Bidisha Samanta


2021

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A Data Bootstrapping Recipe for Low-Resource Multilingual Relation Classification
Arijit Nag | Bidisha Samanta | Animesh Mukherjee | Niloy Ganguly | Soumen Chakrabarti
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Relation classification (sometimes called ‘extraction’) requires trustworthy datasets for fine-tuning large language models, as well as for evaluation. Data collection is challenging for Indian languages, because they are syntactically and morphologically diverse, as well as different from resource-rich languages like English. Despite recent interest in deep generative models for Indian languages, relation classification is still not well-served by public data sets. In response, we present IndoRE, a dataset with 39K entity- and relation-tagged gold sentences in three Indian languages, plus English. We start with a multilingual BERT (mBERT) based system that captures entity span positions and type information and provides competitive monolingual relation classification. Using this system, we explore and compare transfer mechanisms between languages. In particular, we study the accuracy-efficiency tradeoff between expensive gold instances vs. translated and aligned ‘silver’ instances.

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A Hierarchical VAE for Calibrating Attributes while Generating Text using Normalizing Flow
Bidisha Samanta | Mohit Agrawal | NIloy Ganguly
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In this digital age, online users expect personalized content. To cater to diverse group of audiences across online platforms it is necessary to generate multiple variants of same content with differing degree of characteristics (sentiment, style, formality, etc.). Though text-style transfer is a well explored related area, it focuses on flipping the style attribute polarity instead of regulating a fine-grained attribute transfer. In this paper we propose a hierarchical architecture for finer control over the at- tribute, preserving content using attribute dis- entanglement. We demonstrate the effective- ness of the generative process for two different attributes with varied complexity, namely sentiment and formality. With extensive experiments and human evaluation on five real-world datasets, we show that the framework can generate natural looking sentences with finer degree of control of intensity of a given attribute.

2019

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Improved Sentiment Detection via Label Transfer from Monolingual to Synthetic Code-Switched Text
Bidisha Samanta | Niloy Ganguly | Soumen Chakrabarti
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Multilingual writers and speakers often alternate between two languages in a single discourse. This practice is called “code-switching”. Existing sentiment detection methods are usually trained on sentiment-labeled monolingual text. Manually labeled code-switched text, especially involving minority languages, is extremely rare. Consequently, the best monolingual methods perform relatively poorly on code-switched text. We present an effective technique for synthesizing labeled code-switched text from labeled monolingual text, which is relatively readily available. The idea is to replace carefully selected subtrees of constituency parses of sentences in the resource-rich language with suitable token spans selected from automatic translations to the resource-poor language. By augmenting the scarce labeled code-switched text with plentiful synthetic labeled code-switched text, we achieve significant improvements in sentiment labeling accuracy (1.5%, 5.11% 7.20%) for three different language pairs (English-Hindi, English-Spanish and English-Bengali). The improvement is even significant in hatespeech detection whereby we achieve a 4% improvement using only synthetic code-switched data (6% with data augmentation).

2017

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All that is English may be Hindi: Enhancing language identification through automatic ranking of the likeliness of word borrowing in social media
Jasabanta Patro | Bidisha Samanta | Saurabh Singh | Abhipsa Basu | Prithwish Mukherjee | Monojit Choudhury | Animesh Mukherjee
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

n this paper, we present a set of computational methods to identify the likeliness of a word being borrowed, based on the signals from social media. In terms of Spearman’s correlation values, our methods perform more than two times better (∼ 0.62) in predicting the borrowing likeliness compared to the best performing baseline (∼ 0.26) reported in literature. Based on this likeliness estimate we asked annotators to re-annotate the language tags of foreign words in predominantly native contexts. In 88% of cases the annotators felt that the foreign language tag should be replaced by native language tag, thus indicating a huge scope for improvement of automatic language identification systems.