The SemEval 2024 BRAINTEASER task represents a pioneering venture in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by focusing on lateral thinking, a dimension of cognitive reasoning that is often overlooked in traditional linguistic analyses. This challenge comprises of Sentence Puzzle and Word Puzzle sub-tasks and aims to test language models’ capacity for divergent thinking. In this paper, we present our approach to the BRAINTEASER task. We employ a holistic strategy by leveraging cutting-edge pre-trained models in multiple choice architecture, and diversify the training data with Sentence and Word Puzzle datasets. To gain further improvement, we fine-tuned the model with synthetic humor/jokes dataset and the RiddleSense dataset which helped augmenting the model’s lateral thinking abilities. Empirical results show that our approach achieve 92.5% accuracy in Sentence Puzzle subtask and 80.2% accuracy in Word Puzzle subtask.

In this paper, we describe our approach to the ML-ESG-2 shared task, co-located with the FinNLP workshop at IJCNLP-AACL-2023. The task aims at classifying news articles into categories reflecting either “Opportunity” or “Risk” from an ESG standpoint for companies. Our innovative methodology leverages two distinct systems for optimal text classification. In the initial phase, we engage in prompt engineering, working in conjunction with semantic similarity and using the Claude 2 LLM. Subsequently, we apply fine-tuning techniques to the Llama 2 and Dolly LLMs to enhance their performance. We report the results of five different approaches in this paper, with our top models ranking first in the French category and sixth in the English category.