Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT leaves much to be desired for low-resource languages. This is due to the smaller size of available parallel corpora in these languages, if such corpora are available at all. NLP in Ethiopian languages suffers from the same issues due to the unavailability of publicly accessible datasets for NLP tasks, including MT. To help the research community and foster research for Ethiopian languages, we introduce EthioMT – a new parallel corpus for 15 languages. We also create a new benchmark by collecting a dataset for better-researched languages in Ethiopia. We evaluate the newly collected corpus and the benchmark dataset for 23 Ethiopian languages using transformer and fine-tuning approaches.

This paper describes our participation in Task 3 and Task 5 of the #SMM4H (Social Media Mining for Health) 2024 Workshop, explicitly targeting the classification challenges within tweet data. Task 3 is a multi-class classification task centered on tweets discussing the impact of outdoor environments on symptoms of social anxiety. Task 5 involves a binary classification task focusing on tweets reporting medical disorders in children. We applied transfer learning from pre-trained encoder-decoder models such as BART-base and T5-small to identify the labels of a set of given tweets. We also presented some data augmentation methods to see their impact on the model performance. Finally, the systems obtained the best F1 score of 0.627 in Task 3 and the best F1 score of 0.841 in Task 5

The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages and the risk they face of being overlooked in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to bridge the gap between these communities and researchers, emphasizing the need for inclusive technological advancements that respect indigenous community perspectives. We show the NLP progress of indigenous Latin American languages and the survey that covers the status of indigenous languages in Latin America, their representation in NLP, and the challenges and innovations required for their preservation and development. The paper contributes to the current literature in understanding the need and progress of NLP for indigenous communities of Latin America, specifically low-resource and indigenous communities in general.

In the contemporary digital landscape, social media has emerged as a prominent means of communication and information dissemination, offering a rapid outreach to a broad audience compared to traditional communication methods. Unfortunately, the escalating prevalence of abusive language and hate speech on these platforms has become a pressing issue. Detecting and addressing such content on the Internet has garnered considerable attention due to the significant impact it has on individuals. The advent of deep learning has facilitated the use of pre-trained deep neural network models for text classification tasks. While these models demonstrate high performance, some exhibit a substantial number of parameters. In the DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024 task, we opted for the Distilbert-base-multilingual-cased model, an enhancement of the BERT model that effectively reduces the number of parameters without compromising performance. This model was selected based on its exceptional results in the task. Our system achieved a commendable Macro F1 score of 0.6369%.

Social media has transformed into a powerful tool for sharing information while upholding the principle of free expression. However, this open platform has given rise to significant issues like hate speech, cyberbullying, aggression, and offensive language, negatively impacting societal well-being. These problems can even lead to severe consequences such as suicidal thoughts, affecting the mental health of the victims. Our primary goal is to develop an automated system for the rapid detection of offensive content on social media, facilitating timely interventions and moderation. This research employs various machine learning classifiers, utilizing character N-gram TF-IDF features. Additionally, we introduce SVM, RL, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models specifically designed for hate speech detection. SVM utilizes character Ngram TF-IDF features, while CNN employs word embedding features. Through extensive experiments, we achieved optimal results, with a weighted F1-score of 0.77 in identifying hate speech and offensive language.

Over the past few years, research on hate speech and offensive content identification on social media has been ongoing. Since most people in the world are not native English speakers, unapproved messages are typically sent in code-mixed language. We accomplished collaborative work to identify the language of code-mixed text on social media in order to address the difficulties associated with it in the Telugu language scenario. Specifically, we participated in the shared task on the provided dataset by the Dravidian- LangTech Organizer for the purpose of identifying hate and non-hate content. The assignment is to classify each sentence in the provided text into two predetermined groups: hate or non-hate. We developed a model in Python and selected a BERT multilingual to do the given task. Using a train-development data set, we developed a model, which we then tested on test data sets. An average macro F1 score metric was used to measure the model’s performance. For the task, the model reported an average macro F1 of 0.6151.

This research tackles the issue of fake news by utilizing the RNN-LSTM deep learning method with optimized hyperparameters identified through grid search. The model’s performance in multi-label classification is hindered by unbalanced data, despite its success in binary classification. We achieved a score of 0.82 in the binary classification task, whereas in the multi-class task, the score was 0.32. We suggest incorporating data balancing techniques for researchers who aim to further this task, aiming to improve results in managing a variety of information.

