Harnessing Large Language Models Over Transformer Models for Detecting Bengali Depressive Social Media Text: A Comprehensive Study

In an era where the silent struggle of underdiagnosed depression pervades globally, our research delves into the crucial link between mental health and social media. This work focuses on early detection of depression, particularly in extroverted social media users, using LLMs such as GPT 3.5, GPT 4 and our proposed GPT 3.5 fine-tuned model DepGPT, as well as advanced Deep learning models(LSTM, Bi-LSTM, GRU, BiGRU) and Transformer models(BERT, BanglaBERT, SahajBERT, BanglaBERT-Base). The study categorized Reddit and X datasets into "Depressive" and "Non-Depressive" segments, translated into Bengali by native speakers with expertise in mental health, resulting in the creation of the Bengali Social Media Depressive Dataset (BSMDD). Our work provides full architecture details for each model and a methodical way to assess their performance in Bengali depressive text categorization using zero-shot and few-shot learning techniques. Our work demonstrates the superiority of SahajBERT and Bi-LSTM with FastText embeddings in their respective domains also tackles explainability issues with transformer models and emphasizes the effectiveness of LLMs, especially DepGPT, demonstrating flexibility and competence in a range of learning contexts. According to the experiment results, the proposed model, DepGPT, outperformed not only Alpaca Lora 7B in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios but also every other model, achieving a near-perfect accuracy of 0.9796 and an F1-score of 0.9804, high recall, and exceptional precision. Although competitive, GPT-3.5 Turbo and Alpaca Lora 7B show relatively poorer effectiveness in zero-shot and few-shot situations. The work emphasizes the effectiveness and flexibility of LLMs in a variety of linguistic circumstances, providing insightful information about the complex field of depression detection models

Multimodal Hate Speech Detection from Bengali Memes and Texts

Numerous works have been proposed to employ machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to utilize textual data from social media for anti-social behavior analysis such as cyberbullying, fake news propagation, and hate speech mainly for highly resourced languages like English. However, despite having a lot of diversity and millions of native speakers, some languages such as Bengali are under-resourced, which is due to a lack of computational resources for natural language processing (NLP). Like English, Bengali social media content also includes images along with texts (e.g., multimodal contents are posted by embedding short texts into images on Facebook), only the textual data is not enough to judge them (e.g., to determine they are hate speech). In those cases, images might give extra context to properly judge. This paper is about hate speech detection from multimodal Bengali memes and texts. We prepared the only multimodal hate speech detection dataset1 for a kind of problem for Bengali. We train several neural architectures (i.e., neural networks like Bi-LSTM/Conv-LSTM with word embeddings, EfficientNet + transformer architectures such as monolingual Bangla BERT, multilingual BERT-cased/uncased, and XLM-RoBERTa) jointly analyze textual and visual information for hate speech detection. The Conv-LSTM and XLM-RoBERTa models performed best for texts, yielding F1 scores of 0.78 and 0.82, respectively. As of memes, ResNet152 and DenseNet201 models yield F1 scores of 0.78 and 0.7, respectively. The multimodal fusion of mBERT-uncased + EfficientNet-B1 performed the best, yielding an F1 score of 0.80. Our study suggests that memes are moderately useful for hate speech detection in Bengali, but none of the multimodal models outperform unimodal models analyzing only textual data

