This paper demonstrates our work for the shared task on Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages-EACL 2021. Offensive language detection in the various social media platforms was identified previously. But with the increase in diversity of users, there is a need to identify the offensive language in multilingual posts that are largely code-mixed or written in a non-native script. We approach this challenge with various transfer learning-based models to classify a given post or comment in Dravidian languages (Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada) into 6 categories. The source codes for our systems are published.
This paper reports the Machine Translation (MT) systems submitted by the IIITT team for the English→Marathi and English⇔Irish language pairs LoResMT 2021 shared task. The task focuses on getting exceptional translations for rather low-resourced languages like Irish and Marathi. We fine-tune IndicTrans, a pretrained multilingual NMT model for English→Marathi, using external parallel corpus as input for additional training. We have used a pretrained Helsinki-NLP Opus MT English⇔Irish model for the latter language pair. Our approaches yield relatively promising results on the BLEU metrics. Under the team name IIITT, our systems ranked 1, 1, and 2 in English→Marathi, Irish→English, and English→Irish respectively. The codes for our systems are published1 .
In a world with serious challenges like climate change, religious and political conflicts, global pandemics, terrorism, and racial discrimination, an internet full of hate speech, abusive and offensive content is the last thing we desire for. In this paper, we work to identify and promote positive and supportive content on these platforms. We work with several transformer-based models to classify social media comments as hope speech or not hope speech in English, Malayalam, and Tamil languages. This paper portrays our work for the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at LT-EDI 2021- EACL 2021. The codes for our best submission can be viewed.
This paper examines widely prevalent yet little-studied expressions in Indian languages which are known as geometrical terms be-cause “they engage locations along the axes of the reference object”. These terms are andara (inside), b ̄ahara (outside), ̄age (in front of), s ̄amane (in front of), p ̄ıche (back), ̄upara (above/over), n ̄ıce (under/below), d ̄ayem. (right), b ̄ayem. (left), p ̄asa (near), d ̄ura (away/far) in Hindi. The way these terms have been interpreted by the scholars of the Hindi language and handled in the Hindi Dependency treebank is misleading. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of these terms focusing on their triple – nominal, modifier and relational - functions and presents abstract semantic representations of these terms following the proposed analysis. The semantic representation will be explicit, unambiguous abstract and therefore universal in nature. The correspondence of these terms in Bangla and Kannada are also identified. Disambiguation of geometric terms will facilitate parsing and machine translation especially from Indian Language to English because these geometric terms of Indian languages are variedly translated in English de-pending on context.