Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar


2020

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A Multi-Dimensional View of Aggression when voicing Opinion
Arjit Srivastava | Avijit Vajpayee | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Naman Jain | Vinay Singh | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying

The advent of social media has immensely proliferated the amount of opinions and arguments voiced on the internet. These virtual debates often present cases of aggression. While research has been focused largely on analyzing aggression and stance in isolation from each other, this work is the first attempt to gain an extensive and fine-grained understanding of patterns of aggression and figurative language use when voicing opinion. We present a Hindi-English code-mixed dataset of opinion on the politico-social issue of ‘2016 India banknote demonetisation‘ and annotate it across multiple dimensions such as aggression, hate speech, emotion arousal and figurative language usage (such as sarcasm/irony, metaphors/similes, puns/word-play).

2018

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Corpus Creation and Emotion Prediction for Hindi-English Code-Mixed Social Media Text
Deepanshu Vijay | Aditya Bohra | Vinay Singh | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Emotion Prediction is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task dealing with detection and classification of emotions in various monolingual and bilingual texts. While some work has been done on code-mixed social media text and in emotion prediction separately, our work is the first attempt which aims at identifying the emotion associated with Hindi-English code-mixed social media text. In this paper, we analyze the problem of emotion identification in code-mixed content and present a Hindi-English code-mixed corpus extracted from twitter and annotated with the associated emotion. For every tweet in the dataset, we annotate the source language of all the words present, and also the causal language of the expressed emotion. Finally, we propose a supervised classification system which uses various machine learning techniques for detecting the emotion associated with the text using a variety of character level, word level, and lexicon based features.

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A Dataset of Hindi-English Code-Mixed Social Media Text for Hate Speech Detection
Aditya Bohra | Deepanshu Vijay | Vinay Singh | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media

Hate speech detection in social media texts is an important Natural language Processing task, which has several crucial applications like sentiment analysis, investigating cyberbullying and examining socio-political controversies. While relevant research has been done independently on code-mixed social media texts and hate speech detection, our work is the first attempt in detecting hate speech in Hindi-English code-mixed social media text. In this paper, we analyze the problem of hate speech detection in code-mixed texts and present a Hindi-English code-mixed dataset consisting of tweets posted online on Twitter. The tweets are annotated with the language at word level and the class they belong to (Hate Speech or Normal Speech). We also propose a supervised classification system for detecting hate speech in the text using various character level, word level, and lexicon based features.

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Named Entity Recognition for Hindi-English Code-Mixed Social Media Text
Vinay Singh | Deepanshu Vijay | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a major task in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), and also is a sub-task of Information Extraction. The challenge of NER for tweets lie in the insufficient information available in a tweet. There has been a significant amount of work done related to entity extraction, but only for resource rich languages and domains such as newswire. Entity extraction is, in general, a challenging task for such an informal text, and code-mixed text further complicates the process with it’s unstructured and incomplete information. We propose experiments with different machine learning classification algorithms with word, character and lexical features. The algorithms we experimented with are Decision tree, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Conditional Random Field (CRF). In this paper, we present a corpus for NER in Hindi-English Code-Mixed along with extensive experiments on our machine learning models which achieved the best f1-score of 0.95 with both CRF and LSTM.

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Aggression Detection on Social Media Text Using Deep Neural Networks
Vinay Singh | Aman Varshney | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Deepanshu Vijay | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online (ALW2)

In the past few years, bully and aggressive posts on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences for victims/users of all demographics. Majority of the work in this field has been done for English only. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning based classification system for Facebook posts and comments of Hindi-English Code-Mixed text to detect the aggressive behaviour of/towards users. Our work focuses on text from users majorly in the Indian Subcontinent. The dataset that we used for our models is provided by TRAC-1in their shared task. Our classification model assigns each Facebook post/comment to one of the three predefined categories: “Overtly Aggressive”, “Covertly Aggressive” and “Non-Aggressive”. We experimented with 6 classification models and our CNN model on a 10 K-fold cross-validation gave the best result with the prediction accuracy of 73.2%.

2017

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Exploiting Morphological Regularities in Distributional Word Representations
Arihant Gupta | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Avijit Vajpayee | Arjit Srivastava | Madan Gopal Jhanwar | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present an unsupervised, language agnostic approach for exploiting morphological regularities present in high dimensional vector spaces. We propose a novel method for generating embeddings of words from their morphological variants using morphological transformation operators. We evaluate this approach on MSR word analogy test set with an accuracy of 85% which is 12% higher than the previous best known system.

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Word Similarity Datasets for Indian Languages: Annotation and Baseline Systems
Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Arihant Gupta | Avijit Vajpayee | Arjit Srivastava | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

With the advent of word representations, word similarity tasks are becoming increasing popular as an evaluation metric for the quality of the representations. In this paper, we present manually annotated monolingual word similarity datasets of six Indian languages - Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Gujarati. These languages are most spoken Indian languages worldwide after Hindi and Bengali. For the construction of these datasets, our approach relies on translation and re-annotation of word similarity datasets of English. We also present baseline scores for word representation models using state-of-the-art techniques for Urdu, Telugu and Marathi by evaluating them on newly created word similarity datasets.