Akshay Goindani


2022

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PreCogIIITH at HinglishEval : Leveraging Code-Mixing Metrics & Language Model Embeddings To Estimate Code-Mix Quality
Prashant Kodali | Tanmay Sachan | Akshay Goindani | Anmol Goel | Naman Ahuja | Manish Shrivastava | Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Natural Language Generation: Generation Challenges

Code-Mixing is a phenomenon of mixing two or more languages in a speech event and is prevalent in multilingual societies. Given the low-resource nature of Code-Mixing, machine generation of code-mixed text is a prevalent approach for data augmentation. However, evaluating the quality of such machine gen- erated code-mixed text is an open problem. In our submission to HinglishEval, a shared- task collocated with INLG2022, we attempt to build models factors that impact the quality of synthetically generated code-mix text by pre- dicting ratings for code-mix quality. Hingli- shEval Shared Task consists of two sub-tasks - a) Quality rating prediction); b) Disagree- ment prediction. We leverage popular code- mixed metrics and embeddings of multilin- gual large language models (MLLMs) as fea- tures, and train task specific MLP regression models. Our approach could not beat the baseline results. However, for Subtask-A our team ranked a close second on F-1 and Co- hen’s Kappa Score measures and first for Mean Squared Error measure. For Subtask-B our ap- proach ranked third for F1 score, and first for Mean Squared Error measure. Code of our submission can be accessed here.

2021

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A Dynamic Head Importance Computation Mechanism for Neural Machine Translation
Akshay Goindani | Manish Shrivastava
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

Multiple parallel attention mechanisms that use multiple attention heads facilitate greater performance of the Transformer model for various applications e.g., Neural Machine Translation (NMT), text classification. In multi-head attention mechanism, different heads attend to different parts of the input. However, the limitation is that multiple heads might attend to the same part of the input, resulting in multiple heads being redundant. Thus, the model resources are under-utilized. One approach to avoid this is to prune least important heads based on certain importance score. In this work, we focus on designing a Dynamic Head Importance Computation Mechanism (DHICM) to dynamically calculate the importance of a head with respect to the input. Our insight is to design an additional attention layer together with multi-head attention, and utilize the outputs of the multi-head attention along with the input, to compute the importance for each head. Additionally, we add an extra loss function to prevent the model from assigning same score to all heads, to identify more important heads and improvise performance. We analyzed performance of DHICM for NMT with different languages. Experiments on different datasets show that DHICM outperforms traditional Transformer-based approach by large margin, especially, when less training data is available.