Riyaz Ahmad Bhat

Also published as: Riyaz A. Bhat


2022

pdf
Is My Model Using the Right Evidence? Systematic Probes for Examining Evidence-Based Tabular Reasoning
Vivek Gupta | Riyaz A. Bhat | Atreya Ghosal | Manish Shrivastava | Maneesh Singh | Vivek Srikumar
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

Neural models command state-of-the-art performance across NLP tasks, including ones involving “reasoning”. Models claiming to reason about the evidence presented to them should attend to the correct parts of the input while avoiding spurious patterns therein, be self-consistent in their predictions across inputs, and be immune to biases derived from their pre-training in a nuanced, context- sensitive fashion. Do the prevalent *BERT- family of models do so? In this paper, we study this question using the problem of reasoning on tabular data. Tabular inputs are especially well-suited for the study—they admit systematic probes targeting the properties listed above. Our experiments demonstrate that a RoBERTa-based model, representative of the current state-of-the-art, fails at reasoning on the following counts: it (a) ignores relevant parts of the evidence, (b) is over- sensitive to annotation artifacts, and (c) relies on the knowledge encoded in the pre-trained language model rather than the evidence presented in its tabular inputs. Finally, through inoculation experiments, we show that fine- tuning the model on perturbed data does not help it overcome the above challenges.

2018

pdf
Universal Dependency Parsing for Hindi-English Code-Switching
Irshad Bhat | Riyaz A. Bhat | Manish Shrivastava | Dipti Sharma
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Code-switching is a phenomenon of mixing grammatical structures of two or more languages under varied social constraints. The code-switching data differ so radically from the benchmark corpora used in NLP community that the application of standard technologies to these data degrades their performance sharply. Unlike standard corpora, these data often need to go through additional processes such as language identification, normalization and/or back-transliteration for their efficient processing. In this paper, we investigate these indispensable processes and other problems associated with syntactic parsing of code-switching data and propose methods to mitigate their effects. In particular, we study dependency parsing of code-switching data of Hindi and English multilingual speakers from Twitter. We present a treebank of Hindi-English code-switching tweets under Universal Dependencies scheme and propose a neural stacking model for parsing that efficiently leverages the part-of-speech tag and syntactic tree annotations in the code-switching treebank and the preexisting Hindi and English treebanks. We also present normalization and back-transliteration models with a decoding process tailored for code-switching data. Results show that our neural stacking parser is 1.5% LAS points better than the augmented parsing model and 3.8% LAS points better than the one which uses first-best normalization and/or back-transliteration.

pdf
The SLT-Interactions Parsing System at the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task
Riyaz A. Bhat | Irshad Bhat | Srinivas Bangalore
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies

This paper describes our system (SLT-Interactions) for the CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system performs three main tasks: word segmentation (only for few treebanks), POS tagging and parsing. While segmentation is learned separately, we use neural stacking for joint learning of POS tagging and parsing tasks. For all the tasks, we employ simple neural network architectures that rely on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for learning task-dependent features. At the basis of our parser, we use an arc-standard algorithm with Swap action for general non-projective parsing. Additionally, we use neural stacking as a knowledge transfer mechanism for cross-domain parsing of low resource domains. Our system shows substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 4.18% in LAS across all languages. Overall, we are placed at the 12th position on the official test sets.

2017

pdf
Leveraging Newswire Treebanks for Parsing Conversational Data with Argument Scrambling
Riyaz A. Bhat | Irshad Bhat | Dipti Sharma
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Parsing Technologies

We investigate the problem of parsing conversational data of morphologically-rich languages such as Hindi where argument scrambling occurs frequently. We evaluate a state-of-the-art non-linear transition-based parsing system on a new dataset containing 506 dependency trees for sentences from Bollywood (Hindi) movie scripts and Twitter posts of Hindi monolingual speakers. We show that a dependency parser trained on a newswire treebank is strongly biased towards the canonical structures and degrades when applied to conversational data. Inspired by Transformational Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1965), we mitigate the sampling bias by generating all theoretically possible alternative word orders of a clause from the existing (kernel) structures in the treebank. Training our parser on canonical and transformed structures improves performance on conversational data by around 9% LAS over the baseline newswire parser.

pdf
Joining Hands: Exploiting Monolingual Treebanks for Parsing of Code-mixing Data
Irshad Bhat | Riyaz A. Bhat | Manish Shrivastava | Dipti Sharma
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

In this paper, we propose efficient and less resource-intensive strategies for parsing of code-mixed data. These strategies are not constrained by in-domain annotations, rather they leverage pre-existing monolingual annotated resources for training. We show that these methods can produce significantly better results as compared to an informed baseline. Due to lack of an evaluation set for code-mixed structures, we also present a data set of 450 Hindi and English code-mixed tweets of Hindi multilingual speakers for evaluation.

