, we develop a method based on genetic algorithm (GA) to solve this problem. Our underlying assumption is that rather than searching for the best feature set for a particular classifier, ensembling of several classifiers which are trained using different feature representations could be a more fruitful approach. Maximum Entropy (ME) framework is used to generate a number of classifiers by considering the various combinations of the available features. In the proposed approach, classifiers are encoded in the chromosomes. A single measure of classification quality, namely F-measure is used as the objective function. Evaluation results on a resource constrained language like Bengali yield the recall, precision and F-measure values of 71.14%, 84.07% and 77.11%, respectively. Experiments also show that the classifier ensemble identified by the proposed GA based approach attains higher performance than all the individual classifiers and two different conventional baseline ensembles.