Ramit Sawhney


2022

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DocFin: Multimodal Financial Prediction and Bias Mitigation using Semi-structured Documents
Puneet Mathur | Mihir Goyal | Ramit Sawhney | Ritik Mathur | Jochen Leidner | Franck Dernoncourt | Dinesh Manocha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Financial prediction is complex due to the stochastic nature of the stock market. Semi-structured financial documents present comprehensive financial data in tabular formats, such as earnings, profit-loss statements, and balance sheets, and can often contain rich technical analysis along with a textual discussion of corporate history, and management analysis, compliance, and risks. Existing research focuses on the textual and audio modalities of financial disclosures from company conference calls to forecast stock volatility and price movement, but ignores the rich tabular data available in financial reports. Moreover, the economic realm is still plagued with a severe under-representation of various communities spanning diverse demographics, gender, and native speakers. In this work, we show that combining tabular data from financial semi-structured documents with text transcripts and audio recordings not only improves stock volatility and price movement prediction by 5-12% but also reduces gender bias caused due to audio-based neural networks by over 30%.

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Tweet Based Reach Aware Temporal Attention Network for NFT Valuation
Ramit Sawhney | Megh Thakkar | Ritesh Soun | Atula Neerkaje | Vasu Sharma | Dipanwita Guhathakurta | Sudheer Chava
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a relatively unexplored class of assets. Designing strategies to forecast NFT trends is an intricate task due to its extremely volatile nature. The market is largely driven by public sentiment and “hype”, which in turn has a high correlation with conversations taking place on social media platforms like Twitter. Prior work done for modelling stock market data does not take into account the extent of impact certain highly influential tweets and their authors can have on the market. Building on these limitations and the nature of the NFT market, we propose a novel reach-aware temporal learning approach to make predictions for forecasting future trends in the NFT market. We perform experiments on a new dataset consisting of over 1.3 million tweets and 180 thousand NFT transactions spanning over 15 NFT collections curated by us. Our model (TA-NFT) outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by an average of 36%. Through extensive quantitative and ablative analysis, we demonstrate the ability of our approach as a practical method for predicting NFT trends.

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The Impact of Differential Privacy on Group Disparity Mitigation
Victor Petren Bach Hansen | Atula Tejaswi Neerkaje | Ramit Sawhney | Lucie Flek | Anders Sogaard
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing

The performance cost of differential privacy has, for some applications, been shown to be higher for minority groups fairness, conversely, has been shown to disproportionally compromise the privacy of members of such groups. Most work in this area has been restricted to computer vision and risk assessment. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of differential privacy on fairness across four tasks, focusing on how attempts to mitigate privacy violations and between-group performance differences interact Does privacy inhibit attempts to ensure fairness? To this end, we train epsilon, delta-differentially private models with empirical risk minimization and group distributionally robust training objectives. Consistent with previous findings, we find that differential privacy increases between-group performance differences in the baseline setting but more interestingly, differential privacy reduces between-group performance differences in the robust setting. We explain this by reinterpreting differential privacy as regularization.

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DMix: Adaptive Distance-aware Interpolative Mixup
Ramit Sawhney | Megh Thakkar | Shrey Pandit | Ritesh Soun | Di Jin | Diyi Yang | Lucie Flek
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Interpolation-based regularisation methods such as Mixup, which generate virtual training samples, have proven to be effective for various tasks and modalities. We extend Mixup and propose DMix, an adaptive distance-aware interpolative Mixup that selects samples based on their diversity in the embedding space. DMix leverages the hyperbolic space as a similarity measure among input samples for a richer encoded representation.DMix achieves state-of-the-art results on sentence classification over existing data augmentation methods on 8 benchmark datasets across English, Arabic, Turkish, and Hindi languages while achieving benchmark F1 scores in 3 times less number of iterations. We probe the effectiveness of DMix in conjunction with various similarity measures and qualitatively analyze the different components.DMix being generalizable, can be applied to various tasks, models and modalities.

