Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pavement Area Water Detection Algorithm Based on Improved DEEPLABV3+

When using the original Deeplabv3+ algorithm to detect the water on the road, it cannot predict the edge of the water and small targets well. Therefore, this paper improves the deeplabv3 + model to solve these problems, adds an edge detection module to the original model, uses the Garbo filter to extract the edge part of the shallow network and performs loss regression on the edge label map to supervise the edge, so that the model detects more accurately the edge of stagnant water. In order to reduce the parameters of the model, mobilenetV2 is used as the backbone network, and improve ASPP, use Depthwise separable convolution to replace the original 3 × 3 convolution, and the residual branch is used to effectively supplement the loss of position information caused by excessive hole convolution. The improved Deeplabv3+ model, the mIoU value can reach 90.2%, which is 6% higher than the original model, and can predict the road surface water more accurately, and the model parameter is only 5.4M.
Expression and Construction of a Multi-layer Map for Indoor Human-Robot Co-existing Environments

Aiming at the demand for map expression in the human-robot co-existing environments, a multi-layer map including semantic grid map, semantic topological map and semantic concept map is proposed and constructed. Firstly, 2D LIDAR and RGB-D sensors are used to construct object semantic grid map combined with SLAM and object semantic segmentation method. Semantic topological map is then constructed using virtual door detection and Bayesian estimation method based on room and object containment relationships. Finally, according to the semantic grid and the semantic topological map, a seven-step ontology creation method is used to build a semantic concept map. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-layer map is verified by testing in multiple scenarios.
ARE ULTRA-LONG GAMMA-RAY BURSTS CAUSED BY BLUE SUPERGIANT COLLAPSARS, NEWBORN MAGNETARS, OR WHITE DWARF TIDAL DISRUPTION EVENTS?

Ultra-long gamma-ray bursts (ulGRBs) are a new population of GRBs with extreme durations of ∼104 s. Leading candidates for their origin are blue supergiant collapsars, magnetars, and white dwarf tidal disruption events (WD-TDEs) caused by massive black holes (BHs). Recent observations of supernova-like (SN-like) bumps associated with ulGRBs challenged both the WD-TDE and the blue supergiant models because of the detection of SNe and the absence of hydrogen lines, respectively. We propose that WD-TDEs can accommodate the observed SN-like bumps if the fallback WD matter releases energy into the unbound WD ejecta. The observed ejecta energy, luminosity, and velocity are explained by the gravitational energy, Eddington luminosity, and escape velocity of the formed accretion disk, respectively. We also show that the observed X-rays can ionize the ejecta, eliminating lines. The SN-like light curves (SN 2011kl) for the ulGRB 111209A are consistent with all three models, although a magnetar model is unnatural because the spin-down time required to power the SN-like bump is a hundred times longer than the GRB. Our results imply that TDEs are a possible energy source for SN-like events in general and for ulGRBs in particular.
eaVQA: An Experimental Analysis on Visual Question Answering Models

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has recently become a popular research area. VQA problem lies in the boundary of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing research domains. In VQA research, the dataset is a very important aspect because of its variety in image types i.e. natural and synthetic and also question answer source i.e. originated from human source or computer-generated question answer. Various details about each dataset is given in this paper, which can help future researchers to a great extent. In this paper, we discussed and compared the experimental performance of Stacked Attention Network Model (SANM) and bidirectional LSTM and MUTAN based fusion models. As per the experimental results, MUTAN accuracy and loss are 29% and 3.5 respectively. SANM model is giving 55% accuracy and a loss of 2.2 whereas VQA model is giving 59% accuracy and 1.9 loss.
CAWESumm: A Contextual and Anonymous Walk Embedding Based Extractive Summarization of Legal Bills

Extractive summarization of lengthy legal documents requires an appropriate sentence scoring mechanism. This mechanism should capture both the local semantics of a sentence as well as the global document-level context of a sentence. The search for an appropriate sentence embedding that can enable an effective scoring mechanism has been the focus of several research works in this domain. In this work, we propose an improved sentence embedding approach that combines a Legal Bert-based local embedding of the sentence with an anonymous random walk-based entire document embedding. Such combined features help effectively capture the local and global information present in a sentence. The experimental results suggest that the proposed sentence embedding approach can be very beneficial for the appropriate representation of sentences in legal documents, improving the sentence scoring mechanism required for extractive summarization of these documents.
Co-attention based Multimodal Factorized Bilinear Pooling for Internet Memes Analysis

