Papers by Md. Shad Akhtar
HIT - A Hierarchically Fused Deep Attention Network for Robust Code-mixed Language Representation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | linguistics and morphology of resource-short code-mixed texts remain a key challenge in text processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transformer-based framework that captures the semantic relationship among words and hierarchically learns sentencelevel semantics using a fused attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on one European and five Indic languages on four NLP tasks on eleven datasets. |
Synthetic Data Generation and Joint Learning for Robust Code-Mixed Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of languages are used in online conversations, resulting in code-mixing . the problem is largely unexplored due to the lack of annotated data and noise . |
| Approach: | They propose a robust perturbation-based joint-training model that learns to handle noise in code-mixed text by parameter sharing across clean and noisy words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns to handle noise in the real-world code-mixed text by parameter sharing across clean and noisy words. |
EROS:Entity-Driven Controlled Policy Document Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a privacy policy is a crucial component of any organization that allows it to legally collect, process, store, and/or distribute personal data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a policy-document summarization dataset to enforce the summaries to include critical privacy-related entities and organization’s rationale in collecting those entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over baselines and qualitatively evaluates the proposed model on human and qualitative data. |
MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Shraman Pramanick, Shivam Sharma, Dimitar Dimitrov, Md. Shad Akhtar, Preslav Nakov, Tanmoy Chakraborty
| Challenge: | a growing number of harmful memes are being used for trolling, cyberbullying and abuse . a new approach to detect harmful meme images and texts is emerging . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal deep neural network that detects harmful memes . they extend the recently released HarMeme dataset with additional memes and a new topic . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms rival methods in detecting harmful memes and their target social entities. |
Characterizing the Entities in Harmful Memes: Who is the Hero, the Villain, the Victim? (2023.eacl-main)
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Shivam Sharma, Atharva Kulkarni, Tharun Suresh, Himanshi Mathur, Preslav Nakov, Md. Shad Akhtar, Tanmoy Chakraborty
| Challenge: | A common problem associated with meme comprehension lies in detecting the entities referenced and characterizing the role of each of these entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a memes dataset on US Politics and Covid-19 memes to characterize the role of harmful entities in memes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves 4% over baseline and 1% over competing models. |
IARM: Inter-Aspect Relation Modeling with Memory Networks in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a new approach to extract aspect specific sentimental information from user feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates neighboring aspects related information into the sentiment classification of a target aspect using memory networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.6% on average in restaurant and laptop domains. |
LESA: Linguistic Encapsulation and Semantic Amalgamation Based Generalised Claim Detection from Online Content (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on claim detection is built on the basis of a 'segregation' of claims across different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized generalized model that captures syntactic features through part-of-speech and dependency embeddings, as well as contextual features through a fine-tuned language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on six claim datasets by an average of 3 claim-F1 points and 2 claim-f1 points on the general-domain experiments. |
Domain-aware Self-supervised Pre-training for Label-Efficient Meme Analysis (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing self-supervised learning strategies focus on uni-modal applications . a recent study shows that multimodality is a major challenge for multi-modal systems . |
| Approach: | They propose two self-supervised pre-training methods that employ off-the-shelf multi-modal hate-speech data . they also incorporate multiple specialized pretext tasks to cater to complex multi-modity representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the baseline self-supervised learning strategies on the Memotion challenge and the HarMeme task. |
Counterspeeches up my sleeve! Intent Distribution Learning and Persistent Fusion for Intent-Conditioned Counterspeech Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a counterspeech with a certain intent may not be sufficient in every situation due to complex nature of hate speech . a novel framework for intent-conditioned counterseech generation is proposed to address the pervasive issue of hateful speech on the internet. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for intent-conditioned counterspeech generation that leverages intent-specific representations and a fusion module to incorporate intent-related information into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by 10% across evaluation metrics. |
QUENCH: Measuring the gap between Indic and Non-Indic Contextual General Reasoning in LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | QUENCH is a text-based English quizzing benchmarking system for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based English Quizzing Benchmark manually curated from YouTube quiz videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system assesses the world knowledge and deduction capabilities of large language models via a zero-shot, open-domain quizzing setup. |
Empowering the Fact-checkers! Automatic Identification of Claim Spans on Twitter (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to efficiently classify and verify such data to combat this avalanche of misinformation and fake news. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Twitter corpus with token-level claim spans on more than 7.5k tweets and a model that automatically detects and extracts the snippets of misinformation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline systems on several evaluation metrics, improving by 1.5 points. |
MEMEX: Detecting Explanatory Evidence for Memes via Knowledge-Enriched Contextualization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Besides digital archiving of memes and their metadata, there is no efficient way to deduce a meme’s context dynamically. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to mine the context that succinctly explains the background of a meme and a related document to capture cross-modal semantic dependencies between the meme and the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing systems and shows that it can capture cross-modal semantic dependencies between the meme and the context. |
Adding SPICE to Life: Speaker Profiling in Multiparty Conversations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies assumed the speaker’s persona’s immediate availability, a premise not universally applicable. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize persona attributes for each dialogue participant by combining three core tasks: persona discovery, persona-type identification, and persona value extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task synthesizes persona attributes for each dialogue participant . the resulting model is compared against a baseline model and the proposed model is robust. |
Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets (2021.findings-acl)
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Shraman Pramanick, Dimitar Dimitrov, Rituparna Mukherjee, Shivam Sharma, Md. Shad Akhtar, Preslav Nakov, Tanmoy Chakraborty
| Challenge: | a growing body of research on meme analysis has focused on detecting harmful memes and their social entities . a meme is a form of content that is often harmless and designed to look funny . but its multimodal nature and camouflaged semantics make its analysis challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal models to detect harmful memes and identify social entities that harmful meme targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect harmful memes and the social entities they target . the proposed model lacks the appropriate contexts and is poorly validated . |