Vani Kanjirangat


2022

pdf
NLP DI at NADI Shared Task Subtask-1: Sub-word Level Convolutional Neural Models and Pre-trained Binary Classifiers for Dialect Identification
Vani Kanjirangat | Tanja Samardzic | Ljiljana Dolamic | Fabio Rinaldi
Proceedings of the The Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)

In this paper, we describe our systems submitted to the NADI Subtask 1: country-wise dialect classifications. We designed two types of solutions. The first type is convolutional neural network CNN) classifiers trained on subword segments of optimized lengths. The second type is fine-tuned classifiers with BERT-based language specific pre-trained models. To deal with the missing dialects in one of the test sets, we experimented with binary classifiers, analyzing the predicted probability distribution patterns and comparing them with the development set patterns. The better performing approach on the development set was fine-tuning language specific pre-trained model (best F-score 26.59%). On the test set, on the other hand, we obtained the best performance with the CNN model trained on subword tokens obtained with a Unigram model (the best F-score 26.12%). Re-training models on samples of training data simulating missing dialects gave the maximum performance on the test set version with a number of dialects lesser than the training set (F-score 16.44%)

pdf
Early Guessing for Dialect Identification
Vani Kanjirangat | Tanja Samardzic | Fabio Rinaldi | Ljiljana Dolamic
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

This paper deals with the problem of incre-mental dialect identification. Our goal is toreliably determine the dialect before the fullutterance is given as input. The major partof the previous research on dialect identification has been model-centric, focusing on performance. We address a new question: How much input is needed to identify a dialect? Ourapproach is a data-centric analysis that resultsin general criteria for finding the shortest inputneeded to make a plausible guess. Workingwith three sets of language dialects (Swiss German, Indo-Aryan and Arabic languages), weshow that it is possible to generalize across dialects and datasets with two input shorteningcriteria: model confidence and minimal inputlength (adjusted for the input type). The sourcecode for experimental analysis can be found atGithub.

2020

pdf
SST-BERT at SemEval-2020 Task 1: Semantic Shift Tracing by Clustering in BERT-based Embedding Spaces
Vani Kanjirangat | Sandra Mitrovic | Alessandro Antonucci | Fabio Rinaldi
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Lexical semantic change detection (also known as semantic shift tracing) is a task of identifying words that have changed their meaning over time. Unsupervised semantic shift tracing, focal point of SemEval2020, is particularly challenging. Given the unsupervised setup, in this work, we propose to identify clusters among different occurrences of each target word, considering these as representatives of different word meanings. As such, disagreements in obtained clusters naturally allow to quantify the level of semantic shift per each target word in four target languages. To leverage this idea, clustering is performed on contextualized (BERT-based) embeddings of word occurrences. The obtained results show that our approach performs well both measured separately (per language) and overall, where we surpass all provided SemEval baselines.