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have a significant impact on several aspects of society. Memes are a new type of social media communication found on social platforms. Even though memes are primarily used to distribute humorous content, certain memes propagate hate speech through dark humor. It is critical to properly analyze and filter out these toxic memes from social media. But the presence of sarcasm and humor in an implicit way analyzes memes more challenging. This paper proposes an end-to-end neural network architecture that learns the complex association between text and image of a meme. For this purpose, we use a recent SemEval-2020 Task-8 multimodal dataset. We proposed an end-to-end CNN-based deep neural network architecture with two sub-modules viz. (i)Co-attention based sub-module and (ii) Multimodal Factorized Bilinear Pooling(MFB) sub-module to represent the textual and visual features of a meme in a more fine-grained way. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed work through extensive experiments. The experimental results show that our proposed model achieves a 36.81% macro F1-score, outperforming all the baseline models.
EduMT: Developing Machine Translation System for Educational Content in Indian Languages

In this paper, we explore various approaches to build Hindi to Bengali Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems for the educational domain. Translation of educational content poses several challenges, such as unavailability of gold standard data for model building, extensive uses of domain-specific terms, as well as the presence of noise in the form of spontaneous speech as the corpus is prepared from subtitle data and noise due to the process of corpus creation through back-translation. We create an educational parallel corpus by crawling lecture subtitles and translating them into Hindi and Bengali using Google translate. We also create a clean parallel corpus by post-editing synthetic corpus via annotation and crowd-sourcing. We build NMT systems on the prepared corpus with domain adaptation objectives. We also explore data augmentation methods by automatically cleaning synthetic corpus and using it to further train the models. We experiment with combining domain adaptation objective with multilingual NMT. We report BLEU and TER scores of all the models on a manually created Hindi-Bengali educational testset. Our experiments show that the multilingual domain adaptation model outperforms all the other models by achieving 34.8 BLEU and 0.466 TER scores.
Stress Rules from Surface Forms: Experiments with Program Synthesis

Learning linguistic generalizations from only a few examples is a challenging task. Recent work has shown that program synthesis – a method to learn rules from data in the form of programs in a domain-specific language – can be used to learn phonological rules in highly data-constrained settings. In this paper, we use the problem of phonological stress placement as a case to study how the design of the domain-specific language influences the generalization ability when using the same learning algorithm. We find that encoding the distinction between consonants and vowels results in much better performance, and providing syllable-level information further improves generalization. Program synthesis, thus, provides a way to investigate how access to explicit linguistic information influences what can be learnt from a small number of examples.
DialogActs based Search and Retrieval for Response Generation in Conversation Systems

Designing robust conversation systems with great customer experience requires a team of design experts to think of all probable ways a customer can interact with the system and then author responses for each use case individually. The responses are authored from scratch for each new client and application even though similar responses have been created in the past. This happens largely because the responses are encoded using domain specific set of intents and entities. In this paper, we present preliminary work to define a dialog act schema to merge and map responses from different domains and applications using a consistent domain-independent representation. These representations are stored and maintained using an Elasticsearch system to facilitate generation of responses through a search and retrieval process. We experimented generating different surface realizations for a response given a desired information state of the dialog.
Named Entity Recognition for French medieval charters

This paper presents the process of annotating and modelling a corpus to automatically detect named entities in medieval charters in French. It introduces a new annotated corpus and a new system which outperforms state-of-the art libraries. Charters are legal documents and among the most important historical sources for medieval studies as they reflect economic and social dynamics as well as the evolution of literacy and writing practices. Automatic detection of named entities greatly improves the access to these unstructured texts and facilitates historical research. The experiments described here are based on a corpus encompassing about 500k words (1200 charters) coming from three charter collections of the 13th and 14th centuries. We annotated the corpus and then trained two state-of-the art NLP libraries for Named Entity Recognition (Spacy and Flair) and a custom neural model (Bi-LSTM-CRF). The evaluation shows that all three models achieve a high performance rate on the test set and a high generalization capacity against two external corpora unseen during training. This paper describes the corpus and the annotation model, and discusses the issues related to the linguistic processing of medieval French and formulaic discourse, so as to interpret the results within a larger historical perspective.
MUM at ComMA@ICON: Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification Using Supervised Learning Approaches