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HYPHEN: Hyperbolic Hawkes Attention For Text Streams
Shivam Agarwal | Ramit Sawhney | Sanchit Ahuja | Ritesh Soun | Sudheer Chava
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Analyzing the temporal sequence of texts from sources such as social media, news, and parliamentary debates is a challenging problem as it exhibits time-varying scale-free properties and fine-grained timing irregularities. We propose a Hyperbolic Hawkes Attention Network (HYPHEN), which learns a data-driven hyperbolic space and models irregular powerlaw excitations using a hyperbolic Hawkes process. Through quantitative and exploratory experiments over financial NLP, suicide ideation detection, and political debate analysis we demonstrate HYPHEN’s practical applicability for modeling online text sequences in a geometry agnostic manner.

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A Risk-Averse Mechanism for Suicidality Assessment on Social Media
Ramit Sawhney | Atula Neerkaje | Manas Gaur
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Recent studies have shown that social media has increasingly become a platform for users to express suicidal thoughts outside traditional clinical settings. With advances in Natural Language Processing strategies, it is now possible to design automated systems to assess suicide risk. However, such systems may generate uncertain predictions, leading to severe consequences. We hence reformulate suicide risk assessment as a selective prioritized prediction problem over the Columbia Suicide Severity Risk Scale (C-SSRS). We propose SASI, a risk-averse and self-aware transformer-based hierarchical attention classifier, augmented to refrain from making uncertain predictions. We show that SASI is able to refrain from 83% of incorrect predictions on real-world Reddit data. Furthermore, we discuss the qualitative, practical, and ethical aspects of SASI for suicide risk assessment as a human-in-the-loop framework.

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CIAug: Equipping Interpolative Augmentation with Curriculum Learning
Ramit Sawhney | Ritesh Soun | Shrey Pandit | Megh Thakkar | Sarvagya Malaviya | Yuval Pinter
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Interpolative data augmentation has proven to be effective for NLP tasks. Despite its merits, the sample selection process in mixup is random, which might make it difficult for the model to generalize better and converge faster. We propose CIAug, a novel curriculum-based learning method that builds upon mixup. It leverages the relative position of samples in hyperbolic embedding space as a complexity measure to gradually mix up increasingly difficult and diverse samples along training. CIAug achieves state-of-the-art results over existing interpolative augmentation methods on 10 benchmark datasets across 4 languages in text classification and named-entity recognition tasks. It also converges and achieves benchmark F1 scores 3 times faster. We empirically analyze the various components of CIAug, and evaluate its robustness against adversarial attacks.

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Cryptocurrency Bubble Detection: A New Stock Market Dataset, Financial Task & Hyperbolic Models
Ramit Sawhney | Shivam Agarwal | Vivek Mittal | Paolo Rosso | Vikram Nanda | Sudheer Chava
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The rapid spread of information over social media influences quantitative trading and investments. The growing popularity of speculative trading of highly volatile assets such as cryptocurrencies and meme stocks presents a fresh challenge in the financial realm. Investigating such “bubbles” - periods of sudden anomalous behavior of markets are critical in better understanding investor behavior and market dynamics. However, high volatility coupled with massive volumes of chaotic social media texts, especially for underexplored assets like cryptocoins pose a challenge to existing methods. Taking the first step towards NLP for cryptocoins, we present and publicly release CryptoBubbles, a novel multi- span identification task for bubble detection, and a dataset of more than 400 cryptocoins from 9 exchanges over five years spanning over two million tweets. Further, we develop a set of sequence-to-sequence hyperbolic models suited to this multi-span identification task based on the power-law dynamics of cryptocurrencies and user behavior on social media. We further test the effectiveness of our models under zero-shot settings on a test set of Reddit posts pertaining to 29 “meme stocks”, which see an increase in trade volume due to social media hype. Through quantitative, qualitative, and zero-shot analyses on Reddit and Twitter spanning cryptocoins and meme-stocks, we show the practical applicability of CryptoBubbles and hyperbolic models.