Hate speech detection during times of war has become crucial in recent years, as evident with the recent Russo-Ukrainian war. In this paper, we present our submissions for both subtasks from the Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detec- tion contest at CASE 2023, RANLP 2023. We used pre-trained BERT models in both submis- sion, achieving a F1 score of 0.809 in subtask A, and F1 score of 0.567 in subtask B. In the first subtask, our result was not far from the first place, which led us to realize the lower impact of images in real-life memes about feel- ings, when compared with the impact of text. However, we observed a higher importance of images when targeting hateful feelings towards a specific entity. The source code to reproduce our results can be found at the github repository https://github.com/JesusASmx/OmeteotlAtCASE2023

In this paper, we present a parallel Spanish- Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec corpus for machine translation (MT) tasks, where Mazatec and Mixtec are two indigenous Mexican languages. We evaluated the usability of the collected corpus using three different approaches: transformer, transfer learning, and fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual MT models. Fine-tuning the Facebook m2m100-48 model outperformed the other approaches, with BLEU scores of 12.09 and 22.25 for Mazatec-Spanish and Spanish-Mazatec translations, respectively, and 16.75 and 22.15 for Mixtec-Spanish and Spanish-Mixtec translations, respectively. The results indicate that translation performance is influenced by the dataset size (9,799 sentences in Mazatec and 13,235 sentences in Mixtec) and is more effective when indigenous languages are used as target languages. The findings emphasize the importance of creating parallel corpora for indigenous languages and fine-tuning models for low-resource translation tasks. Future research will investigate zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to further improve translation performance in low-resource settings.

This paper describes CIC NLP’s submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) — Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.

With the prevalence of code-mixing among speakers of Dravidian languages, DravidianLangTech proposed the shared task on Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu at RANLP 2023. This paper presents the submission of LIDOMA, which proposes a methodology that combines lexical features and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to address the challenge. A fine-tuned 6-layered CNN model is employed, achieving macro F1 scores of 0.542 and 0.199 for Tulu and Tamil, respectively

This research paper focuses on sentiment analysis of Tamil and Tulu texts using a BERT model and an RNN model. The BERT model, which was pretrained, achieved satisfactory performance for the Tulu language, with a Macro F1 score of 0.352. On the other hand, the RNN model showed good performance for Tamil language sentiment analysis, obtaining a Macro F1 score of 0.208. As future work, the researchers aim to fine-tune the models to further improve their results after the training process.

This research focuses on identifying abusive language in comments. The study utilizes deep learning models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), to analyze linguistic patterns. Specifically, the LSTM model, a type of RNN, is used to understand the context by capturing long-term dependencies and intricate patterns in the input sequences. The LSTM model achieves better accuracy and is enhanced through the addition of a dropout layer and early stopping. For detecting abusive language in Telugu and Tamil-English, an LSTM model is employed, while in Tamil abusive language detection, a word-level RNN is developed to identify abusive words. These models process text sequentially, considering overall content and capturing contextual dependencies.

We present our systems and findings for the iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic at SEMEVAL 2022. Specifically we take part in Subtask A for the English language. The task aims to determine whether a text from social media (a tweet) is sarcastic or not. We model the problem using knowledge sources, a pre-trained language model on sentiment/emotion data and a dataset focused on intended sarcasm. Our submission ranked third place among 43 teams. In addition, we show a brief error analysis of our best model to investigate challenging examples for detecting sarcasm.

Named entity recognition (e.g., disease mention extraction) is one of the most relevant tasks for data mining in the medical field. Although it is a well-known challenge, the bulk of the efforts to tackle this task have been made using clinical texts commonly written in English. In this work, we present our contribution to the SocialDisNER competition, which consists of a transfer learning approach to extracting disease mentions in a corpus from Twitter written in Spanish. We fine-tuned a model based on mBERT and applied post-processing using regular expressions to propagate the entities identified by the model and enhance disease mention extraction. Our system achieved a competitive strict F1 of 0.851 on the testing data set.

This paper describes our submissions for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 shared tasks. We participated in 2 tasks: a) Task 4: Classification of Tweets self-reporting exact age and b) Task 9: Classification of Reddit posts self-reporting exact age. We evaluated the two( BERT and RoBERTa) transformer based models for both tasks. For Task 4 RoBERTa-Large achieved an F1 score of 0.846 on the test set and BERT-Large achieved an F1 score of 0.865 on the test set for Task 9.

Language Identification at the Word Level in Kannada-English Texts. This paper describes the system paper of CoLI-Kanglish 2022 shared task. The goal of this task is to identify the different languages used in CoLI-Kanglish 2022. This dataset is distributed into different categories including Kannada, English, Mixed-Language, Location, Name, and Others. This Code-Mix was compiled by CoLI-Kanglish 2022 organizers from posts on social media. We use two classification techniques, KNN and SVM, and achieve an F1-score of 0.58 and place third out of nine competitors.

The goal of code-mixed language identification (LID) is to determine which language is spoken or written in a given segment of a speech, word, sentence, or document. Our task is to identify English, Kannada, and mixed language from the provided data. To train a model we used the CoLI-Kenglish dataset, which contains English, Kannada, and mixed-language words. In our work, we conducted several experiments in order to obtain the best performing model. Then, we implemented the best model by using Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), which outperformed the other trained models with an F1-score of 0.61%.