MSIR@FIRE: A Comprehensive Report from 2013 to 2016

[EN] India is a nation of geographical and cultural diversity where over 1600 dialects are spoken by the people. With the technological advancement, penetration of the internet and cheaper access to mobile data, India has recently seen a sudden growth of internet users. These Indian internet users generate contents either in English or in other vernacular Indian languages. To develop technological solutions for the contents generated by the Indian users using the Indian languages, the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) was established and held for the first time in 2008. Although Indian languages are written using indigenous scripts, often websites and user-generated content (such as tweets and blogs) in these Indian languages are written using Roman script due to various socio-cultural and technological reasons. A challenge that search engines face while processing transliterated queries and documents is that of extensive spelling variation. MSIR track was first introduced in 2013 at FIRE and the aim of MSIR was to systematically formalize several research problems that one must solve to tackle the code mixing in Web search for users of many languages around the world, develop related data sets, test benches and most importantly, build a research community focusing on this important problem that has received very little attention. This document is a comprehensive report on the 4 years of MSIR track evaluated at FIRE between 2013 and 2016.Somnath Banerjee and Sudip Kumar Naskar are supported by Media Lab Asia, MeitY, Government of India, under the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics & IT. The work of Paolo Rosso was partially supported by the MISMIS research project PGC2018-096212-B-C31 funded by the Spanish MICINN.Banerjee, S.; Choudhury, M.; Chakma, K.; Kumar Naskar, S.; Das, A.; Bandyopadhyay, S.; Rosso, P. (2020). MSIR@FIRE: A Comprehensive Report from 2013 to 2016. 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The first cross-script code-mixed question answering corpus. In: Proceedings of the workshop on modeling, learning and mining for cross/multilinguality (MultiLingMine 2016), co-located with the 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). 2016.Banerjee S, Naskar SK, Rosso P, Bandyopadhyay S. Named entity recognition on code-mixed cross-script social media content. Comput Sistemas. 2017;21(4):681–92.Barman U, Das A, Wagner J, Foster J. Code mixing: a challenge for language identification in the language of social media. In: Proceedings of the first workshop on computational approaches to code switching. 2014. pp. 13–23.Bhardwaj P, Pakray P, Bajpeyee V, Taneja A. Information retrieval on code-mixed Hindi–English tweets. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. 2016.Bhargava R, Khandelwal S, Bhatia A, Sharmai Y. Modeling classifier for code mixed cross script questions. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Bhattacharjee D, Bhattacharya, P. Ensemble classifier based approach for code-mixed cross-script question classification. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Chakma K, Das A. CMIR: a corpus for evaluation of code mixed information retrieval of Hindi–English tweets. In: The 17th international conference on intelligent text processing and computational linguistics (CICLING). 2016.Choudhury M, Chittaranjan G, Gupta P, Das A. Overview of fire 2014 track on transliterated search. Proceedings of FIRE. 2014. pp. 68–89.Ganguly D, Pal S, Jones GJ. Dcu@fire-2014: fuzzy queries with rule-based normalization for mixed script information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the forum for information retrieval evaluation, ACM, 2014. pp. 80–85.Gella S, Sharma J, Bali K. Query word labeling and back transliteration for Indian languages: shared task system description. FIRE Working Notes. 2013;3.Gupta DK, Kumar S, Ekbal A. Machine learning approach for language identification and transliteration. In: Proceedings of the forum for information retrieval evaluation, ACM, 2014. pp. 60–64.Gupta P, Bali K, Banchs RE, Choudhury M, Rosso P. Query expansion for mixed-script information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, ACM, 2014. pp. 677–686.Gupta P, Rosso P, Banchs RE. Encoding transliteration variation through dimensionality reduction: fire shared task on transliterated search. In: Fifth forum for information retrieval evaluation. 2013.HB Barathi Ganesh, M Anand Kumar, KP Soman. Distributional semantic representation for information retrieval. 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Is Attention always needed? A Case Study on Language Identification from Speech

Language Identification (LID) is a crucial preliminary process in the field of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that involves the identification of a spoken language from audio samples. Contemporary systems that can process speech in multiple languages require users to expressly designate one or more languages prior to utilization. The LID task assumes a significant role in scenarios where ASR systems are unable to comprehend the spoken language in multilingual settings, leading to unsuccessful speech recognition outcomes. The present study introduces convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) based LID, designed to operate on the Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) characteristics of audio samples. Furthermore, we replicate certain state-of-the-art methodologies, specifically the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Attention-based Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN with attention), and conduct a comparative analysis with our CRNN-based approach. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on thirteen distinct Indian languages and our model resulted in over 98\% classification accuracy. The LID model exhibits high-performance levels ranging from 97% to 100% for languages that are linguistically similar. The proposed LID model exhibits a high degree of extensibility to additional languages and demonstrates a strong resistance to noise, achieving 91.2% accuracy in a noisy setting when applied to a European Language (EU) dataset.Comment: Accepted for publication in Natural Language Engineerin

TRACE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Continual Learning in Large Language Models

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs, owing to both their simplicity and the models' potential exposure during instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs. TRACE consists of 8 distinct datasets spanning challenging tasks including domain-specific tasks, multilingual capabilities, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. All datasets are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Our experiments show that after training on TRACE, aligned LLMs exhibit significant declines in both general ability and instruction-following capabilities. For example, the accuracy of llama2-chat 13B on gsm8k dataset declined precipitously from 28.8\% to 2\% after training on our datasets. This highlights the challenge of finding a suitable tradeoff between achieving performance on specific tasks while preserving the original prowess of LLMs. Empirical findings suggest that tasks inherently equipped with reasoning paths contribute significantly to preserving certain capabilities of LLMs against potential declines. Motivated by this, we introduce the Reasoning-augmented Continual Learning (RCL) approach. RCL integrates task-specific cues with meta-rationales, effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs while expediting convergence on novel tasks