2021

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FAST: Financial News and Tweet Based Time Aware Network for Stock Trading
Ramit Sawhney | Arnav Wadhwa | Shivam Agarwal | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Designing profitable trading strategies is complex as stock movements are highly stochastic; the market is influenced by large volumes of noisy data across diverse information sources like news and social media. Prior work mostly treats stock movement prediction as a regression or classification task and is not directly optimized towards profit-making. Further, they do not model the fine-grain temporal irregularities in the release of vast volumes of text that the market responds to quickly. Building on these limitations, we propose a novel hierarchical, learning to rank approach that uses textual data to make time-aware predictions for ranking stocks based on expected profit. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 8% in terms of cumulative profit and risk-adjusted returns in trading simulations on two benchmarks: English tweets and Chinese financial news spanning two major stock indexes and four global markets. Through ablative and qualitative analyses, we build the case for our method as a tool for daily stock trading.

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PHASE: Learning Emotional Phase-aware Representations for Suicide Ideation Detection on Social Media
Ramit Sawhney | Harshit Joshi | Lucie Flek | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Recent psychological studies indicate that individuals exhibiting suicidal ideation increasingly turn to social media rather than mental health practitioners. Contextualizing the build-up of such ideation is critical for the identification of users at risk. In this work, we focus on identifying suicidal intent in tweets by augmenting linguistic models with emotional phases modeled from users’ historical context. We propose PHASE, a time-and phase-aware framework that adaptively learns features from a user’s historical emotional spectrum on Twitter for preliminary screening of suicidal risk. Building on clinical studies, PHASE learns phase-like progressions in users’ historical Plutchik-wheel-based emotions to contextualize suicidal intent. While outperforming state-of-the-art methods, we show the utility of temporal and phase-based emotional contextual cues for suicide ideation detection. We further discuss practical and ethical considerations.

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HypMix: Hyperbolic Interpolative Data Augmentation
Ramit Sawhney | Megh Thakkar | Shivam Agarwal | Di Jin | Diyi Yang | Lucie Flek
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Interpolation-based regularisation methods for data augmentation have proven to be effective for various tasks and modalities. These methods involve performing mathematical operations over the raw input samples or their latent states representations - vectors that often possess complex hierarchical geometries. However, these operations are performed in the Euclidean space, simplifying these representations, which may lead to distorted and noisy interpolations. We propose HypMix, a novel model-, data-, and modality-agnostic interpolative data augmentation technique operating in the hyperbolic space, which captures the complex geometry of input and hidden state hierarchies better than its contemporaries. We evaluate HypMix on benchmark and low resource datasets across speech, text, and vision modalities, showing that HypMix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. In addition, we demonstrate the use of HypMix in semi-supervised settings. We further probe into the adversarial robustness and qualitative inferences we draw from HypMix that elucidate the efficacy of the Riemannian hyperbolic manifolds for interpolation-based data augmentation.

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Suicide Ideation Detection via Social and Temporal User Representations using Hyperbolic Learning
Ramit Sawhney | Harshit Joshi | Rajiv Ratn Shah | Lucie Flek
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent psychological studies indicate that individuals exhibiting suicidal ideation increasingly turn to social media rather than mental health practitioners. Personally contextualizing the buildup of such ideation is critical for accurate identification of users at risk. In this work, we propose a framework jointly leveraging a user’s emotional history and social information from a user’s neighborhood in a network to contextualize the interpretation of the latest tweet of a user on Twitter. Reflecting upon the scale-free nature of social network relationships, we propose the use of Hyperbolic Graph Convolution Networks, in combination with the Hawkes process to learn the historical emotional spectrum of a user in a time-sensitive manner. Our system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on this task, showing the benefits of both socially and personally contextualized representations.

