Search

Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models (LLMs) on particular datasets is a commonly employed strategy in Natural Language Processing (NLP) classification tasks. However, this approach usually results in a loss of models generalizability. In this paper, we present a framework that allows for maintaining generalizability, and enhances the performance on the downstream task by utilizing task-specific context attribution. We show that a linear transformation of the text representation from any transformer model using the task-specific concept operator results in a projection onto the latent concept space, referred to as context attribution in this paper. The specific concept operator is optimized during the supervised learning stage via novel loss functions. The proposed framework demonstrates that context attribution of the text representation for each task objective can improve the capacity of the discriminator function and thus achieve better performance for the classification task. Experimental results on three datasets, namely HateXplain, IMDB reviews, and Social Media Attributions, illustrate that the proposed model attains superior accuracy and generalizability. Specifically, for the non-fine-tuned BERT on the HateXplain dataset, we observe 8% improvement in accuracy and 10% improvement in F1-score. Whereas for the IMDB dataset, fine-tuned state-of-the-art XLNet is outperformed by 1% for both accuracy and F1-score. Furthermore, in an out-of-domain cross-dataset test, DistilBERT fine-tuned on the IMDB dataset in conjunction with the proposed model improves the F1-score on the HateXplain dataset by 7%. For the Social Media Attributions dataset of YouTube comments, we observe 5.2% increase in F1-metric. The proposed framework is implemented with PyTorch and provided open-source on GitHub., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables, To be published in 2024 AAAI workshop on Responsible Language Models (ReLM)

Lemmatization holds significance in both natural language processing (NLP) and linguistics, as it effectively decreases data density and aids in comprehending contextual meaning. However, due to the highly inflected nature and morphological richness, lemmatization in Bangla text poses a complex challenge. In this study, we propose linguistic rules for lemmatization and utilize a dictionary along with the rules to design a lemmatizer specifically for Bangla. Our system aims to lemmatize words based on their parts of speech class within a given sentence. Unlike previous rule-based approaches, we analyzed the suffix marker occurrence according to the morpho-syntactic values and then utilized sequences of suffix markers instead of entire suffixes. To develop our rules, we analyze a large corpus of Bangla text from various domains, sources, and time periods to observe the word formation of inflected words. The lemmatizer achieves an accuracy of 96.36% when tested against a manually annotated test dataset by trained linguists and demonstrates competitive performance on three previously published Bangla lemmatization datasets. We are making the code and datasets publicly available at https://github.com/eblict-gigatech/BanLemma in order to contribute to the further advancement of Bangla NLP.

This study introduces SentiGOLD, a Bangla multi-domain sentiment analysis dataset. Comprising 70,000 samples, it was created from diverse sources and annotated by a gender-balanced team of linguists. SentiGOLD adheres to established linguistic conventions agreed upon by the Government of Bangladesh and a Bangla linguistics committee. Unlike English and other languages, Bangla lacks standard sentiment analysis datasets due to the absence of a national linguistics framework. The dataset incorporates data from online video comments, social media posts, blogs, news, and other sources while maintaining domain and class distribution rigorously. It spans 30 domains (e.g., politics, entertainment, sports) and includes 5 sentiment classes (strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, and strongly positive). The annotation scheme, approved by the national linguistics committee, ensures a robust Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) with a Fleiss' kappa score of 0.88. Intra- and cross-dataset evaluation protocols are applied to establish a standard classification system. Cross-dataset evaluation on the noisy SentNoB dataset presents a challenging test scenario. Additionally, zero-shot experiments demonstrate the generalizability of SentiGOLD. The top model achieves a macro f1 score of 0.62 (intra-dataset) across 5 classes, setting a benchmark, and 0.61 (cross-dataset from SentNoB) across 3 classes, comparable to the state-of-the-art. Fine-tuned sentiment analysis model can be accessed at https://sentiment.bangla.gov.bd., Comment: Accepted in KDD 2023 Applied Data Science Track; 12 pages, 14 figures