2016

pdf
A Proposition Bank of Urdu
Maaz Anwar | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Dipti Sharma | Ashwini Vaidya | Martha Palmer | Tafseer Ahmed Khan
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper describes our efforts for the development of a Proposition Bank for Urdu, an Indo-Aryan language. Our primary goal is the labeling of syntactic nodes in the existing Urdu dependency Treebank with specific argument labels. In essence, it involves annotation of predicate argument structures of both simple and complex predicates in the Treebank corpus. We describe the overall process of building the PropBank of Urdu. We discuss various statistics pertaining to the Urdu PropBank and the issues which the annotators encountered while developing the PropBank. We also discuss how these challenges were addressed to successfully expand the PropBank corpus. While reporting the Inter-annotator agreement between the two annotators, we show that the annotators share similar understanding of the annotation guidelines and of the linguistic phenomena present in the language. The present size of this Propbank is around 180,000 tokens which is double-propbanked by the two annotators for simple predicates. Another 100,000 tokens have been annotated for complex predicates of Urdu.

pdf
Conversion from Paninian Karakas to Universal Dependencies for Hindi Dependency Treebank
Juhi Tandon | Himani Chaudhry | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Dipti Sharma
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

pdf
A House United: Bridging the Script and Lexical Barrier between Hindi and Urdu
Riyaz A. Bhat | Irshad A. Bhat | Naman Jain | Dipti Misra Sharma
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

In Computational Linguistics, Hindi and Urdu are not viewed as a monolithic entity and have received separate attention with respect to their text processing. From part-of-speech tagging to machine translation, models are separately trained for both Hindi and Urdu despite the fact that they represent the same language. The reasons mainly are their divergent literary vocabularies and separate orthographies, and probably also their political status and the social perception that they are two separate languages. In this article, we propose a simple but efficient approach to bridge the lexical and orthographic differences between Hindi and Urdu texts. With respect to text processing, addressing the differences between the Hindi and Urdu texts would be beneficial in the following ways: (a) instead of training separate models, their individual resources can be augmented to train single, unified models for better generalization, and (b) their individual text processing applications can be used interchangeably under varied resource conditions. To remove the script barrier, we learn accurate statistical transliteration models which use sentence-level decoding to resolve word ambiguity. Similarly, we learn cross-register word embeddings from the harmonized Hindi and Urdu corpora to nullify their lexical divergences. As a proof of the concept, we evaluate our approach on the Hindi and Urdu dependency parsing under two scenarios: (a) resource sharing, and (b) resource augmentation. We demonstrate that a neural network-based dependency parser trained on augmented, harmonized Hindi and Urdu resources performs significantly better than the parsing models trained separately on the individual resources. We also show that we can achieve near state-of-the-art results when the parsers are used interchangeably.

2014

pdf
Language Identification in Code-Switching Scenario
Naman Jain | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching

pdf
Adapting Predicate Frames for Urdu PropBanking
Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Naman Jain | Ashwini Vaidya | Martha Palmer | Tafseer Ahmed Khan | Dipti Misra Sharma | James Babani
Proceedings of the EMNLP’2014 Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages and Language Variants

pdf
Towards building a Kashmiri Treebank: Setting up the Annotation Pipeline
Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Shahid Mushtaq Bhat | Dipti Misra Sharma
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

Kashmiri is a resource poor language with very less computational and language resources available for its text processing. As the main contribution of this paper, we present an initial version of the Kashmiri Dependency Treebank. The treebank consists of 1,000 sentences (17,462 tokens), annotated with part-of-speech (POS), chunk and dependency information. The treebank has been manually annotated using the Paninian Computational Grammar (PCG) formalism (Begum et al., 2008; Bharati et al., 2009). This version of Kashmiri treebank is an extension of its earlier verion of 500 sentences (Bhat, 2012), a pilot experiment aimed at defining the annotation guidelines on a small subset of Kashmiri corpora. In this paper, we have refined the guidelines with some significant changes and have carried out inter-annotator agreement studies to ascertain its quality. We also present a dependency parsing pipeline, consisting of a tokenizer, a stemmer, a POS tagger, a chunker and an inter-chunk dependency parser. It, therefore, constitutes the first freely available, open source dependency parser of Kashmiri, setting the initial baseline for Kashmiri dependency parsing.

2013

pdf
Animacy Annotation in the Hindi Treebank
Itisree Jena | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Sambhav Jain | Dipti Misra Sharma
Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse

pdf
Transliteration Systems across Indian Languages Using Parallel Corpora
Rishabh Srivastava | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat
Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27)

pdf
Automatic Clause Boundary Annotation in the Hindi Treebank
Rahul Sharma | Soma Paul | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Sambhav Jain
Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27)

pdf
Animacy Acquisition Using Morphological Case
Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Dipti Misra Sharma
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

pdf
Exploring Semantic Information in Hindi WordNet for Hindi Dependency Parsing
Sambhav Jain | Naman Jain | Aniruddha Tammewar | Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Dipti Sharma
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

2012

pdf
Dependency Treebank of Urdu and its Evaluation
Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Dipti Misra Sharma
Proceedings of the Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop