The reported work is a description of our participation in the “Classification of COVID19 tweets containing symptoms” shared task, organized by the “Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H)” workshop. The literature describes two machine learning approaches that were used to build a three class classification system, that categorizes tweets related to COVID19, into three classes, viz., self-reports, non-personal reports, and literature/news mentions. The steps for pre-processing tweets, feature extraction, and the development of the machine learning models, are described extensively in the documentation. Both the developed learning models, when evaluated by the organizers, garnered F1 scores of 0.93 and 0.92 respectively.

Sentiment analysis tools and models have been developed extensively throughout the years, for European languages. In contrast, similar tools for Indian Languages are scarce. This is because, state-of-the-art pre-processing tools like POS tagger, shallow parsers, etc., are not readily available for Indian languages. Although, such working tools for Indian languages, like Hindi and Bengali, that are spoken by the majority of the population, are available, finding the same for less spoken languages like, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, is difficult. Moreover, due to the advent of social media, the multi-lingual population of India, who are comfortable with both English ad their regional language, prefer to communicate by mixing both languages. This gives rise to massive code-mixed content and automatically annotating them with their respective sentiment labels becomes a challenging task. In this work, we take up a similar challenge of developing a sentiment analysis model that can work with English-Tamil code-mixed data. The proposed work tries to solve this by using bi-directional LSTMs along with language tagging. Other traditional methods, based on classical machine learning algorithms have also been discussed in the literature, and they also act as the baseline systems to which we will compare our Neural Network based model. The performance of the developed algorithm, based on Neural Network architecture, garnered precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.59, 0.66, and 0.58 respectively.

In the current work, we present the description of the systems submitted to a machine translation shared task organized by ICON 2020: 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing. The systems were developed to show the capability of general domain machine translation when translating into Indic languages, English-Hindi, in our case. The paper shows the training process and quantifies the performance of two state-of-the-art translation systems, viz., Statistical Machine Translation and Neural Machine Translation. While Statistical Machine Translation systems work better in a low-resource setting, Neural Machine Translation systems are able to generate sentences that are fluent in nature. Since both these systems have contrasting advantages, a hybrid system, incorporating both, was also developed to leverage all the strong points. The submitted systems garnered BLEU scores of 8.701943312, 0.6361336198, and 11.78873307 respectively and the scores of the hybrid system helped us to the fourth spot in the competition leaderboard.

Code-mixing is a phenomenon which arises mainly in multilingual societies. Multilingual people, who are well versed in their native languages and also English speakers, tend to code-mix using English-based phonetic typing and the insertion of anglicisms in their main language. This linguistic phenomenon poses a great challenge to conventional NLP domains such as Sentiment Analysis, Machine Translation, and Text Summarization, to name a few. In this work, we focus on working out a plausible solution to the domain of Code-Mixed Sentiment Analysis. This work was done as participation in the SemEval-2020 Sentimix Task, where we focused on the sentiment analysis of English-Hindi code-mixed sentences. our username for the submission was “sainik.mahata” and team name was “JUNLP”. We used feature extraction algorithms in conjunction with traditional machine learning algorithms such as SVR and Grid Search in an attempt to solve the task. Our approach garnered an f1-score of 66.2% when tested using metrics prepared by the organizers of the task.

Code-mixed texts are widespread nowadays due to the advent of social media. Since these texts combine two languages to formulate a sentence, it gives rise to various research problems related to Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we try to excavate one such problem, namely, Parts of Speech tagging of code-mixed texts. We have built a system that can POS tag English-Bengali code-mixed data where the Bengali words were written in Roman script. Our approach initially involves the collection and cleaning of English-Bengali code-mixed tweets. These tweets were used as a development dataset for building our system. The proposed system is a modular approach that starts by tagging individual tokens with their respective languages and then passes them to different POS taggers, designed for different languages (English and Bengali, in our case). Tags given by the two systems are later joined together and the final result is then mapped to a universal POS tag set. Our system was checked using 100 manually POS tagged code-mixed sentences and it returned an accuracy of 75.29%.

In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2019 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Lithuanian to English. To accomplish the given task, our system used a Word Embedding based Neural Machine Translation model to post edit the outputs generated by a Statistical Machine Translation model. The current paper documents the architecture of our model, descriptions of the various modules and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 17.6.

In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2018 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Finnish to English. The system used a Character Based Neural Machine Translation model to accomplish the given task. The current paper documents the preprocessing steps, the description of the submitted system and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 12.9.

A Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system is always trained using large parallel corpus to produce effective translation. Not only is the corpus scarce, it also involves a lot of manual labor and cost. Parallel corpus can be prepared by employing comparable corpora where a pair of corpora is in two different languages pointing to the same domain. In the present work, we try to build a parallel corpus for French-English language pair from a given comparable corpus. The data and the problem set are provided as part of the shared task organized by BUCC 2017. We have proposed a system that first translates the sentences by heavily relying on Moses and then group the sentences based on sentence length similarity. Finally, the one to one sentence selection was done based on Cosine Similarity algorithm.