Transformer based language models have been widely adopted by industrial and research organisations in developing machine learning applications in the presence of limited annotated data. While these models show remarkable results, their functioning in few-shot settings is still poorly understood. Hence, we perform an investigative study to understand the characteristics of such models fine-tuned in few-shot setups. Specifically, we compare the intermediate layer representations obtained from a few-shot model and a pre-trained language model. We observe that pre-trained and few-shot models show similar representations over initial layers, whereas the later layers show a stark deviation. Based on these observations, we propose to freeze the initial Transformer layers to fine-tune the model in a constrained text classification setup with K annotated data points per class, where K ranges from 8 to 64. In our experiments across six benchmark sentence classification tasks, we discover that freezing initial 50% Transformer layers not only reduces training time but also surprisingly improves Macro F1 (upto 8%) when compared to fully trainable layers in few-shot setup. We also observe that this idea of layer freezing can very well be generalized to state-of-the-art few-shot text classification techniques, like DNNC and LM-BFF, leading to significant reduction in training time while maintaining comparable performance.

Automatic Cognate Detection (ACD) is a challenging task which has been utilized to help NLP applications like Machine Translation, Information Retrieval and Computational Phylogenetics. Unidentified cognate pairs can pose a challenge to these applications and result in a degradation of performance. In this paper, we detect cognate word pairs among ten Indian languages with Hindi and use deep learning methodologies to predict whether a word pair is cognate or not. We identify IndoWordnet as a potential resource to detect cognate word pairs based on orthographic similarity-based methods and train neural network models using the data obtained from it. We identify parallel corpora as another potential resource and perform the same experiments for them. We also validate the contribution of Wordnets through further experimentation and report improved performance of up to 26%. We discuss the nuances of cognate detection among closely related Indian languages and release the lists of detected cognates as a dataset. We also observe the behaviour of, to an extent, unrelated Indian language pairs and release the lists of detected cognates among them as well.

Predicting a reader’s rating of text quality is a challenging task that involves estimating different subjective aspects of the text, like structure, clarity, etc. Such subjective aspects are better handled using cognitive information. One such source of cognitive information is gaze behaviour. In this paper, we show that gaze behaviour does indeed help in effectively predicting the rating of text quality. To do this, we first we model text quality as a function of three properties - organization, coherence and cohesion. Then, we demonstrate how capturing gaze behaviour helps in predicting each of these properties, and hence the overall quality, by reporting improvements obtained by adding gaze features to traditional textual features for score prediction. We also hypothesize that if a reader has fully understood the text, the corresponding gaze behaviour would give a better indication of the assigned rating, as opposed to partial understanding. Our experiments validate this hypothesis by showing greater agreement between the given rating and the predicted rating when the reader has a full understanding of the text.

Interpreting noun compounds is a challenging task. It involves uncovering the underlying predicate which is dropped in the formation of the compound. In most cases, this predicate is of the form VERB+PREP. It has been observed that uncovering the preposition is a significant step towards uncovering the predicate. In this paper, we attempt to paraphrase noun compounds using prepositions. We consider noun compounds and their corresponding prepositional paraphrases as parallelly aligned sequences of words. This enables us to adapt different architectures from cross-lingual embedding literature. We choose the architecture where we create representations of both noun compound (source sequence) and its corresponding prepositional paraphrase (target sequence), such that their sim- ilarity is high. We use LSTMs to learn these representations. We use these representations to decide the correct preposition. Our experiments show that this approach performs considerably well on different datasets of noun compounds that are manually annotated with prepositions.

Wordnets are rich lexico-semantic resources. Linked wordnets are extensions of wordnets, which link similar concepts in wordnets of different languages. Such resources are extremely useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, primarily those based on knowledge-based approaches. In such approaches, these resources are considered as gold standard/oracle. Thus, it is crucial that these resources hold correct information. Thereby, they are created by human experts. However, manual maintenance of such resources is a tedious and costly affair. Thus techniques that can aid the experts are desirable. In this paper, we propose an approach to link wordnets. Given a synset of the source language, the approach returns a ranked list of potential candidate synsets in the target language from which the human expert can choose the correct one(s). Our technique is able to retrieve a winner synset in the top 10 ranked list for 60% of all synsets and 70% of noun synsets.

Given a word, what is the most frequent sense in which it occurs in a given corpus? Most Frequent Sense (MFS) is a strong baseline for unsupervised word sense disambiguation. If we have large amounts of sense-annotated corpora, MFS can be trivially created. However, sense-annotated corpora are a rarity. In this paper, we propose a method which can compute MFS from raw corpora. Our approach iteratively exploits the semantic congruity among related words in corpus. Our method performs better compared to another similar work.

Word embeddings are a crucial component in modern NLP. Pre-trained embeddings released by different groups have been a major reason for their popularity. However, they are trained on generic corpora, which limits their direct use for domain specific tasks. In this paper, we propose a method to add task specific information to pre-trained word embeddings. Such information can improve their utility. We add information from medical coding data, as well as the first level from the hierarchy of ICD-10 medical code set to different pre-trained word embeddings. We adapt CBOW algorithm from the word2vec package for our purpose. We evaluated our approach on five different pre-trained word embeddings. Both the original word embeddings, and their modified versions (the ones with added information) were used for automated review of medical coding. The modified word embeddings give an improvement in f-score by 1% on the 5-fold evaluation on a private medical claims dataset. Our results show that adding extra information is possible and beneficial for the task at hand.

Word embeddings are a relatively new addition to the modern NLP researcher’s toolkit. However, unlike other tools, word embeddings are used in a black box manner. There are very few studies regarding various hyperparameters. One such hyperparameter is the dimension of word embeddings. They are rather decided based on a rule of thumb: in the range 50 to 300. In this paper, we show that the dimension should instead be chosen based on corpus statistics. More specifically, we show that the number of pairwise equidistant words of the corpus vocabulary (as defined by some distance/similarity metric) gives a lower bound on the the number of dimensions , and going below this bound results in degradation of quality of learned word embeddings. Through our evaluations on standard word embedding evaluation tasks, we show that for dimensions higher than or equal to the bound, we get better results as compared to the ones below it.