Papers by Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya
Subjective Crowd Disagreements for Subjective Data: Uncovering Meaningful CrowdOpinion with Population-level Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Annotator disagreements are resolved before learning takes place, but researchers question the performance of a system when annotators disagree. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses language features and label distributions to pool similar items into larger labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on five publicly available datasets with varying levels of disagreements on social media and in the wild using a dataset from Facebook. |
Subasa - Adapting Language Models for Low-resourced Offensive Language Detection in Sinhala (2025.naacl-srw)
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Shanilka Haturusinghe, Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Christopher M Homan, Marcos Zampieri, Sidath Ravindra Liyanage
| Challenge: | A major challenge in the field of NLP are the disparities between high- and low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose fine-tuning strategies that have not been previously explored for Sinhala in the downstream task of offensive language detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baseline models on the Sinhala offensive language detection task. |
Disagreement Matters: Preserving Label Diversity by Jointly Modeling Item and Annotator Label Distributions with DisCo (2023.findings-acl)
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Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Alexander Ororbia, Raj Bhensadadia, Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, Christopher Homan
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that annotator disagreement is common in supervised learning . a simple neural model that learns to predict annotators' labels is competitive with other models that do not model specific annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model that learns to predict annotator distributions by aggregating over all annotators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models that do not model specific annotators or do not learn label distribution learning. |
Blind Spot Navigation in Large Language Model Reasoning with Thought Space Explorer (2026.findings-eacl)
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Jinghan Zhang, Fengran Mo, Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Xinyue Ye, Dongjie Wang, Yanjie Fu, Kunpeng Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models have strong reasoning capabilities through chain-structured methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for navigating and expanding thought structures to overcome blind spots in LLM reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes blind spots in large language models by expanding thought structures . the proposed framework improves accuracy of the final answer and intermediate reasoning steps . |
Rater Cohesion and Quality from a Vicarious Perspective (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Deepak Pandita, Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Sujan Dutta, Sarah Luger, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, Marcos Zampieri, Christopher Homan
| Challenge: | Recent work in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) highlights the gains in model performance from aligning them to human values. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vicarious annotation to break down disagreement by asking raters how they think others would annotate the data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method breaks down disagreements by asking raters how they think others would annotate the data. |