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An Empirical Investigation of Bias in the Multimodal Analysis of Financial Earnings Calls
Ramit Sawhney | Arshiya Aggarwal | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Volatility prediction is complex due to the stock market’s stochastic nature. Existing research focuses on the textual elements of financial disclosures like earnings calls transcripts to forecast stock volatility and risk, but ignores the rich acoustic features in the company executives’ speech. Recently, new multimodal approaches that leverage the verbal and vocal cues of speakers in financial disclosures significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches demonstrating the benefits of multimodality and speech. However, the financial realm is still plagued with a severe underrepresentation of various communities spanning diverse demographics, gender, and native speech. While multimodal models are better risk forecasters, it is imperative to also investigate the potential bias that these models may learn from the speech signals of company executives. In this work, we present the first study to discover the gender bias in multimodal volatility prediction due to gender-sensitive audio features and fewer female executives in earnings calls of one of the world’s biggest stock indexes, the S&P 500 index. We quantitatively analyze bias as error disparity and investigate the sources of this bias. Our results suggest that multimodal neural financial models accentuate gender-based stereotypes.

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Quantitative Day Trading from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning
Ramit Sawhney | Arnav Wadhwa | Shivam Agarwal | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

It is challenging to design profitable and practical trading strategies, as stock price movements are highly stochastic, and the market is heavily influenced by chaotic data across sources like news and social media. Existing NLP approaches largely treat stock prediction as a classification or regression problem and are not optimized to make profitable investment decisions. Further, they do not model the temporal dynamics of large volumes of diversely influential text to which the market responds quickly. Building on these shortcomings, we propose a deep reinforcement learning approach that makes time-aware decisions to trade stocks while optimizing profit using textual data. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art in terms of risk-adjusted returns in trading simulations on two benchmarks: Tweets (English) and financial news (Chinese) pertaining to two major indexes and four global stock markets. Through extensive experiments and studies, we build the case for our method as a tool for quantitative trading.

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Multitask Learning for Emotionally Analyzing Sexual Abuse Disclosures
Ramit Sawhney | Puneet Mathur | Taru Jain | Akash Kumar Gautam | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The #MeToo movement on social media platforms initiated discussions over several facets of sexual harassment in our society. Prior work by the NLP community for automated identification of the narratives related to sexual abuse disclosures barely explored this social phenomenon as an independent task. However, emotional attributes associated with textual conversations related to the #MeToo social movement are complexly intertwined with such narratives. We formulate the task of identifying narratives related to the sexual abuse disclosures in online posts as a joint modeling task that leverages their emotional attributes through multitask learning. Our results demonstrate that positive knowledge transfer via context-specific shared representations of a flexible cross-stitched parameter sharing model helps establish the inherent benefit of jointly modeling tasks related to sexual abuse disclosures with emotion classification from the text in homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. We show how for more domain-specific tasks related to sexual abuse disclosures such as sarcasm identification and dialogue act (refutation, justification, allegation) classification, homogeneous multitask learning is helpful, whereas for more general tasks such as stance and hate speech detection, heterogeneous multitask learning with emotion classification works better.

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Multimodal Multi-Speaker Merger & Acquisition Financial Modeling: A New Task, Dataset, and Neural Baselines
Ramit Sawhney | Mihir Goyal | Prakhar Goel | Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Risk prediction is an essential task in financial markets. Merger and Acquisition (M&A) calls provide key insights into the claims made by company executives about the restructuring of the financial firms. Extracting vocal and textual cues from M&A calls can help model the risk associated with such financial activities. To aid the analysis of M&A calls, we curate a dataset of conference call transcripts and their corresponding audio recordings for the time period ranging from 2016 to 2020. We introduce M3ANet, a baseline architecture that takes advantage of the multimodal multi-speaker input to forecast the financial risk associated with the M&A calls. Empirical results prove that the task is challenging, with the pro-posed architecture performing marginally better than strong BERT-based baselines. We release the M3A dataset and benchmark models to motivate future research on this challenging problem domain.

