Megh Thakkar


2022

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CIAug: Equipping Interpolative Augmentation with Curriculum Learning
Ramit Sawhney | Ritesh Soun | Shrey Pandit | Megh Thakkar | Sarvagya Malaviya | Yuval Pinter
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Interpolative data augmentation has proven to be effective for NLP tasks. Despite its merits, the sample selection process in mixup is random, which might make it difficult for the model to generalize better and converge faster. We propose CIAug, a novel curriculum-based learning method that builds upon mixup. It leverages the relative position of samples in hyperbolic embedding space as a complexity measure to gradually mix up increasingly difficult and diverse samples along training. CIAug achieves state-of-the-art results over existing interpolative augmentation methods on 10 benchmark datasets across 4 languages in text classification and named-entity recognition tasks. It also converges and achieves benchmark F1 scores 3 times faster. We empirically analyze the various components of CIAug, and evaluate its robustness against adversarial attacks.

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Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization
Shankar Kantharaj | Rixie Tiffany Leong | Xiang Lin | Ahmed Masry | Megh Thakkar | Enamul Hoque | Shafiq Joty
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Charts are commonly used for exploring data and communicating insights. Generating natural language summaries from charts can be very helpful for people in inferring key insights that would otherwise require a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. We present Chart-to-text, a large-scale benchmark with two datasets and a total of 44,096 charts covering a wide range of topics and chart types. We explain the dataset construction process and analyze the datasets. We also introduce a number of state-of-the-art neural models as baselines that utilize image captioning and data-to-text generation techniques to tackle two problem variations: one assumes the underlying data table of the chart is available while the other needs to extract data from chart images. Our analysis with automatic and human evaluation shows that while our best models usually generate fluent summaries and yield reasonable BLEU scores, they also suffer from hallucinations and factual errors as well as difficulties in correctly explaining complex patterns and trends in charts.

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DMix: Adaptive Distance-aware Interpolative Mixup
Ramit Sawhney | Megh Thakkar | Shrey Pandit | Ritesh Soun | Di Jin | Diyi Yang | Lucie Flek
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Interpolation-based regularisation methods such as Mixup, which generate virtual training samples, have proven to be effective for various tasks and modalities.We extend Mixup and propose DMix, an adaptive distance-aware interpolative Mixup that selects samples based on their diversity in the embedding space. DMix leverages the hyperbolic space as a similarity measure among input samples for a richer encoded representation.DMix achieves state-of-the-art results on sentence classification over existing data augmentation methods on 8 benchmark datasets across English, Arabic, Turkish, and Hindi languages while achieving benchmark F1 scores in 3 times less number of iterations.We probe the effectiveness of DMix in conjunction with various similarity measures and qualitatively analyze the different components.DMix being generalizable, can be applied to various tasks, models and modalities.

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Tweet Based Reach Aware Temporal Attention Network for NFT Valuation
Ramit Sawhney | Megh Thakkar | Ritesh Soun | Atula Neerkaje | Vasu Sharma | Dipanwita Guhathakurta | Sudheer Chava
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a relatively unexplored class of assets. Designing strategies to forecast NFT trends is an intricate task due to its extremely volatile nature. The market is largely driven by public sentiment and “hype”, which in turn has a high correlation with conversations taking place on social media platforms like Twitter. Prior work done for modelling stock market data does not take into account the extent of impact certain highly influential tweets and their authors can have on the market. Building on these limitations and the nature of the NFT market, we propose a novel reach-aware temporal learning approach to make predictions for forecasting future trends in the NFT market. We perform experiments on a new dataset consisting of over 1.3 million tweets and 180 thousand NFT transactions spanning over 15 NFT collections curated by us. Our model (TA-NFT) outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by an average of 36%. Through extensive quantitative and ablative analysis, we demonstrate the ability of our approach as a practical method for predicting NFT trends.

2021

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HypMix: Hyperbolic Interpolative Data Augmentation
Ramit Sawhney | Megh Thakkar | Shivam Agarwal | Di Jin | Diyi Yang | Lucie Flek
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Interpolation-based regularisation methods for data augmentation have proven to be effective for various tasks and modalities. These methods involve performing mathematical operations over the raw input samples or their latent states representations - vectors that often possess complex hierarchical geometries. However, these operations are performed in the Euclidean space, simplifying these representations, which may lead to distorted and noisy interpolations. We propose HypMix, a novel model-, data-, and modality-agnostic interpolative data augmentation technique operating in the hyperbolic space, which captures the complex geometry of input and hidden state hierarchies better than its contemporaries. We evaluate HypMix on benchmark and low resource datasets across speech, text, and vision modalities, showing that HypMix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. In addition, we demonstrate the use of HypMix in semi-supervised settings. We further probe into the adversarial robustness and qualitative inferences we draw from HypMix that elucidate the efficacy of the Riemannian hyperbolic manifolds for interpolation-based data augmentation.