Prakhar Biyani


2018

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Identifying Domain Independent Update Intents in Task Based Dialogs
Prakhar Biyani | Cem Akkaya | Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis
Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

One important problem in task-based conversations is that of effectively updating the belief estimates of user-mentioned slot-value pairs. Given a user utterance, the intent of a slot-value pair is captured using dialog acts (DA) expressed in that utterance. However, in certain cases, DA’s fail to capture the actual update intent of the user. In this paper, we describe such cases and propose a new type of semantic class for user intents. This new type, Update Intents (UI), is directly related to the type of update a user intends to perform for a slot-value pair. We define five types of UI’s, which are independent of the domain of the conversation. We build a multi-class classification model using LSTM’s to identify the type of UI in user utterances in the Restaurant and Shopping domains. Experimental results show that our models achieve strong classification performance in terms of F-1 score.

2017

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Identifying Empathetic Messages in Online Health Communities
Hamed Khanpour | Cornelia Caragea | Prakhar Biyani
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Empathy captures one’s ability to correlate with and understand others’ emotional states and experiences. Messages with empathetic content are considered as one of the main advantages for joining online health communities due to their potential to improve people’s moods. Unfortunately, to this date, no computational studies exist that automatically identify empathetic messages in online health communities. We propose a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and show that the proposed model outperforms each individual model (CNN and LSTM) as well as several baselines.

2014

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Summarizing Online Forum Discussions – Can Dialog Acts of Individual Messages Help?
Sumit Bhatia | Prakhar Biyani | Prasenjit Mitra
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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Identifying Emotional and Informational Support in Online Health Communities
Prakhar Biyani | Cornelia Caragea | Prasenjit Mitra | John Yen
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

2012

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Thread Specific Features are Helpful for Identifying Subjectivity Orientation of Online Forum Threads
Prakhar Biyani | Sumit Bhatia | Cornelia Caragea | Prasenjit Mitra
Proceedings of COLING 2012