The task of Language Identification (LI) in text processing refers to automatically identifying the languages used in a text document. LI task is usually been studied at the document level and often in high-resource languages while giving less importance to low-resource languages. However, with the recent advance- ment in technologies, in a multilingual country like India, many low-resource language users post their comments using English and one or more language(s) in the form of code-mixed texts. Combination of Kannada and English is one such code-mixed text of mixing Kannada and English languages at various levels. To address the word level LI in code-mixed text, in CoLI-Kanglish shared task, we have focused on open-sourcing a Kannada-English code-mixed dataset for word level LI of Kannada, English and mixed-language words written in Roman script. The task includes classifying each word in the given text into one of six predefined categories, namely: Kannada (kn), English (en), Kannada-English (kn-en), Name (name), Lo-cation (location), and Other (other). Among the models submitted by all the participants, the best performing model obtained averaged-weighted and averaged-macro F1 scores of 0.86 and 0.62 respectively.

Hope is an inherent part of human life and essential for improving the quality of life. Hope increases happiness and reduces stress and feelings of helplessness. Hope speech is the desired outcome for better and can be studied using text from various online sources where people express their desires and outcomes. In this paper, we address a deep-learning approach with a combination of linguistic and psycho-linguistic features for hope-speech detection. We report our best results submitted to LT-EDI-2022 which ranked 2nd and 3rd in English and Spanish respectively.

Social media analytics are widely being explored by researchers for various applications. Prominent among them are identifying and blocking abusive contents especially targeting individuals and communities, for various reasons. The increasing abusive contents and the increasing number of users on social media demands automated tools to detect and filter the abusive contents as it is highly impossible to handle this manually. To address the challenges of detecting abusive contents, this paper describes the approaches proposed by our team MUCIC for Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification shared task (ComMA@ICON) at International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) 2021. This shared task dataset consists of code-mixed multi-script texts in Meitei, Bangla, Hindi as well as in Multilingual (a combination of Meitei, Bangla, Hindi, and English). The shared task is modeled as a multi-label Text Classification (TC) task combining word and char n-grams with vectors obtained from Multilingual Sentence Encoder (MSE) to train the Machine Learning (ML) classifiers using Pre-aggregation and Post-aggregation of labels. These approaches obtained the highest performance in the shared task for Meitei, Bangla, and Multilingual texts with instance-F1 scores of 0.350, 0.412, and 0.380 respectively using Pre-aggregation of labels.

Current approaches to empathetic response generation view the set of emotions expressed in the input text as a flat structure, where all the emotions are treated uniformly. We argue that empathetic responses often mimic the emotion of the user to a varying degree, depending on its positivity or negativity and content. We show that the consideration of these polarity-based emotion clusters and emotional mimicry results in improved empathy and contextual relevance of the response as compared to the state-of-the-art. Also, we introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied empathetic responses than the previous work. We demonstrate the importance of these factors to empathetic response generation using both automatic- and human-based evaluations. The implementation of MIME is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/MIME.

This paper describes our submission to the ALTA-2020 shared task on assessing behaviour from short text, We evaluate the effectiveness of traditional machine learning and recent transformers pre-trained models. Our submission with the Roberta-large model and prediction threshold achieved first place on the private leaderboard.

In this paper, we address the task of utterance level emotion recognition in conversations using commonsense knowledge. We propose COSMIC, a new framework that incorporates different elements of commonsense such as mental states, events, and causal relations, and build upon them to learn interactions between interlocutors participating in a conversation. Current state-of-theart methods often encounter difficulties in context propagation, emotion shift detection, and differentiating between related emotion classes. By learning distinct commonsense representations, COSMIC addresses these challenges and achieves new state-of-the-art results for emotion recognition on four different benchmark conversational datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/conv-emotion.

Code-switching is a phenomenon in which two or more languages are used in the same message. Nowadays, it is quite common to find messages with languages mixed in social media. This phenomenon presents a challenge for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we use a standard convolutional neural network model to predict the sentiment of tweets in a blend of Spanish and English languages. Our simple approach achieved a F1-score of 0:71 on test set on the competition. We analyze our best model capabilities and perform error analysis to expose important difficulties for classifying sentiment in a code-switching setting.

