The rapid growth of online product reviews spurs significant interest in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), which involves identifying aspect terms and their associated sentiment polarity. While ABSA is widely studied in resource-rich languages like English, Chinese, and Spanish, it remains underexplored in low-resource languages such as Odia. To address this gap, we create a reliable resource for aspect-based sentiment analysis in Odia. The dataset is annotated for two specific tasks: Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) and Aspect Polarity Classification (APC), spanning seven domains and aligned with the SemEval-2014 benchmark. Furthermore, we employ an ensemble data augmentation approach combining back-translation with a fine-tuned T5 paraphrase generation model to enhance the dataset and apply a semantic similarity filter using a Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) to remove low-quality data and ensure a balanced distribution of sample difficulty in the newly augmented dataset. Finally, we validate our dataset by fine-tuning multilingual pre-trained models, XLM-R and IndicBERT, on ATE and APC tasks. Additionally, we use three classical baseline models to evaluate the quality of the proposed dataset for these tasks. We hope the Odia dataset will spur more work for the ABSA task.

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 17 teams whose submissions are documented in 27 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

Speech-to-text (ST) task is the translation of speech in a language to text in a different language. It has use cases in subtitling, dubbing, etc. Traditionally, ST task has been solved by cascading automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) models which leads to error propagation, high latency, and training time. To minimize such issues, end-to-end models have been proposed recently. However, we find that only a few works have reported results of ST models on a limited number of low-resource languages. To take a step further in this direction, we release datasets and baselines for low-resource ST tasks. Concretely, our dataset has 9 language pairs and benchmarking has been done against SOTA ST models. The low performance of SOTA ST models on Indic-TEDST data indicates the necessity of the development of ST models specifically designed for low-resource languages.

The presence of sarcasm in conversational systems and social media like chatbots, Facebook, Twitter, etc. poses several challenges for downstream NLP tasks. This is attributed to the fact that the intended meaning of a sarcastic text is contrary to what is expressed. Further, the use of code-mix language to express sarcasm is increasing day by day. Current NLP techniques for code-mix data have limited success due to the use of different lexicon, syntax, and scarcity of labeled corpora. To solve the joint problem of code-mixing and sarcasm detection, we propose the idea of capturing incongruity through sub-word level embeddings learned via fastText. Empirical results show that our proposed model achieves an F1-score on code-mix Hinglish dataset comparable to pretrained multilingual models while training 10x faster and using a lower memory footprint.