2020

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A Time-Aware Transformer Based Model for Suicide Ideation Detection on Social Media
Ramit Sawhney | Harshit Joshi | Saumya Gandhi | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Social media’s ubiquity fosters a space for users to exhibit suicidal thoughts outside of traditional clinical settings. Understanding the build-up of such ideation is critical for the identification of at-risk users and suicide prevention. Suicide ideation is often linked to a history of mental depression. The emotional spectrum of a user’s historical activity on social media can be indicative of their mental state over time. In this work, we focus on identifying suicidal intent in English tweets by augmenting linguistic models with historical context. We propose STATENet, a time-aware transformer based model for preliminary screening of suicidal risk on social media. STATENet outperforms competitive methods, demonstrating the utility of emotional and temporal contextual cues for suicide risk assessment. We discuss the empirical, qualitative, practical, and ethical aspects of STATENet for suicide ideation detection.

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VolTAGE: Volatility Forecasting via Text Audio Fusion with Graph Convolution Networks for Earnings Calls
Ramit Sawhney | Piyush Khanna | Arshiya Aggarwal | Taru Jain | Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Natural language processing has recently made stock movement forecasting and volatility forecasting advances, leading to improved financial forecasting. Transcripts of companies’ earnings calls are well studied for risk modeling, offering unique investment insight into stock performance. However, vocal cues in the speech of company executives present an underexplored rich source of natural language data for estimating financial risk. Additionally, most existing approaches ignore the correlations between stocks. Building on existing work, we introduce a neural model for stock volatility prediction that accounts for stock interdependence via graph convolutions while fusing verbal, vocal, and financial features in a semi-supervised multi-task risk forecasting formulation. Our proposed model, VolTAGE, outperforms existing methods demonstrating the effectiveness of multimodal learning for volatility prediction.

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Deep Attentive Learning for Stock Movement Prediction From Social Media Text and Company Correlations
Ramit Sawhney | Shivam Agarwal | Arnav Wadhwa | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In the financial domain, risk modeling and profit generation heavily rely on the sophisticated and intricate stock movement prediction task. Stock forecasting is complex, given the stochastic dynamics and non-stationary behavior of the market. Stock movements are influenced by varied factors beyond the conventionally studied historical prices, such as social media and correlations among stocks. The rising ubiquity of online content and knowledge mandates an exploration of models that factor in such multimodal signals for accurate stock forecasting. We introduce an architecture that achieves a potent blend of chaotic temporal signals from financial data, social media, and inter-stock relationships via a graph neural network in a hierarchical temporal fashion. Through experiments on real-world S&P 500 index data and English tweets, we show the practical applicability of our model as a tool for investment decision making and trading.

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GPolS: A Contextual Graph-Based Language Model for Analyzing Parliamentary Debates and Political Cohesion
Ramit Sawhney | Arnav Wadhwa | Shivam Agarwal | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Parliamentary debates present a valuable language resource for analyzing comprehensive options in electing representatives under a functional, free society. However, the esoteric nature of political speech coupled with non-linguistic aspects such as political cohesion between party members presents a complex and underexplored task of contextual parliamentary debate analysis. We introduce GPolS, a neural model for political speech sentiment analysis jointly exploiting both semantic language representations and relations between debate transcripts, motions, and political party members. Through experiments on real-world English data and by visualizing attention, we provide a use case of GPolS as a tool for political speech analysis and polarity prediction.

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Augmenting NLP models using Latent Feature Interpolations
Amit Jindal | Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury | Aniket Didolkar | Di Jin | Ramit Sawhney | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Models with a large number of parameters are prone to over-fitting and often fail to capture the underlying input distribution. We introduce Emix, a data augmentation method that uses interpolations of word embeddings and hidden layer representations to construct virtual examples. We show that Emix shows significant improvements over previously used interpolation based regularizers and data augmentation techniques. We also demonstrate how our proposed method is more robust to sparsification. We highlight the merits of our proposed methodology by performing thorough quantitative and qualitative assessments.