In recent years, the use of social media has in-creased incredibly. Social media permits Inter-net users a friendly platform to express their views and opinions. Along with these nice and distinct communication chances, it also allows bad things like usage of hate speech. Online automatic hate speech detection in various aspects is a significant scientific problem. This paper presents the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Mexico) approach for the Semeval 2019 Task-5 [Hateval 2019] (Basile et al., 2019) competition for Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech on Twitter. The goal of this paper is to detect (A) Hate speech against immigrants and women, (B) Aggressive behavior and target classification, both for English and Spanish. In the proposed approach, we used a bag of words model with preprocessing (stem-ming and stop words removal). We submitted two different systems with names: (i) CIC-1 and (ii) CIC-2 for Hateval 2019 shared task. We used TF values in the first system and TF-IDF for the second system. The first system, CIC-1 got 2nd rank in subtask B for both English and Spanish languages with EMR score of 0.568 for English and 0.675 for Spanish. The second system, CIC-2 was ranked 4th in sub-task A and 1st in subtask B for Spanish language with a macro-F1 score of 0.727 and EMR score of 0.705 respectively.

This paper details our approach to the task of detecting reportage of adverse drug reaction in tweets as part of the 2019 social media mining for healthcare applications shared task. We employed a combination of three types of word representations as input to a LSTM model. With this approach, we achieved an F1 score of 0.5209.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has received much attention, lately, from researchers due to its potential widespread applications in diverse areas, such as health-care, education, and human resources. In this paper, we present Dialogue Graph Convolutional Network (DialogueGCN), a graph neural network based approach to ERC. We leverage self and inter-speaker dependency of the interlocutors to model conversational context for emotion recognition. Through the graph network, DialogueGCN addresses context propagation issues present in the current RNN-based methods. We empirically show that this method alleviates such issues, while outperforming the current state of the art on a number of benchmark emotion classification datasets.

We describe the systems of NLP-CIC team that participated in the Complex Word Identification (CWI) 2018 shared task. The shared task aimed to benchmark approaches for identifying complex words in English and other languages from the perspective of non-native speakers. Our goal is to compare two approaches: feature engineering and a deep neural network. Both approaches achieved comparable performance on the English test set. We demonstrated the flexibility of the deep-learning approach by using the same deep neural network setup in the Spanish track. Our systems achieved competitive results: all our systems were within 0.01 of the system with the best macro-F1 score on the test sets except on Wikipedia test set, on which our best system is 0.04 below the best macro-F1 score.

With the advent of the read-write web which facilitates social interactions in online spaces, the rise of anti-social behaviour in online spaces has attracted the attention of researchers. In this paper, we address the challenge of automatically identifying aggression in social media posts. Our team, saroyehun, participated in the English track of the Aggression Detection in Social Media Shared Task. On this task, we investigate the efficacy of deep neural network models of varying complexity. Our results reveal that deep neural network models require more data points to do better than an NBSVM linear baseline based on character n-grams. Our improved deep neural network models were trained on augmented data and pseudo labeled examples. Our LSTM classifier receives a weighted macro-F1 score of 0.6425 to rank first overall on the Facebook subtask of the shared task. On the social media sub-task, our CNN-LSTM model records a weighted macro-F1 score of 0.5920 to place third overall.

We describe our submissions to the Third Social Media Mining for Health Applications Shared Task. We participated in two tasks (tasks 1 and 3). For both tasks, we experimented with a traditional machine learning model (Naive Bayes Support Vector Machine (NBSVM)), deep learning models (Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM)), and the combination of deep learning model with SVM. We observed that the NBSVM reaches superior performance on both tasks on our development split of the training data sets. Official result for task 1 based on the blind evaluation data shows that the predictions of the NBSVM achieved our team’s best F-score of 0.910 which is above the average score received by all submissions to the task. On task 3, the combination of of BiLSTM and SVM gives our best F-score for the positive class of 0.394.

Sentiment analysis has immense implications in e-commerce through user feedback mining. Aspect-based sentiment analysis takes this one step further by enabling businesses to extract aspect specific sentimental information. In this paper, we present a novel approach of incorporating the neighboring aspects related information into the sentiment classification of the target aspect using memory networks. We show that our method outperforms the state of the art by 1.6% on average in two distinct domains: restaurant and laptop.

In this paper, we describe a deep learning framework for analyzing the customer feedback as part of our participation in the shared task on Customer Feedback Analysis at the 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2017). A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based deep neural network model was employed for the customer feedback task. The proposed system was evaluated on two languages, namely, English and French.

We apply word sense disambiguation to the definitions in a Spanish explanatory dictionary. To calculate the scores of word senses basing on the context (which in our case is the dictionary definition), we use a modification of Lesk’s algorithm. The algorithm relies on a comparison between two words. In the original Lesk’s algorithm, the comparison is trivial: two words are either the same lexeme or not; our modification consists in fuzzy (weighted) comparison using a large synonym dictionary and a simple derivational morphology system. Application of disambiguation to dictionary definitions (in contrast to usual texts) allows for some simplifications of the algorithm, e.g., we do not have to care of context window size.