Writing systems of Indic languages have orthographic syllables, also known as complex graphemes, as unique horizontal units. A prominent feature of these languages is these complex grapheme units that comprise consonants/consonant conjuncts, vowel diacritics, and consonant diacritics, which, together make a unique Language. Unicode-based writing schemes of these languages often disregard this feature of these languages and encode words as linear sequences of Unicode characters using an intricate scheme of connector characters and font interpreters. Due to this way of using a few dozen Unicode glyphs to write thousands of different unique glyphs (complex graphemes), there are serious ambiguities that lead to malformed words. In this paper, we are proposing two libraries: i) a normalizer for normalizing inconsistencies caused by a Unicode-based encoding scheme for Indic languages and ii) a grapheme parser for Abugida text. It deconstructs words into visually distinct orthographic syllables or complex graphemes and their constituents. Our proposed normalizer is a more efficient and effective tool than the previously used IndicNLP normalizer. Moreover, our parser and normalizer are also suitable tools for general Abugida text processing as they performed well in our robust word-based and NLP experiments. We report the pipeline for the scripts of 7 languages in this work and develop the framework for the integration of more scripts.

People are expressing their opinions online for a lot of years now. Although these opinions and comments provide people an opportunity of expressing their views, there is a lot of hate speech that can be found online. More specifically, sexist comments are very popular affecting and creating a negative impact on a lot of women and girls online. This paper describes the approaches of the SemEval-2023 Task 10 competition for Explainable Online Sexism Detection (EDOS). The task has been divided into 3 subtasks, introducing different classes of sexist comments. We have approached these tasks using the bert-cased and uncased models which are trained on the annotated dataset that has been provided in the competition. Task A provided the best F1 score of 80% on the test set, and tasks B and C provided 58% and 40% respectively.

Intentionally luring readers to click on a particular content by exploiting their curiosity defines a title as clickbait. Although several studies focused on detecting clickbait titles in English articles, low-resource language like Bangla has not been given adequate attention. To tackle clickbait titles in Bangla, we have constructed the first Bangla clickbait detection dataset containing 15,056 labeled news articles and 65,406 unlabelled news articles extracted from clickbait-dense news sites. Each article has been labeled by three expert linguists and includes an article’s title, body, and other metadata. By incorporating labeled and unlabelled data, we finetune a pre-trained Bangla transformer model in an adversarial fashion using Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS-GANs). The proposed model acts as a good baseline for this dataset, outperforming traditional neural network models (LSTM, GRU, CNN) and linguistic feature-based models. We expect that this dataset and the detailed analysis and comparison of these clickbait detection models will provide a fundamental basis for future research into detecting clickbait titles in Bengali articles.

Topic modeling of a text corpus is one of the most well-studied areas of information retrieval and knowledge discovery. Despite several decades of research in the area that begets an array of modeling tools, some common problems still obstruct automated topic modeling from matching users’ expectations. In particular, existing topic modeling solutions suffer when the distribution of words among the underlying topics is uneven or the topics are overlapped. Furthermore, many solutions ask the user to provide a topic count estimate as input, which limits their usefulness in modeling a corpus where such information is unavailable. We propose a new topic modeling approach that overcomes these shortcomings by formulating the topic modeling problem as a community detection problem in a word association graph/network that we generate from the text corpus. Experimental evaluation using multiple data sets of three different types of text corpora shows that our approach is superior to prominent topic modeling alternatives in most cases. This paper describes our approach and discusses the experimental findings.

Many areas, such as the biological and healthcare domain, artistic works, and organization names, have nested, overlapping, discontinuous entity mentions that may even be syntactically or semantically ambiguous in practice. Traditional sequence tagging algorithms are unable to recognize these complex mentions because they may violate the assumptions upon which sequence tagging schemes are founded. In this paper, we describe our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 11 on identifying such complex Named Entities. We have leveraged the ensemble of multiple ELECTRA-based models that were exclusively pretrained on the Bangla language with the performance of ELECTRA-based models pretrained on English to achieve competitive performance on the Track-11. Besides providing a system description, we will also present the outcomes of our experiments on architectural decisions, dataset augmentations, and post-competition findings.

Recently BERT has achieved a state-of-the-art performance in temporal relation extraction from clinical Electronic Medical Records text. However, the current approach is inefficient as it requires multiple passes through each input sequence. We extend a recently-proposed one-pass model for relation classification to a one-pass model for relation extraction. We augment this framework by introducing global embeddings to help with long-distance relation inference, and by multi-task learning to increase model performance and generalizability. Our proposed model produces results on par with the state-of-the-art in temporal relation extraction on the THYME corpus and is much “greener” in computational cost.

Incivility in public discourse has been a major concern in recent times as it can affect the quality and tenacity of the discourse negatively. In this paper, we present neural models that can learn to detect name-calling and vulgarity from a newspaper comment section. We show that in contrast to prior work on detecting toxic language, fine-grained incivilities like namecalling cannot be accurately detected by simple models like logistic regression. We apply the models trained on the newspaper comments data to detect uncivil comments in a Russian troll dataset, and find that despite the change of domain, the model makes accurate predictions.

Health support forums have become a rich source of data that can be used to improve health care outcomes. A user profile, including information such as age and gender, can support targeted analysis of forum data. But users might not always disclose their age and gender. It is desirable then to be able to automatically extract this information from users’ content. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no such resource for author profiling of health forum data. Here we present a large corpus, with close to 85,000 users, for profiling and also outline our approach and benchmark results to automatically detect a user’s age and gender from their forum posts. We use a mix of features from a user’s text as well as forum specific features to obtain accuracy well above the baseline, thus showing that both our dataset and our method are useful and valid.