Due to the rapid rise of social networks and micro-blogging websites, communication between people from different religion, caste, creed, cultural and psychological backgrounds has become more direct leading to the increase in cyber conflicts between people. This in turn has given rise to more and more hate speech and usage of abusive words to the point that it has become a serious problem creating negative impacts on the society. As a result, it is imperative to identify and filter such content on social media to prevent its further spread and the damage it is going to cause. Further, filtering such huge data requires automated tools since doing it manually is labor intensive and error prone. Added to this is the complex code-mixed and multi-scripted nature of social media text. To address the challenges of abusive content detection on social media, in this paper, we, team MUM, propose Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models submitted to Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification (ComMA@ICON) shared task at International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) 2021. Word uni-grams, char n-grams, and emoji vectors are combined as features to train a ML Elastic-net regression model and multi-lingual Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (mBERT) is fine-tuned for a DL model. Out of the two, fine-tuned mBERT model performed better with an instance-F1 score of 0.326, 0.390, 0.343, 0.359 for Meitei, Bangla, Hindi, Multilingual texts respectively.
The Validity of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis in Interdisciplinary Research

Lexicon-based sentiment and emotion analysis methods are widely used particularly in applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects in fields such as computational social science and digital humanities. These lexicon-based methods have often been criticized for their lack of validation and accuracy – sometimes fairly. However, in this paper, we argue that lexicon-based methods work well particularly when moving up in granularity and show how useful lexicon-based methods can be for projects where neither qualitative analysis nor a machine learning-based approach is possible. Indeed, we argue that the measure of a lexicon’s accuracy should be grounded in its usefulness.
DELab@IIITSM at ICON-2021 Shared Task: Identification of Aggression and Biasness Using Decision Tree

This paper presents our system description on participation in ICON-2021 Shared Task sub-task 1 on multilingual gender-biased and communal language identification as team name: DELab@IIITSM. We have participated in two language-specific Meitei, Hindi, and one multi-lingualMeitei, Hindi, and Bangla with English code-mixed languages identification task. Our method includes well design pre-processing phase based on the dataset, the frequency-based feature extraction technique TF-IDF which creates the feature vector for each instance using(Decision Tree). We obtained weights are 0.629, 0.625, and 0.632 as the overall micro F1 score for the Hindi, Meitei, and multilingual datasets.
Deep Embedding of Conversation Segments

We introduce a novel conversation embedding by extending Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) framework. Specifically, information related to “turn” and “role” that are unique to conversations are augmented to the word tokens and the next sentence prediction task predicts a segment of a conversation possibly spanning across multiple roles and turns. It is observed that the addition of role and turn substantially increases the next sentence prediction accuracy. Conversation embeddings obtained in this fashion are applied to (a) conversation clustering, (b) conversation classification and (c) as a context for automated conversation generation on new datasets (unseen by the pre-training model). We found that clustering accuracy is greatly improved if embeddings are used as features as opposed to conventional tf-idf based features that do not take role or turn information into account. On classification task, a fine-tuned model on conversation embedding achieves accuracy comparable to an optimized linear SVM model on tf-idf based features. Finally, we present a way of capturing variable length context in sequence-to-sequence models by utilizing this conversation embedding and show that BLEU score improves over a vanilla sequence to sequence model without context.
A Method to Disambiguate a Word by Using Restricted Boltzmann Machine

Finding the correct sense of a word is of great importance in many textual data related applications such as information retrieval, text mining and natural language processing. We have proposed one novel Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) method according to its context. Based on collocation extraction score, the proposed method extracts three different features for each sense definition of a target word. These features create a feature vector and all the feature vectors create a sense matrix. Here, Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is used to enhance the sense matrix. Comparison of the proposed WSD method is made with current state-of-the-art systems using SENSEVAL and Sem Eval datasets. The proposed WSD method shows the practical implementation by applying on query-based text summary. For evaluation on query-based text summary, the proposed WSD method uses DUC datasets containing news-wire articles. Finally, the experimental analysis shows that our proposed WSD method performs better as compared to the current systems.
Wikipedia Current Events Summarization using Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a method to summarize news events from multiple sources. We pose event summarization as a clustering-based optimization problem and solve it using particle swarm optimization. The proposed methodology uses the search capability of particle swarm optimization, detecting the number of clusters automatically. Experiments are conducted with the Wikipedia Current Events Portal dataset and evaluated using the well-known ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L scores. The obtained results show the efficacy of the proposed methodology over the state-of-the-art methods. It attained improvement of 33.42%, 81.75%, and 57.58% in terms of ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L, respectively.
Stylistic MR-to-Text Generation Using Pre-trained Language Models

We explore the ability of pre-trained language models BART, an encoder-decoder model, GPT2 and GPT-Neo, both decoder-only models for generating sentences from structured MR tags as input. We observe best results on several metrics for the YelpNLG and E2E datasets. Style based implicit tags such as emotion, sentiment, length etc., allows for controlled generation but it is typically not present in MR. We present an analysis on YelpNLG showing BART can express the content with stylistic variations in the structure of the sentence. Motivated with the results, we define a new task of emotional situation generation from various POS tags and emotion label values as MR using EmpatheticDialogues dataset and report a baseline. Encoder-Decoder attention analysis shows that BART learns different aspects in MR at various layers and heads.
Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design

Over the last several years, end-to-end neural conversational agents have vastly improved their ability to carry unrestricted, open-domain conversations with humans. However, these models are often trained on large datasets from the Internet and, as a result, may learn undesirable behaviours from this data, such as toxic or otherwise harmful language. Thus, researchers must wrestle with how and when to release these models. In this paper, we survey recent and related work to highlight tensions between values, potential positive impact, and potential harms. We also provide a framework to support practitioners in deciding whether and how to release these models, following the tenets of value-sensitive design.
ComMA@ICON: Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification Task at ICON-2021

This paper presents the findings of the ICON-2021 shared task on Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification, which aims to identify aggression, gender bias, and communal bias in data presented in four languages: Meitei, Bangla, Hindi and English. The participants were presented the option of approaching the task as three separate classification tasks or a multi-label classification task or a structured classification task. If approached as three separate classification tasks, the task includes three sub-tasks: aggression identification (sub-task A), gender bias identification (sub-task B), and communal bias identification (sub-task C). For this task, the participating teams were provided with a total dataset of approximately 12,000, with 3,000 comments across each of the four languages, sourced from popular social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Telegram and the the three labels presented as a single tuple. For the test systems, approximately 1,000 comments were provided in each language for every sub-task. We attracted a total of 54 registrations in the task, out of which 11 teams submitted their test runs. The best system obtained an overall instance-F1 of 0.371 in the multilingual test set (it was simply a combined test set of the instances in each individual language). In the individual sub-tasks, the best micro f1 scores are 0.539, 0.767 and 0.834 respectively for each of the sub-task A, B and C. The best overall, averaged micro f1 is 0.713. The results show that while systems have managed to perform reasonably well in individual sub-tasks, especially gender bias and communal bias tasks, it is substantially more difficult to do a 3-class classification of aggression level and even more difficult to build a system that correctly classifies everything right. It is only in slightly over 1/3 of the instances that most of the systems predicted the correct class across the board, despite the fact that there was a significant overlap across the three sub-tasks.
Retrofitting of Pre-trained Emotion Words with VAD-dimensions and the Plutchik Emotions

The word representations are based on distributional hypothesis according to which words that occur in the similar contexts, tend to have a similar meaning and appear closer in vector space. For example, the emotionally dissimilar words ”joy” and ”sadness” have higher cosine similarity. The existing pre-trained embedding models lack in emotional words interpretations. For creating our VAD-Emotion embeddings, we modify the pre-trained word embeddings with emotion information. This is a lexicons based approach that uses the Valence, Arousal and Dominance (VAD) values, and the Plutchik’s emotions to incorporate the emotion information in pre-trained word embeddings using post-training processing. This brings emotionally similar words nearer and emotionally dissimilar words away from each other in the proposed vector space. We demonstrate the performance of proposed embedding through NLP downstream task - Emotion Recognition.
Logical Layout Analysis Applied to Historical Newspapers

In recent years, libraries and archives led important digitisation campaigns that opened the access to vast collections of historical documents. While such documents are often available as XML ALTO documents, they lack information about their logical structure. In this paper, we address the problem of logical layout analysis applied to historical documents. We propose a method which is based on the study of a dataset in order to identify rules that assign logical labels to both block and lines of text from XML ALTO documents. Our dataset contains newspapers in French, published in the first half of the 20th century. The evaluation shows that our methodology performs well for the identification of first lines of paragraphs and text lines, with F1 above 0.9. The identification of titles obtains an F1 of 0.64. This method can be applied to preprocess XML ALTO documents in preparation for downstream tasks, and also to annotate large-scale datasets to train machine learning and deep learning algorithms.