Text Simplification for Comprehension-based Question-Answering

Text simplification is the process of splitting and rephrasing a sentence to a sequence of sentences making it easier to read and understand while preserving the content and approximating the original meaning. Text simplification has been exploited in NLP applications like machine translation, summarization, semantic role labeling, and information extraction, opening a broad avenue for its exploitation in comprehension-based question-answering downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the effect of text simplification in the task of question-answering using a comprehension context. We release Simple-SQuAD, a simplified version of the widely-used SQuAD dataset. Firstly, we outline each step in the dataset creation pipeline, including style transfer, thresholding of sentences showing correct transfer, and offset finding for each answer. Secondly, we verify the quality of the transferred sentences through various methodologies involving both automated and human evaluation. Thirdly, we benchmark the newly created corpus and perform an ablation study for examining the effect of the simplification process in the SQuAD-based question answering task. Our experiments show that simplification leads to up to 2.04% and 1.74% increase in Exact Match and F1, respectively. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of the transfer process, investigating the types of edits made by the model, and the effect of sentence length on the transfer model.

Predicting Popularity of Images Over 30 Days

The current work deals with the problem of attempting to predict the popularity of images before even being uploaded. This method is specifically focused on Flickr images. Social features of each image as well as that of the user who had uploaded it, have been recorded. The dataset also includes the engagement score of each image which is the ground truth value of the views obtained by each image over a period of 30 days. The work aims to predict the popularity of images on Flickr over a period of 30 days using the social features of the user and the image, as well as the visual features of the images. The method states that the engagement sequence of an image can be said to depend on two independent quantities, namely scale and shape of an image. Once the shape and scale of an image have been predicted, combining them the predicted sequence of an image over 30 days is obtained. The current work follows a previous work done in the same direction, with certain speculations and suggestions of improvement.

IIITG-ADBU@HASOC-Dravidian-CodeMix-FIRE2020: Offensive Content Detection in Code-Mixed Dravidian Text

This paper presents the results obtained by our SVM and XLM-RoBERTa based classifiers in the shared task Dravidian-CodeMix-HASOC 2020. The SVM classifier trained using TF-IDF features of character and word n-grams performed the best on the code-mixed Malayalam text. It obtained a weighted F1 score of 0.95 (1st Rank) and 0.76 (3rd Rank) on the YouTube and Twitter dataset respectively. The XLM-RoBERTa based classifier performed the best on the code-mixed Tamil text. It obtained a weighted F1 score of 0.87 (3rd Rank) on the code-mixed Tamil Twitter dataset.