Vikas Raykar


2017

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GRASP: Rich Patterns for Argumentation Mining
Eyal Shnarch | Ran Levy | Vikas Raykar | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

GRASP (GReedy Augmented Sequential Patterns) is an algorithm for automatically extracting patterns that characterize subtle linguistic phenomena. To that end, GRASP augments each term of input text with multiple layers of linguistic information. These different facets of the text terms are systematically combined to reveal rich patterns. We report highly promising experimental results in several challenging text analysis tasks within the field of Argumentation Mining. We believe that GRASP is general enough to be useful for other domains too. For example, each of the following sentences includes a claim for a [topic]: 1. Opponents often argue that the open primary is unconstitutional. [Open Primaries] 2. Prof. Smith suggested that affirmative action devalues the accomplishments of the chosen. [Affirmative Action] 3. The majority stated that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to offend others. [Freedom of Speech] These sentences share almost no words in common, however, they are similar at a more abstract level. A human observer may notice the following underlying common structure, or pattern: [someone][argue/suggest/state][that][topic term][sentiment term]. GRASP aims to automatically capture such underlying structures of the given data. For the above examples it finds the pattern [noun][express][that][noun,topic][sentiment], where [express] stands for all its (in)direct hyponyms, and [noun,topic] means a noun which is also related to the topic.

2016

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An Empirical Evaluation of various Deep Learning Architectures for Bi-Sequence Classification Tasks
Anirban Laha | Vikas Raykar
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Several tasks in argumentation mining and debating, question-answering, and natural language inference involve classifying a sequence in the context of another sequence (referred as bi-sequence classification). For several single sequence classification tasks, the current state-of-the-art approaches are based on recurrent and convolutional neural networks. On the other hand, for bi-sequence classification problems, there is not much understanding as to the best deep learning architecture. In this paper, we attempt to get an understanding of this category of problems by extensive empirical evaluation of 19 different deep learning architectures (specifically on different ways of handling context) for various problems originating in natural language processing like debating, textual entailment and question-answering. Following the empirical evaluation, we offer our insights and conclusions regarding the architectures we have considered. We also establish the first deep learning baselines for three argumentation mining tasks.

2014

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Claims on demand – an initial demonstration of a system for automatic detection and polarity identification of context dependent claims in massive corpora
Noam Slonim | Ehud Aharoni | Carlos Alzate | Roy Bar-Haim | Yonatan Bilu | Lena Dankin | Iris Eiron | Daniel Hershcovich | Shay Hummel | Mitesh Khapra | Tamar Lavee | Ran Levy | Paul Matchen | Anatoly Polnarov | Vikas Raykar | Ruty Rinott | Amrita Saha | Naama Zwerdling | David Konopnicki | Dan Gutfreund
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations