Content moderation on social media is governed by policies that are intricate and frequently updated with evolving world events. However, automated content moderation systems often restrict easy adaptation to policy changes and are expected to learn policy intricacies from limited amounts of labeled data, which make effective policy compliance challenging. We propose to model content moderation as a binary question answering problem where the questions validate the loosely coupled themes constituting a policy. A decision logic is applied on top to aggregate the theme-specific validations. This way the questions pass theme information to a transformer network as explicit policy prompts, that in turn enables explainability. This setting further allows for faster adaptation to policy updates by leveraging zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained transformers. We showcase improved recall for our proposed method at 95\% precision on two proprietary datasets of social media posts and comments respectively annotated under curated Hate Speech and Commercial Spam policies.

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) techniques are designed to automatically assess short answers written in natural language. Apart from MCQs, evaluating free text answer is essential to assess the knowledge and understanding of children in the subject. But assessing descriptive answers in low resource languages in a linguistically diverse country like India poses significant hurdles. To solve this assessment problem and advance NLP research in regional Indian languages, we present the Science Answer Assessment (ScAA) dataset of children’s answers in the age group of 8-14. ScAA dataset is a 2-way (correct/incorrect) labeled dataset and contains 10,988 and 1,955 pairs of natural answers along with model answers for Hindi and Marathi respectively for 32 questions. We benchmark various state-of-the-art ASAG methods, and show the data presents a strong challenge for future research.

The requirement of performing assessments continually on a larger scale necessitates the implementation of automated systems for evaluation of the learners’ responses to free-text questions. We target children of age group 8-14 years and use an ASR integrated assessment app to crowdsource learners’ responses to free text questions in Hindi. The app helped collect 39641 user answers to 35 different questions of Science topics. Since the users are young children from rural India and may not be well-equipped with technology, it brings in various noise types in the answers. We describe these noise types and propose a preprocessing pipeline to denoise user’s answers. We showcase the performance of different similarity metrics on the noisy and denoised versions of user and model answers. Our findings have large-scale applications for automated answer assessment for school children in India in low resource settings.

The logistics of collecting resources for Machine Translation (MT) has always been a cause of concern for some of the resource deprived languages of the world. The recent advent of crowdsourcing platforms provides an opportunity to explore the large scale generation of resources for MT. However, before venturing into this mode of resource collection, it is important to understand the various factors such as, task design, crowd motivation, quality control, etc. which can influence the success of such a crowd sourcing venture. In this paper, we present our experiences based on a series of experiments performed. This is an attempt to provide a holistic view of the different facets of translation crowd sourcing and identifying key challenges which need to be addressed for building a practical crowdsourcing solution for MT.