Sumit Shekhar


2022

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DynamicTOC: Persona-based Table of Contents for Consumption of Long Documents
Himanshu Maheshwari | Nethraa Sivakumar | Shelly Jain | Tanvi Karandikar | Vinay Aggarwal | Navita Goyal | Sumit Shekhar
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Long documents like contracts, financial documents, etc., are often tedious to read through. Linearly consuming (via scrolling or navigation through default table of content) these documents is time-consuming and challenging. These documents are also authored to be consumed by varied entities (referred to as persona in the paper) interested in only certain parts of the document. In this work, we describe DynamicToC, a dynamic table of content-based navigator, to aid in the task of non-linear, persona-based document consumption. DynamicToC highlights sections of interest in the document as per the aspects relevant to different personas. DynamicToC is augmented with short questions to assist the users in understanding underlying content. This uses a novel deep-reinforcement learning technique to generate questions on these persona-clustered paragraphs. Human and automatic evaluations suggest the efficacy of both end-to-end pipeline and different components of DynamicToC.

2020

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STL-CQA: Structure-based Transformers with Localization and Encoding for Chart Question Answering
Hrituraj Singh | Sumit Shekhar
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Chart Question Answering (CQA) is the task of answering natural language questions about visualisations in the chart image. Recent solutions, inspired by VQA approaches, rely on image-based attention for question/answering while ignoring the inherent chart structure. We propose STL-CQA which improves the question/answering through sequential elements localization, question encoding and then, a structural transformer-based learning approach. We conduct extensive experiments while proposing pre-training tasks, methodology and also an improved dataset with more complex and balanced questions of different types. The proposed methodology shows a significant accuracy improvement compared to the state-of-the-art approaches on various chart Q/A datasets, while outperforming even human baseline on the DVQA Dataset. We also demonstrate interpretability while examining different components in the inference pipeline.