2019

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#YouToo? Detection of Personal Recollections of Sexual Harassment on Social Media
Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury | Ramit Sawhney | Rajiv Ratn Shah | Debanjan Mahata
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The availability of large-scale online social data, coupled with computational methods can help us answer fundamental questions relat- ing to our social lives, particularly our health and well-being. The #MeToo trend has led to people talking about personal experiences of harassment more openly. This work at- tempts to aggregate such experiences of sex- ual abuse to facilitate a better understanding of social media constructs and to bring about social change. It has been found that disclo- sure of abuse has positive psychological im- pacts. Hence, we contend that such informa- tion can leveraged to create better campaigns for social change by analyzing how users react to these stories and to obtain a better insight into the consequences of sexual abuse. We use a three part Twitter-Specific Social Media Lan- guage Model to segregate personal recollec- tions of sexual harassment from Twitter posts. An extensive comparison with state-of-the-art generic and specific models along with a de- tailed error analysis explores the merit of our proposed model.

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ARHNet - Leveraging Community Interaction for Detection of Religious Hate Speech in Arabic
Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury | Aniket Didolkar | Ramit Sawhney | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

The rapid widespread of social media has lead to some undesirable consequences like the rapid increase of hateful content and offensive language. Religious Hate Speech, in particular, often leads to unrest and sometimes aggravates to violence against people on the basis of their religious affiliations. The richness of the Arabic morphology and the limited available resources makes this task especially challenging. The current state-of-the-art approaches to detect hate speech in Arabic rely entirely on textual (lexical and semantic) cues. Our proposed methodology contends that leveraging Community-Interaction can better help us profile hate speech content on social media. Our proposed ARHNet (Arabic Religious Hate Speech Net) model incorporates both Arabic Word Embeddings and Social Network Graphs for the detection of religious hate speech.

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Investigating Political Herd Mentality: A Community Sentiment Based Approach
Anjali Bhavan | Rohan Mishra | Pradyumna Prakhar Sinha | Ramit Sawhney | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Analyzing polarities and sentiments inherent in political speeches and debates poses an important problem today. This experiment aims to address this issue by analyzing publicly-available Hansard transcripts of the debates conducted in the UK Parliament. Our proposed approach, which uses community-based graph information to augment hand-crafted features based on topic modeling and emotion detection on debate transcripts, currently surpasses the benchmark results on the same dataset. Such sentiment classification systems could prove to be of great use in today’s politically turbulent times, for public knowledge of politicians’ stands on various relevant issues proves vital for good governance and citizenship. The experiments also demonstrate that continuous feature representations learned from graphs can improve performance on sentiment classification tasks significantly.

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Speak up, Fight Back! Detection of Social Media Disclosures of Sexual Harassment
Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury | Ramit Sawhney | Puneet Mathur | Debanjan Mahata | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

The #MeToo movement is an ongoing prevalent phenomenon on social media aiming to demonstrate the frequency and widespread of sexual harassment by providing a platform to speak narrate personal experiences of such harassment. The aggregation and analysis of such disclosures pave the way to development of technology-based prevention of sexual harassment. We contend that the lack of specificity in generic sentence classification models may not be the best way to tackle text subtleties that intrinsically prevail in a classification task as complex as identifying disclosures of sexual harassment. We propose the Disclosure Language Model, a three part ULMFiT architecture, consisting of a Language model, a Medium-Specific (Twitter) model and a Task-Specific classifier to tackle this problem and create a manually annotated real-world dataset to test our technique on this, to show that using a Discourse Language Model often yields better classification performance over (i) Generic deep learning based sentence classification models (ii) existing models that rely on handcrafted stylistic features. An extensive comparison with state-of-the-art generic and specific models along with a detailed error analysis presents the case for our proposed methodology.