Online remote learning has certain advantages, such as higher flexibility and greater inclusiveness. However, a caveat is the teachers' limited ability to monitor student interaction during an online class, especially while teachers are sharing their screens. We have taken feedback from 12 teachers experienced in teaching undergraduate-level online classes on the necessity of an attention tracking tool to understand student engagement during an online class. This paper outlines the design of such a monitoring tool that automatically tracks the attentiveness of the whole class by tracking students' gazes on the screen and alerts the teacher when the attention score goes below a certain threshold. We assume the benefits are twofold; 1) teachers will be able to ascertain if the students are attentive or being engaged with the lecture contents and 2) the students will become more attentive in online classes because of this passive monitoring system. In this paper, we present the preliminary design and feasibility of using the proposed tool and discuss its applicability in augmenting online classes. Finally, we surveyed 31 students asking their opinion on the usability as well as the ethical and privacy concerns of using such a monitoring tool., Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures

Social media platforms and online streaming services have spawned a new breed of Hate Speech (HS). Due to the massive amount of user-generated content on these sites, modern machine learning techniques are found to be feasible and cost-effective to tackle this problem. However, linguistically diverse datasets covering different social contexts in which offensive language is typically used are required to train generalizable models. In this paper, we identify the shortcomings of existing Bangla HS datasets and introduce a large manually labeled dataset BD-SHS that includes HS in different social contexts. The labeling criteria were prepared following a hierarchical annotation process, which is the first of its kind in Bangla HS to the best of our knowledge. The dataset includes more than 50,200 offensive comments crawled from online social networking sites and is at least 60% larger than any existing Bangla HS datasets. We present the benchmark result of our dataset by training different NLP models resulting in the best one achieving an F1-score of 91.0%. In our experiments, we found that a word embedding trained exclusively using 1.47 million comments from social media and streaming sites consistently resulted in better modeling of HS detection in comparison to other pre-trained embeddings. Our dataset and all accompanying codes is publicly available at github.com/naurosromim/hate-speech-dataset-for-Bengali-social-media

In this paper, we present HS-BAN, a binary class hate speech (HS) dataset in Bangla language consisting of more than 50,000 labeled comments, including 40.17% hate and rest are non hate speech. While preparing the dataset a strict and detailed annotation guideline was followed to reduce human annotation bias. The HS dataset was also preprocessed linguistically to extract different types of slang currently people write using symbols, acronyms, or alternative spellings. These slang words were further categorized into traditional and non-traditional slang lists and included in the results of this paper. We explored traditional linguistic features and neural network-based methods to develop a benchmark system for hate speech detection for the Bangla language. Our experimental results show that existing word embedding models trained with informal texts perform better than those trained with formal text. Our benchmark shows that a Bi-LSTM model on top of the FastText informal word embedding achieved 86.78% F1-score. We will make the dataset available for public use., Comment: Submitted to ICON 21 (Rejected)

Dengue fever has been considered to be one of the global public health problems of the twenty-first century, especially in tropical and subtropical countries of the global south. The high morbidity and mortality rates of Dengue fever impose a huge economic and health burden for middle and low-income countries. It is so prevalent in such regions that enforcing a granular level of surveillance is quite impossible. Therefore, it is crucial to explore an alternative cost-effective solution that can provide updates of the ongoing situation in a timely manner. In this paper, we explore the scope and potential of a local newspaper-based dengue surveillance system, using well-known data-mining techniques, in Bangladesh from the analysis of the news contents written in the native language. In addition, we explain the working procedure of developing a novel database, using human-in-the-loop technique, for further analysis, and classification of dengue and its intervention-related news. Our classification method has an f-score of 91.45%, and matches the ground truth of reported cases quite closely. Based on the dengue and intervention-related news, we identified the regions where more intervention efforts are needed to reduce the rate of dengue infection. A demo of this project can be accessed at: http://erdos.dsm.fordham.edu:3009/, Comment: 5 Pages, Joint KDD 2021 Health Day and 2021 KDD Workshop on Applied Data Science for Healthcare