Since propaganda became more common technique in news, it is very important to look for possibilities of its automatic detection. In this paper, we present neural model architecture submitted to the SemEval-2020 Task 11 competition: “Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles”. We participated in both subtasks, propaganda span identification and propaganda technique classification. Our model utilizes recurrent Bi-LSTM layers with pre-trained word representations and also takes advantage of self-attention mechanism. Our model managed to achieve score 0.405 F1 for subtask 1 and 0.553 F1 for subtask 2 on test set resulting in 17th and 16th place in subtask 1 and subtask 2, respectively.

Using different neural network architectures is widely spread for many different NLP tasks. Unfortunately, most of the research is performed and evaluated only in English language and minor languages are often omitted. We believe using similar architectures for other languages can show interesting results. In this paper, we present our study on methods for improving sentiment classification in Slovak language. We performed several experiments for two different datasets, one containing customer reviews, the other one general Twitter posts. We show comparison of performance of different neural network architectures and also different word representations. We show that another improvement can be achieved by using a model ensemble. We performed experiments utilizing different methods of model ensemble. Our proposed models achieved better results than previous models for both datasets. Our experiments showed also other potential research areas.

In this paper, we present neural model architecture submitted to the SemEval-2019 Task 9 competition: “Suggestion Mining from Online Reviews and Forums”. We participated in both subtasks for domain specific and also cross-domain suggestion mining. We proposed a recurrent neural network architecture that employs Bi-LSTM layers and also self-attention mechanism. Our architecture tries to encode words via word representation using ELMo and ensembles multiple models to achieve better results. We highlight importance of pre-processing of user-generated samples and its contribution to overall results. We performed experiments with different setups of our proposed model involving weighting of prediction classes for loss function. Our best model achieved in official test evaluation score of 0.6816 for subtask A and 0.6850 for subtask B. In official results, we achieved 12th and 10th place in subtasks A and B, respectively.

In this paper, we present neural models submitted to Shared Task on Implicit Emotion Recognition, organized as part of WASSA 2018. We propose a Bi-LSTM architecture with regularization through dropout and Gaussian noise. Our models use three different embedding layers: GloVe word embeddings trained on Twitter dataset, ELMo embeddings and also sentence embeddings. We see preprocessing as one of the most important parts of the task. We focused on handling emojis, emoticons, hashtags, and also various shortened word forms. In some cases, we proposed to remove some parts of the text, as they do not affect emotion of the original sentence. We also experimented with other modifications like category weights for learning and stacking multiple layers. Our model achieved a macro average F1 score of 65.55%, significantly outperforming the baseline model produced by a simple logistic regression.

In recent years, the number of texts has grown rapidly. For example, most review-based portals, like Yelp or Amazon, contain thousands of user-generated reviews. It is impossible for any human reader to process even the most relevant of these documents. The most promising tool to solve this task is a text summarization. Most existing approaches, however, work on small, homogeneous, English datasets, and do not account to multi-linguality, opinion shift, and domain effects. In this paper, we introduce our research plan to use neural networks on user-generated travel reviews to generate summaries that take into account shifting opinions over time. We outline future directions in summarization to address all of these issues. By resolving the existing problems, we will make it easier for users of review-sites to make more informed decisions.