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SNAP-BATNET: Cascading Author Profiling and Social Network Graphs for Suicide Ideation Detection on Social Media
Rohan Mishra | Pradyumn Prakhar Sinha | Ramit Sawhney | Debanjan Mahata | Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Ratn Shah
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth and the use of social media to detect suicidal ideation is an active line of research. While it has been established that these users share a common set of properties, the current state-of-the-art approaches utilize only text-based (stylistic and semantic) cues. We contend that the use of information from networks in the form of condensed social graph embeddings and author profiling using features from historical data can be combined with an existing set of features to improve the performance. To that end, we experiment on a manually annotated dataset of tweets created using a three-phase strategy and propose SNAP-BATNET, a deep learning based model to extract text-based features and a novel Feature Stacking approach to combine other community-based information such as historical author profiling and graph embeddings that outperform the current state-of-the-art. We conduct a comprehensive quantitative analysis with baselines, both generic and specific, that presents the case for SNAP-BATNET, along with an error analysis that highlights the limitations and challenges faced paving the way to the future of AI-based suicide ideation detection.

2018

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Detecting Offensive Tweets in Hindi-English Code-Switched Language
Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Shah | Ramit Sawhney | Debanjan Mahata
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

The exponential rise of social media websites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit in linguistically diverse geographical regions has led to hybridization of popular native languages with English in an effort to ease communication. The paper focuses on the classification of offensive tweets written in Hinglish language, which is a portmanteau of the Indic language Hindi with the Roman script. The paper introduces a novel tweet dataset, titled Hindi-English Offensive Tweet (HEOT) dataset, consisting of tweets in Hindi-English code switched language split into three classes: non-offensive, abusive and hate-speech. Further, we approach the problem of classification of the tweets in HEOT dataset using transfer learning wherein the proposed model employing Convolutional Neural Networks is pre-trained on tweets in English followed by retraining on Hinglish tweets.

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Did you offend me? Classification of Offensive Tweets in Hinglish Language
Puneet Mathur | Ramit Sawhney | Meghna Ayyar | Rajiv Shah
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online (ALW2)

The use of code-switched languages (e.g., Hinglish, which is derived by the blending of Hindi with the English language) is getting much popular on Twitter due to their ease of communication in native languages. However, spelling variations and absence of grammar rules introduce ambiguity and make it difficult to understand the text automatically. This paper presents the Multi-Input Multi-Channel Transfer Learning based model (MIMCT) to detect offensive (hate speech or abusive) Hinglish tweets from the proposed Hinglish Offensive Tweet (HOT) dataset using transfer learning coupled with multiple feature inputs. Specifically, it takes multiple primary word embedding along with secondary extracted features as inputs to train a multi-channel CNN-LSTM architecture that has been pre-trained on English tweets through transfer learning. The proposed MIMCT model outperforms the baseline supervised classification models, transfer learning based CNN and LSTM models to establish itself as the state of the art in the unexplored domain of Hinglish offensive text classification.

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Exploring and Learning Suicidal Ideation Connotations on Social Media with Deep Learning
Ramit Sawhney | Prachi Manchanda | Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Shah | Raj Singh
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

The increasing suicide rates amongst youth and its high correlation with suicidal ideation expression on social media warrants a deeper investigation into models for the detection of suicidal intent in text such as tweets to enable prevention. However, the complexity of the natural language constructs makes this task very challenging. Deep Learning architectures such as LSTMs, CNNs, and RNNs show promise in sentence level classification problems. This work investigates the ability of deep learning architectures to build an accurate and robust model for suicidal ideation detection and compares their performance with standard baselines in text classification problems. The experimental results reveal the merit in C-LSTM based models as compared to other deep learning and machine learning based classification models for suicidal ideation detection.

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A Computational Approach to Feature Extraction for Identification of Suicidal Ideation in Tweets
Ramit Sawhney | Prachi Manchanda | Raj Singh | Swati Aggarwal
Proceedings of ACL 2018, Student Research Workshop

Technological advancements in the World Wide Web and social networks in particular coupled with an increase in social media usage has led to a positive correlation between the exhibition of Suicidal ideation on websites such as Twitter and cases of suicide. This paper proposes a novel supervised approach for detecting suicidal ideation in content on Twitter. A set of features is proposed for training both linear and ensemble classifiers over a dataset of manually annotated tweets. The performance of the proposed methodology is compared against four baselines that utilize varying approaches to validate its utility. The results are finally summarized by reflecting on the effect of the inclusion of the proposed features one by one for suicidal ideation detection.