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Community Question Answering (cQA) services like Yahoo! Answers 1 , Baidu Zhidao 2 , Quora 3 , StackOverflow 4 etc. provide a platform for interaction with experts and help users to obtain precise and accurate answers to their questions. The time lag between the user posting a question and receiving its answer could be reduced by retrieving similar historic questions from the cQA archives. The main challenge in this task is the "lexicosyntactic" gap between the current and the previous questions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called "Siamese Convolutional Neural Network for cQA (SCQA)" to find the semantic similarity between the current and the archived questions. SCQA consist of twin convolutional neural networks with shared parameters and a contrastive loss function joining them. SCQA learns the similarity metric for question-question pairs by leveraging the question-answer pairs available in cQA forum archives. The model projects semantically similar question pairs nearer to each other and dissimilar question pairs farther away from each other in the semantic space. Experiments on large scale reallife "Yahoo! Answers" dataset reveals that SCQA outperforms current state-of-theart approaches based on translation models, topic models and deep neural network https://answers.yahoo.com/

Today, there are a large number of online discussion fora on the internet which are meant for users to express, discuss and exchange their views and opinions on various topics. For example, news portals, blogs, social media channels such as youtube. typically allow users to express their views through comments. In such fora, it has been often observed that user conversations sometimes quickly derail and become inappropriate such as hurling abuses, passing rude and discourteous comments on individuals or certain groups/communities. Similarly, some virtual agents or bots have also been found to respond back to users with inappropriate messages. As a result, inappropriate messages or comments are turning into an online menace slowly degrading the effectiveness of user experiences. Hence, automatic detection and filtering of such inappropriate language has become an important problem for improving the quality of conversations with users as well as virtual agents. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based technique for automatically identifying such inappropriate language. We especially focus on solving this problem in two application scenarios-(a) Query completion suggestions in search engines and (b) Users conversations in messengers. Detecting inappropriate language is challenging due to various natural language phenomenon such as spelling mistakes and variations, polysemy, contextual ambiguity and semantic variations. For identifying inappropriate query suggestions, we propose a novel deep learning architecture called "Convolutional Bi-Directional LSTM (C-BiLSTM)" which combines the strengths of both Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) and Bi-directional LSTMs (BLSTM). For filtering inappropriate conversations, we use LSTM and Bi-directional LSTM (BLSTM) sequential models. The proposed models do not rely on hand-crafted features, are trained end-end as a single model, and effectively capture both local features as well as their global semantics. Evaluating C-BiLSTM, LSTM and BLSTM models on real-world search queries and conversations reveals that they significantly outperform both pattern-based and other hand-crafted feature-based baselines.

Spelling correction is a well-known task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Automatic spelling correction is important for many NLP applications like web search engines, text summarization, sentiment analysis etc. Most approaches use parallel data of noisy and correct word mappings from different sources as training data for automatic spelling correction. Indic languages are resourcescarce and do not have such parallel data due to low volume of queries and nonexistence of such prior implementations. In this paper, we show how to build an automatic spelling corrector for resourcescarce languages. We propose a sequenceto-sequence deep learning model which trains end-to-end. We perform experiments on synthetic datasets created for Indic languages, Hindi and Telugu, by incorporating the spelling mistakes committed at character level. A comparative evaluation shows that our model is competitive with the existing spell checking and correction techniques for Indic languages.

Abstract. In this paper, we present our Hindi to English and Marathi to English CLIR systems developed as part of our participation in the CLEF 2007 Ad-Hoc Bilingual task. We take a query translation based approach using bi-lingual dictionaries. Query words not found in the dictionary are transliterated using a simple rule based transliteration approach. The resultant transliteration is then compared with the unique words of the corpus to return the 'k' words most similar to the transliterated word. The resulting multiple translation/transliteration choices for each query word are disambiguated using an iterative page-rank style algorithm which, based on term-term co-occurrence statistics, produces the final translated query. Using the above approach, for Hindi, we achieve a Mean Average Precision (MAP) of 0.2366 using title and a MAP of 0.2952 using title and description. For Marathi, we achieve a MAP of 0.2163 using title.

Code-Mixing (CM) is the phenomenon of alternating between two or more languages which is prevalent in bi-and multilingual communities. Most NLP applications today are still designed with the assumption of a single interaction language and are most likely to break given a CM utterance with multiple languages mixed at a morphological, phrase or sentence level. For example, popular commercial search engines do not yet fully understand the intents expressed in CM queries. As a first step towards fostering research which supports CM in NLP applications, we systematically crowd-sourced and curated an evaluation dataset for factoid question answering in three CM languages-Hinglish (Hindi+English), Tenglish (Telugu+English) and Tamlish (Tamil+English) which belong to two language families. We share the details of our data collection process, techniques which were used to avoid inducing lexical bias amongst the crowd workers and other CM specific linguistic properties of the dataset. Our final dataset, which is available freely for research purposes, has 1,694 Hinglish, 2,848 Tamlish and 1,391 Tenglish factoid questions and their answers. We discuss the techniques used by the participants for the first edition of this ongoing challenge.

Today, parallel corpus-based systems dominate the transliteration landscape. But the resourcescarce languages do not enjoy the luxury of large parallel transliteration corpus. For these languages, rule-based transliteration is the only viable option. In this article, we show that by properly harnessing the monolingual resources in conjunction with manually created rule base, one can achieve reasonable transliteration performance. We achieve this performance by exploiting the power of Character Sequence Modeling (CSM), which requires only monolingual resources. We present the results of our rule-based system for Hindi to English, English to Hindi, and Persian to English transliteration tasks. We also perform extrinsic evaluation of transliteration systems in the context of Cross Lingual Information Retrieval. Another important contribution of our work is to explain the widely varying accuracy numbers reported in transliteration literature, in terms of the entropy of the language pairs and the datasets involved.

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